Page 9 of Orc'd At A Wedding
Her eyes have already moved back to Olog with the forensic focus of a woman who catalogues information for later deployment. She's looking at him the way you'd look at a piece of abstract sculpture in a gallery—deeply intrigued, not entirely sure of the correct response, but absolutely committed to forming an opinion.
"And who," she says, drawing the words out, "is this?"
I feel Olog straighten beside me, just slightly, a fractional squaring of those enormous shoulders, and when he extends his hand toward Aunt Susan the movement is so smooth and deliberate that even she blinks.
"Olog Glore," he says, and his voice drops into that register that seems to physically relocate itself in the room, something that resonates slightly in the chest cavity. "It's a pleasure."
Susan looks at his hand, then up at the full reach of his height, and then she shakes it with the expression of someone recalibrating rapidly.
"My goodness," she says, which is the closest I've ever heard Aunt Susan come to being lost for words. She recovers withinapproximately three seconds. "Olog. That's unusual. Where is that from?"
"Northern clan name. My grandmother's side."
"And you're—" She waves her wine glass vaguely in the direction of us. "Together? With Bliss?"
"Yes," he says, with a conviction so total and unhesitating that I feel it land somewhere in my sternum.
Susan looks at me with a countenance I cannot immediately decode, something between scepticism and reassessment.
"Since when?" she asks, and this one is aimed at me with the precision of someone who has noticed the pause before my inhale.
"About eight months," I say, landing on the number Olog and I had agreed on during the lift ride up. Enough time to be serious. Not so long that the total lack of prior family introduction becomes suspicious.
"Eight months." She lets that sit for a moment, tasting it. "And you haven't mentioned him once."
"I wanted to keep something for myself for five minutes, Susan. You know how this family operates."
She makes a sound that is not quite agreement and not quite disagreement, watching me over the rim of her wine glass, and then she shifts her attention back to Olog with renewed focus.
"What do you do?" she asks.
"Private security consultation," he says, smoothly, "with some specialist logistics work." Which is, I note, not technically a lie about what tonight's arrangement involves, just an extremely generous framing of it.
Susan nods slowly, filing this away. "And how did you two meet? Don't tell me it was one of those app things. Bliss, I swear to God?—"
"Cliff diving," Olog says.
I keep my face entirely neutral.
Susan stares at him. "Cliff diving."
"Bliss capsized on the third rapid. I pulled her out."
A beat of silence. Susan looks at me with a guise that is, for the first time in recent memory, something approaching impressed.
"You went cliff diving?"
"I contain multitudes," I say.
"You're scared of the wave pool at Centre Parcs."
"I've grown."
Susan points at Olog with her wine glass in a gesture that conveys a complicated mixture of approval and warning. "You. You should know that Bliss is brilliant and stubborn and has terrible taste in men historically, no offence, Bliss?—"
"Tremendous offence, Susan?—"
"—and if you're just here for the weekend to perform—" She lets that hang, eyeballing Olog with a directness that makes lesser humans step backwards.
