Page 39 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

"Stay by the buckets," I tell her. "Yell if any of them fill."

I don't wait for an answer. I go out into the storm.

The rain hits like gravel thrown by a giant. My boots sink to the ankle in the churn where her lawn used to be. The woodpile sits under the lean-to on the north side, tarped, dry, because I tarp things, because a man who leaves his wood uncovered deserves a cold night. I load an armful, then a second, hauling split oak against my body and shielding it from the wet as best I can.

Lightning turns the whole hollow white for half a breath.

The water in the driveway is up another hand-span. Her little SUV is nearly swallowed. Past it, the road is a black creek moving fast enough to carry a car, and the sight of it puts a low growl in my throat that is not for the vehicle.

She's on the wrong side of that water. So am I. Nobody reaches her tonight but me.

The certainty settles into my spine and locks there, ancient and old as bedrock.

I shoulder back through the doorway and dump the oak by the hearth. She's crouched by the buckets exactly where I left her, phone dark in her hand, still reaching for a signal that isn't coming.

"Put it down," I say.

She looks up. In the last of the gray, her eyes are enormous.

"Put it down and help me build a fire," I say, gentler.

She sets the phone face-down on a bucket lid. Deliberate. Like setting down a weight.

I stack the oak the way my father taught me, the way his father taught him, a small dense cabin of kindling with air in its bones. She kneels across from me, mud on her knees, and hands me splits as I ask for them without a single word about the dirt. The old her would have narrated this. Would have found her light and her angle. This one just works.

I strike the ferro rod. Sparks rain into the tinder. On the third strike it catches, a small orange tongue that climbs into the kindling and stands up tall, and the firelight jumps across her face and turns it gold.

Her breath goes out slow. "Oh."

Warmth pushes into the cold room. The whole space changes, walls flickering, shadows dancing up the raw studs. She holds her hands to the blaze, and the tremor in her fingers eases.

A gust rattles the far window, the big one she overpaid for, and cold air knifes across the floor. I stand and cross to it. One pane sits loose in its frame, weeping water down the sill in a thin steady line. I strip a length of the six-mil plastic, fold it double, and staple it over the gap by hand, driving each staple home with the heel of my palm until the draft dies. The house goes quiet again except for the fire and the rain.

"You just fixed a window with your bare hand," she says behind me.

"Staple gun's dead. Hand isn't." I test the seal. It holds. "House stays dry, you stay warm. Simple math."

I go to my truck bag, still slung by the door, and pull out the heavy canvas coat I keep for these mountains. It smells of cedar and sawdust and me. I drop it over her shoulders before she can argue.

"I'm fine," she says, already pulling it tighter.

"You're blue."

"I'm not..." She glances down at her own hands, then huffs a laugh that has no fight in it. "Okay. I'm a little blue."

She pulls the coat around herself and vanishes into it. The thing swallows her whole, cuffs hanging past her fingertips, hem pooling on the floor. Something about that, about how small she goes inside a thing that's mine, does a slow dangerous thing to my pulse.

I feed the fire and pretend the heat on my face is only the flames.

"Sit closer," I tell her. "Stone holds warmth. You'll thaw faster."

She scoots along the hearthstone until her shoulder rests an inch from my arm. She's careful about the inch. So am I. I've been careful about inches with this woman for weeks, ever since she stepped between me and Patsy and defended a man she'd barely met. Ever since she dropped the influencer act on the pizza floor and let me meet the person underneath.

The storm hammers the roof I built. Water runs into the buckets in six different rhythms. I count them without meaning to, a habit, a way to keep my hands off the impulse riding up my arms.

"You built all of this," she says. Quiet. The fire pops between us. "The chimney. The floor we're saving. You didn't have to tarp that wood. You didn't have to overbuy the plastic. You didn't have to come back through a flood to sit on a rock with me."

"I build for the storm you can't see coming." I turn a split with the poker. "Everybody gets one eventually."