Chapter 7
ZAK
My phone buzzes, the name Leigh flashing up on the screen.
I swipe open the call, putting it on speaker so I can keep chopping potatoes.
I’ve been living here a few weeks, and it turns out that none of my flatmates know how to cook more than the absolute basics.
Josh had his girlfriend cooking for him the last time she was over, and I had to bite my tongue before I made a comment about weaponised incompetence.
“You’re actually cooking a roast?” Heath had asked me earlier as he passed by the kitchen.
“What? Like it’s hard?” I’d replied, doing my best Reese Witherspoon impression, which I actually think is pretty fucking good, but it was obvious that he didn’t get the reference.
“Hey!” I say now, bending over my phone.
“Hey! Look, I’ve got a favour to ask. I know we discussed you having one more week on doors et cetera, but Nate has a family emergency, and he’s got to get back over to Aussie for a bit. If I send you the videos of his usual routine, do you think you could do it?”
“Um, I mean yeah. Yeah I can, but I’m gonna need a bigger helmet.” Nate’s whole thing is him being a biker, which I don’t really get, because he’s such a pretty boy that it seems like a waste to cover his face with a bike helmet, but the audience seems to love it.
“Yeah, I already figured that. I’ve got one for orcs, but it’s second-hand if you’re ok with that? It belonged to my ex.”
Her tone is laced with bitterness. Yikes. “Yeah, that’ll do. Okay. Should I grab that today then? I’m in the middle of making dinner, but —”
“I can drop it off, I’ve got your address. I’m about to head out now anyway. Thank you for this!”
I shrug, even though she can’t see me. “It’s part of the job, right? I’m happy to help.”
It’s been dark for hours by the time I finally make it over to Rose’s place. I bring the helmet with me because it’s impossible to practise in my bedroom, and I have 24 hours to get this routine right before I’m up on stage in nothing but a g-string and this thing on my head.
“I thought that perhaps you weren’t coming tonight,” Rose begins as she greets me at the door, her eyes roaming over my face. “I’d not blame you; my company is not all that good.”
“Bullshit. I love spending time with you. Why would I tidy up this place for hours just to never come here again?” I step inside, lifting the other item I’ve brought along: a battery-powered lantern. I close the front door behind me, then switch the lamp on, and Rose gasps in surprise.
“Oh that’s delightful, and so bright! It fills the entire room.”
“It's nice right? You can keep it here, if you like. You don't have to live in the dark the whole time.”
She flashes me a sad smile, her head tilting as if to say don't be silly.
“I don't think I'm capable of turning it on.
I can't seem to be able to interact with anything in here apart from the surface I'm standing on, and the chair there,” she says, pointing to one of the wooden chairs that I righted as I was tidying today.
“I tested it out earlier tonight; I can sit on it!
It's the first time I've sat down in a long time, or at least I think it is.
Whenever I'm here I'm usually just standing.”
“Oh, right. Well, I’m here to turn yo— it on, whenever you want me to. Apart from Friday and Saturday nights; I won't be back until late on those days.” I hope she didn't catch my Freudian slip there, though from the twitch of her lips I think she did.
“When you go to your dancing job?” I’d briefly explained stripping to her last night.
“My job as a male entertainer, yeah. Does it bother you?”
There’s that head tilt again, though I can’t tell what she’s thinking. “It’s hard to know how to answer that when I don’t have any understanding of it in my mind. You say you dance for these people — mostly women — and that you are nearly naked… and I cannot picture it.”
I figured that. “Well,” I say, “today might be your lucky day, because I brought this over here so that I could practise the new routine for Friday. I hope you don't mind, but there's no room at my place. I need to learn this so that I don't make a fool of myself up on stage.”
Her eyes are round as she stares at the helmet. “That’s a form of head protection, yes? I’ve seen people wear them while riding their motorcycles past this house. Why would you wear that?”
“Because some people — a lot of people — have a thing for men in masks.”
“A thing?”
Part of me wonders if I'm corrupting her, but I brush that thought away as quickly as it appears.
That's some old-school puritanical bullshit right there; there's no corrupting her.
There's nothing to corrupt, because there's nothing wrong with sex and sexual attraction, nothing wrong with enjoying the sight of bodies up on stage and doing all the sexual things that make us people.
She was twenty-two when she died, and I find it hard to believe that a pretty woman like her didn't experience anything, anyway.
“Attraction,” I say now. “Men in masks, it turns people on.”
Her eyes travel over my body, lingering on my pecs and my stomach, where I know the outline of my abs is visible through my white t-shirt.
Her eyes drop lower still to my thighs, before finally landing on my crotch.
When she looks back up at me, there's a heat in her eyes that I haven't seen before.
“I can understand that,” she says quietly.
“Though it seems a shame to cover up your handsome face. I would quite gladly look at all of you.”
Well damn. “All of me?”
Her smile is flirtatious and knowing, and she bites her lower lip for a moment. “Everything you're willing to show, yes.”
“I'll show you it all, baby.” It's such a lame fucking thing to say but she giggles — giggles — and bites at her lower lip again. She is the prettiest little elf, or whatever she is.
God, I wish she were alive. I want to see her cheeks flush pink with a rush of blood, to touch her and feel her skin under my fingertips. I want to know what delicious things she smells like. I want to taste her on my tongue.
I just want to be able to hold her.
I'm half-hard and getting more aroused by the second, and there's not really any hiding it given the fact that I am a seven and a half foot tall orc.
I grab my dick through the fabric of my jeans, quickly readjusting myself, and clear my throat as I glance away for a second.
“I really do need to practise this routine for tomorrow,” I say, daring to look at her again.
She nods. “Please do. I would love to watch.”
“Alright then.”
Going through the routine is more technical than sexy, at least at first. I play the videos of Nate that I’ve been sent on my phone, Rose peering over my arm, her eyes wide as she watches a strip show for the first time.
We chat on and off as I replay it again and again, practising each individual step, the hardwood floors creaking under my weight.
Rose sits on her chair, her elbow leaning on the table and her chin in her hand while I slowly piece together every part of the dance.
Every hip roll and pop and thrust is designed to look as sexy as possible, and I know it’s working on her by the way her eyes stay focused on my body the entire time.
I keep the helmet off and most of my clothes on, my long hair tied in its usual half-up style with a small top-knot — one of the only traditionally orcish things I tend to do — and pretend to strip at the right moments, not bothering to actually take my clothes off.
My jeans do have to go when they start hampering my mobility as I get down onto my knees, though by then I’m warm enough that I don’t care that I’m down to my boxer briefs.
“You have to imagine this as a g-string,” I tell Rose at one point, as she continues to gnaw at her bottom lip in that hungry way of hers.
“Is that what your friend was wearing? The little loincloth-type contraption?”
“Yeah. Like this.” I pull the hem of each leg up as best I can, tucking the fabric into my asscrack. It feels uncomfortable, but her laugh as I wiggle my ass in her direction is worth it.
“You have a very lovely bottom, sir.”
“Why thank you, milady.” I grin at her undignified snort. “Sorry, that was the wrong century. I don’t know why I went back to the Middle Ages for that one.”
“Hmm.” The humour fades from her face, until her eyes are sad in the way they were in those first days when I saw her. I know what she’s thinking — that so much separates us still. She’s here, but she’s really not.
“Where do you go, when you leave?” I ask suddenly, the question spilling out like half my questions do.
“I don’t know,” she says with a small shake of her head, and there’s a terrified look in her eyes. “I don’t remember anything other than being here. And…”
I wait for her to continue, but she doesn’t say anything further. “And?”
“I have no memory of any time before you. I was alive, living in this house in nineteen fifteen, and then when I was next here, I was like this, dead. I know there’s more to it.
When I start to go each night, I feel…” She shakes her head.
“I can’t even tell you what I feel because it’s as if every time I go to examine the feeling it slips out of my grasp.
I know there’s something there but I can’t explain it.
Have you ever looked at the stars, when they’re fading just before dawn?
They’re there in your periphery, but when you look at them directly, sometimes you can’t see them because they’re too faint, and then they’re gone.
It feels like that, like something is stealing half my mind, and it terrifies me.
” She takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry I don’t have any more answers for you. ”
I shake my head. “You don’t need to apologise. You’re the one that’s in this situation. I just want to help you, Rose. I’m not a religious man at all but fuck, I’m praying for a miracle here.”
She nods. “I am too.”