Page 46 of Orc'd At A Wedding
I take her hand, and we walk back toward the resort, bypassing the reception entirely.
The night is cool and clear, and for the first time all weekend, Bliss isn't performing.
She's just herself.
And she's mine.
Not because I was paid to claim her.
Because I chose to.
And I'll keep choosing her, every single day, for as long as she'll let me.
CHAPTER 13
BLISS
The notification stares up at me from my phone screen.
"Booking with Olog Glore has been cancelled. Full refund issued."
The words blur. I blink, and they sharpen again, just as cruel and final as the first time I read them. The cold knot that's been living in my stomach all day drops straight through the floor, and suddenly I'm standing in a hotel car park in borrowed heels and a silk dress that smells faintly of the rehearsal dinner's candle smoke, watching my entire weekend unravel in real time.
He cancelled it. He cancelled it while I was standing right next to him, and I didn't even feel him do it.
Olog is still looking at the phone in his hand with that same unreadable expression he's been wearing all evening, the one that could mean anything from deep thought to active predator assessment, and I am catastrophically bad at reading Orc faces, which is a personal failing I am only now fully reckoning with.
"You didn't have to do that." My voice comes out wrong. Too tight, too small, scraped thin by the effort of not completely dissolving. "You didn't have to cancel the contract just to get away from me."
He looks up from his phone.
"Bliss—"
"No, I mean it." I pull my cardigan tighter around my shoulders because the night air has turned sharp and I need something to do with my hands before they start shaking. "The weekend's basically over anyway. You could have just let the timer run out. Collected your payment, got your five stars, never had to see me or my absolute disaster of a family ever again. That was the deal. That was the whole point of the deal." The words are coming faster now, tumbling out in that horrible way they do when I'm trying to hold everything back and failing badly. "You didn't have to throw away your rating or your money or whatever professional reputation you've spent god knows how long building just to let me down gently in a car park, Olog. I'm a grown woman. I can handle it. You're very good at your job. Genuinely. You're probably the best fake boyfriend who has ever walked the earth, and I will absolutely write you the most glowing five-star review in the history of the app?—"
"I cancelled the contract," he says, very quietly, "because I cannot be your hired date anymore."
There it is. The clean break. I knew it was coming, and knowing doesn't make it hurt any less. I shove my lips together hard.
"Right. Okay. That's fine. That's completely?—"
"Bliss." His voice drops into that low, resonant register that bypasses my rational brain entirely and goes straight to somewhere much older and more animal. "I cannot be your hired date because I am courting you."
The sentence lands in the room between us like something physical.
I look at him.
He stares back, perfectly still, completely serious.
"I am courting you," he says again, as if I might have misheard it the first time, as if he's simply restating a fact aboutthe weather or the structural integrity of the venue behind us. "Formally. Intentionally. I will not take payment for defending my mate. The application of human currency to that particular situation is not something I am willing to tolerate."
The cardigan slips off one shoulder and I don't fix it because I've completely forgotten how my arms work.
"Your mate," I repeat.
"That is what I said."
"You said mate."
