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His gaze drops to my mouth.

Mine drops to his.

"Jilly." My name comes out of him wrecked, barely a word at all, more like a hinge giving way after a century of holding. "The camera is off."

"I know," I breathe.

"If I do this," he says, and his forehead lowers until it rests against mine, and his hand slides from my wrist up the bare skin of my arm and leaves a wake of fire everywhere it travels, "I cannot take it back. I told you. My hands do not lie. There is no clean ending drafted in advance."

I curl my fingers into the canvas of his apron and pull, and he comes, that whole impossible mountain of him, willing, undone.

"Then don't take it back," I whisper against his mouth. "Don't you dare take it back."

CHAPTER 16

OGGAN

The red light on her camera dies, and something in me lets go of a rope I have gripped for eleven hours.

Jilly exhales. The bubbly influencer drains out of her shoulders all at once, and what stays behind is a tired woman standing in a room made of raw pine studs and nothing else. Sawdust hangs in the last of the light. The generator ticks somewhere outside, cooling. A single bare bulb swings on its cord and throws our shadows long across the subfloor.

"That's a wrap," she says to no one. "God. My face hurts from smiling."

I set the level down on the sawhorse. Slow. Careful. Everything in me has gone loud and simple.

She rolls her neck. The overalls she wears carry a smear of joint compound across one hip that she has ignored for hours, and I have ignored it too, the way you ignore a splinter driven too deep to dig at.

"You did that on purpose," she says.

"Did what."

"The cabinet thing. The rip-it-off-the-wall thing. The internet goes feral for it, and you love it." She points a screwdriver at me, mock-stern, and a smudge of primer rides her cheekbone. "You're a ham, Oggan Warhip."

A ham. Me. Thirty-five years of keeping to the far edge of every room, and a curly-haired human in muddy overalls has determined that I perform for a camera.

I cross the framed-out doorway. Two steps. The subfloor gives its familiar creak under my boots.

She stops turning the screwdriver.

"That's the real me you keep filming," I tell her. "It's no bit."

"Oggan."

"When I take a wall down, it comes down because it should come down. There's no audience in my head." Closer now. She has to tip her chin up, up, up to hold my gaze, and her throat moves when she swallows. "The only fake thing on this whole property is the smile you paint on when the light turns red."

Color climbs her neck. "That's my job."

"I know what your job is." The stud frame stands at her back, and she takes a small step into it without meaning to, until the raw pine bracket sits behind her spine. "I want the woman who ate cold pizza off a paint can with me last night. The one who says 'crap' when the drill slips. The one under all the sparkle."

Her breath goes shallow. Fast.

"Say something," I tell her.

"I don't know what I'm allowed to say."

I set one hand on the stud beside her head. The wood complains under my palm, old-growth pine that will outlive us both, and I lean in until the heat of her rolls off her skin in a wave I could drink down.

"Say stop," I offer, low, "and I sleep in the truck and we never speak of it again. You have my word as an Orc. That means more than any contract Patsy will ever draft."