Page 16 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

Then she lowers herself down onto the floor, cross-legged, mirror of me, and reaches for a slice with a hand that finally, finally stops shaking.

CHAPTER 9

JILLY

The pizza is the best thing I have ever eaten and I have eaten at restaurants with tasting menus.

I sit on the cold plywood floor of my half-built house, in the dark, with grease on my fingers and cheese burning the roof of my mouth, and I inhale two slices before I come up for air. Oggan sits across the open box, his back against a stud, headlamp tilted up at the ceiling so the whole space glows soft and gold instead of harsh and white. He eats slower than me. He eats like a man who has never once worried a meal would be taken away, which, given the size of him, no one has ever tried.

My stomach unclenches for the first time in weeks. My hands go still. The render is dead on the laptop and the world has not ended.

"Okay," I admit around a mouthful, "this was a good call."

He grunts. In four days I have collected a small dictionary of his grunts. This one means obviously. I have started narrating them to myself, giving each grunt a subtitle, and I have not told him because he would either grunt about it or, worse, stop. The dictionary is mine. It is the first thing in months I have made that I have no plans to post.

I lick sauce off my thumb and reach for slice three, and for once I do not reach for my phone. It sits dark and dead a few feet away and I let it stay dead. The quiet is enormous. No notifications. No Patsy. No little glowing rectangle demanding I be delightful.

Just an orc, a pizza, and a barn full of stars showing through the roof gaps.

"You keep looking at the ceiling," Oggan says.

I had no idea he was tracking where my eyes go. Warmth climbs my neck.

"The trusses." I point up with the crust. "Look at them. That's why I bought this place. Everyone told me I was insane, three hundred grand on a falling-down barn in the middle of nowhere, but I walked in the first time and tipped my head back and there they were."

He tips his head back too. The exposed trusses arc overhead, huge old timbers, dark and honest, holding up nothing but sky and moonlight right now.

"Douglas fir," he says. "Old growth. You do not get grain like that anymore. The tree that made these was two hundred years old before someone felled it." He says it the way other people say the name of someone they love. "Whoever framed this barn understood the work. It is why the thing still stands when it should have come down thirty years back."

Something loosens behind my ribs.

"That's it," I say. "That's exactly it. That's what I want the whole house to become." I gesture at nothing, hunting for the door into the sentence. "The opposite of all the ring-light stuff. The opposite of the perfect Pinterest thing. Everyone takes that for my brand and it is my brand and I am so tired of it I could scream into a throw pillow."

The words keep coming and I let them, because it is dark, and he is not filming, and there is pizza.

"I used to build things. Actual things. Before the channel was a channel. My grandpa taught me. He had this garage, and he'd let me sand things for hours, and it smelled like cedar and motor oil, and I was so happy the word never once occurred to me. He built everything. Our kitchen table. The bookshelf that held my mom's paperbacks. A jewelry box for my grandmother with a hidden drawer he never showed anyone but me. He had these hands, huge and scarred and slow, and I used to sit on the workbench and hand him tools until I could name every one by the weight in my palm. Half-inch chisel. Block plane. The good Japanese pull-saw he wouldn't let anyone else touch." I dig my thumbnail into the pizza crust, making little half-moons. "He died the year before the channel took off, so he never had to witness the sellout. Sometimes I am glad." I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them. "Then I posted one little dresser flip and it did numbers, and Patsy found me, and now I have a brand color palette and a content calendar and I haven't held a chisel in two years because chisels don't photograph soft enough."

I stop. My throat has gone tight again, but the good tight this time, the honest kind.

"I bought this barn to get back to the trusses," I say quietly. "And instead I turned it into another set."

The headlamp glow catches Oggan's face. He has stopped eating. He is looking at me, all of me, and there is nothing flat or grumpy in it now. His dark eyes hold steady and deep and unnervingly kind.

"That," he rumbles, "is the first true thing you have said since I met you."

The observation should sting. It lands like a hand on my shoulder instead.

"I'm a fraud," I say, and I laugh, and it comes out wet. "You figured it out day one, didn't you. That's why you never laugh at my besties bit."

"You are not a fraud." He sets down his crust. He leans forward, forearms on his knees, and the whole dark space seems to bend toward him. "The bright one is a costume. I have understood that since the cabinet. But a costume is not a lie about the person wearing it. The woman who tipped her head back and found the trusses. The woman who bought a dying barn to save two-hundred-year-old wood. That one is real. She is just buried under lights."

I stare at him.

Nobody talks to me like this. Nobody reads me, the real me, past the ring light and the palette and the numbers. Patsy tracks engagement. The sponsors track a demographic. The besties get a smile. This enormous, technologically illiterate, cabinet-murdering orc looked at me for four days and dug all the way down to the girl in her grandpa's garage.

My eyes sting. I blink hard.

"Careful, Oggan," I say, going for light, missing by a mile. "That almost sounded like a compliment. People will talk."