Page 41 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

"The orange one. The branded one, with the mascot and the slogan." My throat works. "You told me exactly who you are. You don't perform. You don't fake. And I put you in a costume and pointed a camera at you and turned you into content because Patsy threatened the budget." I make myself hold his eyes. "I'm sorry. I've been so sorry, and I kept swallowing it because saying it out loud meant admitting what I did."

The fire cracks. A spark leaps and dies on the stone between us.

"You needed the money," he says. Flat. A statement, an excuse he's handing me.

"That's not a reason. That's a scapegoat." I shake my head hard enough to loosen a strand of ruined hair. "I've been using the money as a scapegoat for four years. Skip the meal, it's for the channel. Wear the smile, it's for the channel. Turn a man's privacy into a thumbnail, it's for the..." My throat closes. "I turned you into a thumbnail, Oggan."

He doesn't move to comfort me. He skips the thing everyone else does, the quick reassurance that lets you off the hook. He just holds my gaze in the firelight and lets the words stand.

"Say the rest," he says.

My pulse trips. "What?"

"There's more. You've got the same face you get before a take you don't want to do." His eyes drop to my hands, twisting in the too-long cuffs of his coat, then rise again. "Say the rest."

The storm presses on the metal roof. Water sings into the buckets.

I gather my knees up under the coat and wrap my arms around them, small as I can make myself, which around him is very small indeed.

"You want to know the worst part?" My throat aches. "I used to be a person. Before the channel. I painted terrible watercolors and burned every casserole I ever attempted and I had a laugh my roommate said could crack a windshield." A wet laugh escapes me now, nothing like that one. "Then I got twelve thousand followers off a video where I organized a pantry, and a brand sent me a check, and I looked at that check and something in me went, oh. This is who they'll pay for. And I built her. Brick by brick. The hair, the influencer lilt, the smile that never slips."

He stays quiet. The good kind of quiet, the kind that leaves room.

"And she worked," I keep going. "She worked so well that I lost the seam where she ended and I began. I'd cry in the bathroom and then walk out and hit record and be fine, because fine gets sponsors and real gets you dropped." My fingers dig into my own arms. "You're the first person in four years who looked at the smile and just... turned it down. Do you have any idea how terrifying that is? To have somebody find the actual you when you've spent everything you have making sure nobody can?"

The fire cracks between us. His eyes hold mine, steady, unblinking, patient as stone weathering rain.

"You looked lighter tonight than in every video I've been forced to sit through," he says.

I choke on a laugh. "You sit through my videos?"

"Judanna makes me." He shifts, and the firelight rolls across the slope of his shoulder. "The woman in them is very good at her job. She's also worn to the bone. It shows in the eyes if you look close enough. Showed the first week." He pauses. "The one dumping paint to save a floor tonight isn't worn out. She's alive."

I have never in my life said the next part out loud, not to a camera, not to Patsy, not to the two million strangers who think they know me.

"I don't want the viral thing." The words shake loose. "I want you. And I don't mean the Hot Grumpy Orc. Never the engagement spike. Never the fancams." A hysterical laugh catches in my throat and dies. "I want the man who tarps his firewood. Who dumps snacks by my laptop like a raccoon leaving offerings. Who cut the power so I'd eat. I want the one who told me the smile was a costume and didn't apologize for being right."

He's gone completely still. Even the small movements, the flex of a jaw, the shift of a shoulder, all of it stopped.

"I don't know how to be a person without a camera," I keep going, because if I stop I'll never start again. "But I want to learn. With you. And I'm terrified you're going to say I already ruined it. That the shirt, and the secret, and the way I hid us, that I broke the one thing you told me you can't fake."

The fire pops. Rain roars. He hasn't said a word, and the silence is unbearable.

"Say something," I whisper. "Please. Anything. Even the grumpy..."

"Orcs don't fake affection."

I go rigid. It's what he told me when he refused the fake-dating pitch. The line that made me stop breathing in a framed-out bedroom two weeks ago.

"When we claim someone," he says, low, each word set down with the care he gives to a load-bearing beam, "it's real. And it's permanent. That's why I couldn't do the pretend version. And it wasn't for lack of wanting you." He leans in another inch, and the heat of him wraps around me stronger than the coat. "Because I already didn't have to pretend."

The floor drops out of my stomach.

"You've been claimed for weeks, human." The firelight carves his face into something ancient and certain. "You just kept pointing a camera at it and asking why it wouldn't sit still."

A sound comes out of me, half laugh, half sob, entirely undignified.

"Weeks," I repeat, dumb with it. "You've wanted this for weeks and you said nothing?"