Page 64 of Single Pucking Orc

He didn’t reach for her. He sat where he was with his elbows on his knees and his daughter asleep down the hall, and he listened.

She recognized the quality of the listening, because she’d seen it once before—on her couch that first night, when Charlie finally slept against his chest and he’d stopped being the fun one for anybody’s benefit. That same stillness, his enormous attention pointed at her and asking for nothing back.

“Twelve addresses before I was eighteen,” she said. “I wrote them out once. There was a van, for four months, when I was eleven. She called it an adventure and it was. That’s the trap. It was genuinely wonderful. We saw the ocean in November and ate fries out of the bag, and she made it feel like the most brilliant idea anyone had ever had. And it was. Right up until it was December and the van didn’t have heat and I was the one who worked out we couldn’t stay in it. And she was so proud of me. She kept telling people. My Nora sorts everything out.”

Her voice did something on that last part that she hadn’t authorized. She let it.

“So I built this.” She lifted one hand off the counter and pointed at her house. At the ordered quiet life with the paid bills and the stocked fridge and the keys that were always on the hook. “All of it. On purpose. And then you moved in next door with your parties and your teammates and your… You charmed the mailman, Rognar. You charmed my mailman. He tells me things about you now. And I looked at you and I thought, there’s the van. Charming. Spontaneous. Wonderful to love.” She made herself finish it. “And somebody else always ends up being the one who works out we can’t stay in it.”

He didn’t defend himself. She had braced for it—for the reasonable case, the evidence, the but I did the paternity and the childcare and the pediatrician. It didn’t come. He just looked at her, and didn’t argue, and her throat went tight.

“I’m not telling you this so you’ll say something kind,” she said. “I’m telling you because you said what you said, over there, with the antibiotics, and you’re owed the reason it’s taken me eight weeks.”

“Okay,” he said.

“That’s it? Okay?”

“You told me to stop talking.” A small tilt at the corner of his mouth, gone as fast as it came. “I’m being agreeable. That’s my thing.”

She didn’t laugh, but it was close.

He was quiet for a moment, and then he said it, not weaponized, but laid down on the counter beside everything else.

“Nora. Name one.”

“One what?”

“One time.” He didn’t lean forward. He didn’t sharpen it. He handed it to her the way she’d handed him both options in the hall at two in the morning—here, choose. “Eight weeks. Name one time I asked you to be the one who works it out. One thing I dropped that you had to catch. One bill you paid. One egg you kept in the house because I couldn’t.” A beat. “You keep a ledger for everything. You’ve got one for the hours I cost you, I’ve seen the notebook. I’m not mad, I’d have kept one too. So run it. Name one.”

She ran it.

She was good at ledgers. She was the best she knew at ledgers; four years of it as a living, and a lifetime of it before that from nine years old and a payphone. She ran the eight weeks the way she’d run Rosa’s shoebox, line by line. The evenings he’d turned up with dinner and not stayed. The porch light he’d fixed without being asked. The way he’d taken her name off Deb’s laminated schedule. The way he’d learned Charlie’s whole vocabulary in eight weeks rather than asking her to teach him. She looked for the entry, the single debit, the moment the charming male next door had turned around and made her responsible for him.

There wasn’t one.

She stood in his kitchen and audited eight weeks of a professional hockey player. The ledger came out clean. She felt what she’d been holding shut for eight weeks come open all at once, with no procedure attached to it at all.

“There isn’t one,” she said.

“No.”

“That’s—” She stopped. Started again and it came out as the worst-constructed sentence of her adult life, and she heard it going wrong and couldn’t stop it and didn’t want to. “That’s why. That’s… You never once. In eight weeks you never once, and I kept waiting, I had a whole… I was ready. I’ve been ready since the eggs. And you never⁠—”

The words gave out and she abandoned them, which she never did. She always finished the sentence. “That’s why I love you. Don’t. Don’t look at me like that. I’ve had four hours’ sleep.”

He was looking at her like that.

“I mean it,” she said, “I will leave,” and it was a lie and both of them knew it was a lie. She was already crossing the floor towards him. It was possibly the first thing she had said to him in eight weeks that she didn’t mean, and it was the truest.

He caught her at the counter. He stood up out of the chair as she came, and she got a fist in his shirt and he got one enormous hand at the back of her head.

It was nothing like their other kisses. It had eight weeks in it and a whole night of fever in it and that’s why I love you still hanging in the air over the toast.

“The baby,” she got out against his mouth.

“Is asleep. On drugs. In the other room.” He pulled back half an inch, and the grin arrived, the one that had charmed her mailman. “I’m not going to pretend the house is empty, Nora, we live here.”

We live here. He said it like the box said Stonebreaker, C.—like an ordinary fact about the world.