Page 20 of The Orc's Protection
“Vraag’s.” I open the bakery box. “He gave it to me yesterday because I was underdressed for the cold snap. His physiology handles temperature better than humans, so it was the logical—”
“He gave you his coat.”
“It was practical.”
“He gave you his coat,” Kendra says again, in exactly the same tone, because she has known me for eleven years and she understands that the way I use the word practical is a tell.
I hand her a pastry and sit down. We both look at the coat for a moment.
“It’s the second thing,” I say. “He gave me his poncho a couple of weeks ago. In the rain.”
Kendra nods slowly. She already knew about the poncho. I told her about it the same way I told her it was nothing—quickly, with my eyes somewhere else.
“And tonight,” she says.
“He’s picking me up at seven. It’s a clan gathering, the First Frost Feast. It’s a cultural event, I’ve always wanted to—”
“Riona.”
“It’s genuinely a cultural event.”
“I’m sure it is.” She looks at me steadily. “And you’ve been home alone all day walking past that coat.”
I don’t answer, which is its own answer.
“You’re doing the thing,” she says. Not unkindly.
“I’m not doing the thing.”
“You’re building the case for why you should cancel.”
“I’m not going to cancel.”
“I know you’re not. But you’ve been building it anyway, just in case you change your mind.” She tilts her head. “How long have you been home?”
“Since yesterday after school.”
She looks at the coat. At me. At the coat again.
“He’s not your father,” she says quietly.
There it is. The thing I’ve been not saying to myself all day, the shape underneath all the reorganized bookshelves and unread pages.
“I know that.”
“Do you? Because from where I’m sitting, you’ve accepted two pieces of clothing from a man who noticed you were cold and solved it—without being asked, without making a production of it—and your response has been to spend twenty-four hours looking for the catch.”
“My mother said my father was like that too,” I say. “Genuinely attentive. Genuinely good at noticing what she needed before she said it. And then one day she had nothing that was hers, and he left, and she didn’t know how to read a utility bill.” I pause. “I made a decision at seventeen that I would never be her. That I would always be the person who could leave if I needed to.”
“And you’ve kept that promise,” Kendra says. “You know exactly what your bank account looks like. You know what your life looks like without someone in it. You’ve been running your own life for fifteen years.” She pauses. “That doesn’t go away because someone hands you a coat.”
“It’s not the coat.”
“I know it’s not the coat.”
We sit with that for a moment.
“He’s different,” I say finally. “That’s what I can’t get past. Every other person I’ve been interested in, I stayed in control of how much I let it matter. This one, I don’t know how I got here. Three weeks and I’ve worn his clothes twice, and I’m getting dressed to go to a clan gathering tonight, and somewhere in the last twenty-four hours it stopped feeling like a decision I was making.”
