Page 43 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"I have no idea what to do," I say.

"There is a great deal to do. The bark on the uphill course is lifting at the third seam and I have been leaving it because of the wind, and now there is no wind, and if I get up there before dark I can lap two courses and have it"

"Ghorlan."

"Yes."

"There is nobody here."

He stops with a sheet of cedar bark in one hand.

The storm lands at six.

It is a bigger one than Day Five, and it comes up the drainage with the whole strait behind it, and it hits the bench and the roof takes it and the batten poles do their work and rain goes over the eave in a solid sheet eleven feet out into the dark. Lightning gets into the cloud somewhere south and lights the whole underside of the sky green, twice, with no sound after either one.

We are in the tent by seven because there is nowhere else.

And before we get in, standing on the deck in the wet with the tent door open and the wool blankets already in there, Ghorlan stops, and puts one hand on the ridge pole sleeve, and conducts an assessment.

Out loud.

"Before we go in," he says.

"Oh no."

"The fabric is thirty denier ripstop with a silicone impregnation. It has a tear strength of about eleven pounds, and that is eleven pounds of tearing force at a point rather than eleven pounds of load." He runs two fingers along the sleeve. "The poles are aluminum, nine millimeter, four sections, shock corded. The shock cord is the weakest element in the entire structure and it is a piece of elastic."

"Ghorlan."

"The floor is a hundred and fifty denier and it is under thirteen square feet of deck bearing, and the deck is split alder on two sleepers, and the deck will hold anything either of us can do to it, so the deck is not my concern." He straightens up. "My concern is the pole geometry. Those two arches cross at the peak and take their thrust out into four grommets at the corners, and the entire standing capacity of this structure depends on nothing striking a pole laterally at the midpoint of a section."

"Are you finished."

"I am telling you the failure mode."

"I understand the failure mode."

"If a pole goes, it goes at a joint, and the section end is cut aluminum, and it will come through that fabric like a chisel." He looks at me. "Anything that happens tonight happens down the long axis of this tent and away from the arches."

The rain goes over the eave.

"That," I say, "is the single most disgusting thing anybody has ever said to me, and I want you to say it again."

"Which part."

"Down the long axis."

He gets in first, because he always gets in first, and I come in after and pull the door and get the zip about two thirds of the way up before it jams on the storm flap, and I leave it, because there is no one on this mountain to come through a door.

He is on his back. Head at the peak, boots in the taper, shoulders taking up two thirds of the width, exactly like Day Five.

And I do not lie down.

I get up over him instead, one knee down beside his hip and the other coming across, and there is not enough room in this tent for a woman to straddle a man of his dimensions, and I do it anyway, in about three inches of clearance, with my hands braced on the nylon floor either side of his head.

Ghorlan goes completely still under me.

"Junie."