Chapter 11 #2
He stopped. And here was the thing about Torrk that most people never bothered to learn, because they got tired somewhere around his third fart noise and stopped paying attention: he could turn it off.
All of it. In an instant, like a light switch.
When I arrived in the human world, the light switches were one of the first things that amazed me; imagine being able to turn the sun on and off so quickly!
But that was Torrk, once you bothered to get to know him.
He caught the lacrosse ball out of the air, set it down on the bench with only one bounce, and turned to face me with an expression I’d seen maybe four times in as many seasons.
Sober. Focused.
The face he wore in a shootout, when the arena went quiet and there was nothing left in the world but him and the shooter and the six feet of net he was sworn to defend.
“I heard her,” he said. “On the bus.”
Everything in me went still.
“Sofia,” he clarified, unnecessarily, gently. “I was sitting four rows in front of you with my hood up, and I wasn’t trying to listen, Dak, I swear it on the Torrk Method, but—” He tapped one pointed ear. “We hear what we hear.”
Fuck. Of course. Of course he had. I’d been so wrapped in her, in the smell of her fear and grief and the horror of what she’d told me, that I’d forgotten I sat in a metal tube full of males with hearing as sharp as my own.
I’d been careless. With her secrets, the most precious thing she’d ever handed me.
“Who else?” I asked. My voice came out flat and low, and I didn’t recognize it.
“Nobody,” he said it fast, firm, no hedging.
“Jord had his buds in, blasting that noise he calls music. Bardon was up front with Coach. Kardok was asleep and drooling on the window like a kitling—I have photos, they’re disgusting.
” His mouth twitched, then went still again.
“It was just me, and it stays just me. I’d never—you know I’d never betray you. Her. Rosa.”
I did know. That was the thing. Beneath all the noise, Torrk was the most loyal male I’d ever stood beside on the ice. I let out a breath and sat down hard on the bench.
“So.” He lowered himself onto the bench across from me, elbows on his knees, and for once said nothing goofy. “None of our contacts have seen Anthony around town again since you beat the shit out of him. What are you going to do about him?”
And that—that was the question, wasn’t it?
“I don’t know,” I admitted, and the words tasted like rust.
Torrk waited. That was another thing nobody knew about him: he could wait. A goalie’s patience, endless and total.
“I hate it,” I said finally, quietly, to my own hands.
“I hate that I’m just—sitting here. Waiting for him to come to us.
Every day I go to practice and I stand at my own door before I leave it, listening to make sure they’re still inside, still breathing, still there.
And every night I come home and they are, and I think—” I stopped.
“I don’t chase him. I can’t. I don’t know where he is, I don’t know when he’s coming, so I just wait, and an orc is not built to wait while a threat walks free with his—”
I stopped again.
“With his family,” Torrk finished, soft.
I didn’t correct him.
“And the worst part—” I dragged a hand down my face.
“The worst part, Torrk, is that some traitor piece of me doesn’t want it to end.
Because right now they’re in my house. Right now she makes my coffee and the kitling puts her drawings on my cold-box and calls me Dak, and I get to—I get to pretend.
That it’s mine.” I dropped my hand and stared at the concrete floor of the locker room.
“That they’re mine. That this is my life and not just some—some siege I’m waiting out.
” I laughed, and it wasn’t a good sound.
“What kind of male likes the danger because the danger is the only reason she’s under his roof? ”
Torrk was quiet for a moment.
“Does she know?” he asked.
I looked up. “Know what?”
“That she’s yours,” he said it plainly, no drama, no bit, just the flat truth of it laid on the concrete between us. “That she’s your Mate. Does she know?”
The question landed between us like a dropped puck.
“No,” I finally said. “She knows I love her. I told her. But the—the rest of it—what it means, what she is to me?” I looked away. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because she was sold, Torrk!” It came out louder than I meant, and it echoed off the lockers, and I lowered my voice and dragged my hand through my hair.
“She was sixteen and her stepfather handed her to a monster who told her she belonged to him. That she was owned. And now I’m supposed to sit her down and say—what?
Congratulations, the universe has decided you’re mine, forever, no take-backs, it’s biology, you don’t get a vote?
” I shook my head hard. “I won’t put another set of bars around her.
I won’t. If she stays, it’ll be because she chose it.
Not because I told her the gods already decided. ”
I expected him to make a joke. To lighten it. That was the Torrk I knew, the Torrk I expected.
He didn’t.
He sat there and looked at me with those dark goalie eyes that missed nothing, and when he spoke, it was the most serious I’d ever heard him.
“That’s real pretty, D’kap,” he said, using the ancient honorific for a wise elder. “It is. And it’s also horseshit.”
I blinked.
“You think you’re protecting her by not telling her.
” He leaned forward. “But you’re not. You’re protecting you.
Because if you tell her, then she gets to say no, and that’s the thing you can’t stand.
” He held up a hand before I could argue.
“You’re letting her choose whether to stay in the house.
Whether to make your coffee. Whether to let the kitling call you Dak.
You’re letting her choose all the little forevers.
But you’re keeping the big one to yourself, the one that actually matters, because you’re scared.
And that’s not you giving her freedom, man.
That’s you deciding for her that she can’t handle the truth.
That’s the same thing he did. You just dressed it up nicer. ”
Gods below.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
“She’s been making decisions with half the picture,” Torrk said, gentler now.
“She doesn’t know what she’s choosing. And you can’t start your forever with her until she knows there’s a forever there to work toward.
Give her the whole picture. Then let her choose.
” He shrugged, and just like that, ninety percent of the manic light flickered back into his face.
“That’s the Torrk Method. Emotional edition. That one, people will read.”
I stared at him. This ridiculous, brilliant, foam-roller-abusing lunatic of a goalie, who invented workouts that didn’t exist and slept standing up and had just cut straight to the center of the thing I’d been failing to see for weeks.
“When,” I said slowly, “did you get wise?”
“I’ve always been wise. I lead with the farts because wisdom is off-putting in large doses.” He stood, cracked his neck, and retrieved his lacrosse ball with a flourish. “Also I stop a lot of pucks with my face. It rearranges the brain. Very clarifying.”
I stood too, and gripped his shoulder—hard, gratefully.
“Thank you, T’mak.” I used the word for little brother, because I knew it would piss him off. “For your insight…and your discretion.”
Torrk’s whole face went briefly, genuinely soft at the address… Then he ruined it by making a fart noise with his mouth and shouldering past me toward the door.
“Go home, Dak,” he called over his shoulder. “Give your female the full picture. And ice those ribs, you magnificent purple disaster—I meant it about the mirror.”
I was still almost smiling when I stepped out into the corridor, toward the parking lot, toward them, my resolve settling into place with the quiet finality of a puck hitting the back of the net.
Tonight. I would tell her tonight.