Page 31 of The Orc’s Comfort

The silence is long enough to be its own answer.

“I would like to think so,” he says finally. “I resolved to tell you several times. There was always a reason it was the wrong moment.” He pauses. “Those reasons were real. But they were also convenient.”

I turn back. He’s watching me with an expression I haven’t seen from him before: not his usual reserve, not his formal composure, but something altogether unguarded. Just a man waiting to find out if something he cares about is going to survive the next few minutes.

“I’m angry,” I say.

“You have every right to be.”

“Not because you have feelings for me. That part I…” I stop. “That part I can work with. I’m angry because you sat across from me every day while I thought we were building something honest, and the foundation of it was something you were hiding.” I look at him directly. “That matters, Rhazgar. It matters to me.”

“Yes,” he says. “It should.” He sets the leather piece on my counter and unfolds it with care.

Inside is a hair comb: carved bone, worked into an intricate pattern, the carvings worn smooth from decades of use. And beside it, a folded piece of paper covered in two columns of text, one in a language I don’t recognize, one in English.

“My grandmother’s hair comb,” he says. “She wore it every day. I don’t remember a single morning when her hair wasn’t fastened up with it.” He looks at it, not at me. “It came through the portal with her. I have been keeping it because I did not know what else to do with it. Because giving it away felt like a door closing.”

He looks up.

“The recipe is her healing broth. The full version, with the original language. I have never written it down before. It has only ever existed in my hands and my memory.” A beat. “It is the most important thing I know. I am giving it to you because I used food as a way to tell you something I was too afraid to say out loud, and you deserved to have that knowledge freely given, on your own terms, not slipped past you in a bowl you thought was medicine.”

The room is very quiet.

“I am thirty-two years old,” he says. “I have never courted anyone. Not here, not properly on my world. There was always going to be more time, and then there wasn’t, and then eight years went by, and you were on the other side of the wall, and I didn’t know how to do this and I did it badly.” He exhales. “That is not an excuse. It is an explanation. You asked me to be honest with you, and that is the honest version.”

“That’s a very good explanation,” I say. “I’m still deciding whether it’s enough.”

“That is fair,” he says. “I will wait.”

I look at the comb for a long moment. The carvings are intricate even though they’re worn smooth, something botanical I think, though I can’t be certain. The kind of pattern someone made by hand for someone they loved.

“She sounds remarkable,” I say finally. “Your grandmother.”

“She was.” Something in his face shifts. “She would have been furious with me for waiting this long.”

“And she would have been right.” I pick it up. It’s lighter than I expected, warm from being in his hand. “This is too much, Rhazgar. You don’t have to give me something irreplaceable to apologize.”

“I am not giving it to you as an apology,” he says. “I am giving it to you because I have been carrying it for six years waiting for someone worthy of it, and I was too busy being afraid to notice I had already found her.”

The comb turns in my hands. Then, without quite deciding to, I gather my hair, twist it up, and fasten it in place.

It holds perfectly.

I look up at him. He’s watching me like a man who has put everything on the table and is very still.

“I’m still angry,” I say.

“I know.”

“And I need you to not do anything like this again. No more withholding things because you’re afraid of how I’ll react. If we’re doing this, whatever this is, we do it honestly.”

“Yes,” he says. It comes out with the solemn weight of a man who means it completely.

I look at him for a moment. The comb is in my hair. The recipe he wrote for me is on the counter. He has given me every honest thing he has, and I can see that clearly, and I am still not ready to let it be simple.

“I need you to understand something,” I say. “The part that hurt most was you deciding what I was ready to know and when. That is not yours to decide. Not with me.”

He holds my gaze. “You are right. I will not do that again.”