Page 37 of Orc'd & Loaded
"Solene. You're shaking like a tuning fork."
He's right, and the fact that he can feel the precise frequency of my trembling through every point of contact between our bodies is both mortifying and oddly flattering. He sits up. The cold rushes into the space he vacates and I nearly whimper at the loss.
He reaches for his leather apron. The massive thing has been hanging on a wall hook since we first stumbled down here with the produce crates, and he pulls it free with one hand. Heavy-gauge cowhide, triple-stitched, stained with years of smoke and rendered fat and whatever alchemical marinades orcs consider standard. It's enormous. A two-person tent.
He settles back against the crate wall, pulls me against him, and wraps the apron around both of us.
The leather is cold for exactly three seconds. Then his body heat floods the space between hide and skin and the temperature inside our makeshift cocoon rockets to something tropical. His arm locks around my shoulders. My cheek presses into the hollow beneath his collarbone, where the muscle slopes into the heavy ridge of his body. His heartbeat pounds against my ear. Slow. Steady. A metronome set to a tempo that has nothing todo with urgency and everything to do with mass. A heart that doesn't need to rush.
My body surrenders. Not a choice. A structural collapse. Every muscle I've held taut for the last three years of sixteen-hour kitchen shifts, every tendon I've wound to breaking point over menu development and ingredient sourcing and the relentless pursuit of a star that might never come, every joint I've locked against fatigue and doubt and the gnawing certainty that perfection is a moving target I'll chase until it kills me. All of it releases. Simultaneously. Like cutting the strings on a marionette that's been dancing so long it forgot it was made of wood.
I melt into him.
His chin rests on top of my head. One massive hand moves in slow circles on my back, beneath the apron, palm flat against my spine. The calluses catch on the thin cotton of my camisole with each pass. A rough, rhythmic drag. Like a cat's tongue. Like a pestle grinding spice against stone.
"Your heartbeat's fast," he murmurs into my hair.
"Adrenaline."
"It's been twenty minutes since the last mushroom attack."
"Delayed adrenaline."
He rumbles. Not a laugh. Something quieter. Something that lives in the subsonic range and travels through bone rather than air. My body absorbs it like a tuning fork absorbs a perfect pitch.
"Boris."
"Mm."
"I ruined your shirt."
"You improved my shirt."
"The buttons are gone."
"Buttons are a human invention. Orcs use bone clasps. Far superior."
"I'll get you bone clasps."
"You will not. I'll use it as an excuse to go shirtless in my kitchen. Drive up lunch traffic."
I snort against him. The sound is ugly and graceless. My hand rests flat against his stomach beneath the apron. His skin radiates heat like cast iron pulled from a four-hundred-degree oven. Each slow breath lifts my hand, lowers it, lifts it again. Tidal.
Safe.
The word arrives without permission. Unbidden and absolute. I haven't felt safe in a kitchen, a cellar, a city, a relationship, a room, since the day I signed my first lease and bet every dollar I'd ever saved on the belief that plants could be transcendent. Three years of white-knuckling my way through health inspections and supply chain disasters and critics who write off vegan cuisine before the first bite hits their tongue. Three years of sleeping in my office, showering in the staff bathroom, eating scraps standing up because sitting down means stopping and stopping means thinking and thinking means drowning.
His heartbeat fills my ear. Slow. Unhurried. A drum that doesn't know how to rush.
I close my eyes.
The icebox pulses blue. Then violet. Then settles into a deep, steady indigo that paints the insides of my eyelids.
A key scrapes in a lock.
My eyes fly open. Boris stiffens beneath me. The sound comes from above. The cellar door. Metal grinding against metal, a deadbolt retracting, hinges groaning under old oak.
Light pours down the stone steps. Gray, watery, post-storm morning light that hits my retinas like a flashbang.
