Page 15 of Orc'd At A Wedding
"I factored that into the assessment."
I turn from the window. He's standing at the wardrobe with his back to me, shrugging his jacket off his shoulders, and the fabric of his waistcoat pulls taut across the breadth of him in a way that my eye tracks with the same involuntary diligence as the tongue finding a new filling.
"She pulled me aside near the end," I say. "Before the Brandon thing. When you were getting drinks."
"I know. I could see you from the bar."
"She told me you looked at me like you were very serious about me." I say it lightly, conversationally, the way you can say things when they're enormous and you need to smuggle them past your own nervous system. "She said, and I'm quoting,that man is not performing."
Olog doesn't answer immediately. He hangs the jacket with precise attention, smoothing the shoulders onto the hanger.
"She's perceptive," he says finally.
My heart does a thing.
"She's a terror who once made a caterer cry at a christening," I say, which is completely true and also a masterful deflection.
"Both can coexist."
He turns and reaches for the buttons of his waistcoat, working them open from the bottom with the methodical patience he brings to absolutely everything, and I drift from the window to sit on the end of the bed because my legs have decided to quietly withdraw their cooperation. The waistcoat comes off. He hangs it beside the jacket. His white shirt underneath is impeccable still, buttoned high, the sleeves rolled to the forearm over the dark spill of tattoo ink that surfaces at his wrists and disappears up under the fabric.
I've been trying not to see the tattoos all evening.
I have failed, repeatedly, and with diminishing effort.
"Olog." I'm not entirely sure what's coming next so I leave his name sitting there while I find the rest.
"Yes."
"What do the tattoos mean?"
He looks at me, then down at his own forearm with a brief expression I can't fully classify. "The ones here," he says, turning his arm so I can see the inner wrist, "are my grandmother's recipe for a slow-cooked bone broth. The preparation is very specific. Three days' minimum simmer."
I blink. "Sorry."
"The geometric patterning on my left side is my family lineage going back six generations. The script across my right shoulder is a seasonal harvest notation from the region my family originates from." He says it with the same complete, deadpan gravity he used to inform Brandon of whatever existential truth he whispered into his ear. "I'm told humans expect them to mean something violent."
"They're beautiful," I say, without running it through the filter first, and something in his expression shifts at a frequency I feel more than see.
He reaches up and begins unbuttoning his shirt.
This is ordinary. This is a person taking off their work clothes at the end of an evening. This is not, in any functional sense, an event. I understand this intellectually and I tell myself this with considerable firmness while he works down the buttons and the shirt falls open and the full architecture of him becomes visible and the intellectual understanding waves cheerfully goodbye from a very great distance.
His chest is extraordinary.
It is broad in a way that registers less as aesthetic and more as fact, a geographical reality, the kind of thing you accept as correct the way you accept that mountains are large. The tattoos cover him completely from the base of his throat down, dense and intricate, coiling over the heavy plates of muscle, tracing the deep lines of his abdomen, and the effect is not chaotic but mapped, deliberate, a dense narrative written in black ink over ash-gray skin. He turns to hang the shirt and I get the full expanse of his back and I pick up my glass of water from the bedside table and drink approximately half of it in one go.
He folds the shirt with the same careful precision as everything else.
The room is very quiet.
He reaches for the hem of his undershirt and I am suddenly, acutely aware that I am about to lose the remaining structural argument my common sense is making, and my mouth opens.
"Don't sleep on the floor tonight."
It lands in the room like something dropped.
I didn't decide to say it. It assembled itself from somewhere underneath the filter and simply exited, and now it exists, and we are both in the room with it. His hands still at his hem. Iwatch his back, the vast geography of ink and muscle, and wait for the wordprofessionalto arrive in the area between us.
