Page 52 of Orc'd At A Wedding
"Yes."
"You just picked me up."
"I understand."
"People can see us."
"We are nearing the hotel." I begin walking again.
"You could have warned me."
"I made the tactical decision that announcement would have generated unnecessary argument."
She is quiet for two seconds. Then she pulls the hand still holding the knife inward against her stomach, tucks her other arm around my neck, and puts her cheek against my shoulder, and says nothing at all.
This is, I have learned over the course of fifty-eight hours, Bliss's highest form of concession. When she runs out of arguments, she goes quiet and leans in. I find it disproportionately affecting. I file this under information I will revisit at significant length.
The hotel entrance comes into view. The glass doors catch the exterior light. Through them I can see the tail end of the wedding reception crowd, some of them spilled out into the lobby, dressed in formal wear and holding champagne flutes, talking with the loose-limbed ease of people who have been drinking steadily for five hours.
They see us at approximately the same moment we come through the doors.
I do not slow down.
The lobby is marble and warm light and the low hum of ambient music someone has piped through speakers in the ceiling. It smells like cut flowers and expensive cleaning products and the faint ghost of several hundred people's perfume. Bliss's family is clustered near the entrance to the ballroom corridor. I register Aunt Susan's silhouette at a distance of fourteen meters. I register the ex-boyfriend, standing near the bar with his new girlfriend, both of them holding drinks and watching the doors with the particular stillness of people who have been waiting to see what they are going to see.
I carry Bliss through the center of the lobby at full stride.
The crowd parts. It always parts. I have never required people to move out of my way because the architecture of my body communicates the instruction without any additional effort on my part. But tonight I acknowledge it differently, not as a professional asset or a logistical convenience but as a simple fact of physics, and underneath that awareness is something considerably more primal, which is the quiet, cellular satisfaction of carrying her through this space in front of every single person who spent the last two days making her feel small.
She is not small. She is five feet four inches of sharp wit and genuine warmth and stubborn, exhausting courage, and she has been performing for these people her entire life, and she is currently tucked against me with her shoes dangling four feet off the floor and my grandmother's knife in her hand, and the expression on Aunt Susan's face is one I will remember with considerable pleasure for a long time.
"Everyone is staring," Bliss says, into my shoulder.
"Yes."
"You're aware of that."
"Completely aware."
She moves her head slightly. I feel her cheek move against my lapel. "Are you doing this on purpose?"
"The route to the lifts takes us directly through the lobby. The alternative is the service stairs, which would add four minutes to our journey."
"Right." A pause. "But you're also doing it on purpose."
"The two things are not mutually exclusive."
I hear her exhale. It has the texture of a laugh that has decided not to fully commit. Her arm tightens fractionally around my neck.
We pass Aunt Susan at a distance of roughly two meters. The woman opens her mouth. I turn my head and look at her, just the turn and the look, nothing more, and she closes it. Her husband, a quiet man with the resigned posture of someone who has been navigating Susan's personality for several decades, raises his champagne glass at me in what reads as genuine respect.
The ex-boyfriend watches us cross the lobby with an attitude that I would categorize as a complex mixture of wounded pride and recently acquired clarity about his own life choices. I don't look at him for more than a half second. He is not worth more than a half second. He has never been worth more than a half second, and I suspect, on some level, Bliss has always known this.
The lift doors open. I step inside. The mirrored interior reflects us back from three angles, which is genuinely useful visual data, her tucked against me, the knife glinting in her hands, my jacket covering her like a second garment even while she's wrapped in her own. She looks up at the mirror and registers the image.
Something in her face settles.
The doors close. The lobby and the wedding party and the entire architecture of the weekend disappear behind polished metal.
