Chapter 15 Livia
LIVIA
His forehead is still resting against mine and I can feel the warmth radiating off him in waves, that deep, steady heat that I have come to understand is just the baseline operating temperature of an Orc, not a fever, not distress, just him, just the particular and specific fact of his body existing in close proximity to mine.
His hands are on my shoulders, careful as always, calibrated down to some internal tolerance I can feel in the deliberate placement of each massive finger.
Even now, even here, with his voice stripped of all its formal scaffolding and the transfer request sitting on the desk behind him like an indictment, he is being careful with me.
And it makes me furious.
Not at him. I am very clear on that distinction. The fury is entirely directional and it points squarely at the world that has taught him that careful is the only option he has.
I step back. His hands follow my shoulders for half a second before he lets them fall, and I cross the room to his desk.
The transfer request is printed on three pages.
It is very neat, very thorough. I see his name in the header and the destination and the effective date and the carefully itemised business justification, which reads like a risk assessment and probably was one, and I pluck up all three pages and I tear them directly in half.
The sound is enormously satisfying.
I tear the halves in half again, and then again, small and smaller, and I let them fall, and they scatter across the floor in a small blizzard of precise actuarial reasoning, and I stand turn to look at him.
He is staring at the floor. Then at me. Then at the floor again, at the scattered fragments of his exit strategy, and something moves across his face that is very complicated and very quiet.
"That was a formal document," he says finally, and his voice is quiet and very careful, the way it gets when he is trying to simultaneously process too many variables at once and failing to find a conclusion that does not hurt.
"I know," I tell him.
There is a pause. It stretches out between us like something physical, something I could reach out and touch if I wanted to. His gaze flickers back to the torn paper on the floor, then to me, then away again, as though he is trying to solve an equation that refuses to balance.
"I had a second copy," he says.
"Narod," I say, and his name comes out sharper, edged with something I have been holding back for days now.
He goes still. Entirely, completely still, in that way that only he can manage, as though every muscle in his enormous frame has locked into place simultaneously.
"I need you to listen to me," I say, and my voice comes out differently, not angry, not the controlled professional tone I use for budget reviews and difficult conversations with management, but something lower and more certain, the voice I apparently only have access to when I am standing in his apartment at twenty past eleven at night surrounded by the confetti remains of his self-sabotage.
"I need you to actually listen, not calculate, not model, not build a risk framework around what I'm about to say. Just listen."
He is very still. Amber eyes on mine.
I cross back to him, which takes less time than it probably should because his apartment is scaled for him and everything in it is further apart than I'm used to, but I cover the distance and I stop in front of him and I tip my head back because there is simply no other option when a conversation with Narod requires direct eye contact.
"Stop trying to be smaller," I say.
His jaw tightens fractionally.
"I mean that in every possible interpretation of the phrase," I continue, pressing forward because I have been building to this for three weeks.
"Stop hunching. Stop using tiny forks. Stop apologising every time your shoulder clips a doorframe or your voice drops below a register that human men use.
Stop performing a version of yourself designed for an audience that doesn't deserve the performance. "
"Livia." His voice is very careful.
"I'm not finished." I hold up one hand, and the small absurdity of it, my hand held up flat against the landscape of him, does not escape me but I hold it there with conviction.
"You have been so busy trying to make yourself acceptable that you have completely missed the fact that I do not need you to be acceptable.
I need you to be you, the actual you, not the one with the wire-rimmed glasses and the sweater vest and the terrifyingly accurate statistics about social friction coefficients.
Although," I add, because I am constitutionally incapable of a clean emotional statement, "the glasses are genuinely very endearing, that part can stay. "
Something shifts in his expression. The tightness around his eyes loosens by a fraction.
"I didn't fall in love with the sweater vest, Narod.
" The words land in the room and I hear them the same moment he does and neither of us addresses the technical implications of the verb I just used, the tense and the severity of it, because we are both apparently pretending I said it very casually.
"I fell in love with the man who ordered a cosmopolitan because he liked the colour and then held the glass with two fingers because his hands were too large for it.
I fell in love with the man who stood up in that bar and made Chad physically reconsider every choice he has ever made and then sat back down and apologised to me for the elevated heart rate.
I fell in love with someone who is gentle and terrifying and brilliant and so profoundly convinced that everyone in the room is about to run screaming that he's already planning the apology before anyone's even looked at him. "
He doesn't say anything. I watch the careful, formal architecture of his expression doing something complicated, the way a very precisely maintained structure looks just before it makes a decision about whether to hold.
"Your friends," he says, finally, and the words are measured and low. "Last night. They look at you differently because of me. I have run the aggregate social cost and it is not insignificant, Livia. Your professional reputation, your—"
"My professional reputation is fine," I say.
"My friendships, specifically the ones that require me to apologise for who I'm with, are less fine, but that is a problem with the friendships and not with who I'm with.
Those people were not my friends last night.
A friend does not sit at a dinner table and make a joke about someone's tusks and then look to me for a laugh.
A friend does not treat the person I came in with as a punchline and call it casual.
I am not interested in recalibrating my life to accommodate people who think your existence is a punchline, and I am not interested in you recalibrating yours to accommodate people who are never going to extend you the basic decency you extend to everyone you meet automatically. "
He is quiet. Outside, the rain shifts in pitch against the windows, a hard horizontal sweep of it that I can hear from here. The room is warm.
"I do not want to be the reason you lose things," he says, and his voice is so raw and honest and stripped of every professional layer he usually keeps up like scaffolding that it physically hurts to hear.
"I have run this model extensively, and I understand that you find the model frustrating, but Livia, I have seen the data on what happens to humans who partner with non-human species in mixed social environments and the structural social cost is—"
"Narod." I put both hands flat on his chest. I can feel his heartbeat through his shirt, fast and hard and very immediate. "What is the model's sample size?"
A pause. Slight.
"The published literature has a reasonable—"
"What is the sample size for Narod Guumstrop specifically partnered with Livia Chordas specifically in this specific city, in this specific apartment, in this specific version of our actual lives?" I wait. "What is the n?"
His mouth closes.
"One," I say. "The n is one. You have been running catastrophic probability models on a sample size of one, and I am the one, and I am standing in your apartment at nearly midnight having ripped your transfer request into approximately sixty pieces telling you that the model is wrong.
I am the primary source. I am the data. And the data says stay. "
The last wall goes. I watch it happen, which is not a dramatic external event, it is very small and very interior The careful professional expression he wears like a second set of clothes, the one designed to broadcast harmless and small and non-threatening at all times, falls away entirely, and what is underneath it is just him, just Narod, just the full and unguarded reality of him looking at me.
He lets out a breath. It is ragged and long and entirely unlike the controlled, measured breathing he normally maintains in company, and as it goes out of him his shoulders drop.
Not the anxious drop, not the apologetic curvature he uses to shave centimetres off his height in doorways.
They drop back and out, settling wide and heavy into their actual shape, the true geometry of him, massive and real and no longer apologising for the space they occupy.
He is enormous like this. Fully, unambiguously enormous. He takes up most of the room simply by existing at his actual scale, and it does not frighten me, it has never frightened me, and I think somewhere in him he has been quietly terrified that one day it would.
I look up at him. I do not step back.
He looks down at me, and his expression is very open and very serious, and he reaches up with one hand and touches my face, barely, the back of two knuckles against my cheekbone in the careful way he always does, like I am made of something that requires consideration.
"Are you absolutely certain, Livia?" he asks.
His voice has dropped into the low register, not the formal careful politeness voice, not the professional actuary voice, but the one underneath all of them, the one that lives in his chest reverberating at a frequency I can feel in my ribcage when he uses it.
"Because I need you to understand that if I believe you, if I actually allow myself to believe that you are certain, I will not be able to go back to being uncertain about this.
About you. I am not built for uncertainty in one direction and certainty in the other.
I would very much prefer to be fully certain or to have the transfer request reprinted and to be sad in Minneapolis. "
I stare at him.
"That is the most precise and terrible thing anyone has ever said to me," I tell him.
"I am an actuary," he says, and there is something in it, something very dry and very warm simultaneously, the closest thing to a joke he makes when he is being emotionally honest.
"I am absolutely certain," I say.
He holds very still for one more second. I can see him taking the information in, processing it, running whatever final internal check he needs to run before he lets himself have it.
Then he exhales, slow, and his hand settles properly against my face, warm and enormous, and the amber of his eyes goes very dark and very soft, and he doesn't say anything else for a while.
The rain hammers the windows. The pieces of the transfer request lie scattered across the floor. I make a mental note to hoover them up in the morning, and then I stop making mental notes about anything practical at all.