Chapter 11 Livia
LIVIA
The CEO's footsteps fade up the stairwell and I'm still pressed against Narod's chest, laughing so hard my ribs ache, and Narod is making a sound I've come to recognise over the past few weeks as his laugh, this low, careful rumble he seems to deploy very precisely, like he's been rationing it his whole life and is only now learning that the supply might be renewable.
"Your boss," I manage, when I can actually form words again that aren't just helpless giggles.
"Yes," Narod confirms, with the kind of patience I've noticed he reserves specifically for my moments of conversational incoherence.
"Your boss just walked in on us," I continue, still trying to process the entire mortifying sequence of events, "actively making out in the stairwell of your office building."
"Yes," he repeats, and there's the faintest hint of amusement threading through that single syllable.
I press my hand to my mouth, another wave of disbelieving laughter threatening to escape. "And he looked at the situation, looked at you, looked at me, and then he just said 'take your time' like he'd interrupted you updating a pivot table or something."
Narod's chest vibrates under my cheek and his arm tightens around me by approximately three inches, which, given the circumference of the arm in question, is a significant development.
"Drokk is," he begins, with the care of a man who is choosing each word like he's defusing something, "a pragmatic individual.
He has mentioned on several occasions, during performance reviews, that my social isolation represented a long-term actuarial risk to my productivity metrics. "
I pull back far enough to look at him. The overhead lighting is not kind to anyone but it is particularly not kind to a six-foot-nine Orc with dishevelled hair and a shirt that has come entirely free of his trousers, and he still somehow looks like the best thing I have seen in this specific calendar year.
"He was worried about you," I translate.
Narod's amber eyes do the thing, the softening thing, which I am now categorically powerless against. "That is a less precise but not inaccurate interpretation.
" He reaches up and straightens my glasses, which had migrated to approximately thirty degrees off-centre.
His fingers are very careful around the frames. "We should return to the building."
"We should absolutely return to the building," I agree, and reach up on my toes and kiss him once, firmly, on the corner of his jaw where his tusk curves, because I have learned over the past three weeks that this is the precise location that produces the most interesting physiological response in a six-foot-nine Orc actuary, and I am a data-driven person.
The rumble I get in response rattles right down into my back molars.
We collect my cardigan from the railing.
The next three weeks are, by any measurable standard, ridiculous.
Narod's reinforced desk chair gets moved to my apartment on a Tuesday evening, ostensibly so he has "appropriate ergonomic support" when he reviews actuarial tables after dinner, and it occupies approximately a third of my living room and I do not ask him to move it back.
My kettle, which was a perfectly adequate kettle for one person, gets replaced with a commercial-grade model that can produce enough hot water for his preferred quantity of tea without cycling four times, and the new one sits on my counter like a small industrial appliance and I make my morning coffee standing next to it with a certain domestic satisfaction I refuse to fully interrogate.
He learns that I take my tea before I'm ready to form sentences.
I learn that he has specific, strong, well-reasoned opinions about the correct ratio of filling to pastry in a sausage roll.
He learns that I will tolerate any volume of actuarial table discussion if it's delivered in the low, even voice he uses when he's comfortable, the one that I'm becoming convinced has a direct neurological pathway to my capacity for rational decision-making.
I learn that he sleeps with one arm extended at a perfect ninety degrees, which means he needs approximately sixty percent of the available bed surface, and I've started sleeping in the curve of his shoulder where there is plenty of room and the ambient warmth is extraordinary.
It's good. It's very, very good, in a way that sneaks up on me while I'm looking at a spreadsheet or eating toast, this sudden awareness that something has settled into the correct position.
Which is exactly why, three weeks in, I call my oldest friends and invite them to dinner.
This, I will later reflect, is an error of significant magnitude.
I tell Narod about the dinner party on a Thursday evening.
He is reviewing mortality tables at his desk chair, which has a small throw blanket draped over the back of it because the apartment gets cold and he expressed concern once that it seemed draughty near the window and I bought the blanket the next day and didn't explain it, and he used it without comment, which is a form of communication we have both apparently agreed upon.
"A dinner party," he says, in the tone of a man hearing about a scheduled medical procedure.
"Six people. My oldest friends. Maya and her husband, Dev, who are completely lovely.
Priya, who is mostly lovely unless she's had more than two glasses of Pinot, and her partner James, who is consistently inoffensive.
And Greta, who is my best friend since uni and who has been sending me increasingly aggressive texts asking to meet you, so honestly this is as much to appease her as anything else. "
"I see." He sets his glasses down on the table. He does this when he is processing something of significant emotional weight and needs his visual field cleared for thinking. "And these individuals are, to your knowledge, aware that I am."
"An Orc?"
"Physiologically non-human. Substantially sized." A pause. "Possessed of tusks."
"I told them. Maya said, and I'm quoting directly, 'oh my God, send photos, immediately,' and then when I did she sent back eleven fire emojis and a very long voice note that I listened to with headphones for reasons that should be self-evident."
The amber eyes warm considerably. "That is a positive response."
"Maya is a positive person. The others I'm slightly less certain about, but they're my friends and they're going to be perfectly nice, and you are going to be perfectly fine, and I'm making your favourite lamb dish.
" I cross to the desk chair and lean against the arm, which is the correct structural choice given that the arm is reinforced steel and can tolerate the weight.
"Narod. You've been to my work. You've met my colleague Reena who grabbed your arm and asked to feel your forearm for what she described as research purposes. "
"I found that interaction within acceptable parameters," he confirms.
"You are going to be fine at a dinner party in my flat. Where you have your own desk chair."
He looks at the desk chair. Something works through his expression that I'm learning to read as the specific intersection of affectionate exasperation and the reluctant acceptance that I am correct.
"I will require," he says finally, "my good suit."
The good suit is a deep charcoal grey, custom made, because Narod attempted to buy a suit off the rack exactly once, in his mid-twenties, and he describes the experience in the same tone other people use to describe dental emergencies.
It fits him properly across the shoulders, which means it fits him properly across the shoulders, and when he turns up at my door on Sunday evening at the precise agreed time with a bottle of wine chosen with what I can only describe as statistical rigour and a small, careful bunch of flowers that he holds in one enormous green hand with the delicacy of someone handling unexploded ordnance, I have to breathe for a moment in the doorway.
"You look good," I tell him.
"I ironed the shirt three times," he admits, which is absolutely the most Narod sentence that exists, and I stand on my toes and fix his collar, which doesn't need fixing, because I want an excuse to put my hands on the lapels of the suit.
The guests arrive in a cheerful, slightly chaotic wave. Maya enters first, clocks Narod across my living room, and physically grabs Dev's arm with both hands in the manner of someone bracing for impact.
"Hi," she says, directly to Narod. "I'm Maya. I sent the fire emojis."
Narod's posture, which had gone to full nervous formality, shifts by approximately three degrees toward something more habitable. "Livia informed me. They were," he considers, "well-received."
Maya beams at him like he's just passed a very important exam.
Dev shakes his hand like a man who is not intimidated by anything and introduces himself. The two of them end up standing near the kitchen window discussing the catastrophic state of pension fund liquidity. Within six minutes Narod explains a specific actuarial model he's been developing.
James arrives and finds the cheese board and stations himself next to it with the dedication of a man who has located his purpose for the evening.
Greta arrives last, blowing through my door with her coat half-on and a very expensive bottle of red tucked under her arm, takes one look at Narod across the room, turns to face me with theatrical outrage, and hisses, directly into my ear, "Livia Chordas, you have been holding out on me."
"I have not."
"You said he was tall."
"He is tall."
"Tall," she repeats, with significant emphasis, "implies basketball player. It does not imply." She gestures broadly in Narod's direction.
"Greta."
"I'm just saying. For future reference. There needs to be a different word."
Narod, across the room, looks up at his name not being said, which I've noticed he does, this ambient awareness of me in any space we're sharing, and catches my eye, and I give him a very small reassuring nod that means everything is completely fine, and the corner of his mouth does the thing where it wants to smile but he doesn't quite let it, which is my absolute favourite thing in his entire considerable repertoire.
Dinner goes well for the first hour and a half.
I made the lamb, slow-cooked with herbs, and a ridiculous amount of sides, partly because I enjoy cooking and partly because I'd calculated, correctly, that having enough food on the table gives everyone something to do with their hands and their mouths during potential awkward silences.
Narod navigates the small dining chair with careful precision and uses the salad fork correctly, which he mentioned later he had researched, and he listens with genuine attention when Maya describes her work, and he makes a dry, precisely timed comment about pension fund risk assessment that makes Dev actually choke on his wine from laughing, and by the main course I'm starting to think I was worried about nothing.
Priya has been on her third glass of Pinot for a while.
I register this, the way you register weather changing, a low ambient pressure shift, because I know Priya.
I have known Priya for fifteen years. Priya is sharp and funny and loyal and she gets loud and loose-tongued past the second glass and then the edit function starts lagging, and I have seen this cause several mildly combustible situations at various social gatherings over the years.
I've been watching her watching Narod across the table. Not unkindly, exactly. More with the squinting, slightly sideways attention of someone trying to locate a category for something unexpected.
I should redirect the conversation. I know I should redirect it.
I'm reaching for a new topic, already constructing the pivot, when Priya leans forward on her elbows and points her fork, not aggressively, just gesturally, in Narod's direction, and says, with the cheerful ease of someone who does not currently have access to their own better judgement,
"I have to ask. The whole." She waggles the fork vaguely.
"Tusks, the big sort of. I mean, is it like a heritage thing?
Like cultural? My gran had this thing about never cutting her hair for religious reasons.
Is it like that? Like, very barbaric-ancestry-type thing?
It's fascinating, genuinely, I've just never. "
She keeps talking. I stop hearing the individual words because the table has gone absolutely, completely, immediately silent, the specific silence of six people simultaneously realising something has gone badly wrong, and I'm watching Maya freeze with her wine glass halfway to her mouth, and Dev look at the tablecloth with the attention of a man removing himself from a situation, and James stop engaging with the cheese board for the first time all evening, and Greta's hand land on my arm under the table, firm and steadying.
And I'm watching Narod.
His fork has set itself down onto his plate with the extremely quiet precision of a very controlled person making a very controlled decision.
His eyes have moved from Priya's face to the middle distance above her left shoulder.
Every line of his enormous frame, the frame he spends his entire life trying to compress and minimise and make less, has gone very, very still.
The lamb sits in the suddenly cold air of my dining room, going tepid.