Page 55 of Single Pucking Orc

Brogan didn’t look at him. “She’s a baby. There’s nothing to like. She’s a set of demands with a face on it.”

“You’re holding her.”

“You put her in my hands.”

“I put her in your hands ninety minutes ago, Brogan.”

Nothing. The big male stood with Charlie tucked against the slab of his chest and gazed out at the ice with the expression of a male reading a parking ticket.

“And you haven’t moved,” he went on, because pushing Brogan was one of the small free pleasures of his life. “You could’ve handed her off. There are forty people out there who’d take her. All of them are smaller than you.”

“You keep talking,” Brogan said, “and you’ll find out how far I can throw a stick.”

“You wouldn’t. She’s on you.”

“That’s the only reason.” He shifted her, a small correcting motion, his thumb settling against the back of her head. It was so automatic that Rognar wondered, not for the first time, where a male learned a motion like that. He’d learned by now not to ask. Asking got you the flat silence Brogan reserved for it.

He didn’t ask. He let it go. He’d take the competence and leave the why where Brogan kept it. He’d pushed once, years back, and gotten neither. He skated off to let the goalie hate him in peace.

Later he came back around the near boards with two programs to sign and stopped. Brogan had turned his back to the room. He’d angled himself into the corner where the glass met the boards, facing out at the empty stands. Charlie had fallen asleep on him, her cheek mashed sideways against his collarbone, and one small fist buried to the wrist in the heavy silver-threaded beard. Sound asleep. Utterly boneless. And Brogan stood there facing the wall so the loud cheerful room couldn’t see whatever his face was doing.

Rognar looked at him for a second. Then he signed his two programs badly and said nothing at all.

He found Nora at the far end of the rink. He hadn’t set out to find her, but somehow he always knew where she was.

She was at the raffle table, and she was working. He knew nobody had asked her to. But the Emerald Hearts volunteer running the raffle had the hunted look of a person whose numbers had stopped adding up. Nora had the calm of a person for whom numbers had never once, in her entire life, failed to add up. She had the raffle ledger turned around to face her and a stub of a pencil in her hand. She fixed a total with two strokes, said something dry, and the volunteer laughed—the relieved laugh of someone handing a fire to a fireman. Then, inside five minutes, the volunteer handed Nora the cash box outright and walked off to get a coffee.

He leaned on the boards and watched her count someone else’s money faster and more accurately than they’d ever managed it themselves. Glasses down her nose, dark hair coming loose from where she’d pinned it. He knew that once again her competence meant she’d been given the job, but there was a small smile on her face and he knew that she’d done it deliberately.

This is what I want.

Nora at a table doing what needed to be done. Charlie asleep on Brogan, who hadn’t put her down in ninety minutes. Him leaning on a rail watching both of them. On a Tuesday.

Tuesday-forever.

He'd said it on her step, as a promise of something that would never happen, and now he couldn’t think of anything he wanted more. Next Tuesday and the one after and for as long as she'd let him have it.

He was grinning at the cash box like an idiot when the male walked up to her.

Rognar clocked him and cleared him in the same instant. Just a pleasant, ordinary father in a mint-green rink hoodie, his kid somewhere out on the ice, standing at the far side of the raffle table making conversation while Nora counted. Harmless. Completely, provably harmless. He said something. Nora said something back without looking up, dryly, and the dad laughed. And then Nora glanced up over the top of her glasses and smiled. The small private smile, the one he had spent months earning.

Nothing was happening.

He could see, with total clarity, from thirty feet away, that nothing was happening. The male was married. He was wearing a ring and making rink small talk with a woman fixing a raffle ledger. It was the most nothing thing in the entire building.

Rognar’s stick came down against the boards.

The crack of it went off flat and hard across the ice and several people turned to look at him. He hadn’t decided to do it. His hand had just done it, the same way his head had just turned to the stands at the game he’d lost the puck in. The way his eyes went hunting for her before he asked them to. His body was running a program he hadn’t installed and couldn’t turn off.

Right.

He knew this trick. He’d watched Tarmek burn a whole season on this trick and reroute the fuel into practice, skating the roster into the ice until nobody could feel their legs. He wasn’t the captain. He didn’t have drills to give. So he took the fuel and put it where he could—he went and hauled the equipment.

The gear had to go out to the truck at the end of the day anyway. He did it now. He did it alone, in two trips, his arms loaded way past anything reasonable, so the tower of equipment blocked his view down the tunnel. Once out. Once back. Once out again. He came in from the lot sweating through his shirt in November, and stood there breathing.

None of it had burned off what was underneath.

It scared him, and it scared him badly, because he couldn’t excuse it. He’d built an army of excuses—orc instincts. New father. The excuse had covered the head that turned at a crying baby. It had covered the window facing southwest.