Page 12 of Orc'd At A Wedding
"She verified me. It's different."
"You invented an entire trip to Italy."
"I've been to the Noce. The details were accurate."
"What if she googles it?"
"She won't. She got what she wanted, which was confirmation that the story holds weight and that I'm capable of looking at you like—" I stop.
Bliss turns to look up at me. "Like what?"
I recalibrate. "Like someone with a credible personal history. Shall we do a circuit of the patio? I want to confirm Brandon's current position and your mother has been trying to catch your eye from the far table for approximately twelve minutes."
A beat.
"You're deflecting," she says.
"I'm providing professional threat assessment."
She studies my face for a moment with those dark eyes that have an uncomfortable capacity for focus, and then something at the corner of her mouth shifts.
"Fine," she says. "Let's do a circuit."
I offer her my arm, she takes it, and we move.
The professional parametersof this engagement are clear.
I reviewed them on the drive to the resort, the same way I review every client brief, methodically, thoroughly, and with particular attention to the clauses governing physical contact, which in this contract are listed underAuthentic Presentation Needsand cover hand-holding, brief embraces, and proximity maintenance at social functions. I am, by any objective measure, operating entirely within scope.
This does not account for the scent situation.
I become aware of the scent situation again when Bliss leans slightly into my side to murmur a low commentary about a distant cousin who apparently once told her that her career was aphase, and the jasmine-and-warmth combination reaches me at close range and activates something in my olfactoryprocessing that is significantly above the baseline I would expect from professional proximity. Orc biology is not subtle about these things. We are built for clear signals. The signals I am currently receiving are not ambiguous and they are not, in any clinical evaluation, professional.
I feed her a prawn crostino from a passing tray to give my hands something occupationally relevant to do.
"I can feed myself," she says.
"Your Aunt Susan provided specific intelligence on your appetiser avoidance patterns. I'm mitigating."
"You're being—" She eats the crostino. "Actually that's really good."
"Yes."
She makes a small sound of genuine pleasure at the food and I redirect my attention to the perimeter with significant focus.
The evening proceeds.
I intercept her mother with a firm and warm handshake and a series of strategically sincere observations about the venue that redirect the conversation away from Bliss's romantic history and toward the floral arrangements. I stand at Bliss's shoulder during a twenty-minute exchange with a pair of bridesmaids who are visibly recalibrating their entire prior narrative about her, and I contribute exactly three sentences to that conversation, all of them specifically designed to make Bliss sound like someone who has been so thoroughly occupied with her own vivid and satisfying life that she simply hasn't had surplus attention for anyone else's timeline expectations. I track Brandon, who has moved from the hedge to the bar and is now somewhere in the intermediate stage of drunk where the ratio of confidence to good judgement has inverted badly. I feed Bliss two more things from passing trays. She stops protesting after the second one.
And she laughs.
This is the variable I have not adequately prepared for.
She laughs at things I say in a way that is not the social lubricant laugh of the mixer circuit, the polished hat that she deploys for her family's benefit with perfectly calibrated warmth. When I deliver a dry observation about the groom's best man, who has given the same three-point speech twice to different groups with zero variation, Bliss makes a sound that is low and genuine and briefly helpless, and she turns her face slightly toward my arm to muffle it, and I can feel the warmth of it through my jacket sleeve, and my instincts do something that I do not have a professional category for.
Orcs pair-bond along scent-and-resonance lines. This is biology, not sentimentality. I understand the mechanism the way I understand any relevant operational data. The issue is that the mechanism is currently running unsupervised and I am in a professional context with a client and a contract and a five-star rating that I have maintained for three consecutive years through the precise application of boundaries, and all of that is architecturally sound.
Her laugh is a structural problem.
