Page 31 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

Somewhere under the performance a small voice asks what I am so afraid of. The sponsor is a home-goods company, not the vice squad. Grown people share beds. And I have no clean answer, only the cold reflex that has run my life for six years. Protect the brand. Hide the seams. Never let them see the wires.

"You're moving like the floor's on fire."

His words come out gravel-rough. I spin. He is up on one elbow, tarp sliding off the slab of his shoulder, and his eyes track my hands, my speed, the tool bag I clutch to my belly like armor.

"Sponsor shoot got moved up." The influencer chirp climbs out of me and I hate it. Bright. Smooth. Weightless. "Big deal, forty grand, they're flying in, I have to get the space camera-ready, so if you could maybe . . ."

He goes very still.

"Maybe," he says.

"Just for the shoot. An hour. Two."

"You want me gone."

"I want you dressed." I bring my palms together, pleading. "Please. Patsy can't . . . the home-goods people can't walk in and see . . ."

"See what." He sits all the way up. The tenderness of two minutes ago drains out of his face, and a shutter comes down behind his eyes that I have learned to dread. "See the man you tangled up with all night. See the mess."

"That's not what I meant."

"It's the word you reached for." He grabs his shirt. Pulls it over his head slow. Every unhurried motion is a wall going back up brick by brick, and I stand there in my straightened overalls with my hidden tank top and I let it happen. "You crushed the pizza box, Jilly. You buried your own shirt in a bag. You threw a tarp over me like I'm a paint stain on the good drop cloth."

"Oggan."

"Last night you said you had it." He stands. He fills the framed doorway edge to edge, blotting out the striped morning. "In your body, you had it, you told me. It was real. Twelve hours and one text, and I'm something to sweep under the drywall before company shows up."

"That is not . . ." My throat closes. "The money keeps the whole project alive. It keeps you paid. It buys your workshop."

Wrong thing. I hear it the instant it lands.

His jaw sets to stone. "So it's a transaction."

"No. God. No."

"Then look me in the eye and tell me you'd let the home-goods people find us. Tell me you'd introduce me. As what?" He waits. He actually waits, gives me the whole silent space to say the true thing.

And I say nothing. Because I have no answer that fits inside forty thousand dollars.

The quiet stretches until it snaps.

"That's what I figured," he says, and it comes out soft, and soft is somehow worse than any shout. He grabs his tool belt off the sawhorse and slings it over one shoulder. "I'll work the north side. Off camera. Where the mess goes."

"Don't do that. Don't put it like that."

"You put it like that." He steps through the doorway. The subfloor groans under him, once, and then he is gone down the hall, boots fading, and the striped sunlight pours back into the empty corner where an hour ago I held everything.

My phone buzzes.

Patsy. 45 MINS. WHERE ARE YOU.

I lower myself onto the deflating air mattress. It sighs out the last of his warmth beneath me. My hands shake. I put them over my face, and I do the thing I am very, very good at.

I fix my expression. I stand up. I go clean the barn.

Down the hall a drill starts up in the north bedroom, steady and methodical, a man walling himself off one screw at a time. I could go to him right now. I could cross that hall and take his enormous hand and tell the home-goods people the plain truth, that the handyman is mine and the mess was ours and the barn is a home, not a set. It sits in my throat like a stone I cannot quite swallow.

Instead I curl my hair. I stage the coffee bar. I check my teeth in the black mirror of my dead phone.