Page 67 of Single Pucking Orc

She stood in the doorway of the kitchen she now half-lived in and let the noise surround her.

It was too loud. It was disorderly. There was chili of unknown origin bubbling on a counter she had wiped that morning. A male she had done the accounts for was drinking her good wine. Someone had put music on. And it was, by every metric she had spent almost thirty years constructing, a disaster.

She liked it enormously.

She kept running into that, all afternoon. Like her hand going to the shelf where Rognar kept the mugs instead of the shelf where she kept them. She waited for the old, familiar panic. She stood in the doorway of a house full of enormous loud orcs. She waited for the tightening in her chest that eight weeks ago would have had her reaching for a notebook and a clean page and a plan.

It didn’t come. Nothing tightened, nothing clenched, and that was so much worse. She’d thought the very same thing weeks ago, standing in her kitchen doorway.

No. Not worse, better. She meant better. She was still learning the vocabulary.

Tarmek came at five, Edie under his arm with paint still on the side of her hand and a bakery box balanced on her palm.

“We’re not staying long,” Tarmek said, which meant they intended to stay a while, and set a bottle down.

“He said that in the truck,” Edie said. “He’s said it four times. He wants to see the baby, he just doesn’t want anyone to know he wants to see the baby.” She kissed Nora’s cheek with a cheerful smile. “Congratulations. On all of it. The paper thing. The him thing.” A grin. “The obvious thing nobody’s supposed to mention.”

“There’s no obvious thing.”

“Sure there isn’t.”

She watched the captain of the Emerald Enforcers cross a crowded room towards her daughter without appearing to hurry and without appearing to have a destination. He crouched carefully in front of the sofa where Charlie sat propped and imperial in the mystery jersey. Charlie regarded him with the total absorption she reserved for large green males.

Then he did something she didn’t understand.

There was a window behind the sofa, the low afternoon light coming through it grey and cold. Tarmek lifted Charlie’s small chubby hand and set her palm against the cold glass. Then he lightly placed his enormous palm over it. Glass and hand and hand. He held it there for two seconds. Charlie stared at the arrangement with the delight of a scientist whose experiment has confirmed the hypothesis.

She looked for Rognar to find out whether this was a joke.

He was already watching. He stood motionless against the far wall with a beer he wasn’t drinking, and there was nothing amused in his face at all. Whatever the window thing was, he’d found it funny once. He didn’t find it funny anymore. He was watching Tarmek press a baby’s hand to a pane of glass, with the same expression he’d worn holding a page with a stamp on it. She crossed the room to stand beside him without deciding to and put her shoulder against his arm. He came back from wherever he’d gone and looked down at her.

“You okay?”

“I’m having,” he said, “a lot of feelings. I’d like it noted for the record that I’m handling them extremely well.”

“You’re not drinking your beer.”

“I’m savoring it.”

“You’ve savored it for an hour.”

“It’s a very good beer, Nora.” He put his arm around her in front of nineteen people and a slow cooker. They had a rule about that, or had had a rule about it. Rule three, we do not tell the team, a rule that had not survived Fen and that neither of them had bothered to mourn. “Eight weeks,” he said quietly, watching his daughter. “Eight weeks ago I owned nothing. I didn’t have a bottle. I stood in a shop and almost cried at a wall of… You weren’t there, but there was a wall and there were seventeen kinds of⁠—”

“I’ve heard about the wall.”

“It was a genuinely traumatic wall.”

“I know.”

“And now there’s—” He stopped. Looked around the room, at the noise and the chaos, the chili, the mohawk, the captain and the baby and the cold window, and the overloud impossible afternoon. “There’s this.”

“There’s this,” she agreed, leaning against a male who ran hot enough to warm the room through his shirt.

He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to. He wasn’t surprised into a different person by any of it. He was the same male who’d charmed her mailman. He was still going to reach for a joke the second he felt something too big to say. Fatherhood had not swapped him out for someone else. It had simply turned a light on in a room that had always been there, but she hadn’t been perceptive enough to see.

The party thinned around seven, in a slow tide of coats and half-hugs and someone finally claiming the slow cooker. The slow cooker turned out to be Jensen’s after all, which explained nothing, since Jensen had left before it arrived.

Brogan hadn’t meant to stay.