Chapter 21 Bliss
BLISS
My mother calls back eleven minutes later.
I know this because Olog has already logged it in the binder under Maternal Contact Patterns: Escalation Timeline and, according to his notes, eleven minutes is exactly how long it takes her to compose herself after receiving an unexpected response and regroup for a secondary offensive.
I answer on the second ring, sitting cross-legged on his massive, Orc-scaled sofa, wearing his shirt, completely unbothered.
"Hi, Mum."
"Bliss." Her voice is the specific temperature of a cold marble countertop. "I received a rather unusual text message."
"Olog sent that, yeah."
"He signed it with his initials."
"That's just how he communicates."
A pause. Measured, tactical, deeply familiar. For many years I’ve navigated these pauses, reading them like weather systems, adjusting my posture and my smile and my vowel sounds accordingly. I don't adjust anything right now. I pick a loose thread on the hem of Olog's shirt and wait her out.
"Will he be attending the gala," she says, not quite a question.
"Yes."
"Bliss, the gala is a formal—"
"He owns six bespoke suits, Mum. He'll be the best-dressed person there. He'll also be the tallest, the broadest, and genuinely the most intimidating, but I figure that's your problem to manage, not mine."
Another pause. Longer this time.
Olog appears in the kitchen doorway, watching me with those silver eyes, one shoulder against the frame.
He has an expression that might generously be described as neutral and is actually deeply attentive.
He is listening to every word. His hearing is approximately four times sharper than mine, which I have stopped finding unsettling and started finding incredibly convenient.
"Fine," my mother says, which is not a word she uses lightly or without significant internal suffering. "We will see you both on Saturday."
"Brilliant. Can't wait."
I hang up.
Olog raises one dark brow.
"She capitulated in under ninety seconds," he says. "I had projected a four-minute negotiation."
"She wasn't expecting me to push back." I toss my phone onto the cushion beside me. "She never is."
He crosses the room and sits beside me, the sofa registering his weight in a way that subtly tilts the entire cushion toward him. I've stopped fighting the gravitational pull. I just lean in.
"Are you prepared for Saturday?" he asks.
"For the first time in my life," I say, and I genuinely mean it, "yes."
Saturday arrives in the form of sharp winter light and the smell of Olog's bergamot cologne filling the apartment while he dresses with the focused precision of someone preparing for a military operation.
I watch him from the bed, my chin propped on my hand, and I think that if I had to describe him to someone who had never seen him, I would simply say imagine the most beautiful, terrifying thing you have ever encountered and then triple it.
The suit is charcoal this time, nearly black, with a deep teal silk tie that does something extraordinary against his ash-gray skin.
The tattoos climb his throat above his collar, the intricate black lines of his grandmother's soup recipes curving over his jaw, and he adjusts his cufflinks with complete, unhurried calm.
"You're staring," he says, without turning around.
"Aggressively," I confirm.
The corner of his mouth moves.
I get up and find my dress, a deep burgundy silk that I bought specifically for tonight, specifically because it is the color of quiet confidence and absolutely nothing to do with making Olog's silver eyes track me across a room. That is simply a bonus I have chosen to accept.
He turns when I step into it and does the zip up my back with one careful hand, his fingertips barely grazing my spine, and I feel it down to my heels.
"Adequate," he says.
"You absolute menace."
"You look exceptional," he corrects, his voice dropping a register. "I am practicing restraint."
I turn and straighten his tie, which doesn't need straightening, and he lets me do it anyway.
"Okay," I say. "Let's go terrify my family."
The gala is held in a restored Victorian ballroom in the city center, the kind of venue where every surface is either marble or gilt and the waitstaff have been trained to move silently and never make eye contact.
My family hires this room every December.
Nearly every December of my adult life I’ve walked into it with my stomach in knots, rehearsing my answers to their questions in the car on the way over, pre-emptively bracing for the comments about my career and my flat and my relationship status and my hair.
Tonight I walk in on Olog's arm.
He has to angle his shoulders slightly to clear the door.
I watch the room register him in real time.
It moves like a wave, that moment of collective recalibration, the way a crowded space full of confident, wealthy people suddenly and unanimously decides that perhaps standing directly in the path of the massive tattooed Orc in the charcoal suit is not the evening's wisest social strategy.
Conversations don't stop exactly, but they pause, readjust, resume at a slightly higher pitch.
A waiter with a tray of champagne flutes executes a smooth, instinctive arc around us.
Olog doesn't notice. Or rather, he notices everything and is moved by none of it.
His hand covers mine on his arm, warm and certain, and he scans the room once with those silver eyes in the way he always does, cataloguing exits and threats and the locations of people he has pre-identified in the binder as requiring monitoring.
"Your aunt is at the bar," he whispers.
"Of course she is."
"Your ex-boyfriend's mother is near the ice sculpture."
"Noted."
"Your mother is approaching from the eleven o'clock position."
I take a long breath.
My mother arrives in a floor-length champagne gown, her hair in its signature ruthless chignon, her eyes already performing the rapid assessment she deploys on every situation before deciding how to engage with it. She looks at me first, then up, considerably further up, at Olog.
A lesser man would fidget under that look.
Olog meets it with the serene, impenetrable stillness of a mountain that has been standing for several thousand years and expects to continue doing so.
"Olog," my mother says finally, extending her hand with the careful graciousness of someone making a calculated diplomatic gesture. "Bliss has told me very little about you."
"That is her prerogative," Olog replies, and takes her hand with enormous, careful gentleness. "You have a beautiful venue. The load-bearing columns are structurally excellent."
My mother blinks.
"Thank you," she says, apparently deciding this is a compliment.
"I assessed the building's integrity when Bliss informed me we would be attending.
I like to ensure the environments she occupies are sound.
" He says it with complete sincerity, as if this is standard conversation, and my mother stares at him for a moment with the expression of a woman trying to find the angle and failing to locate one.
"Right," she says. "Well. Drinks are—"
"I'll get Bliss's drink," Olog says pleasantly. "Champagne, and she prefers it cold rather than room temperature. If you'll excuse us."
He guides me toward the bar with his hand warm at the small of my back, and I watch my mother stand very still in our wake with admiration I have never seen on her face before.
She looks, I realise, slightly impressed.
Aunt Susan finds us twenty minutes later near the string quartet.
This is inevitable. Susan is a woman who has spent sixty years treating every social gathering as a competitive sport, and I have historically been one of her easiest targets.
She arrives with the specific bright-eyed energy of someone who has been saving up her opening remarks, and she looks at Olog with a smile that doesn't entirely reach its destination.
"Well," she says. "Aren't you something."
"Good evening," Olog says.
"Susan," I say.
"I was just saying to Margaret that Bliss has certainly made an interesting choice." She tilts her head at him, the gesture she uses when she is deciding whether someone is worth her sustained attention. "And what is it you do, exactly?"
"I run a security firm," Olog replies. "Executive protection, risk assessment, threat mitigation.
We work primarily with high-profile individuals who require discreet and reliable support.
" He pauses, just briefly. "I find I am very good at identifying and neutralising threats to the people I care about. "
Susan's smile stays exactly where it is, but something behind her eyes recalibrates.
"How fascinating," she manages.
"It is. For example, I have noticed that Bliss's stress cortisol levels increase measurably when she is in close proximity to certain family members.
" He says this pleasantly, informatively, the way someone might describe the weather.
"I have found that a direct and early conversational intervention tends to resolve the issue efficiently. "
A silence unfolds.
Susan looks at me.
I sip my champagne.
"She seems very relaxed tonight," Susan says, apparently deciding this is safer ground.
"She is," Olog agrees. "I work very hard to ensure that."
Susan excuses herself approximately thirty seconds later, and I see her retreat toward the ice sculpture with the bearing of a woman who has just reassessed several foundational assumptions about the evening.
I lean up toward Olog's ear. "You just told my aunt you monitor my stress hormones."
"It is relevant information," he says.
"It was perfect," I tell him.
My father corners us near the dessert table.
This is less comfortable, because my father does not retreat the way my mother and Susan do. He plants his feet and holds his ground and looks at Olog the way men of his generation look at anything they cannot immediately categorise or control.
"Bliss," he says, and then, grudgingly, "Olog."