Page 72 of Single Pucking Orc

“There are several more, but go on.”

“My gear does not go in the house.”

She blinked. “That’s my line. I was going to say that.”

“You were thinking it, I got there first. The gear does not go in the house. I’ve smelled the gear. The gear has a personality now, the gear has done things⁠—”

“Where does your gear go?”

“There is a garage,” he said, with the solemnity of a male delivering a eulogy. “It has been waiting its entire life for this. That garage has spent a year pretending to be a garage while it was really a locker room, and its purpose is my gear, and the two of them are going to be very happy together, far away from the room where my daughter sleeps and the room where you count things.”

“Approved,” she said, and closed the folder, and it was done. The rest of their lives, settled on the merits at a kitchen counter in under twenty minutes. And then Charlie lunged one more time, and this time, catastrophically, moved. One uncoordinated hand-and-knee crawl of about four inches, powered by rage, straight towards the low cupboard where the good pans lived. Both adults said “no” at exactly the same moment and dove for her, and knocked heads reaching for the same baby. Charlie sat back on her diaper and beamed up at the two of them clutching their skulls above her, delighted.

“That’s new,” Nora said, from the floor, holding her forehead.

“That’s very new.”

“We are going to have to move everything.”

“We are going to have to move everything.”

“Add it to the folder,” she said. He sat on the kitchen floor with a bump coming up on his head and a mobile baby and a bookkeeper and a garage that had finally found its calling. He laughed until Charlie laughed too, which set Nora off. And that was the point, in the end, of all of it.

A week later, Nora’s life was still orderly.

Mostly.

Rognar knew this because she told him, at intervals, usually while standing in the middle of a room holding something that did not belong in that room. Her tone suggested she was reporting a variance rather than complaining. Her life was orderly. It simply now contained, in and around the order, one very large orc hockey player and one very small eight-month-old who had gone from immobile rage to genuine mobile menace in a week. Charlie now had to be physically retrieved from beneath the Christmas tree roughly every ninety seconds, according to Nora.

Nora’s life also contained an alarming quantity of hockey equipment, which had—mostly—been persuaded into the garage. Not to mention a rotating cast of enormous males who did not appear to understand that a door being shut was information rather than a suggestion.

It was the first week of December. There were lights on the house now, because Fen had put them there—uninvited, on a ladder, singing. There was a tree in the front window that Charlie regarded as a personal challenge. The safe corner of the kitchen had spread into a good third of the house. An eight-month-old who could crawl was a different animal entirely from one who could only rage about it.

And she had never in her life been happier, and he knew that because she had not once said it, which for Nora was the largest possible tell.

Charlie was thriving. She was a sturdy, cheerful, ferociously determined creature with two proper lower tusks now and a laugh that could be heard from the garage. She was utterly besotted with him. She had learned to say a sound that was not quite “da” but was clearly aimed at him, and she deployed it like a weapon, and it worked every single time. He was aware that he was being played by a person who still couldn’t say his name. He didn’t care even slightly.

She was also still, inexplicably, besotted with Brogan.

Which was why, on the Tuesday evening it all came to a head, Brogan was sitting on Rognar’s couch… Nora’s couch… Their couch. Charlie was asleep against his chest with one of her fists in his beard. He had arrived to drop off a spare set of gloves and had been, once again, unable to leave.

There were seven of them, which counted as a small gathering by Enforcers standards and had been arranged by nobody. Korvash was in the good chair with a book. Fen and Kowalski had brought food and grievances in roughly equal measure. Tarmek and Edie had turned up because Edie and Nora had a mural project now that Rognar didn’t fully understand and didn’t need to. And Brogan had come with gloves and stayed with the baby, and the clipboard from the community skate had made its way into the room.

“Right,” Fen said, holding it up. “So. Emerald Hearts Children’s Foundation.” He said the name carefully, like a male reading off a form, because he was reading it off a form. “Same lot as the skate. They do the Christmas run—the ward visits, the toy thing, the big event on the twenty-third—and they need bodies. Players. In costume. Signing stuff, handing stuff out, and being large and festive.”

“I’m in for the ward visits,” Korvash said, without looking up from his book.

“You’re a saint, Korv. Ward visits. Toy sorting. The sleigh photo. And—” Fen paused, and Rognar knew what was coming before it came, and started, quietly, to enjoy himself. “They need a Santa.”

The room went quiet.

“Big lad,” Fen went on, warming to it. “Beard, obviously. A real beard’s a huge bonus, because the kids can clock a fake beard a mile off. Apparently there was an incident last year where a kid pulled Jensen’s off and Jensen said a word. So. A real beard. Big. Warm. Jolly.”

Every head in the room slowly began to turn.

Now normally—and this was the part that was killing him, this was the part he had been savoring in advance for a full week—normally he would be perfect for this. He was the obvious answer. He was large, he was festive by temperament, he had a beard, he liked children more than he’d ever have admitted a year ago, and he could be relied upon to be jolly to a fault. The heads should have been turning to him.

But he also had an excuse. And it was an excellent excuse, and he deployed it with a joy he did not bother to hide.