Page 10 of Orc'd At A Wedding
Olog holds eye contact without blinking.
"I'm not performing," he says, and his voice has gone quiet in a way that is completely different from his professional register. Lower. Stripped of the smooth deliberateness. The words land with a plainness that makes the back of my neck prickle.
Susan studies him for a long moment.
Then she takes a sip of her wine and says, "Good," in the tone she uses when she has accepted something as settled.
I breathe.
She turns back to me, and the interrogation light in her eyes banks down to something that almost approaches warmth.
"Your mother's been asking about you," she says. "She thinks you seem stressed."
"I'm not stressed, I'm at a wedding."
"Those are not mutually exclusive. Come find me at dinner, I want to hear about this diving incident properly." She aims onefinal, assessing look at Olog. "Lovely to meet you," she says, and sweeps away toward the bar.
I wait until she's out of earshot, then I turn to look up at Olog.
He is already looking down at me.
"Cliff diving," I say.
"You suggested something dangerous. Cliff diving is dangerous and plausible. I've done it."
"She believed you."
"People believe things said with sufficient confidence." He reaches out and lifts a champagne flute from a passing tray, offers it to me. "You did well. Your voice only pitched up once."
"I'm choosing to ignore that." I take the champagne. "She liked you."
"She assessed me. Whether she liked me is a separate determination she'll arrive at over the next twenty-four hours based on observed behaviour."
I take a long sip of the champagne and look out over the patio, the string quartet, the assembled machinery of my cousin's wedding weekend, all the people who have been waiting for years to catch me at a disadvantage.
None of them are looking at me with pity right now.
They're looking at me with curiosity, which is a completely different thing, and it feels, despite all the silk-and-strategy absurdity of the evening, like the first full breath I've taken all day.
"Thank you," I say, and I mean it without any of the customer-transaction layer on top.
Olog stands beside me, solid and unhurried, watching the room.
"The night isn't over," he says. "Your ex is working up to something near the bar. I've counted three attempts to make eye contact with you in the last four minutes."
I follow his eyeline without turning my head. Brandon. Of course.
"Let him," I say, and I'm surprised to find I actually mean that too.
CHAPTER 4
OLOG
The woman called Susan is not finished with me.
I clock this approximately ninety seconds after she walks away from our initial exchange, when she takes a long, evaluating sip of wine at the bar and then turns back to look at us over the rim of her glass with the focused patience of someone who has simply relocated, not retreated. I file her underActive Surveillancein the mental map I've been building since we arrived on the patio, a map that currently includes seven potential social threat vectors, two structural exits, the location of every member of Bliss's immediate family, and the precise trajectory of the ex-boyfriend, Brandon, who is now on his fourth drink near the ornamental hedge and glancing this way with escalating frequency.
"She's coming back," I say.
