Page 5 of Tusks And Conditions

My hands are shaking as I fish my keys out of my purse. The familiar weight of my keychain, with its tiny calculator charm and its miniature bottle of hand sanitizer, feels like a talisman against the chaos that has consumed my life. I slot the key into the lock, turn it, and push open the door to my apartment.

The smell of lavender from my diffuser hits me immediately, followed by the soft hum of the air purifier I leave running in the corner and the gentle tick of the analog clock on the wall above my bookshelf. Everything is exactly as I left it this morning. My throw pillows are arranged at precise forty-five-degree angles on my beige sofa. My coffee table books are stacked in descending order by size. My kitchen counters are spotless, my dish towels are folded into perfect rectangles, and my refrigerator is stocked with exactly one week's worth of pre-portioned meals in color-coded containers.

It's perfect, controlled, and It's safe.

And then Jagger steps through the doorway, and the illusion shatters completely.

He has to duck to clear the frame, his horns coming within inches of scraping the ceiling, and when he straightens to his full height inside my living room, I realize with a sick lurch of my stomach that he fundamentally does not fit in this space. His shoulders are too broad, his presence too overwhelming, his very existence too large and too dangerous for my carefully curated sanctuary of neutrality and order. He's like a wolf that's wandered into a dollhouse, all coiled power and barely contained violence, and my apartment seems to shrink around him until I can barely breathe.

"Nice place. Very... beige."

"I like beige," I say defensively, though I'm not entirely sure why I feel the need to defend my decorating choices to a man who probably lives in a cave. "Beige is calming. Beige is neutral. Beige doesn't cause visual overstimulation."

He makes a sound that might be a grunt of acknowledgment or might be suppressed laughter. It's impossible to tell with Orcs. Their facial expressions operate on an entirely different register than human ones, all subtle shifts of their heavy brows and minute movements of their tusks, and I've never taken the time to learn the nuances because I never expected to need to. I never expected to have an Orc standing in my living room, taking up all the oxygen and making my tasteful neutral color palette look like a prison cell by comparison.

"Where should I put my things?" he asks, and I notice for the first time that he's carrying two large duffel bags, one slung over each shoulder, the canvas straining against whatever's inside. There's also something else waiting in the hallway behind him, something large and wooden that I can just barely see past his massive frame.

"Your things." I swallow hard. "Right. Your things. Of course you have things."

I should have thought about this. I should have prepared. But everything happened so fast, the stamping of the form and the alarms and the announcement and the ninety-day requirement, and by the time we left the DMI office, I was operating on pure autopilot, my brain having apparently decided that if it refused to fully process what was happening, then maybe it wouldn't be real.

"There's a guest room," I hear myself say, pointing down the short hallway that leads to the bedroom I've been using as a home office slash emergency storage space. "It's small. There's a daybed. I don't know if you'll... fit."

Jagger doesn't respond immediately. His yellow eyes track across the careful arrangements of my space, the alphabetized spice rack visible through the kitchen doorway, the color-based filing system on my desk, the way every single item in this room has been chosen and placed with deliberate intention.

"We should establish some ground rules," I blurt out, because silence is dangerous and warmth is more dangerous and I need to feel like I have some control over this situation before I lose my mind completely. "Boundaries. Expectations. A clear framework for how this cohabitation is going to work."

"Ground rules. Alright. What did you have in mind?"

I'm already moving toward my desk, pulling open the drawer where I keep my emergency office supplies, extracting a fresh legal pad and a package of colored markers. My hands have stopped shaking, I realize, replaced by the familiar comfort of having a task to complete, a system to build, a problem to organize into manageable components.

"Sit down," I say, gesturing toward the sofa. "This might take a while."

Jagger looks at the sofa. The sofa looks back at him, small and delicate and clearly not designed to support Orcish muscle. He sighs, a sound like wind through a canyon, and carefully lowers himself onto the cushions, which immediately compress to approximately one-third of their original height. The frame creaks ominously, but holds, and he settles back with his arms spread across the backrest, taking up the entire piece of furniture like it was built specifically for him.

I perch on my armchair, legal pad balanced on my knee, and uncap the first marker with a satisfying click.

"Rule number one," I say, writing in careful block letters with the red marker. "Shared spaces will be kept clean at all times. I have a cleaning schedule posted on the refrigerator, and I expect both parties to adhere to it strictly."

"Cleaning schedule," Jagger says, nodding slowly. "Reasonable."

"Rule number two." I switch to the blue marker. "Quiet hours are from ten PM to seven AM. No loud noises, no visitors, no... bounty hunting activities during this time."

"I don't typically hunt at night," he says, which is not the reassurance he seems to think it is.

"Rule number three." Green marker now. "All weapons must be stored securely in the guest room. No weapons in common areas. No weapons visible at any time."

He tilts his head, and the movement makes the silver piercings in his tusk catch the light. "Define 'weapons.'"

"Any object designed to cause harm to another living being."

"That includes my hands."

I pause, marker hovering over the paper. "What?"

He holds up one massive fist, and I notice for the first time the calluses across his knuckles, the faint scarring that suggests years of combat, the sheer devastating size of his fingers. "I could kill most creatures with my bare hands. Does that make them weapons?"

"I... no. Obviously not. I mean objects. Manufactured objects intended for violence."