19. Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Nineteen
Honey
I don’t tell him I’m coming.
This is not a test. I want to be clear about that, at least to myself, even if I can’t fully explain it to anyone else.
It’s not suspicion, and it’s not a trap.
It’s something simpler and harder to say out loud: I’ve been putting him together in pieces for weeks now: the workshop version, the porch version, the male at the creek and the male at the StillWater fire, and there’s one version I’ve only heard about.
The one who walks into a bar on a Friday night and fills it.
I want to see that when he doesn’t know I’m watching.
Not because I’m afraid of what I’ll find.
Because I want the true thing. I’ve been taking in true things about him for weeks, and I’d like to finish the picture.
I’ve been going to Sunshine Valley for supplies long enough that the drive doesn’t require thinking.
Twenty-three miles of Missouri two-lane, the ridge going dark to the east, the town lights coming up in the valley shining bright on a clear summer night.
I know where The Taproom is. I’ve passed it many times without ever going in.
The sound of his guitar reaches me before I’m through the door.
The room is full. Not packed with restless energy, just full of people drinking, listening, and lingering.
Friday night, every stool taken, groups at the high tables near the windows, the low steady noise of people who are comfortable.
The stage is in the far corner, small, with one lamp angled down.
I find an empty table near the wall, sit, and look up.
Oh.
He’s on a bar stool with one boot on the floor and one on the rung, guitar across his chest, and he is, I don’t have a better word for it, perfect.
Dark hair loose around his face, pushed back enough to stay out of his eyes.
Flannel shirt, open at the collar, jeans.
He didn’t dress for a stage. He just happens to be on one.
The casualness. The absolute absence of performance in his posture.
He’s big the way I’ve known he’s big for months, but here, with the room arranged around him and the lamp throwing its light down, what registers first is his face.
He’s handsome. I’ve known this. I haven’t let myself look at it straight on until right now, from here, with him not looking back.
His face is open in a way I’ve come to recognize, that quality he has of not monitoring himself, of simply being where he is without checking whether it’s working.
The song has him. His eyes are half-closed and his jaw is slightly loose, and whatever the lyric is asking of him is right there on his face, visible to the whole room.
I understand in this moment why women have always fallen for musicians.
It’s not the instrument. It’s the permission they give themselves to feel openly.
He doesn’t do that at my kitchen table. He doesn’t do it on the porch.
He’s doing it right now in a flannel shirt on a Friday night and I cannot look away.
His tusks catch the stage light. I’ve been close to his face for weeks, in lamplight, in the Missouri dark, across a kitchen table, and I know the shape of him.
But from here, with distance and the angle of the lamp, I notice how well they fit him.
The prominent cheekbones, the strong line of his jaw, the tusks as part of it all.
Not separate from his face. Just his face.
He is very, very good-looking, and I have been, apparently, not letting myself fully register that.
I register it now.
His hands move on the guitar with the ease of eight years. Big hands, thick fingers that shouldn’t be able to find every note on a small instrument. They shouldn’t, yet they do. I’ve thought about his hands since the first visit. Watching them from here is different from everything I’ve imagined.
The song goes where it goes. He reads the room with his eyes, adjusts the chorus to match the crowd, and reflects their energy back. He’s in genuine exchange with this space. Not performing at it. Just… with it. I’m looking for any contradiction and I’m not finding any.
He finishes. The room responds. He says a few words low into the mic and two people near the stage laugh. Then he moves into the next song without a gap.
He finds me watching.
It happens mid-verse. His gaze moves across the room, reading, and then it stops.
Just for a beat—half a second, maybe less—where the song keeps going but his focus slips slightly sideways, his attention splitting between the music and the table near the wall where I’m sitting.
He pulls it back. The song continues exactly as it was.
He schools his expression. He is not entirely successful. There’s a tension in the set of his jaw, in the way his next breath comes and goes, that a person who didn’t know him wouldn’t catch. I know him. I catch it.
He’s glad I’m here. He’s trying to be cool about how glad he is, and he’s not quite pulling it off, and he knows I can see it, and he keeps playing anyway.
A glass appears on my table. I glance up. The bartender—older, human, the kind of face that has been watching rooms for decades and misses nothing—is already turning away. He doesn’t acknowledge me directly. His attention went to the stage first. Then to me. Then he brought me a drink.
I lower my eyes to the glass. Then to the stage, where Kragen is very carefully not watching me.
I understand. I pick up the glass.
The set ends to real applause, and the room reshuffles, people moving, new conversations opening up, the bar getting three people deep. I’m at my table when a sound arrives that precedes its owner by several feet.
“There she is.”
The orc approaching me at a rapid pace is shorter than the other orcs I’ve seen, stocky through the chest and shoulders, moving through the crowd with the momentum of someone who has never once questioned his right to be wherever he’s going.
Green-skinned, broad-faced, with a grin that takes up most of the available real estate.
He’s pointed at me the way a compass points north.
He arrives and drops into the chair across from mine without asking.
“Honey.” My name in his mouth has the weight of something he’s been saving. “I’m Grulk.” He says it like an introduction that should require no further explanation. “I’ve been waiting for this.”
“Have you,” I say.
“Months.” He settles his elbows on the table. He is constitutionally incapable of subtlety and has decided this is a virtue, which, on consideration, it might be. “He talks about you.”
“Does he,” I say flatly.
“Not the way he talks about other things.” He waves a hand, apparently editing himself, which appears to cost him real effort. “I’m not going to tell you what he said.”
I look at him steadily.
He looks back.
“You’re smaller than I expected,” he says.
“You’re about what I expected,” I say.
He blinks. Something in his face rearranges into delight. “Ha.” He says it like a word. “Ha. Good.” He leans forward. “You’re StillWater.”
I look at him. “I’m human.”
“You’re human and you’re StillWater.” He puts his hand in front of his chest, palm down, and rocks it once, a small, deliberate motion, like water barely disturbed. “You know what that means?”
“I looked it up,” I say. “After his first visit.”
Recognition shifts in his expression. Not surprise so much as confirmation. “You looked it up,” he repeats.
“Quiet. Deliberate. Internal.” I inform him.
“Yes.” He studies me. “He’s StillWater too.
Has been his whole life. Spent most of his life running from it, which is…
” He pauses. His expression softens into unmistakable fondness.
“Which is very StillWater of him, actually. The sitting with things. The not forcing.” He shakes his head.
“But you. You just have it. No running. No eight years of a bar and two sets a night and a room full of people.” He says this with complete sincerity and not a trace of judgment. “You got there on your own.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I pick up my glass.
“He took you to the clearing,” Grulk says. It isn’t a question.
“Sunday,” I say.
His whole face opens. He sits back and crosses his arms and nods with the satisfaction of someone watching his own prophecy land. “Good,” he says. “Good, good.” He drums both hands on the table once, a HammerFall punctuation mark, evidently. “This is very good.”
“I’m glad you approve,” I say, drier than I intended.
He points at me. “I like her,” he announces. Then, louder: “Kragen. I like her.”
Kragen has come off the stage; I didn’t see him do it, and he’s standing at the edge of the room with an expression that suggests he’s been there long enough to have heard at least part of this exchange. He looks at Grulk. Then at me. Then at Grulk again.
“I see that,” he says.
“She looked up StillWater,” Grulk informs him, as though reporting something of civic importance.
“I know.” He comes over and pulls out the chair beside me. “After the first visit,” he says, not quite a question.
“Yes,” I say.
Kragen looks at me with that unguarded warmth he usually keeps banked down. Then he almost smiles, lower-wattage and more real than the one he wears for rooms. My sternum registers it like a plucked string.
“Second set in five minutes,” he says to Kragen. “Don’t waste it.”
“Thank you, Grulk,” Kragen says, though his tone suggests he’s not sincere.
“I’m helping,” Grulk says cheerfully.
Kragen stands and looks down at me. The bar noise surrounds us, and Grulk has turned to introduce himself to the adjacent table at a volume that makes their conversation everyone’s conversation.
“Stay,” Kragen says. Not quite a question. Not a command. An admission.
I look up at him. “I was going to.”
A flicker of feeling flashes across his face, quick and unguarded, here and gone. He goes back to the stage.
The second set is different.
He knows I’m in the room now, and he’s playing with that knowledge. His hands find every note. His face gives the songs what they ask for. Nothing contradicts anything I know about him.
He plays the old song about two-thirds through the set, the one from his world; I recognize it now from the StillWater clearing.
The room goes quiet in a different way as they listen.
Not more attentive. More still. Like the sound is asking more of them than the other songs do.
It lasts three minutes, and then he comes back to a familiar song, and the room exhales.
I sit with what I just heard.
He came through the Emergence with that song in his memory.
Carried it eight years in a bar in Missouri and dusts it off when the room feels right for it.
Both things true at once: the male who owns a Friday night and the male who carries old music through a crossing between worlds.
Not contradictions. The same person in two frequencies, playing in the same key.
I knew this. I’ve known it for weeks, in the way you know things you’ve thought about carefully.
Watching him from here, in the lamplight, with Grulk’s empty glass on the table and Walt’s unrequested drink cool in my hand, I understand that knowing it and seeing it complete are different things.
The picture has been assembling since the first visit. This is the last piece.
He is who he is. All the way through. I’ve been waiting without knowing I was waiting to find that out for certain, and now I know, and I’m not afraid of what I’m going to do with it.
The set ends. He comes off the stage and through the room, and he doesn’t stop to talk to anyone. He comes to me.
His stage version stepped down somewhere between the mic and my table. This version arrived. The transition happens in real time—not a change, just a settling—and I feel something in my chest resolve like a final note finding its home.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” I say.
Walt appears at Kragen’s shoulder. He carries himself like someone who has already made up his mind and is getting around to saying it. His attention shifts to Kragen. He looks at me. Eight years of knowing this male down to the grain of him.
“I’ll close up tonight,” he says. “You two get going.”
Kragen goes still.
He looks at Walt, who is already turning away, back to the bar, as if this kind of loyalty requires no acknowledgment at all. I can tell by the way Kragen stills that it matters anyway, something having reached him somewhere unguarded.
He looks back at me.
“Ready?” he asks.
Outside, the Missouri summer night is humid and loud with crickets, the sky fully dark above the street.
We walk toward the parking lot, and he slows before we reach it, one hand coming up to find my face, that big palm, the one I know, curving from my jaw to my cheekbone the way it did the first night in my grandmother’s living room.
I tilt my face up.
He comes down to meet me, slow and deliberate, his thumb tracing along my jaw, and I feel the whole evening settling into this moment—the stage, the song, Walt’s eight words, the picture complete—and I close my eyes.
The bar door bangs open behind us.
A group spills out into the night, loud and half-lit, laughing at something that happened inside. They flow around us without noticing us, or noticing and not caring, voices carrying down the block.
We stand in the sudden noise, not quite touching.
I look up at him. His hand is still at my jaw.
He looks down at me with an expression that has stopped managing anything at all.
He opens the passenger door of his car. I get in. My car is in the lot and will be there until tomorrow, and neither of us says so because we don’t need to.
Twenty-three miles of Missouri two-lane.
The ridge dark against the sky. His hand finding mine across the console, warm and certain, and the knowledge settling into my chest that I have stopped managing this—somewhere around the fourth song of the second set, without deciding to, I just stopped—and I am entirely glad.
The creek will be running when we get there. The house will be lit from the inside.
I know what tonight is.