Page 54 of Single Pucking Orc

She had spent four years and a considerable amount of money arranging her life to be quiet and safe. She had chosen the house for the quiet. She had built the business so she’d never have to depend on anyone’s schedule but her own. She had made, brick by brick, invoice by invoice, the exact opposite of the places she’d grown up in. The ones with the disconnected power and the different addresses and the mother who loved her and could not, for one single billing cycle, be relied upon.

She’d called it a success. She had genuinely believed it was one. She had the words for it—solvent, stable, independent, secure—and she’d used the words on herself for years, the way she’d read a good statement to a nervous client. See? Everything’s accounted for. Nothing’s outstanding. I’m fine.

She lay in her full loud house at two in the morning with an orc’s hand over her heart and a baby breathing through a plastic speaker, and she reached for the words.

They weren’t there.

Not gone, exactly. Just—insufficient. The words were all still true, every one of them, and every one of them had stopped being enough to describe what she was feeling. Independent didn’t have a word in it for the eight feet of grass he hadn’t walked. Secure did not know what to do with a hand that counted her heartbeats in the dark. Success had been the name she gave the quiet, and the quiet was gone, and she could not make herself want it back.

She didn’t decide anything. She was too tired to decide anything, and anyway she had, for once, no desire to make one. She simply lay there, in the full dark and the loud quiet, listening to the two of them breathe.

And she found she could no longer describe her life, in any terms she’d ever trusted, as a success.

CHAPTER 19

Rognar kept waiting to resent it.

He waited for it in the truck, which was clean now. Genuinely clean, with no fossilized coffee cups and no gear rotting in the footwell. A car seat lived back there, and a car seat did not go next to rotting gear. He waited for it at the late dinners, the ones that happened at nine because a bath and a bottle came first and a male learned to eat cold food. He waited for it hardest at six in the morning, lying awake in a bed he could no longer sleep past dawn in, listening for a snuffle two rooms away.

The resentment didn’t come.

He turned it over sometimes, in idle moments, like a male patting his pockets for keys he was sure he’d lost. Everyone said this was the part you gave things up for. Sleep. Nights out. Yourself, mostly—that was the one people leaned on, the you won’t recognize yourself, man. He’d nodded along for years and never once believed it would happen to him.

But he recognized himself just fine. He was still on the ice. Still fast. Still the one who made the room laugh. Charlie was fat and cheerful and putting on length like it was a competition, and Nora hadn’t somehow tricked him into a life he woke up trapped inside. He’d checked. He kept checking, and every time it came back the same way.

His life hadn’t gotten smaller. He couldn’t get his hands around that. It had gotten⁠—

He got about two-thirds of the way into that thought and Fen skated into the boards next to him hard enough to rattle the glass.

“The hat has holes in it,” Fen announced, holding it up.

It was small. It was green. It was less a hat than a knit hood, the kind that came down over the cheeks and buttoned under the chin, and it had two neat slits worked into the jaw, spaced with obvious intent.

“For tusks,” Kowalski said, from the bench.

“Her tusks are about a quarter that far apart.”

“For future tusks.”

The community skate was already loud—families all over the ice, kids in helmets three sizes too big, the local rink’s ancient sound system pushing something festive and distorted out into the rafters. Every year the Enforcers gave up an afternoon to it, and every year it ran the same. Open ice, a raffle table, players in jerseys signing programs so badly the signatures were a running joke. There was a banner across the far boards for the outfit that organized it. Emerald Hearts Children’s Foundation. Rognar had signed a check to them every December for six seasons without once reading the name off the banner. He read it now, idly, because his daughter was on somebody else’s chest and he had a minute.

“Who made the hat?” he asked.

Silence. Four large orcs suddenly became very interested in their skate laces.

“Somebody cut holes in a hat for a baby who won’t need them for ten years,” he said. “That’s a lot of forward planning for a person who won’t put their hand up.”

“It’s an anonymous charity,” Fen said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

The jersey situation had not been resolved. Fen’s next-day-shipped 4T still hung on Charlie like a christening gown, and Fen still refused to concede a single inch of it, on the grounds that fabric was fabric and she’d get there. Kowalski’s mystery jersey fit her like it had been cut for her, snug across the little barrel of her stomach, and Kowalski still wouldn’t say where it came from. He’d stopped asking. Some questions you retired.

Charlie herself was across the room, and Charlie was busy.

Charlie was working the crowd. She’d become someone nobody had voted on and everybody agreed to—the unofficial mascot, passed hand to enormous hand, a set of chubby green legs and a gummy grin that had put grown defensemen on their knees. She had preferences. She had always had preferences. And her preference, immovable and inexplicable, was for the largest and least willing member of the entire organization.

Rognar found him at the boards, and found her in his hands.

“You like her,” Rognar said, skating up.