Page 10 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

For a full minute I let it land. I did that. I chased down a seven-foot man in my own driveway and talked him out of leaving, and tomorrow at seven he walks back through that door and my entire ruined future starts knitting itself back together, one subfloor joist at a time. The relief is so enormous it borders on nausea. Underneath the relief, quieter, is the memory of a warm rough hand cradling mine like an egg he would not let crack, and I shove that particular observation into a box, and I sit on the box, and I promise myself I will never open it.

Patsy appears at my elbow, phone already up, already filming.

"Thirty days," she breathes. "Do not fall for him."

I laugh it off. I laugh it all the way off, loud and easy, the practiced laugh I use on camera when a sponsor says something dumb and I still want their money.

Thirty days. One barn. One giant, quiet, impossible man who looks straight through every performance I own.

I really should have listened.

CHAPTER 6

OGGAN

The word "yes" tastes like sawdust in my mouth.

I stand in the gutted kitchen of this ridiculous barn-turned-house, tool belt slung low on my hips, and I stare down at the small human who just bought a month of my life with a number that made my ears ring. Triple rate. Enough to close on the workshop by the end of the month. Enough to buy back the quiet I have wanted for eleven years.

And the price is my dignity, apparently.

"Terms," I say.

Jilly blinks up at me. She has a clipboard now. She produced it from somewhere, the way she produces everything, out of thin air and pure nerve. "Terms. Yes. Absolutely. I love terms. Terms are my love language."

"No speaking parts." I hold up one finger, thick as a hammer handle. "I do not talk to the little glass eye."

"The camera."

"I do not talk to the camera." Second finger. "No lights in my face. Those white circles. They stay behind you."

"The ring lights." She scribbles. Her pen moves fast. "Behind me. Got it. What else?"

Third finger. This one matters most.

"I do the work my way. You do not stop me for a better angle. You do not ask me to pretend to hammer a nail that is already set." My words land flat and heavy in the empty space. "If you make me lie about how a thing is built, I walk. That is the whole list."

She goes still.

For a second the perky mask drops off her face and something real surfaces underneath, tired and hungry and stubborn all at once. Then she smooths it back down like fresh drywall mud.

"Deal," she says, and sticks out her hand.

My palm swallows hers whole. Small bones, soft skin, a callus at the base of her thumb from holding that pen too hard for too long. Warmth travels up my arm and settles somewhere behind my ribs where it has no business being.

I let go first. She flexes her fingers like she is checking they all survived.

"For the record," she says, "that's the least scary contract negotiation I've had all year, and one of them was with a man who cried."

I grunt. It is the safest response I own.

She tucks the clipboard under her arm and studies me, head tilted, like I am a piece of furniture she cannot quite place. "Most contractors would charge me double and deliver half. And here you are, haggling for the right to do it correctly." She shakes her head. "That is either the most honorable thing I have ever come across or the worst business instinct on the planet."

"Both," I say.

Her grin catches me off guard, quick and crooked and nothing like the one she aims at the camera. I look at the dead cabinets before that grin does anything else to me.

The first shoot happens two hours later, once she has "set up her shot," a process that involves more equipment than I use to frame an entire wall.