Page 30 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

She goes still. "Oggan."

"I told you Orcs don't fake." My hand moves slow up and down her spine. "You have it now. In your body, you have it."

She traces the scar on my collarbone again, slow, like she is memorizing the map of me. Her breath evens out against the side of my neck. Outside, a truck passes on the county road and its headlights sweep the raw studs, and for a moment the whole unfinished room glows amber, every joint and joist we set today lit up gold, and then it goes dark again and it is only us.

She is quiet a long moment. The generator ticks. A moth finds the one bare bulb and knocks against it, once, twice.

"I have it," she says finally, soft.

Something in me settles that has not settled in years. I close my eyes. Sawdust in the air, and her heartbeat beside mine going slow, and for the first time on this ridiculous, camera-cursed job, I hold everything I want inside four unfinished walls.

I should have known better than to close my eyes.

CHAPTER 17

JILLY

Sunlight through raw studs lays stripes across a wall of green muscle, and I wake up draped over it like a dropped scarf.

Oggan sleeps on his back on an air mattress built for one, which means most of me sleeps on him. His arm covers me shoulder to hip. His breathing lifts me and lowers me, slow as tide. A curl of my hair sticks to his jaw. Drywall dust powders his eyebrows, and a bruise blooms on my hip in the exact shape of pure, dumb joy.

I have never been this happy. I have never been this terrified.

His mouth goes soft in sleep. No scowl. The line he wears between his brows all day has smoothed clean away, and he looks ten years younger and unbearably dear, and my heart does a slow, dangerous roll.

I could stay here. That is the whole trap of it. I could stay here in the sawdust with a man who tore three cabinets off a wall for me and then cradled my hip like it was blown glass, and I could let the entire curated world of Jilly Dulane, Lifestyle Brand, burn to the studs around us.

The barn smells like cut pine and last night. His skin runs warm as an oven under my cheek, warmer than any human, some Orc furnace idling low. One of his hands rests open on my back, palm big enough to cover my whole spine, fingers loose in sleep. Even at rest he takes up more space than the room can hold. Yesterday that size scared me a little. This morning I want to crawl further inside it, hide in the shadow of him where no ring light reaches, where nobody expects anything of me except to be exactly the mess I actually am.

A whole future flickers behind my eyes in the space of one breath. Cold pizza on paint cans. His off-key humming through every wall of a house he built. Ask me tomorrow, he said, about the scars, and I want every tomorrow it would take to hear them all.

My phone buzzes on the subfloor.

I go rigid. Oggan's arm tightens on instinct, dream-heavy, hauling me closer to the warm bulk of him, and for one more second I let him.

The phone buzzes again.

I slide out from under his arm one degree at a time. His brow creases. The scowl comes back in his sleep, hunting for the weight I took away, and my heart cracks a little at that alone. I ease off the mattress onto cold subfloor, snag the phone, and turn the screen to my face.

Patsy. 6:52 a.m.

UP AND AT EM SUNSHINE. Moving the sponsor shoot to 8. Home-goods people flying in. Need you camera-ready and the BARN clean. No dust bunnies, no MESS. This deal is 40K. Do NOT blow it.

Forty thousand dollars.

The number lands in my stomach like a swallowed stone. Forty thousand keeps the lights on. Forty thousand finishes the roof. Forty thousand is the whole gulf between a triumphant reveal video and a foreclosure I livestream by accident.

I take in the room.

Two coffee cans. A pizza box. My overalls in a puddle. A tank top hanging off a sawhorse like a flag of surrender. An air mattress with a giant, gorgeous, entirely un-hideable Orc asleep on it in a shaft of morning light.

Evidence. All of it, evidence.

My brain goes to the place I hate. The place with the checklist and the ring light and the smile I flip on like a faucet. I move fast. Overalls up, straps yanked over my shoulders. Tank grabbed off the sawhorse and stuffed into a tool bag. Pizza box crushed and shoved behind a stack of insulation batts. I fold the work tarp over the corner of the mattress, over him, hiding the shape of last night like it shames me.

It does not shame me. That is the worst part. I am hiding the best thing that has ever happened to me because a woman in Los Angeles typed the number forty into a text.

My hands keep moving on their own, running the old choreography. Straighten the coffee cans into a neat row so they read as intentional set dressing instead of two-in-the-morning debris. Wipe the sawdust off the folding table with my sleeve. Kick the deflated corner of the mattress flat so its shape stops screaming what happened on it. I have staged a hundred rooms for a hundred videos, made chaos look like a curated lifestyle a thousand times over, and every practiced motion of it works against me now, because the mess I am erasing is the one honest thing in the whole barn.