Chapter 5
LIVIA
The growl is still vibrating somewhere behind my sternum when the bartender materialises at our table, and I look up at her with what I can only assume is an expression that communicates something deeply unhinged, because she blinks, glances at Narod, and then blinks again.
"Another round?"
"Check," I say. "Please. Now. Immediately."
Narod's amber eyes are still fixed on me, warm and unsteady and slightly wild around the edges. I absolutely cannot look at him directly or I will combust into something that would be very difficult to itemise on a tax return.
The sound. That sound. It is still inside me, lodged somewhere between my ribs, a deep, resonant vibration that had zero percent to do with fear and one hundred percent to do with something I have not felt in a very long time, a hot, low pull behind my navel that my body is treating as a five-alarm emergency requiring immediate evacuation.
I am a practical person. I am a spreadsheet person. I believe in logical outcomes and risk assessment and not making decisions in emotionally elevated states.
I am also a person who just watched a six-foot-nine Orc stand up to his full, terrifying height and dismantle my ex-boyfriend using nothing but bone density statistics and the tone of voice of someone who genuinely might, under slightly different circumstances, do exactly what he is describing, and then sit back down and look at me like I am the only data point in the room that matters.
So I ask for the check.
The bartender produces it with admirable speed, and Narod reaches for it before I have even registered its existence on the table, his large hand covering it completely, and I open my mouth to protest on principle, and he says,
"Please."
Just that. One word, low and careful, and he is looking at me with those soft amber eyes behind the wire-rimmed glasses, earnest and slightly desperate, and I close my mouth again.
"Fine," I say. "But I'm splitting the next one."
"There will be a next one?"
I look at him. He is asking with total sincerity, his heavy brow slightly furrowed, his pen hovering over the bill, and the fact that he is genuinely uncertain, that after all of tonight, the cosmopolitan and the listening and the Chad demolition and the growl, he is still sitting there calculating odds and coming up uncertain, does something to my chest that I refuse to examine in any depth right now.
"Narod." I lean forward slightly. "There is going to be a next one."
He gazes at me for a long, suspended moment, and then something in his expression shifts, the careful, guarded blankness that he wears like armour just cracking open at the edges, and he writes the tip with a slightly unsteady hand.
We collect our coats from the rack near the door, and the bartender says something cheerful and entirely irrelevant to us as we leave, and then we are outside.
The city hits us both at once.
The rain is not a drizzle. The rain is not even a downpour in the polite, cinematic sense, the sort that descends gently on people making significant life decisions in romantic comedies.
This is a full structural assault, fat heavy drops driving down sideways on a sharp April wind that shoves itself immediately up my sleeves and under my collar, and I gasp at the cold shock of it and spin to face Narod, who is standing on the pavement looking up at the sky with a genuine, deeply scientific interest.
"The precipitation index for this evening was forecast at forty-two percent," he says, raising his voice slightly over the roar of it. "I underweighted the humidity data."
"Narod!" I grab his arm, or attempt to, my fingers closing around approximately half his wrist. "My flat is two blocks. Run."
He looks down at me, blinking rain from his lashes. "I can—I could carry—"
"Run," I say firmly, and I start running.
He runs.
He runs like something with a very different relationship to physics than the rest of us, his long legs eating up the pavement in strides that I have to triple to match, but he sees almost immediately that he is pulling ahead and adjusts, shortening his gait so that we are side by side, and I am half-laughing, half gasping, my shoes filling with water at the kerb crossing, my hair plastered flat to my skull in approximately four seconds.
The street lamps blur and double through my soaked glasses, and I pull them off and shove them into my coat pocket for the last half-block, navigating by sheer muscle memory toward the familiar shape of my building's door, and then we are there, under the shallow overhang, and I am fumbling with my keys with hands that are cold and slightly shaking, and Narod is standing directly behind me, shielding me from the worst of the wind with the sheer physical fact of his body, and he is drenched, his sweater vest dark with water, his broad shoulders streaming, and he looks, objectively, deeply absurd and completely wonderful.
The key goes in. The door opens.
"Come in," I say.
The lobby of my building is narrow and lit by the flickering bulb on the second floor that the property management company has been promising to replace since March, and Narod steps through the main door with automatic, practised caution, ducking his head, angling his shoulders, performing the particular geometry that I realise he must perform constantly, every door, every room, every public space designed for a human body and not his.
We take the stairs because my lift is also a conversation with the property management company that I have been losing for eight months, and Narod fills the stairwell in a way that makes the stairwell feel like a different sort of space entirely, warm and close and deeply aware of him.
Third floor. My door. Keys again, steadier this time, and I push it open and reach in to flick on the hall light and step inside, turning back to him with what I intend to be a casual, welcoming gesture.
"Come in, I've got towels, obviously, and I think there might be something that could fit—" I stop, because I am re-evaluating the "fit" portion of that sentence in real time while looking at his shoulders. "There might be something in the general vicinity of your torso that—"
"I am certain I can manage," he says. "Thank you."
He steps through the door.
The doorframe is standard width. Narod is not standard width by a significant margin, and the hallway beyond it is narrow in the particular way of old city buildings, with the bookshelf that I have been meaning to reorganise since I moved in pressed up against the left wall, and the coat rack that my mother gave me as a flat-warming gift taking up the right.
He makes it through the door.
He does not make it past the bookshelf.
He stands there, wedged in my hallway, dripping onto my welcome mat, radiating heat and the smell of rain and that deep, earthy warmth that I have been clocking all evening.
"I am," he says, with immense, careful dignity, "slightly lodged."
I stare at him.
He stares back.
He is wedged between my Organisational Behaviour textbooks and a coat rack shaped like a tree that I genuinely cannot look at without mild shame, he is soaking wet, his glasses have a raindrop balanced perfectly on the left lens, and he is the most unexpectedly spectacular thing that has ever stood in my hallway.
I start laughing.
Not a polite laugh. Not a small, controlled, date-appropriate laugh. A real one, the kind that doubles me forward at the waist and steals my breath, because the absurdity of the entire evening is suddenly compressing into this single, perfect image, and I am helpless against it.
I hear him make a sound. Low, warm, slightly self-deprecating, and when I manage to straighten up and look at him properly, he is laughing too, a deep, rumbling sound that is entirely different from the growl but registers somewhere in the same neighbourhood of my nervous system, and his eyes behind his rain-dotted glasses are creased at the corners and soft, warm and entirely unguarded.
"Okay," I manage, wiping my eyes, which are definitely wet from laughter and not anything else at all. "Okay. If you angle left—no, your left, the other—"
"This is my left," he says, and the sheer earnestness with which he announces it, coupled with the fact that he is objectively facing the wrong direction entirely, makes my ribs ache with the effort of not dissolving back into laughter.
"That is absolutely not your left," I say, and I can hear the helpless fondness creeping into my voice despite my best efforts to sound remotely professional about any of this.
"You know what, never mind the left-right thing, just turn yourself towards the bookshelf, the one with all the spines facing out, that direction. "
"If I turn towards the bookshelf," he says slowly, his eyes widening slightly behind his rain-speckled glasses as he clearly runs some kind of internal spatial calculation, "I will knock your books from the shelf.
Several of them. Possibly all of them in the immediate radius.
I have already caused sufficient disruption to your organizational systems tonight, and I would prefer not to compound the damage with additional—"
"I reorganise them every six months anyway," I interrupt, waving one hand in what I hope is a reassuring gesture, though I suspect it looks more frantic than soothing.
"Honestly, it is completely fine, they are due for a reshuffle, just turn, please, before you get permanently wedged in my entryway and I have to explain to my landlord why there is a very polite Orc living in my hallway. "
There is a mild avalanche of my management accounting volumes.
There is also a successful pivot, and then Narod is free of the coat rack, standing in my hallway at a slight angle with two of my coats on the floor and a copy of Financial Reporting Standards Volume II resting against his left foot, and his shoulders are still almost the full width of the space, and my flat is simply not going to recover its previous sense of scale.
He looks at the fallen books. He looks at the toppled coats. He looks at me.
"I will replace the coat rack if I have damaged it," he says.
"The coat rack is fine. The coat rack has survived worse.
" I step forward, crouching to retrieve the books, stacking them back roughly in order, and when I straighten back up he is right there, very close, and the warmth coming off him in the narrow space is considerable, and my soaked cardigan is extremely cold, and the contrast of those two things does nothing to reduce the five-alarm situation that my body has been running since the growl.
I tilt my head back to look at him properly. It is a significant tilt.
"Welcome to my flat," I say.
"Thank you for having me." He pauses. "I apologise for the structural implications."
"Narod." I look up at him, at the water still dripping from his jaw, at the careful, slightly anxious set of his expression, at the way he is standing very still in my hallway as though afraid that any sudden movement will cause further damage to my property or my composure, and I think about the probability of me surviving the rest of this evening with my practical, sensible, spreadsheet-based self-image intact, and I put it at roughly twelve percent, which seems, under the circumstances, fair. "Stop apologising."
"I will attempt to," he says. "I find it challenging."
"I know." I reach past him to pull the hall cupboard open, where I keep the spare towels on the second shelf, and I have to lean into the narrow space between him and the wall to reach it, and I am abruptly, comprehensively aware of exactly how small this hallway is and exactly how large he is and exactly how warm, and I grab the towel by feel alone because I am absolutely not looking at him from this distance.
I pass it to him.
His fingers close around it and around mine for just a second, inadvertent, and the warmth of his hand against my cold ones is acute and immediate, and neither of us moves for a breath longer than strictly necessary.
"I should—" I start.
"Yes," he says.
I take a deliberate step back into the slightly wider space of the hallway and gesture toward the living room, which is larger, by which I mean that it has a sofa and a coffee table and a window and he will probably only fill approximately sixty percent of it.
"Through there," I say. "I'll find something dry. I'm serious that I do not have anything remotely your size, but there might be a large jumper somewhere that could—" I stop again, re-evaluating his chest. "No. There is not. But I have a very good heating system and the sofa is comfortable."
He nods, carefully, holding the towel. He takes one step toward the living room and then stops and looks back at me over his massive, rain-drenched shoulder.
"Livia," he says, and the way he says my name, quiet and deliberate and like he has been saving it, does something genuinely destabilising to my nervous system.
"I want you to know that this has been—" He pauses, and the careful, precise machinery of his speech falters for just a moment.
"This evening has significantly exceeded my projected outcomes. "
I look at him.
"Mine too," I say.
He holds my gaze for a long, charged beat.
My heart is doing something that I would describe, if forced to quantify it on a balance sheet, as a net positive.
I go to find towels.