Page 41 of Tusks And Conditions

I scratch lightly behind his ear. The war hum intensifies.

Saturday evening. He discovers my collection of true crime documentaries and is appalled.

"These people are terrible trackers." He gestures at the screen with a slice of pizza. "He left boot prints in wet soil. Boot prints. A first-year kit could follow that trail."

"That's the point. The investigators eventually figure it out."

"Eventually." He says the word like it physically wounds him. "Four episodes to process a single footprint. I could close this case during a bathroom break."

"Not everyone has your skill set."

"Clearly." He takes an aggressive bite of pizza. On screen, a detective examines a fiber sample. Jagger leans forward with sudden intensity. "Wait. Enhance that. The weave pattern. That is Dwarven cotton."

"You can tell thread types from a TV screen?"

"Sabine. The Dwarven stitch count is unmistakable. Twenty-four per inch, always. Their guild enforces it."

He is riveted for the remaining three episodes. He correctly identifies the killer by the second commercial break.

Sunday morning. I wake up pinned under one massive grey arm. The runes pulse faintly in his sleep, cycling through soft amber and pale gold. The scar on his ribs glows warmest.

Endurance.

I trace it with my fingertip. His arm tightens. Still asleep. His face in rest is something I was not prepared for. The hard lines smooth out. The permanent tension between his brows disappears. He looks young. Almost soft.

The Snarbo creeps onto the foot of the bed and settles on his ankles. Three of its seven eyes blink at me in sequence. Approval, maybe. Or gas. Hard to tell with Snarbos.

Sunday afternoon. He fixes the loose hinge on my bathroom cabinet that has been driving me insane for eight months. Then he fixes the kitchen faucet drip. Then the squeaky floorboard in the hallway. He moves through my apartment with quiet purpose, tightening and adjusting, and every repair feels like a sentence in an argument he is making without words.

I reorganize his bounty receipts into quarterly folders with colorful tabs.

"You just alphabetized my kill warrants."

"Your filing system was criminal. Literally. Three of these were past their submission deadline. You would have lost the payout."

"I would have lost eleven thousand gold marks."

"Eleven thousand, four hundred, and sixty-two. I calculated the late penalties."

He looks at me. The runes flare bright enough to cast shadows. Then he crosses the kitchen in two strides, lifts me clean off the chair, and carries me back to the bedroom.

Sunday evening. We eat leftover pizza on the bed. The sheets are destroyed. My hair is beyond recovery. His novel is bookmarked on the nightstand next to my reading glasses.

The annulment papers are still on the counter. Still unsigned.

The pen is on the floor where I dropped it.

Monday morning. Six forty-five. The alarm on my phone goes off and I reach for it through a wall of grey muscle.

Jagger doesn't move. He sleeps like something carved from bedrock, one arm locked around me, the other dangling off the side of the bed because the mattress is a full-size and he is emphatically not. The Snarbo is draped across both our feet, all eyes sealed shut, producing a sound like a diesel engine idling underwater.

I silence the alarm. Jagger's arm tightens.

"Work," I say.

"No."

"Jagger."