Page 27 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

He looks directly into the camera for the first time in his life. The chat inhales as one organism.

"It is a table," he says. Flat. Final. Devastating. "You will eat at it for the rest of your life. Build the things you keep as if you mean to keep them."

Then he goes back to the wood like he did not just detonate the entire comment section. Someone superimposes those words over a sunset within the hour. Patsy texts me a single line: DO YOU SEE. DO YOU SEE WHAT WE HAVE. I turn my phone face down.

Day two: sanding. My palm and his palm on the same block, orbiting the wood in slow circles. Our fingers overlap. He does not move his away. I do not move mine. We sand the same square foot for an unreasonable amount of time. Later, someone will clip this and call it "the circle scene" and score it to a cello and I will cry in my own kitchen while strangers narrate the exact moment I stopped pretending.

Judanna stops by around noon on a lumber run, leans in the doorway with a coffee, and takes one look at the two of us bent over the slab with our hands overlapping.

"Oh," she says, delighted, drawing the word out to four syllables. "Oh, this is happening. Finally. I've been telling him for years, Jilly, the man builds beautiful houses and lives in a rented room, it's tragic, it's a whole thing."

"Judanna," Oggan says, a warning that lands nowhere.

"He alphabetizes his chisels." She sips her coffee, gleeful. "You should know that going in. Forty chisels. Alphabetized. By the tree the handle came from." She winks at me and backs out the door. "Good luck. He's worth it. Don't tell him I said so, it'll go to his head and then he'll need a bigger hat."

The door swings shut. Oggan sands in furious silence. The tips of his ears have gone a darker green.

"Forty chisels," I say.

"Do not."

"By tree species."

"She exaggerates. It is thirty-eight."

I laugh so hard I have to sit down on a sawhorse, and he almost smiles again, and this time I do not squirrel it away for later. This time I just get to have it.

"You're good at this," I say, once I catch my breath. "Teaching. You should have students."

"I had one." He does not look up from the wood. "Long ago. My daughter, if things had gone another way."

My hand stills under his. "You wanted kids?"

"I wanted a workshop full of noise." His thumb keeps circling, patient, endless. "Judanna and I were not built for it, and we were wise enough to admit it before we broke each other proving it. So. No students. Only houses. The houses do not call me on my birthday, but they also do not leave." A pause. "Until now, this was enough."

Until now. Two words. He lets them sit there on the slab between us like the third thing he wasn't going to say.

By day three I am not sleeping. I lie on the air mattress at night and replay the circle scene against the dark and my whole skin keeps the weight of his hand. I have styled a thousand tablescapes and never once wanted to lie down on one. This is a problem. This is a beautiful, ruinous, entirely off-brand problem, and I have stopped trying to solve it.

Day three: the epoxy pour. This is the delicate one, the one that cannot be redone, the crack in the walnut that will either heal gold or scar forever depending on the next twenty minutes. He mixes the resin in a bucket the size of my torso, slow, exact, reading the color the way he reads everything, with his hands and his patience and none of his hurry.

We fill the cracks in the walnut with resin the deep gold of late afternoon, and I hold the torch to chase the bubbles while he steadies the level, and our shoulders brace together, and when a bubble surfaces we both lean in at once and our cheeks nearly touch and he stops breathing entirely.

The heat of him is a physical weather system. I have stopped pretending I am here for the woodworking.

I keep torching. My hand shakes.

"Careful," he says, low.

"I've got it."

"You do not have it." His hand cups the back of mine, engulfing it, righting the torch angle before I scorch the resin. His thumb settles over my pulse. It has to be jackhammering against his skin. There is no hiding it. He goes still, absolutely still, the way he does when he is choosing not to reach for something he wants.

The camera battery dies with a small, sad beep.

We both look at it. Then at each other.

The barndominium is very quiet. Sawdust drifts in the last of the sun coming through the west windows he framed himself. The finished table gleams between us, gold veins in dark wood, the truest thing either of us has made, and there are no lenses left running, and his hand is still cupped around mine, and neither of us has let go.