Page 69 of Single Pucking Orc

She looked out at the two dark houses and the silver grass. She thought about the nine-year-old girl at a payphone with an account number copied off a letter. The girl who had learned that needing someone was the most dangerous thing a person could do.

And about the woman that girl had built, brick by careful brick. A life so tight and so paid-up and so entirely hers that there was no room in it for a single other person to knock anything over. And she thought about the eight feet of grass, and how she had crossed it, and how many times she’d crossed it, and how she had stopped counting, which she had never once done about anything else in her life.

“For someone,” she said, “who spent months complaining about your neighbor, you’ve made yourself remarkably difficult to get rid of.”

“You started it.”

“I started it. You moved in.”

“You gave me three eggs.”

“You asked for one.”

“I know,” he said, and something moved in his voice, some old buried amusement finally coming up for air. He set the mug down on the step and turned to look at her properly in the near-dark. “I’ve been meaning to tell you about that.”

“About the eggs?”

“About the egg. Singular. I only asked for one.” He was almost smiling now, the real smile, the one he didn’t hand out to rooms. “I had a full carton in the fridge, Nora. I’d shopped. I had twelve perfectly good eggs eight feet from where I was standing when I knocked on your door last October and asked to borrow one.”

She stopped turning the mug.

“You knocked on my door,” she said, “for an egg you already had.”

“I wanted to see if you’d open it.” He said it simply, the way he’d said everything that mattered. “You’d been glaring at me over the fence since the day I moved in and I couldn’t work out if there was a person under the glaring or just the glaring, and I couldn’t think of a reason to find out, so I invented one. It was a bad plan. I had to eat fifteen eggs that week so you wouldn’t catch me.”

“You—” She put a hand over her mouth. “A year. I have thought, for a year, that you were the kind of male who runs out of eggs.”

“I let you think it. It was easier being the one who runs out of eggs. Nobody checks on him.” The smile finally arrived “You gave me three. I only asked for one and you gave me three. And you did it while looking at me like I was something you’d found in a drain. I stood in my kitchen with three eggs I didn’t need and I thought, there’s a person under there. And she doesn’t like me at all. Best morning I’d had in months.”

“You are,” she said, and couldn’t finish, because she was laughing, out on a frozen step at eight o’clock in the dark, “you are an absolute menace, you engineered a year of⁠—”

“I engineered one egg. You did the year yourself, with the glaring.” He caught her hand off her mouth and held it, warm as a stone in the sun. “So. Mate. That’s the word and that’s what it means. No ring tonight because I know you’d want to price the ring yourself and probably audit the jeweler. I’m not asking you anything. I’m telling you something that’s true, and you can file it wherever you file those.”

The monitor crackled on the sill.

They both stopped to listen. It wasn’t a cry. It was the small conversational noise Charlie made surfacing halfway out of sleep, a low series of vowels addressed to no one. The sound of a seven-month-old with a strong opinion and no vocabulary to deploy it.

He tipped his head towards the window.

“She gets a vote,” he said.

They listened. The vowels resolved themselves into one clear syllable, repeated twice, with tremendous satisfaction, into the dark of the nursery. A fat, decisive, unmistakable “Bah.” And then the settling shuffle of a baby who had said her piece and gone back to sleep.

“That’s a yes,” he said.

“That is not a yes. That’s not even a word. She’s seven months old, her entire vocabulary is a noise she makes at the goalie.”

“She said it twice.”

“She says everything twice.”

“Two votes, then.” He put his arm around her on the step, and she leaned into the warmth of him without a single alarm going off anywhere in her orderly, over-warm, entirely rearranged life. He kissed the top of her head, careful of nothing, because there was nothing left to be careful about. “You’re outnumbered, my mate. It’s on the record.”

“It’s not on any record. I’m the one who keeps the records and I know.”

“Then write it down.”

She looked at the two dark houses, and the frost between them, and the yellow light of the nursery window with her whole outrageous future asleep behind it.