Page 39 of Single Pucking Orc

She had spent a year waiting for the moment Rognar Stonebreaker would choose himself. She’d been so certain it was coming. She’d built the file around it. But it wasn’t coming. It was never going to come. She’d just watched it not come, over the sound of a six-month-old being told hey, hey, I’ve got you. Given the choice between his good evening and his daughter’s distress, he hadn’t hesitated for the length of a breath.

The crying thinned, hiccupped, and stopped. He appeared in the kitchen doorway a short time later with Charlie on his shoulder, one enormous hand spread across her back, his shirt back on and buttoned wrong, entirely unrepentant.

“For the record,” he said, “I want it noted that I was having a very good evening.”

“Noted.”

“Write it down.” He patted Charlie’s back slowly, and looked at her over his daughter’s dark head with something that was almost the grin and almost wasn’t. “You write everything down.”

CHAPTER 13

The kiss ended, she went back across the grass, and Rognar stood alone in his kitchen at eleven at night and discovered he was furious.

Not at her. Not at Charlie, asleep with her fist against her cheek. At the arrangement. At what they’d built without meaning to—the doorways, the tunnels, the four-second goodbyes stolen over a diaper bag while a monitor threatened them both from the counter. He’d been telling himself for two weeks that it was working. It was working the way a bucket under a leak works. He could go a long time before admitting he’d rather fix the roof.

He wanted to take her somewhere. He wanted an evening that started somewhere and went somewhere and didn’t end because a small person down the hall had a strong opinion about the state of her diaper. He wanted a table and two chairs and no exits available to either of them.

He planned the ask carefully. He rehearsed it, which he’d never done for anything that wasn’t a media scrum. He knew exactly how he was going to do it.

Then he did it, the next morning, in her kitchen doorway, holding the diaper bag, and it came out like a male confirming a delivery window.

“Friday,” he said. “Are you doing anything Friday?”

She looked at him over the top of her glasses. She had a pen behind her ear and a client’s shoebox of receipts open on the table behind her.

“That depends on what you’re asking me.”

“That’s fair.” He set the diaper bag down on her floor. Put it right down, both hands free, like a male surrendering a weapon. “I did that badly. Come out with me on Friday.”

“Out.”

“Out. Away from here. On a date.”

She took the pen out from behind her ear, which for Nora was the equivalent of anyone else standing up.

“Do you know how those work?”

“I’ve seen them on television.”

“Because your reputation would suggest a certain⁠—”

“My reputation,” he said, “is going to come up on Friday. Say yes and I’ll ruin it for you in person.”

She said yes. She said it the way she did everything, dry and level, fine, Friday, I’ll move a call—and he carried it around all day like a boy who’d been passed a note by the cutest girl in the class.

Then Friday came and Rognar Stonebreaker, whose file supposedly made him a professional at this, stood in his bedroom at ten to six with three shirts on the bed and no idea which of them was the right one.

He’d made the mistake of asking Fen.

“Green,” Fen had said, with the confidence of a male who’d never been right about anything. “Not the mohawk green. Your green. Skin green. Match yourself. Powerful.”

“That’s insane.”

“It’s coordinated. And roll the sleeves. Show the arms. The arms are the whole product, Stone, don’t hide the product.” Then, delighted: “Wait. Wait. Are you nervous? Cap—Tarmek—he’s nervous, he’s got shirts out⁠—”

He’d hung up. He regretted asking. He regretted, separately and more deeply, that he’d taken the note about the sleeves, because he’d rolled them, and now he couldn’t unroll them without admitting it to himself how much it mattered.

He got in the truck, backed out of his driveway, and parked on the street outside a house he could see from his kitchen window. Eight feet of grass. He’d traveled eight feet and arrived early. He sat there and looked at her lit front window. He was going to have to go up and knock on a door he’d knocked on about eggs and diapers and never once about this.