Chapter 15 Bliss
BLISS
The knife is barely on the nightstand before my hands find his lapels.
I don't think about it. There is no internal committee meeting, no anxious cost-benefit analysis running in the background of my skull.
My fingers curl into the dark wool of his jacket and I pull, which is a largely symbolic gesture given the physics involved, but Olog reads the intention with that uncanny, precise attention he gives to everything I do, and he comes down to me like he's been waiting for the signal.
His mouth finds mine in the dark and it is nothing like the careful, choreographed performances of the last two days.
Those kisses had an audience. They were designed.
This has no design at all. It is immediate and honest and thorough, his broad hand cupping the side of my face with a gentleness that is genuinely at odds with the size of him, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw while he takes his time, and I make a sound against his mouth that I would be embarrassed about in any context that still involved performance or pretense.
There is no pretense left in this room.
"Bliss." My name in his mouth, low and deliberate, the same measured weight he gives to everything, except this time it is stripped of the professional cadence. It is just his voice. Just my name.
"Still here," I say against his jaw. "Fully present. No notes."
The sound he makes is low and warm and a little wrecked, which is possibly the most satisfying thing I have ever heard in my twenty-eight years of existence, and I file it immediately for future reference.
He stands from the bed in one smooth motion and I reach out before I can stop myself.
He's already sliding the jacket off his shoulders, the same efficient precision that got us through every choreographed cocktail hour, every staged photograph.
He drapes it over the chair. Smooths a nonexistent crease.
I set my knuckles against my sternum where something warm and stupidly tender has lodged itself.
He unbuttons his cuffs. Rolls each sleeve twice, slow and methodical, exposing the black ink that crawls up the dense muscle of his forearms, his grandmother's soup recipes, his family tree, rendered in sharp, sweeping lines. My throat clicks when I swallow.
"Are you cataloguing me?" he asks without looking up from his sleeve.
"I'm appreciating you," I say. "There's a distinction."
He looks up then, silver eyes steady on my face, and there is something in them that is not professional and not restrained and not filtered through any version of client management. It is direct and warm and entirely focused on me, and it sits somewhere behind my sternum and refuses to move.
He crosses the room and I lean back across the bed, making space, and he follows me down onto it with careful, deliberate intent.
The mattress concedes completely to his weight.
The whole architecture of the bed shifts and resettles with him in it, and I am acutely, viscerally aware of the sheer fact of him, the broad solidity of his chest above me, the warm bergamot-and-linen scent of his skin, the way he braces himself on one arm to keep the full weight of himself from simply flattening me into the expensive hotel mattress.
"Hi," I say.
"Hello, Bliss."
"We're doing this."
"We are." He dips down and drags his mouth along the line of my throat, slow and deliberate, and my entire nervous system briefly resigns. "I have, for the record, wanted to do this since approximately the welcome mixer."
"The welcome mixer was twelve hours into the gig."
"Yes, I know." His mouth finds the curve of my shoulder. "I spent a substantial amount of internal energy that evening reviewing the ethics."
"And?"
"The contract is cancelled." He lifts his head to look at me. "The ethics are resolved."
I laugh, actual and unguarded, and something in his expression softens in a way that is entirely private, entirely for this room, and I reach up and trace the line of his jaw with my fingers and feel the muscle there work as his eyes close briefly.
He pulls the zip of my dress down my spine with one slow, careful motion, and the silk falls away.
His hands trace the new geography of me with the same focused attention he brings to threat assessment and hors d'oeuvre logistics, which should be clinical but is instead the most seen I have felt in recent memory.
His palms are enormous against my skin, spanning the breadth of my ribcage, the curve of my waist, mapping me with a thoroughness that makes my breathing shift into something irregular.
"You have been," he says against my collarbone, the words measured and low, "occupying a significant percentage of my cognitive bandwidth since Thursday morning."
"What percentage?"
"Inadvisably high." He lifts his head and looks down at me, and the silver of his eyes is very dark in this light.
"I had a rate card. I had a protocol. I had a five-star professional reputation built across two years of impeccable service delivery.
" A beat. His thumb traces a slow, thoughtful line across my hip.
"You have done considerable damage to my operational framework. "
"I'm going to need you to stop talking about your operational framework while I'm lying here like this."
"Noted," he says, and then his mouth moves down my sternum and the ability to generate coherent sentences is no longer available to me.
There is a particular quality to the way he takes his time that I was not adequately prepared for.
I expected the intensity, because Olog applies intensity to everything up to and including the loading of luggage onto a trolley.
What I was not prepared for is the patience.
The thoroughness. The sense that he has made a deliberate decision about what he wants to do and he is now executing it with his full, undivided professional attention redirected toward a completely different objective, and that objective is me.
His hands are careful with the size difference in a way that is not tentative.
It is considered. He adjusts his weight and his angle with quiet, practical attention, watching my face, reading the information there with the same focused precision he used to read the lobby when he walked in on Thursday, and every adjustment he makes is exactly right, and I cannot tell if this is instinct or intelligence or both and I stop caring almost immediately.
I get his shirt off him. This requires some collaboration and he assists without ceremony, tossing it somewhere behind us, and then the full expanse of him is above me and the tattoos in the low lamplight are extraordinary, dense and intricate, curving over the planes of his chest and shoulders and down his arms, and I press my palm flat against his sternum because I want to feel his heartbeat and I find it immediately, steady and fast, and something about the fast part undoes me entirely.
"Your heart is racing," I say.
"Yes." No qualification, no deflection. Just the word, offered plainly.
I pull him down.
What follows is not quiet or careful or restrained in the way the last two days have been.
There is no audience to perform for and no family to manage and no clock ticking in the corner of my phone screen.
There is just the massive king bed and the dark suite and the wind picking up outside and Olog, who has apparently been applying very considerable discipline to his instincts for the better part of two days and is now not applying it at all.
He is vocal in a way I did not expect. Low sounds, deep in his chest, pressed against my throat or my shoulder or my hair, and the sounds are not performative, they are involuntary and honest and they vibrate straight through me in a way that is frankly unfair.
He says my name at intervals, always with that same precise weight, and each time it lands somewhere different and deeper.
The size of him requires some practical navigation, which we manage through a combination of his extraordinary awareness of his own physicality and my complete willingness to direct proceedings, which he responds to with what I can only describe as enthusiastic compliance.
His hands can span almost my entire waist. The knowledge of this is, empirically, doing something significant to my higher cognitive function.
At one point, I say, against the side of his neck, "You are very large."
"I have been informed," he says, with that particular dry precision, and I laugh and he feels it against him and the sound he makes in response is one I am going to be thinking about for a very long time.
The final claiming, which is how my brain files it later in the small hours of the morning, is deep and unhurried and so thoroughly real that the memory of everything before it, every performed kiss and staged embrace and carefully choreographed tenderness, seems thin and papery and entirely beside the point.
This is the point. This has always been the point, working its way toward the surface through forty-eight hours of fake dating and genuine terror and family dinners and a locked restroom and a parking lot and a throwing knife.
He marks me. Not ceremonially, though there is ceremony in it, in the deliberate way he presses his mouth to the curve of my shoulder and holds it there while I press into him and his large hands hold my hips still against him.
But more than that, he binds me in the straightforward biological sense of making it impossible to imagine the architecture of my life without this specific, large, terrifyingly attentive Orc inside it.
I tell him this, or some compressed and less articulate version of it, at some point when the lamplight is lower and the window shows full dark and the sounds of the wedding reception have faded entirely from somewhere below us.
He goes still and looks at me, and I can see him processing it, running it through whatever internal framework he runs things through, and then he says, quietly and without any professional cadence at all, "Good. I have begun planning accordingly."
"You've been planning already?"
"Since the parking lot." A beat. "Possibly since the welcome mixer. The timeline is somewhat complicated."
I shove my face into the warm skin of him and laugh, and he wraps one massive arm around me and holds me there, and the warmth of him and the steady thud of his heartbeat and the smell of bergamot and starched linen and something warmer underneath it settle over me like something I have been missing the precise shape of for a very long time.
I am asleep before I form another thought.
The sleep is deep and dark and entirely without anxiety, which is a novelty of a magnitude I cannot fully appreciate until much later, and I sleep through the remainder of the night and the first grey light of morning without stirring.
When I surface, the room is quiet.
The bed is warm where he was and cool at the edges, and the light coming through the gap in the curtains is the thin, pale light of early morning, and I reach sideways before I am fully awake, instinctive and certain of what I'm reaching for.
My hand finds the sheets.
I come fully awake.
Olog is standing at the window, fully dressed, his dark three-piece suit impeccable, each button done, each fold correct, the jacket across his shoulders without a wrinkle.
He is looking down at his phone, and the expression on his face is not the expression of a man who has just slept beside the person he spent the night calling his mate.
It is closed and deliberate and entirely unreadable, his brow slightly drawn, his jaw set, the silver eyes moving across whatever is on his screen with that precise, focused attention that I know by now means he is processing something significant.
He has not heard me wake.
I watch him from the bed, the sheets pooled around me, and the warm certainty of three hours ago develops, with clinical speed, a very small and very cold crack directly through its centre.