Page 4 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

I glance at it against my better judgment.

A text. From her. Please just consider it. I'll explain everything in person. I really need this. Jilly.

I do not answer.

I drive.

The road unspools dark and empty, pines crowding both shoulders, my headlights carving a tunnel through the black. This part of the day belongs to me. Nobody talks. Nobody wants anything. The engine hums, the tires whine, and for eleven miles I am simply a large man in a truck going home to a small cabin where the only thing that has ever gone viral is the mold I killed in the bathroom last spring.

Home sits at the end of a gravel drive. One room, more or less. A wood stove with a surround I built myself. A bed too short for me, because every bed on earth is too short for me. A shelf of cracked-spine books. A dog-eared photo of my parents I avoid looking at head-on.

I let myself in. I leave the overhead light off. I move through this room by heart, every board and nail, because I set most of them.

The rectangle buzzes again.

I set it on the counter face-down and stand in the dark, a large green man alone in a small black room, and I run the arithmetic I did not want to run.

One month. Forty-one thousand short. The workshop on the market, two other men circling it, my savings not quite enough, time picking the other side.

I turn the phone over.

The screen has lit up with more of these little grey bubbles from a woman I met for ninety minutes and disliked and cannot stop hearing. Another one arrives as I look. I'm not going to blow up your phone I promise. Just... one conversation. Tomorrow. Please.

She broke her own sentence in half with that little trailing pause, three dots hanging in the air, as though her ideas were sprinting away and she flung the words after them just to keep up. A person who writes like that is a person in a hurry. A person who has run out of room and out of time and out of pride, all three at once, and stopped bothering to hide it.

I have never in my life run out of pride. I keep mine stacked and squared like good lumber.

I type three words. I delete them. I type them again.

One conversation.

I hit send before the wiser, quieter part of me can wrestle the phone from my hand, and then I set it down and go to my too-short bed and stare up at the ceiling I hung myself, and sleep stays out of reach, because somewhere beyond these walls five million strangers have claimed ownership of my shoulders, and tomorrow I have to drive out and look the cause of that in the eye.

I should have let the phone ring.

I never let the phone ring.

That, as sleep finally hauls me under, is going to be a problem.

Judanna would laugh at me. My mother would not. My mother would peer down that long green nose of hers and ask why a man who claims to crave quiet drove eleven miles to have a conversation he plans to end in a single syllable.

I have no answer for the version of my mother who lives in my skull. She has always asked better questions than I can dodge.

I roll onto my side. The bed frame groans in protest. Outside an owl calls once and goes silent, and I count the ridge caps of my own roof in the dark until the numbers smear together, and the last image I hold before the black takes me is a small loud human squeaking an apology into a phone in the middle of the afternoon, frantic and ridiculous and utterly unafraid to be caught looking foolish.

I have spent my whole life making sure nobody ever catches me looking foolish.

I do not enjoy the suspicion that this makes her the braver of the two of us.

CHAPTER 3

JILLY

Patsy arrives at nine sharp, and by nine-oh-four she has three phones out and is talking into two of them.

"...no, the numbers are real, the numbers are gorgeous, I am staring at the numbers as we speak..." She paces the length of the barndominium in heels entirely unsuited to a construction site, dodging exposed nails with the instinct of a woman who has walked away from worse. "...I understand the concern about optics, but I am telling you, this is not a fluke, this is a franchise..."

I hover by the coffee I set up on a sheet of plywood balanced across two sawhorses, and I try to pass for a person who has slept.