Page 23 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

"You're really not going to fix that, are you," Jilly says, following the line of my stare.

"Not today."

"It's going to bother you every single time you walk under it."

"Yes."

She almost smiles. "You could just patch it. Sixty seconds. Nobody would ever know."

"I would know." I run my thumb along the trigger guard, checking the safety out of habit, out of the need to touch something that behaves the way I intend it to. "A house should carry a little proof of the day it was fought for. Yours will. Right there. Crooked and honest, up where nobody photographs, holding nothing up but the truth of it."

Patsy, still typing, does not look up from her phone. "God, put THAT on a mug."

Jilly does not laugh with her. Jilly is looking at the nail like I hung a painting. And I let the framing nailer hang loose in my grip and I do not patch the ceiling, and something in the ruined afternoon settles into place as solid as any joist I have ever set. Evidence of the one time I stood where I was needed and did not run the other way.

CHAPTER 13

JILLY

By Tuesday I have a nickname.

I did not consent to the nickname. I have consented to almost nothing that has happened to my life in the last nine days, and yet here I am, trending in four countries, the unwilling co-star of a romance I have not technically started.

Several nicknames, actually, and none of them are mine. I am "the girl." Oggan is "the wall," "husband material," "green flag" in a joke that has now been made by four hundred thousand strangers. Someone has cut the nailgun footage into slow motion and set it to a song about devotion. It has two million views. In the comments, people are naming our future children. The frontrunner is Basil.

I sit cross-legged on the air mattress in the half-built master bedroom, phone six inches from my nose, and scroll until my thumb aches.

There is a compilation. My stomach drops through the subfloor. It is titled "the way he looks at her (I'M NOT OKAY)," and it is forty seconds of Oggan, in the background of my own videos, in moments I never clocked because I was on-camera being sunshine.

Oggan handing me a granola bar, gaze snagged on my mouth.

Oggan steadying the scaffolding, gaze snagged on my hands.

Oggan across a room while I babble to the lens, unsmiling, still as a held breath, fixed on me like I am the only weight-bearing thing in the structure.

I stop breathing a little. The heat climbs my neck and settles in my ears.

He does not look at me like a job. He looks at me like a man reading the one book he was told he'd never be allowed to own.

I set the phone face-down on the air mattress. I pick it back up. I am a woman with no self-control and a data plan.

The next clip is worse. It's the insulation day, shot by nobody I hired, some fan who slowed the footage and circled his hand with a little animated heart every time it hovered near my waist. Fourteen thousand people in the comments are having a collective breakdown. "he's SO careful with her." "the size difference I'm going to be sick." "protect them at all costs."

Protect them. Like we're a them. Like there's a category we belong to that has a plural.

I make the terrible decision to check the comments on my actual channel, the place where I am supposedly in charge. My last three real videos, the ones I scripted and lit and edited into perfection, have a combined comment section entirely devoted to a man who has never once looked at the lens.

"the tutorial was great but WHERE is he."

"came for grout tips stayed for the orc who would die for her."

"jilly babe we love you but you're the side quest now, and honestly? we're okay with it."

I should be furious. I built this channel one exhausting smile at a time, and a shirtless contractor wandered through the background of one livestream and repossessed my entire audience. Every ounce of my Type-A soul should be filing a complaint with the universe.

Instead I keep scrolling, and my treacherous heart keeps doing the thing it does when his slow-motion face fills my screen, the little swoop, the free-fall, the exact sensation of a ladder tipping backward with me still on it.

There's a fan edit where someone has painstakingly collected every single time he says my name. Just my name. "Jilly." Forty-one clips, back to back, in that gravel-and-gravel register that goes straight through my sternum and out the other side. It is the most unhinged thing I have ever seen and I let it loop twice.