Chapter 13 Livia
LIVIA
The table goes quiet in the particular way that means everyone heard it and no one is going to acknowledge it, which is somehow worse than if they'd all laughed.
James sets his wine glass down. Maya straightens her fork. Priya looks at the ceiling. The joke is still sitting on the table like a bill nobody wants to pick up.
I look at Narod.
He's already pulling out his wallet.
"Please excuse me." His voice is the polite one, the formal one, the one that sounds like a professionally worded email, and I know that voice now.
I know what it costs him to use it. He sets several folded notes down on the white tablecloth with the precision of someone who has already calculated exactly what proportion of the evening he is financially responsible for, even though we'd agreed to split it, and he tucks the wallet away and he smiles at the table, which is the worst part.
The smile. Perfectly calibrated, entirely hollow.
"Narod." I reach for his arm.
"I think I'll get some air." He stands, and the table rocks slightly as his thigh catches the edge, and he apologises for that too, quietly, and he walks to the door and leaves, and my friends start filling the silence the way they always do, rushing in with noise to cover what they don't want to examine.
"He's very sensitive," James says, in a tone that means he thinks this is the problem.
I grab my bag.
"Liv, come on, it was just—"
"Finish your food." "I look at each of them, James with his professional smile and Maya with her careful neutrality and Priya, who at least has the grace to look ashamed.
"Actually, no. Don't. I've known you lot for nine years and I've excused a lot of things that I told myself weren't worth the argument.
This is worth the argument." I pull my coat on.
My voice is very level, which means the anger has passed the processing stage and arrived somewhere much colder.
"That was cruel. You were cruel to him. He sat at your table in his best suit with his ridiculous tiny fork because he was trying, and you made him feel like a punchline, and I need you to understand that I am not angry because I'm in a new relationship and I'm being precious about it.
I'm angry because you have always done this to people who don't look like what you expect, and I have always let it go, and I'm not doing that anymore. "
"We were just—"
"I'm done with just." I shoulder my bag. "Call me when that changes."
I walk out of the restaurant and the night air hits me, cold and damp, and I look left and right and there's no massive green shape in either direction.
The rain is just starting.
I flag a cab.
The ride takes twenty minutes. I spend it with my forehead against the cold glass and my phone in my hand, which I have opened to his contact three times and closed again, because I do not want to give him the option of preparing a response.
Narod's prepared responses are very polite and completely impenetrable.
I need the version of him that's still sitting in the feeling, not the version that's had time to build a spreadsheet around it.
I know his neighbourhood now. We've walked it on the two Sunday mornings I've managed to drag him out of his apartment before noon, which requires a negotiation that I've begun to enjoy unreasonably.
The cab drops me on the corner with the all-night newsagent and the Orc-scaled bus shelter, which always startles me slightly because it's about four feet taller than the human ones and makes me feel like I've shrunk in the wash.
I pull up his number and call.
It rings. And rings. And clicks to voicemail.
"Narod." I start walking. "I know you're doing the thing where you decide what's best for me without consulting me, and I need you to know that I have some very serious notes on that methodology." The rain picks up. I tuck my chin into my collar. "Also, I'm outside. So."
I hang up.
His building is three streets north, a converted industrial block that the building company fitted for mixed occupancy ten years ago, which in practice means the Orc residents have the upper four floors where the ceilings are higher and the structural reinforcement is heavier, and the lifts have two sets of buttons at two different heights.
The lobby buzzer is enormous. I press his flat number and wait.
Silence.
I press it again.
I hold it.
I reach into my bag for the key.
He gave it to me two weeks ago, Tuesday.
We weren't even having a significant moment.
I was leaving his flat and couldn't find my left shoe, which had somehow ended up on top of the refrigerator, and while I was constructing a frustrated theory about this—"Okay, there is no logical explanation for how footwear achieves that kind of vertical displacement unless you physically relocated it, and I need you to know that I am keeping a mental spreadsheet of these incidents"—he pressed the key into my hand with no preamble, just placed it in my palm and closed my fingers around it and went back to making his coffee.
I stared at the small piece of metal. "What is this?"
"It is a key," he said, not looking up from the French press.
"I know what it is, Narod."
He was quiet for a moment, his massive shoulders hunching slightly the way they did when he was calculating how to phrase something.
"I did not want you to have to wait in the corridor," he said finally, "if you arrived before I got home from work.
The corridor is draughty. I find this thought. .. unacceptable."
I stared at him. At his enormous green back, at the way his wire-rimmed glasses had slid down his nose, at the careful, deliberate way he was measuring coffee grounds like he hadn't just handed me a key to his home on a random Tuesday morning.
He cleared his throat. "You are also welcome to reorganise the kitchen shelves. If you would like. I can tell that the current configuration bothers you."
Which was the single most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me in my entire adult life.
The key is heavy and slightly oversized and it opens the ground floor door, then the stairwell door, then his flat on the third floor.
I climb the stairs.
His door is reinforced steel, matte grey, which I thought was excessive when I first saw it and have since been told is entirely standard for Orc residential lets because standard doors do not survive the combination of large bodies and the particular spatial unawareness that comes from living for years in slightly-too-small spaces.
There are two small potted plants beside it on the floor.
He waters them on a schedule. Of course he does.
I knock anyway. Hard, three times.
Nothing.
"Narod, I'm going to use the key."
I use the key.
The flat opens into a short hallway, which is a completely ordinary flat hallway except scaled like the world should have always been scaled, with a ceiling high enough that I could probably stack two of me and still have clearance, and hooks on the wall at a height that means I have to actively reach for them, and a shoe rack beside the door that holds two pairs of his shoes which are approximately a small canoe.
I shrug my coat off and hang it on the lowest hook, which is still above my shoulder.
The lights are low. He didn't leave them off entirely, which means some part of him knew someone might come, or maybe he's just always careful about not walking back into a completely dark flat.
I hear nothing.
I move down the hallway to the bedroom door, which is open.
He's sitting on the bed.
The bedroom is the room in his flat that made me understand something about him the first time I saw it properly.
The rest of the flat is tidy, practically furnished, books arranged with an organisational logic that I respect deeply, kitchen as neat as mine.
But the bedroom has this massive, heavy wooden bed frame that he clearly built himself or had built to specification, and the ceiling is the highest in the flat, and the whole room just breathes differently.
Like the one space in his life where he doesn't have to compress anything.
He's sitting on that bed in his suit trousers and his shirt, jacket folded on the chair. His glasses are in his hand. His eyes are very still and very far away.
On the nightstand beside him is a document.
Printed. Neatly paper-clipped. Formal letterhead.
I walk to the nightstand, and I pick it up, and I read the top line.
Internal Transfer Request. Submitted for consideration. Orc Financial Services, Regional Branch, Minneapolis.
Minneapolis.
I put the document down.
Narod watches me do all of this without speaking, which tells me everything about how bad it's gotten inside his head tonight, because Narod in a manageable state apologises before I've even identified what he's apologising for.
"When did you print this?"
"A few days ago." He says it simply. No hedging. "I had not decided. I was considering."
"A few days ago." I sit on the bed beside him, leaving a foot of space between us. "While we were—that was while we were actively, what, Narod. You cooked me dinner four days ago."
"I make good decisions when I have multiple models available." He puts his glasses back on. Looks at his hands. "It seemed irresponsible to close a viable option on the basis of insufficient data."
"Insufficient data." I say this back to him very quietly.
"I did not know what your friends would think." He is very still. "I did not know how it would go. I was running a parallel projection."
"And now you know how it went, so you're activating the transfer."
He doesn't answer, which is an answer.
I breathe. The rain is audible against his window, heavier now than it was when I was outside in it, though it's very warm in here, the way his flat always is, the heating calibrated for a body that runs much warmer than mine.