Page 13 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

I should hate that. I have written scripts for three years.

I love it so much it scares me.

Patsy calls at 6:15. I put her on speaker because holding the phone that early asks too much of my arm.

"THREE MILLION," she screams. No hello. Hello is not in Patsy's repertoire. "Jilly. Jilly. The Hearthwell people called. HEARTHWELL. They want a six-part series. They want him in all six. They want to TALK NUMBERS."

"That's incredible," I say, and I am smiling, and my face aches, and the smile does that thing where it stays on after the warmth underneath has already left the building.

"Feature him HARD. Lean in. I want thirst, I want tension, I want that whole grumpy-hot-orc energy in every single frame. This is your pivot, baby. This is the pivot that saves the house."

The house. Right. The three hundred thousand dollars of my own money currently sunk into a barn with no working kitchen and a bathroom you have to wade to reach. The whole reason my stomach has been eating itself since March.

"On it," I tell her.

I am always on it.

It is a good problem. I repeat that to myself while I answer the deliverables email, while I schedule the posts, while I queue the next three days of content around a man who has agreed to exactly zero content. A good problem. Three million people and a saved house and a sponsor with a name in all caps. Every influencer I came up with would trade a kidney for this exact good problem, and here I sit on a bucket at dawn with a jaw that will not stop aching, wondering why the win sits in my stomach like a bill coming due.

She rattles off deliverables and deadlines and a hashtag strategy while I nod at a phone incapable of nodding back. When she finally hangs up, the silence rushes back in, and I sit alone with three million strangers and a barn full of dust and the strangest, most inconvenient wish. I wish I could show one specific person the numbers. A person who would grunt at them. A person who would probably ask why a picture of me is worth more than the wall he built behind me.

I lock the phone and get to work before I can finish that idea.

Filming with Oggan for the next four days becomes a kind of theater I perform entirely for one silent, unimpressed audience member.

I switch on the voice. Hey besties! I do the wave. I bubble and sparkle and narrate every step with breathless delight, and the whole time, the whole entire time, Oggan stands in the corner of the frame with his arms crossed and his brow flat, and he reads straight through me.

He never says it. He just does not laugh at the parts where the camera expects a laugh. He does not pretend the drywall dust is fun. When I chirp "Isn't this SO satisfying, besties?" over a perfectly boring stud placement, he grunts, and the grunt says: you do not find this satisfying, small human. Why are you lying to them.

The performance costs more with him standing there. Around ordinary crew I can run the bright act on autopilot for ten hours and stay hollow the whole time. Around Oggan, every fake syllable scrapes going out.

By day three my molars ache from smiling.

Day two I make him hold a level for a shot he does not need to be in, and I narrate a whole bit about trusting the process, and he holds the level, and he stares at the camera with the blank patience of a boulder, and after I call cut he sets it down and says, "The process does not need trust. It needs a straight line and a man who checks twice." Then he checks twice. I keep that clip. I keep all his real lines. I bury them in a folder Patsy will never find, labeled with a single asterisk, and some nights I open it just to hear him be right about something.

By day four I catch my reflection in the black mirror of my dead phone screen during a battery swap, and the face looking back is gray under the concealer, dark half-moons swelling beneath both eyes. I have slept maybe four hours a night since the cabinet clip. Edit all night, film all day, answer Patsy, refresh the numbers, edit again. Rinse. Never sleep. Repeat.

"Break," Oggan rumbles from across the room.

I glance up. He has stopped mid-cut, table saw silent, and he is looking at me the way you look at a load-bearing wall you suspect is failing.

"I'm good!" The bright act pops out on reflex, three notes too high. "We've got great light for another hour, so I want to grab the beam reveal while..."

"Break," he says again. Flatter. It is not a suggestion. He sets down his ear protection, crosses the plywood in four strides, and lifts the coffee cup right out of my hand.

"Hey!"

"This is your fifth." He tilts it. Empty, of course. "You have eaten nothing. Your hands shake." He holds up my own trembling fingers as evidence, gently, like he is showing me a splinter he plans to remove. "You are running on burnt beans and stubborn. It will catch you."

"I'm fine, Oggan. This is just what it takes. You wouldn't understand, you don't have sponsors breathing down your..."

"I understand starving to finish a job." His flat gaze does not move. "I did it for years. It builds nothing. It only breaks the builder."

The words land somewhere unguarded, and my throat goes tight, and I do the only move I have when a real thing gets too close.

I laugh, bright and hollow, and I take my coffee cup back.

"Okay, Dr. Orc. Noted. Now can we please grab the beam shot before I lose the golden hour?"