Chapter 9
LIVIA
The receptionist, who is as large as a small building and has a scar running from her left tusk to her right eyebrow in a diagonal line that suggests a very decisive opponent, holds up one hand as I approach the front desk.
"Human." She says it the way a customs official says next, flat and final and utterly without malice, which somehow makes it worse. "Do you have an appointment?"
"No." I set my tote bag down on her desk, which brings it to roughly mid-thigh on her, and I straighten my cardigan.
"But I have a very specific grievance and about forty-five minutes of annual leave I haven't used, so I'm going to need you to tell Narod Guumstrop that Livia Chordas is here, and I would strongly recommend doing it quickly, because I did my hair this morning specifically for this and I would like to still be angry when I walk through that door. "
She peers at me. Her amber eyes, a shade darker than Narod's, do a slow, thorough inventory of my person, cataloguing, I imagine, my sensible flats, my dark-framed glasses, and the fact that my hands are shaking very slightly despite my best efforts.
Whatever she finds in this assessment, her expression shifts by approximately three degrees in a direction that I choose to interpret as respect.
She presses the intercom.
Whatever Narod says on the other end makes something in her heavy brow do a complicated, private thing, the ghost of what might, on a less weathered face, be called amusement. She lifts her hand and points toward the glass-panelled office at the far end of the floor, and I walk.
I do not look at the other Orcs. There are many of them, arranged at reinforced desks in neat rows, wearing variations of Narod's particular brand of office-worker sincerity, and every single one of them is watching me cross the floor.
I can feel it, the collective weight of a dozen pairs of large amber eyes tracking my progress, and I keep my chin level and my stride purposeful and think very deliberately about amortisation schedules, because focusing on amortisation schedules has historically been my most reliable method of keeping my heartrate at a functional level.
I push open the door to his office. I close it behind me. On reflection, the word "slam" is accurate.
"Livia," he says. His voice does the thing where it is simultaneously very large and very small, filling the room and retreating from it at the same time. "I was just—"
"Were you writing me an email?" My voice comes out at a register I recognise as the one I use in review meetings when the numbers don't reconcile. "Were you genuinely sitting here, the morning after the best night I have had in two years, writing me a formal apology email?"
His jaw does something complicated. His large hands, folded on the desk in front of him with the careful intentionality of a man trying very hard to look composed, tighten against each other. "I was attempting to address several areas of concern that I identified upon reflection—"
"Narod."
"—specifically regarding the potential for physiological incompatibility in terms of—"
"Narod."
He stops. His eyes, behind the delicate wire frames, find mine and stay there, and they are doing the thing they did last night on the sofa, that warm, overwhelmed, helpless thing, and I feel it hit me somewhere in the chest with the same force it hit me then.
"You ghosted me," I say. Flat. Direct. The numbers don't lie.
"You were there and then you weren't, and I woke up to a blanket tucked around me, which was a lovely gesture that I would have appreciated significantly more if you had still been attached to it, and then there was nothing.
No text, no note, no low-probability follow-up.
" I pull my glasses off, rub the bridge of my nose once, put them back.
"I had to get your work address from the bar, Narod.
I described you to the bartender and he said, and I'm quoting directly, 'oh, the big sweet one who apologised for the water glass,' and he gave me your business card, which you apparently left on the table along with an extremely generous tip. "
Something in his face shifts, a kind of flinching that doesn't involve any actual movement, internal and entirely visible. He looks down at his folded hands.
"I thought," he says, and then stops, and he does the thing I've now seen him do three times, where he measures each word before releasing it, making sure of its dimensions, checking it for sharp edges.
"I thought that when you woke up, and you saw me there, me in your space, taking up your sofa and probably your entire living room, you would be—" He pauses.
"I know how I look in the morning, Livia.
Without the effort. Without the filed tusks and the pressed shirt and the rehearsed small talk.
I thought you would look at me and the numbers would change. "
The room is silent. Through the glass panel of the door, I am peripherally aware of the open-plan office existing, but it feels very far away.
"What numbers?" I ask, and my voice has done the thing it does when I stop performing practical and start being it.
"The ones that made you stay." He lifts his eyes to mine, and they are entirely unguarded in a way that makes my ribs feel insufficient.
"You stayed for the appetisers. You said you would.
And I thought that was—I thought that was conditional on the version of me that was managing his presentation correctly, and I don't know what I am when I stop managing it.
I haven't—" He exhales, a slow, controlled breath through his nose.
"I haven't stopped managing it in front of a human before. "
I come around the desk. This requires navigating a significant gap between the desk and the wall that was clearly designed with an Orc in mind, and I have to turn partially sideways to achieve it, which does slightly undercut the dramatic momentum of the gesture, but I manage it, and I end up standing beside his chair, close enough that I have to tip my head back to properly look at him even though he is sitting down.
"Stand up," I say.
He blinks. "What?"
"Stand up, please. I would like to make a point and I can't make it effectively when you are at this angle."
He unfolds from the chair slowly, the way a very large, very cautious thing unfolds when it is not entirely sure of its welcome, and then he is standing, and he is 6'9" in a blue shirt with his glasses slightly crooked and his massive shoulders pulled in and forward with that terrible habitual hunch, the one that says I know I take up too much room, I know I'm too much, I know, and it hits me somewhere soft and specific, that hunch.
It hits me the way it hit me when he held the porcelain teacup with two fingers and looked genuinely afraid of it.
I reach up. My arms don't quite reach his shoulders at full extension, so I get his upper arms, my hands wrapping around approximately a third of each one, and I push. Not hard. Just the clear, directional suggestion of the motion. "Stop doing that."
He doesn't move. But his breath changes.
"The hunch," I clarify. "Stop doing it. You're not too big, Narod.
You are the exact right size for someone who is also built like a small fortress and drinks cosmopolitans because he likes the colour and spent three hours practising small talk in a mirror before a date he gave a twelve percent probability of success.
" I keep my hands on his arms. My thumbs trace the fabric of his shirt.
"The version of you that stopped managing it is the version that tucked a blanket around me.
And that's the one I got on the bus in the rain to come and find. "
The amber behind his glasses does something I cannot fully describe. The flinching quality of his expression dissolves, slowly, the way a very careful knot loosens when you find the right thread, and what's underneath it is just him, large and earnest and entirely present.
"I calculated," he says, very quietly, "the probability that you came here because you were angry."
"It's high. I'm still angry." I am still touching his arms. I have not moved my hands. "And?"
"And the probability that you came here because you wanted to find me." A pause. "That number is higher."
"Significantly," I confirm.
He breathes out. His shoulders drop, not forward, not the hunch, but down, the natural release of something held too long, and the effect on his posture is immediate and dramatic, a full inch of unnecessary tension gone, and he looks like himself, like the actual shape of him, which is large and a little rumpled and entirely genuine.
His hand comes up, slowly, telegraph clear in its intention, and he tucks a strand of wet hair behind my ear where the rain walk this morning has made a liar of my straightening efforts, his touch careful in the specific way that large hands are careful when they have learned to be, precise and unhurried.
"I'm very glad," he says, "that you take the bus."
"The tube was quicker but I needed to stay angry for the walk," I admit.
The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile yet, but the infrastructure of one, and I feel the specific, structural satisfaction of a number that finally reconciles.
The fire alarm goes off.
It is not subtle. It is the full, immediate, no-ambiguity-available shriek of a building-wide system engaging, the kind of alarm that bypasses cognition entirely and speaks directly to the part of the brain that controls legs, and for approximately two seconds neither of us moves, we just look at each other while the sound tears through the ceiling above us.
Then the office outside his glass door becomes a sea of extremely large bodies all moving in the same direction with the coordinated urgency of people who have done evacuation drills and take them seriously, and his office door opens, and Grukka's head appears in the gap, her scar illuminated briefly by the emergency lighting that flickers on along the ceiling.
"Narod. Evacuation. Stairwell B." She glances at me with the flat, assessing expression she gave me when I arrived, and then back at him. "She comes too, presumably."
"Yes," Narod says, and he says it with a steadiness that has nothing to do with alarm management and everything to do with the fact that approximately forty-five seconds ago I told him to stop making himself smaller, and something in him is deciding to try.
He puts his hand, briefly and carefully, at the small of my back to guide me toward the door, and even through the cardigan the warmth of it is significant, a whole-palm warmth that has a specific gravitational quality.
The floor empties fast. Orcs, I will note, are efficient evacuators.
The stairwell door is at the end of the corridor, a heavy fire door with a push bar, and we reach it as the last of the office files through, the crowd compressing briefly in the doorway because even a wide commercial stairwell is only so wide, and there is a moment of collective shuffling and then we are through, and the door swings shut behind us with the solid, conclusive sound of a fire door's auto-latch engaging, and then the stairwell is dim, warm and entirely, abruptly still.
Above us, the retreating footsteps of the evacuation echo upward and then fade, the emergency exit at the top of the building swallowing the last of the sound, and then it is just the alarm, muffled now by the heavy door, and the two of us, standing on the landing between floors in the amber glow of the emergency lighting.
Narod pushes the door handle.
It doesn't move.
He pushes it again, deliberately, with the considered force of someone who is checking that they have the physics correct before escalating, and the door remains entirely committed to its current position.
"Auto-lock," he says. "Fire door protocol. It releases when the alarm system resets or when the emergency service override is engaged from the outside." He looks at me over his shoulder, his glasses catching the amber light. "We're locked in."
The alarm continues its muffled conversation with the building around us.
I look at the locked door. I look at the stairwell, its concrete walls, its emergency lighting, its complete and total absence of other people.
I look at Narod, 6'9" of him, filling the landing with his presence in a way that the landing was not entirely designed for, his shoulder a few inches from the railing, his collar slightly open, his expression carrying the specific quality of a man recalculating.
"Right," I say. My voice is very level. "Well."
He turns to face me fully, and the landing is not large, and the emergency lighting is doing something warm and low to the specific angle of his jaw, and very suddenly and very completely, I am still angry at him.
I came here on a bus and I am also still thinking about last night, and the blanket, and his hands.
"Statistically speaking," Narod says, and his voice has dropped, just slightly, into a register that has nothing to do with actuarial science, "the average response time for a false alarm reset in a commercial building is between twelve and eighteen minutes."
"Is that right," I say.
"It is." He holds very still. His amber eyes are warm and direct and no longer behind any of the layers he arrived at the bar with last night. "I am noting that for informational purposes only. I want to be completely clear about that."
"Completely noted," I say.
The alarm pulses through the walls.