Page 51 of Orc'd At A Wedding
She laughs. Not the careful, performance-ready laugh she used at the mixer when her relatives were watching, and not the short, sharp exhalation she makes when something surprises her. This one comes up from somewhere lower, genuine and warm and slightly wet because she is still crying a little, and the combination of it, the laugh and the tears and the way she presses her free hand flat against her sternum like she is trying to physically contain something, does something highly inconvenient to my rib cavity.
My professional detachment, I note, is entirely and irreparably gone.
I filed it somewhere around the moment I stepped into the women's restroom and shot the bolt and saw her at the vanity with her shoulders curved inward, and I have not retrieved it since. I do not intend to retrieve it. The loss of it feels less like a failure of professional standards and considerably more like setting down a piece of luggage I did not realize I had been carrying for three years of gig work and precisely managed client interactions and five-star ratings that I pursued with the kind of focused energy that, in retrospect, I was directing at something because I had nothing better to direct it at.
She stops walking, turning to face me with her dark eyes still bright with tears and her mouth curved and the knife balanced in both hands now, and I think: there is something considerably better to direct it at.
"Olog," she says, "I am going to accept this knife."
Something in me releases. A tension I had not fully mapped until this moment, a coiled-spring tightness behind my ribs that I had categorized as professional focus and was, apparently, not that at all.
"Good," I say.
"I still don't fully know what I'm agreeing to."
"I will explain every step."
"And I can ask questions."
"You will ask questions regardless. I have already factored this into my planning."
She laughs again, softer this time, and closes her hands around the handle of the knife and something ancient and instinctive and entirely outside the scope of any gig-worker handbook I have ever read recognizes the gesture and responds to it with a ferocity that is mildly alarming even for me. My grandmother would have understood it immediately. She would have looked at this small, sharp-tongued, champagne-scented human woman and she would have nodded once with the particular gravity of someone confirming a thing they already knew.
Bliss curls her fingers around the hilt and lifts her face and says, "So what's the next step? Formally."
"You carry the knife until I provide you with a permanent sheath for it. That is the second stage."
"I don't have anywhere to put a knife in this dress."
"The dress presents a logistical challenge, yes. I will source a sheath in the morning."
"And after that?"
"After that, we discuss terms."
"Terms," she echoes.
"Where you live. Whether I am welcome there. What you need from me and what I am prepared to give you, which is,for the record, considerably more than the standard gig-worker arrangement." I pause. "The discussion of terms is, traditionally, conducted over a shared meal. My family's custom is goat."
Her expression goes beautifully, helplessly incredulous. "Goat."
"I can adapt the tradition to your preferences."
"I feel like goat is fine. I feel like at this point in the evening, goat is the least alarming thing that's happened to me."
I look at her standing in her ruined evening with her mascara smudged and her heels slightly tilted and my grandmother's knife in her hands, and the professional distance that I spent three years constructing and refining is not simply absent but seems, from this vantage point, like a genuinely ridiculous structure to have built at all.
She is looking at me the same way she has looked at me three or four times tonight, with the mask entirely down, the performance she runs for her family stripped away completely. No bright, slightly brittle smile. No careful, high-pitch cheer. Just her, tired and genuine and slightly unraveled, and looking at me like I am something she did not expect to find and is not entirely sure how to hold but is absolutely committed to holding.
I step forward.
Her chin tips up immediately, tracking the movement, and there is no flinch in her. There has never been a flinch. She stood in my space since I pulled her against me in the lobby, never stiffening or recalibrating. No carefully neutral expression masking discomfort with my size, no polite pretense. She just fit. She looked up at me with those dark eyes and she fit, and every interaction since has been a study in the same thing, the way she occupies the space between my arm and my chest like it was built to the correct specifications.
I pick her up.
Not slowly, not with the careful, pre-announced movements I use around humans who need time to recalibrate to my size. I just reach down and scoop her directly off the tarmac, one arm under her knees and the other at her back, and she lets out a short, startled sound that is not alarmed, is instead something considerably warmer.
"Olog."
