Chapter 10
WILLA
At quarter to six I headed to Abbey Burger to snag a table and a beer.
The restaurant was packed when I got there.
By the time they called my name for a booth in the back, Jordan was coming in the front door.
We’d just placed our beer orders when Abby squeezed through the crowd to slide in beside me and ask the waiter what local IPAs they had on tap.
“Mobtown and Peabody Heights this week,” he told her. “We’ve also got Troeg’s if you count Harrisburg PA to be local.”
“I do, but I’ll take a pint of the Mobtown.
” Abby smiled up at the waiter, her adorable dimples in full force.
The guy smiled back. And with that I knew we’d have the best service of any table in the burger joint.
Abby had that kind of effect on people. And I was happy to draft in the wake of her adorable, bubbly charm.
“How is the dating scene?” Jordan asked me once our beers had arrived and we’d placed our food order.
“Last night’s dinner with Dean was very promising, unlike a disastrous lunch with Paul.
” I relayed the details of the lunch where Paul had spent more time texting someone on his phone than conversing with me, making the whole thing into a comedy routine.
Then I briefly summed up my date with Dean, completely leaving out any mention of Eng since our encounters could hardly be considered dates.
“How about you?” I asked Abby.
She shrugged. “I’m on a dating hiatus while I regroup from the latest mistake. But I did cheer my niece on to a win at her field hockey game this week.”
I high-fived her, then turned to Jordan. “And now the news we’ve all been waiting for…how did the date with Ozar go?”
Jordan told us of an amazing dinner, romantic candles, and a rubber knife fight that had a very happy ending. It had been such a great date that she’d seen him again last night and the pair had this time ended up at her house with even more happy endings.
I’ll admit I felt a twinge of envy before I banished the feeling. Jordan deserved to hit the jackpot. Ozar sounded amazing, and from what I’d seen at McHenry’s the orc was besotted with my friend.
“Am I moving too fast?” Jordan asked.
“No!” Abby and I said in unison.
“When it’s good, it’s good,” Abby elaborated.
“Besides, you’re thirty. You know when there’s even a hint of a red flag at this point. Green means go,” I added.
Jordan laughed. “Well, since he is green then I guess go is the operative word.”
We went on to chat until Jordan dropped the bomb that had Abby and me ready to shop for bridesmaid dresses—Ozar had spent the night. And Jordan’s notoriously judgy cat had actually liked the orc.
If the cat didn’t chase a man away, then Jordan usually did. She guarded her heart, which meant she hadn’t had a man spend the night at her house in ages. In one week, this orc had charmed both my cautious friend and her prickly cat.
Our food interrupted Abby’s and my request for all the dirty details, but we repeated our questions as soon as the waiter was out of earshot.
“Is he proportionate, or reasonably sized?” Abby asked. “You’re not walking funny and neither of us needed to pick you up at the hospital, so I’m assuming he’s not literally hung like a horse.”
I felt my face heat up, because that had been my concern in that back alley by McHenry’s. Jordan’s cheeks were red as she informed us that Ozar was, like the porridge in the three-little-bears’ house, just right.
“So is the sex good?” I asked. “He’s taking care of your needs first? He knows where your clit actually is and how to treat it right? There’s substantial foreplay before the zipper on his pants goes down?”
Just because Eng was five-out-of-five stars didn’t mean Ozar was. Unless orcs had some special God-given talent in the bedroom—a trait I wasn’t ruling out.
“Yes, yes, yes, and yes.” Jordan sighed. “It’s not just the physical either. There’s this weird emotional connection that’s hard for me to describe. This all seems too good to be true.”
“Jordan is in love,” Abby teased in a sing-song voice.
She was, from her sappy expression. Even if she denied it vehemently, her face told a different story. Then suddenly her past reared its ugly head and Jordan was full of doubts.
“There’s no reason for you to think Ozar is anything like your past boyfriends,” I reminded her. “Judge him for who he is. Evaluate the man in front of you, not one clouded by your past experiences.”
Hypocrite. Ah well, this was a “do as I say and not as I do” kind of situation,
“Just go with it,” Abby said. “Ride the wave of awesome sex and perfect guy and just enjoy it.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Especially the sex. Ride that…what did you say he called his peen? A spear or something?”
I knew what he called his dick, because Eng used the same euphemism.
Jordan grinned. “His hand-axe.”
I laughed. “Yeah, girl. Ride that hand-axe every chance you get. And if things go to shit, then drop him to the curb like garbage on Tuesday night.”
And there was my own past, sneaking in to cloud the present.
Abby glared at me before turning to Jordan. “But things won’t go south. Be positive. This might be the one. Don’t let all those past crappy experiences color your judgement. Don’t miss out on what could be the love of your life.”
I kinda needed that pep talk as well. Dean was a good guy.
He checked all the boxes. I should give him a chance…
give us a chance. No more wild orc sex for me.
If I ever wanted to find a life-partner, I needed to start dating guys who actually met that criteria and stay away from the sexy assholes who always ended up burning my heart and dancing on the ashes. No. More. Eng.
Then Abby broke me out of my thought with some weird insistence that Jordan take regular pregnancy tests because in those crazy monster romance books she read the orcs all had super-sperm.
“Fiction,” I told her while mentally panicking and wondering where the closest drug store was for a pregnancy test. IUD.
Condoms. Damn, what if they really did have some sort of supernaturally powered swimmers?
I envisioned the little guys busting through prophylactics and powering their way intact past the coils of my birth control device, and shuddered in horror.
“How the hell does sperm force her to ovulate when she’s on hormonal birth control?” I asked. “That doesn’t make sense. Does orc sperm burn through condoms? Diaphragms?”
“I swallowed,” Jordan said, twisting her napkin in her hands. “There’s no way that stuff is caustic enough to do any of that. I mean it didn’t burn my esophagus, so how could it burn condoms?”
“Hot damn. Jordan swallowed.” I saluted her with my beer, silently counting the days since my last period.
“Is there anything else those orc romances mentioned?” Jordan asked Abby. “Unusual customs or physiological things I should know about? Is Ozar going to sprout a tail and a second cock? Do orcs have harems? Shed their skin? Need to take a six-year pilgrimage to a cave during their lifetime?”
I stared at Abby, a little afraid of her answer. Fiction. This was fiction that my friend was reading and it had nothing to do with the actual living orcs in Baltimore, with the actual living orc I’d been fucking like my life depended on it.
“No, but they often have soulmates,” Abby said. “Two orcs will meet and it will be more than just a love-at-first-sight thing. It’s like they’re meant for each other. Fated to be together.”
I blew out a relieved breath. There was no need to worry about that sort of thing. At least I didn’t need to be prepared for shedding skin or second cocks, although the tail thing I could live with.
But none of that mattered because I was not having sex with Eng again. Not.
We moved on to other topics of conversation, finished our beers and our food. Saying our goodbyes in front of the burger joint, we each went our separate ways to our cars. Halfway home, I made a left where I should have made a right and parked outside of a familiar apartment building.
Eng answered on the first knock.
“I’d like to ride your hand-axe,” I informed him. “All night long, if you’re up to that sort of thing.”
He grunted then his hand shot out to drag me inside his apartment. “I am up to being ridden. All night long.”