Page 47 of Orc'd At A Wedding
"I am aware."
"That's an Orc thing. That's a very specific Orc thing. You can't just say that to a person in a hotel car park, Olog, that's—" I press both hands over my mouth, because I'm either about to laugh or cry and I honestly cannot tell which, and either outcome seems equally likely and equally humiliating. "You barely know me. We've known each other for approximately sixty hours. I hired you off a gig app. I had to Google whether your profile picture was a real person or a very dedicated AI render. You cannot have decided I'm your mate in sixty hours."
"Fifty-eight," he corrects. "And I reached that conclusion considerably earlier than that."
The sheer calm undoes me. Not the bad kind of breaking. The other kind. The kind where something that's been held together with anxiety and performance and sheer, grinding stubbornness finally gets to let go.
"How are you so certain?" I whisper.
He is quiet for a moment, those silver eyes moving over my face with an attention so focused it feels like being read, like every micro-expression I've been carefully managing all weekend is absolutely transparent to him and always has been.
"You were standing in the lobby," he says, "and you were terrified, and you were doing it anyway. You had constructed an entire strategy out of desperation and you were executing it witheverything you had. When I walked through those doors and you looked at me—" He stops. Something flickers across his jaw, a movement of muscle, a slight tightening. "You looked at me like I was the solution to a problem you'd been carrying alone for a very long time. I am not accustomed to being looked at that way." He pauses again. "I found I wanted to deserve it."
The tears I've been holding back since the restroom incident, since the wine glass, since the wedding ceremony when he held my hand and I had to spend thirty solid minutes of beautiful, romantic vows reminding myself that I was paying him to hold it, those tears make a very decisive break for freedom.
I swipe at my face with the back of my hand, which accomplishes nothing except redistributing mascara.
"This is the most unhinged thing that has ever happened to me," I tell him, my voice cracking around the edges. "And I grew up with those people in there. Do you understand how high that bar is?"
"I understand completely." He shifts his weight, and then, with a slow, deliberate gravity that makes the breath stall in my throat, he lowers himself down onto one knee.
In the middle of the car park.
On the tarmac.
In his bespoke three-piece suit.
He doesn't look ridiculous. He looks enormous and serious and completely, terrifyingly sincere, the kind of sincere that has no self-consciousness in it at all, the kind that only exists in people who have never once worried about what they look like while doing something important. The parking lot floodlights catch the silver in his eyes and the dark lines of his tattoos at his collar, and my heart is doing something medically concerning in my ribcage.
"Olog." My voice has gone very small. "What are you doing?"
He reaches down, and with two fingers, he lifts the leg of his perfectly pressed suit trouser. There is a knife strapped to his boot. Not a small knife. A substantial, purposeful, hand-span-long knife with a handle carved from something dark and dense, wound round with intricately knotted cord in a pattern that I recognise, with a jolt, matches the tattoo wrapping up the inside of his left forearm. He draws it free with a soft, clean sound, and holds it out to me, hilt-first, the blade angled carefully away, balanced across his huge palm like an offering.
I look at it.
I look at him.
"That's a knife," I say.
"A throwing knife. Traditionally forged." His voice is entirely level. "In Orc courtship, a warrior presents a blade to the person they intend to pursue. The knife is for your protection. It is not symbolic. You should carry it."
"You want me to carry a knife."
"I want you to be safe whether I am beside you or not."
I gaze at the knife. The handle is warm from being against his skin. The carving is extraordinary up close, intricate whorling patterns cut deep into what I now realise is bone, not wood, dense and smooth and worn at the highest points by what must be years of handling. This is not a prop. This is not a gift-shop purchase. This knife has been on his person, or near it, for a very long time.
"Whose was this?" I ask softly.
"Mine. I've carried it since I was nineteen." He doesn't elaborate. He doesn't need to. The offering is already immense.
I stand there in my borrowed heels on the tarmac with the faint thump of wedding reception music filtering out from the venue behind me and the night sky stretched enormous overhead, and I think about Aunt Susan with her invasive questions, and my ex's smug face, and my father pulling out acheque book, and I think about sixty hours, fifty-eight, of being protected and attended to and made to feel like I was worth the trouble by a person who was theoretically being compensated for it, except he just cancelled the compensation, on purpose, in front of me, and got down on one knee in a car park to give me a knife he's carried since he was nineteen.
My family would absolutely lose their minds.
The thought makes me want to laugh so hard I could cry, and the laugh wins, bursting out of me messy and wet and completely uncontrolled, and Olog watches it happen with a guise that has shifted from solemnly serious into something warmer, something that I suspect, on a face less architecturally severe, would read as quietly delighted.
"I am going to need you to understand," I manage, pressing my hand to my sternum, "that I grew up being told I was too much. Too loud, too messy, too emotional, too difficult, not enough of the right things and too much of the wrong ones." I swallow. "And you are down on one knee in a car park giving me a knife and calling me your mate after fifty-eight hours. That is the single most disproportionate and unhinged response to me that any person has ever had, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment."
