Page 83 of Orc Tusks in a Wedding Tux

The cake is a masterpiece. Vanilla bean sponge with passion fruit curd filling, wrapped in ivory fondant, and crowned with hand-sculpted enchanted sugar peonies that shimmer faintly with residual baking magic. It weighs forty-seven pounds. It took me nine hours to decorate. It costs more than my first car.

He carries it like a reliquary through the parting crowd.

People move. They always move. Not out of fear anymore, though some of the newer residents on the block still give him a wide berth. They move because this is Dash, and Dash carries cakes through this street every Saturday, and the regulars know better than to get between an Orc and a delivery schedule.

"LEFT SIDE, PLEASE."

A man with a golden retriever steps aside. A group of teenagers drinking boba tea presses against the flower shop window. A tiny grandmother on a mobility scooter gives him a thumbs up.

He walks the entire block in a perfectly straight line without a single tremor in his hands. The sugar peonies don't even wobble.

When he reaches the delivery van's back doors, he slides the cake onto the custom shelf, locks the spring-loaded clamps into place, and closes the doors with surgical precision.

Then he turns around and looks at me.

Two years. Two years of 4 a.m. alarms and flour-dusted morning kisses and his massive frame wedged behind a van steering wheel and the scar on his ribs from the Grimjaw fight that I trace with my thumb every single night. Two years of him learning to temper chocolate. Two years of me learning to throw a proper right hook. Two years of a lifetime exclusivity contract pinned to our refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a croissant.

He crosses the sidewalk in four strides. Flour on his henley from where he leaned against the prep counter this morning to steal a cinnamon roll while he thought I wasn't looking. I was looking. I'm always looking.

His hand finds the back of my neck. Massive palm, warm and rough, tilting my chin up.

"Delivery route is clear. ETA twenty-two minutes. No griffins."

"No griffins."

"No rock crawlers."

"No rock crawlers."

"One kiss for fuel."

I grab his henley with both flour-covered fists and pull him down to me.

Saturday morning on Birch Street. Sun on the windows. Croissants in the oven.

Home.