Page 55 of Orc'd At A Wedding
"Noted," he says, and then his mouth moves down my sternum and the ability to generate coherent sentences is no longer available to me.
There is a particular quality to the way he takes his time that I was not adequately prepared for. I expected the intensity, because Olog applies intensity to everything up to and including the loading of luggage onto a trolley. What I was not prepared for is the patience. The thoroughness. The sense that he has made a deliberate decision about what he wants to do and he is now executing it with his full, undivided professional attention redirected toward a completely different objective, and that objective is me.
His hands are careful with the size difference in a way that is not tentative. It is considered. He adjusts his weight and his angle with quiet, practical attention, watching my face, reading the information there with the same focused precision he used to read the lobby when he walked in on Thursday, and every adjustment he makes is exactly right, and I cannot tell if this is instinct or intelligence or both and I stop caring almost immediately.
I get his shirt off him. This requires some collaboration and he assists without ceremony, tossing it somewhere behind us, and then the full expanse of him is above me and the tattoos in the low lamplight are extraordinary, dense and intricate, curvingover the planes of his chest and shoulders and down his arms, and I press my palm flat against his sternum because I want to feel his heartbeat and I find it immediately, steady and fast, and something about the fast part undoes me entirely.
"Your heart is racing," I say.
"Yes." No qualification, no deflection. Just the word, offered plainly.
I pull him down.
What follows is not quiet or careful or restrained in the way the last two days have been. There is no audience to perform for and no family to manage and no clock ticking in the corner of my phone screen. There is just the massive king bed and the dark suite and the wind picking up outside and Olog, who has apparently been applying very considerable discipline to his instincts for the better part of two days and is now not applying it at all.
He is vocal in a way I did not expect. Low sounds, deep in his chest, pressed against my throat or my shoulder or my hair, and the sounds are not performative, they are involuntary and honest and they vibrate straight through me in a way that is frankly unfair. He says my name at intervals, always with that same precise weight, and each time it lands somewhere different and deeper.
The size of him requires some practical navigation, which we manage through a combination of his extraordinary awareness of his own physicality and my complete willingness to direct proceedings, which he responds to with what I can only describe as enthusiastic compliance. His hands can span almost my entire waist. The knowledge of this is, empirically, doing something significant to my higher cognitive function.
At one point, I say, against the side of his neck, "You are very large."
"I have been informed," he says, with that particular dry precision, and I laugh and he feels it against him and the sound he makes in response is one I am going to be thinking about for a very long time.
The final claiming, which is how my brain files it later in the small hours of the morning, is deep and unhurried and so thoroughly real that the memory of everything before it, every performed kiss and staged embrace and carefully choreographed tenderness, seems thin and papery and entirely beside the point. This is the point. This has always been the point, working its way toward the surface through forty-eight hours of fake dating and genuine terror and family dinners and a locked restroom and a parking lot and a throwing knife.
He marks me. Not ceremonially, though there is ceremony in it, in the deliberate way he presses his mouth to the curve of my shoulder and holds it there while I press into him and his large hands hold my hips still against him. But more than that, he binds me in the straightforward biological sense of making it impossible to imagine the architecture of my life without this specific, large, terrifyingly attentive Orc inside it.
I tell him this, or some compressed and less articulate version of it, at some point when the lamplight is lower and the window shows full dark and the sounds of the wedding reception have faded entirely from somewhere below us.
He goes still and looks at me, and I can see him processing it, running it through whatever internal framework he runs things through, and then he says, quietly and without any professional cadence at all, "Good. I have begun planning accordingly."
"You've been planning already?"
"Since the parking lot." A beat. "Possibly since the welcome mixer. The timeline is somewhat complicated."
I shove my face into the warm skin of him and laugh, and he wraps one massive arm around me and holds me there, andthe warmth of him and the steady thud of his heartbeat and the smell of bergamot and starched linen and something warmer underneath it settle over me like something I have been missing the precise shape of for a very long time.
I am asleep before I form another thought.
The sleep is deep and dark and entirely without anxiety, which is a novelty of a magnitude I cannot fully appreciate until much later, and I sleep through the remainder of the night and the first grey light of morning without stirring.
When I surface, the room is quiet.
The bed is warm where he was and cool at the edges, and the light coming through the gap in the curtains is the thin, pale light of early morning, and I reach sideways before I am fully awake, instinctive and certain of what I'm reaching for.
My hand finds the sheets.
I come fully awake.
Olog is standing at the window, fully dressed, his dark three-piece suit impeccable, each button done, each fold correct, the jacket across his shoulders without a wrinkle. He is looking down at his phone, and the expression on his face is not the expression of a man who has just slept beside the person he spent the night calling his mate. It is closed and deliberate and entirely unreadable, his brow slightly drawn, his jaw set, the silver eyes moving across whatever is on his screen with that precise, focused attention that I know by now means he is processing something significant.
He has not heard me wake.
I watch him from the bed, the sheets pooled around me, and the warm certainty of three hours ago develops, with clinical speed, a very small and very cold crack directly through its centre.
CHAPTER 16
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