Chapter 3
LIVIA
Iam holding the wrist of a six-foot-nine-inch Orc in a cocktail bar on a Tuesday night, and I have absolutely no plan for what happens next.
His skin is warm under my palm, warmer than I expect, and the texture is smooth in a way that catches me off guard because I realize with a jolt of mortification that I was subconsciously expecting it to feel rough or scaled or something equally ridiculous and vaguely racist. It feels like skin.
Just skin. The bones underneath are thick and solid, and I can feel the faint, steady thrum of his pulse against my fingertips, which is beating considerably faster than I would have predicted for someone who spends his professional life calculating mortality tables.
He sits.
The booth protests under his weight with a low creak that makes the couple two tables over glance in our direction, but Narod does not seem to notice.
I let go of his wrist. My hand feels cold without the contact, which is absurd, so I wrap both hands around my martini glass to give them something useful to do.
"Okay," I say
"So. You're actually an actuary."
"Yes." His voice is still low, still careful, like he is testing the structural integrity of each word before he lets it out into the world.
"I apologise if that was unclear in my profile.
I thought the occupation field was sufficiently specific, but I have been told that I sometimes assume a level of detail orientation in others that is not universally present. "
I blink at him. "No, that part was clear. I just thought the rest of you was... I don't know. A really committed aesthetic choice."
His brow furrows slightly, and the micro-expressions shift across his face as he processes this statement and arrives at what I assume is the correct interpretation, because his eyes widen just a fraction and his tusks catch the candlelight as his mouth opens slightly in something that looks like dawning horror.
"You thought I was human," he says, and it is not a question, it is the verbal equivalent of watching someone recalculate an entire financial model from scratch after discovering a fundamental error in the underlying assumptions.
"I mean, to be fair, your profile picture looked like you were at a convention or something.
There was a booth in the background with a banner.
I thought maybe you were really into tabletop gaming.
" I take a sip of my martini because my mouth has gone dry and I need to do something with my hands that is not reaching out to touch him again.
"Also, the lighting was kind of dim, and I've been on approximately twelve dates in the last six months where the guy's profile picture was taken in 2015 and involved significantly more hair than the person who actually showed up, so my threshold for photographic accuracy has been systematically lowered. "
He is staring at me like I have just explained that I believed the moon was a government projection.
"You thought I falsified my appearance," he says slowly, "but in the direction of appearing less human."
"Well, when you put it like that, it sounds weird."
"It is objectively extremely weird."
"Okay, yes, fair, but also you have to understand that dating apps have absolutely destroyed my ability to take anything at face value, so the possibility that you were a literal Orc did not actually crack the top five hypotheses I was working with when I walked in here tonight.
" I am talking too fast, which is what I do when I am flustered, and I am definitely flustered because he is looking at me with this intensely focused attention that makes me feel like I am the only spreadsheet in the room and he is going to audit every single cell.
"I was mostly prepared for you to be shorter than your profile said, or significantly older, or secretly married, or one of those guys who spends the entire date explaining cryptocurrency. "
"I do not own any cryptocurrency," Narod says, very seriously. "The volatility makes it unsuitable for any conservative financial planning strategy."
"Oh thank god," I say. "You have no idea how refreshing that is."
The server arrives with Narod's drink, and I watch with barely concealed delight as she sets down what is unmistakably a cosmopolitan in front of him.
It is bright pink. It has a sugar-frosted rim.
It looks like something that should be photographed for a lifestyle blog, and it is sitting in front of an enormous Orc who is wearing an argyle sweater vest and wire-rimmed glasses.
"Thank you," Narod says to the server, and his voice is so unfailingly polite that she smiles at him before she walks away, and I realize with a strange little flip in my stomach that he has absolutely no idea how disarming he is when he is trying this hard to be considerate.
He picks up the glass with surprising delicacy, his massive fingers curling around the stem, and takes a careful sip.
"I like the colour," he says, as if this explains everything.
I do not laugh, but it is a near thing. "That's a completely valid reason to order a drink."
"The bartender recommended it when I called ahead to confirm the reservation.
I explained that I do not have extensive experience with cocktails and asked for something approachable.
" He sets the glass down with meticulous care, aligning it precisely with the napkin beneath it. "I typically drink tea."
"What kind of tea?"
"Earl Grey. Sometimes chamomile in the evenings if I am having difficulty managing stress levels before bed."
I should not find this as charming as I do.
This is a first date with someone I have known for approximately eight minutes in person, and I am sitting here feeling absurdly warm and soft about the fact that he drinks chamomile tea to manage his stress levels like some kind of enormous, anxious grandparent.
"I'm more of a coffee person," I say, because I need to contribute something to this conversation that is not just me staring at him like he is the most unexpectedly endearing thing I have encountered in years.
"I have a very elaborate morning routine that involves a French press and a specific bean-to-water ratio that my roommate thinks is unhinged. "
His eyes brighten. It is a subtle shift, but I catch it, the way his posture straightens just slightly and his attention sharpens in a way that feels like he has just opened a new spreadsheet and is ready to fill in every field.
"What ratio do you use?" he asks, and he sounds genuinely interested, and I realize with a jolt that he is actually going to listen to my answer.
"One to fifteen," I say. "Thirty grams of coffee to four hundred and fifty grams of water. I weigh it out every morning."
"That is extremely precise."
"I'm an accountant. Precision is sort of my whole thing."
"I can respect that." He takes another sip of his cosmopolitan, as his throat works as he swallows, which is a thing I should not be noticing but I am noticing it anyway because apparently my brain has decided that we are doing this now.
"I have a similar approach to my breakfast. I eat the same thing every morning at the same time.
Two eggs, one piece of whole grain toast, a small portion of berries.
It minimises decision fatigue and ensures consistent nutritional intake. "
"That is the most actuary thing I have ever heard."
"It is not a widely appealing personality trait."
"Are you kidding? Do you know how many dates I've been on where the guy shows up twenty minutes late and orders something he can't pronounce and then spends forty-five minutes talking about his podcast that he hasn't actually started yet?
" I lean forward slightly, and the candlelight makes his eyes look even warmer, and I am definitely smiling now, I can feel it pulling at the corners of my mouth.
"You showed up on time. You researched the cocktail menu.
You have a structured breakfast routine.
You are literally the first person I've met on this app who has their life together. "
He blinks at me. His hands are still wrapped around the cosmopolitan glass, and I can see the faint tension in his shoulders, like he is not entirely sure whether I am making fun of him.
"I was fifteen minutes early," he says quietly. "I have been sitting in the coffee shop across the street for the past half hour running through conversation scenarios."
"That's... actually really sweet."
"It is a function of anxiety, not sweetness."
"It can be both."
He looks at me for a long moment, and I feel something shift in the space between us, something that feels a little like the moment in a spreadsheet when all the formulas finally balance and the numbers start to make sense.
"I did not think you would stay," he says, and his voice is softer now, low enough that I have to lean in slightly to hear him over the ambient noise of the bar. "I calculated the probability of you leaving within the first five minutes at approximately seventy-three percent."
"What's it at now?"
"I am recalculating."
I smile. "Good. Keep me updated."
The conversation unfolds in a way that feels startlingly easy.
Narod asks me about work, and I tell him about the mid-sized consulting firm I work for, about the endless parade of clients who cannot reconcile their own bank statements and the special kind of hell that is tax season.
He listens with this focused, unblinking attention that should probably be unnerving but instead makes me feel like every word I am saying actually matters, like he is taking notes in his head and filing them away in some meticulously organised mental database labelled "Things Livia Cares About. "
"Do you enjoy it?" he asks, and the question catches me off guard because most people do not ask me that, they just assume that accounting is accounting and there is nothing particularly interesting to say about it.