Page 14 of Orc'd At A Wedding
BLISS
Idon't see him move. That's the thing I keep snagging on afterward, replaying it in the suite with my heels off and my pulse still doing something erratic. One moment Brandon's fingers are wrapped around my wrist with that particular proprietary pressure that used to make me shrink three inches, and the next moment Olog's hand is around Brandon's wrist instead, and the transition between those two states happens so fast my brain files it undermagic trickrather thanphysics.
Olog doesn't yank. He doesn't make a scene. He simply repositions Brandon's arm with the calm, definitive energy of someone who has moved an object to a better shelf, and then he leans down, just slightly, just enough that his mouth is close to Brandon's ear, and he says something I can't catch. His voice is barely a thread of sound. A whisper at a register that doesn't carry.
Whatever it is, Brandon's face does something extraordinary.
It goes through shock, then a very specific kind of pale, and then it becomes the face of a man who has just been informed, in quiet and thorough detail, of his own structural inadequacies. His eyes cut to me once, then away, and then he's walking backacross the patio with a gait that is working very hard to look like a choice and not a retreat.
I watch him go.
"What did you say to him?"
"Something accurate." Olog straightens and smooths the lapel of his jacket with one hand, the gesture so unhurried it's almost offensive. "Are you all right?"
"I'm great." The adrenaline is still rushing, doing laps, looking for an exit. "That was extremely, I mean, I'm fine. Totally fine."
My mother appears at my elbow, watching Brandon's retreating back with the serene expression of a woman who has waited years for exactly this. "I like him," she says to me, with a small, decisive nod in Olog's direction.
"Wonderful," I say.
The walkback through the lobby is quiet.
Not uncomfortable quiet. Something denser than that. The mixer noise falls behind us and the marble of the lobby absorbs our footsteps and the lift opens immediately when Olog presses the button, which feels like the universe is trying very hard to get us into a small enclosed space together as efficiently as possible. I step in first and face the mirrored doors and he steps in after me and the lift is genuinely not small but the proportion of it that he occupies means the remaining portion available for me is intimate in a way that the square footage technically doesn't explain.
I can smell him. I've been cataloguing this all evening without meaning to. Bergamot and something warm underneath, starched linen and a clean biological undercurrent that probably has a scientific name I don't know and a practical effect I know very well.
I gaze at the floor numbers changing.
"You didn't have to do that," I say. "Back there. That was above and beyond."
"It was within the scope of the engagement."
"There's nowhere in your listing that saysthreaten my ex-boyfriend with whatever that was."
"Client physical safety is implicit." He pauses. "He was hurting you."
I look at my wrist. There's no mark. Brandon wasn't holding me hard enough to leave one, but the fact that Olog noticed before I'd fully registered it undoes me completely.
"He wasn't going to, it was just Brandon being dramatic." I hear how that sounds the moment it leaves my mouth. The lift chimes.
Olog looks at me in the mirror. Just looks, those silver eyes level and patient, with the specific quality of someone who is not going to argue but is also not going to agree.
The doors open.
The suite is exactlyas we left it: the lamp on the writing desk throwing its warm pool of light, the enormous bed at the centre of the room like a stage no one is addressing, Olog's bag sitting with military neatness beside the wardrobe. I drop my clutch on the side table and step out of my heels in one motion and immediately lose four inches of height and the last structural pretence of having this evening under control.
I go to the window. The resort grounds below are still lit, the pool a rectangle of blue light, distant laughter drifting up from somewhere. I press my fingers against the cool glass and try to let the adrenaline metabolise.
Brandon. Brandon, who I dated for two years and who told me, at the end, with genuine bewilderment, that I wasa lot.Brandon, who I spent three weeks genuinely dreading seeing this weekend, who I booked an orc fake-boyfriend to neutralise, and who Olog dispatched in approximately six seconds with a whisper and a wrist grip, and who I am now realising I've spent approximately four minutes thinking about since it happened.
The rest of my brain has been otherwise occupied.
I hear Olog set his phone on the desk. The soft sounds of him moving through the suite with that preternatural quiet, unhurried, tending to the careful routine of the professional winding down. I hear the wardrobe open.
"Your aunt," he says, "was approximately sixty percent less formidable than her advanced reputation suggested."
A laugh breaks out of me before I can contain it. "Don't tell her that. She will take it as a challenge."
