Chapter 13 Bliss #2
My hand is shaking slightly when I reach out, and I take the knife from his palm, wrapping my fingers around the carved handle. It fits there differently than I expect, not awkwardly but substantially, present and purposeful, it settling into my grip like something that knows where it belongs.
"I don't know how to throw a knife," I tell him.
"I will teach you."
"I'm probably terrible at it."
"You will improve."
"What if I throw it at you by accident?"
Something moves through his expression. The warm thing at his edges spreads.
"Then you will have thrown a knife at me," he says, "and I will be deeply impressed by your commitment."
I look down at the knife in my hand, then up at him.
He is still on one knee, watching me with those relentless silver eyes, and he is so large that even kneeling he barely has to tilt his head up to meet my gaze, and the suit is immaculate despite the wine incident and the rehearsal dinner and however many hours he has spent tonight being aggressively dapper in service of a contract he just tore up.
"Get up," I say softly.
He rises. Smooth and unhurried, all that enormous mass moving with that quiet, predatory economy that I have been very unsuccessfully not noticing since the moment he walked into the lobby.
He straightens to his full height and the night seems to close in around him, the scale of him always slightly astonishing no matter how much time I spend in his proximity.
I tip my head back to look up at him properly.
"I need to tell you something," I say.
He waits.
"I was terrified of this weekend. I don't mean the social performance of it, though that was also genuinely awful.
I mean—" I choose the words carefully, because they deserve to be chosen carefully.
"I've been running on anxiety and pure stubborn spite for so long that I'd completely forgotten what it felt like to have someone in my corner who actually wanted to be there.
Not out of family obligation or politeness or because they were being paid to be.
" I tighten my grip on the knife handle.
"And then you showed up, and you were so completely, aggressively on my side, and I kept telling myself it wasn't real because you were on the clock, except it felt real.
It felt more real than anything I've had in years. "
His jaw tightens. Not anger. The other kind of tightening, the kind that happens when something lands.
"It was real," he says. "From the beginning. I was simply also doing my job."
"Past tense."
"Completely past tense."
The music from inside the venue changes keys, something slower rolling out across the evening, and in the distance a group of guests spills out onto the terrace laughing, but we are far enough back in the car park that no one is paying attention to us, and the night is very quiet in the immediate radius of this enormous, formally dressed Orc who has just offered me his blade and upended every expectation I arrived here with.
I look up at him for a long moment, and then I do the thing I've been stopping myself from doing without the excuse of a watching audience for the first time all weekend.
I reach up, curl my free hand into the lapel of his jacket, and pull him down.
He comes willingly, folding himself toward me with that careful, deliberate gentleness that is somehow more devastating than any amount of force, and I kiss him in the car park with his knife in my right hand and my heels uneven on the tarmac and the distant wedding reception playing something that is technically a love song.
He makes a low sound against my mouth and his hands come up to bracket my face, thumbs tracing the line of my jaw with a precision that feels like reverence, and I stop thinking about anything except the warmth of him and the solid, immovable reality of his presence and the fact that when the weekend ends and we drive away from this venue and this family and this particular sixty-hour disaster, he is coming with me.
Not because I'm paying him.
Because he decided to.
When we finally break apart, I'm breathing unsteadily and he's watching me with a look I've only seen fragments of all weekend, usually in the moments between the performance, when he thought I wasn't looking.
It's stripped of the professional calm and the deadpan precision and the elaborate bodyguard posture.
It's just him, looking at me, and what's in his face is so straightforward and so enormous and so completely unguarded that it nearly takes my knees out entirely.
"I need to ask you something," I say, when I have approximately recovered the power of speech.
"Yes."
"Not a question yet. I just wanted to note that I'm about to ask you something."
"I await your question with great patience."
"Sarcasm."
"Never."
I take a breath. "Come back to the city with me. Not to the gig app, not as anyone's fake anything. Just—" I search his face. "Come back with me. See what this is when it's not inside a sixty-hour crisis."
He is quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that isn't hesitation but is instead the deliberate, considered pause of someone who does not say things they don't mean.
"I had already intended to ask you the same thing," he says. "I was simply waiting for a tactically appropriate moment."
"Was the car park not tactical enough?"
"The car park was sufficient."
The laugh comes out of me again, lighter this time, easier, not fighting against anything on the way out.
I look down at the knife in my hand. The carved handle is warm against my palm.
"You know my family is going to be unhinged about this forever," I tell him.
"Your family's reactions are not my primary concern."
"Aunt Susan is going to ask you invasive questions every Christmas for the rest of our natural lives."
"Aunt Susan should be deeply concerned about what I do and do not share with her."
"My father is going to try to give you a check again."
The look on his face is absolutely serene. "He will be unsuccessful."
Inside the venue, someone has started a toast. The microphone feedback squeals briefly across the night air, and there is laughter and clinking glass and all the formal machinery of someone else's love story continuing on without us, and I think that might be the most perfect thing about this moment, that I am outside in a car park with my heels going uneven on the tarmac and a throwing knife in my hand, completely unconcerned with how any of this looks, while my cousin's wedding carries on behind those closed doors.
I made it through the whole weekend.
I have an Orc.
He's mine and he's keeping the knife in my hand and he's coming home with me.
Aunt Susan is going to have an absolutely spectacular meltdown and I am going to enjoy every second of it.
"Alright," I say, tipping my head back to look up at him in the particular way I'm already getting used to, the craning back, the scale of him against the sky. "So. Formally courting. What does that involve, exactly?"
The warmth of his expression deepens.
"Meals," he says. "Your safety. My presence. My time. My full and undivided attention and all resources at my disposal applied toward demonstrating that I am worth keeping."
"You're already worth keeping."
"Nevertheless. I will be thorough."
"Of course you will."
"Five stars is insufficient when the motivation is personal."
I push my lips together against the smile pulling at them, fighting it and losing completely.
"Olog."
"Yes."
"Shut up and take me back to the room."
He offers me his arm, formal and deliberate and completely, magnificently serious, and I slide my hand through it and let him walk me back through the car park and away from the venue and the family and the ticking clock that has been hanging over my head since the moment this weekend began.
The knife sits warm and certain in my free hand.
I carry it all the way to the hotel door.