Page 40 of That’s My Orc, Tusk Off

We’d be alone again on Friday.

Same time. Same conference room.

Probably more cookies, though I needed to pull out my recipe box and tell him I’d bring the treat this time.

I could look forward to more Traig looking at me with his dark eyes while his tusks fiddled with his upper lip and his voice dropped half an octave when he said my name.

“Well,” I said.

I was still smiling when I pulled back onto the road and headed home.

CHAPTER EIGHT

TRAIG

It was Thursday evening, and I was finally back at the fizzling enclosure. A structural failure in enclosure four had eaten most of my afternoon, right on the heels of the planning meeting, and I still felt scattered, like I'd been holding too many threads at once.

As I approached the enclosure, Nix looked up from where he was excavating a small hole in the ground outside the enclosure, his stripes glowing.

“Nix,” I said. “What are you doing out of your pen? You need to be with the other fizzlings.”

He chirped and kept digging, dirt flying up from beneath his front paws, hitting his belly.

I opened the gate and gestured inside. “Come on. Back inside.”

Nix kept digging.

“I’m going to document this,” I said.

He chirped again.

I picked him up, carried him inside, and set him down near the shelter where the other fizzlings had curled into a big ball and were dozing. Only one of them looked up. It studied Nix in my arms and went back to sleep.

“Stay here,” I said, gently placing him among them.

I left and closed the gate, confirming the latch had secured, and started looking for his escape route. I couldn’t find a hole in the mesh big enough for a fizzling to escape. There had to be something I’d missed.

I found it near the bottom left corner where one wall met another. He’d scored the mesh, working on a joining point, creating a small gap. The edges had been bent outward from his effort.

I pulled out my tablet and opened the behavioral documentation file, typing.

Nix has created an exit point through consistent manipulation of the front left fence corner. The gap is only as wide as half my hand, but it’s enough for him to slip through.

It didn’t take long to repair the mesh and the joining point.

Stepping back, I nodded. “Fixed, Nix. Try to escape now.”

Nix blinked at me from where he snuggled with the other fizzlings.

Turning away from them, I continued strolling past the enclosures.

“Willa will work close beside me three times a week,” I said softly, though there wasn’t anyone here but me.

“Willa smiled and my brain stopped providing useful information.”

This was ridiculous.

I should be documenting information about the fizzlings, not whispering about my emotional responses to an assignment that was professional and useful.