Page 9 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

"You gave me a number yesterday," he says.

"That was the polite number." I lower my arms, because they are shaking and I would rather he not catch it. "That was the number I led with because I took you for a normal contractor who wanted a normal deal." I swallow. "You're not normal. I've clocked that now. You don't want fame and you don't want followers and you don't care about any of the machinery my whole industry runs on. So I asked myself last night, at three a.m., staring at my ceiling, what does a man like that actually want."

He goes very still. The gravel ticks under his boots as his weight shifts.

"And you're a stranger to me," I press on, "but I can research a contractor, so I looked you up, and there is almost nothing, which by the way is deeply unusual, but one thing surfaced. A comment you left on the county listings forum eight months ago. About the Renner lot. The metal building on Route 9."

The steel door bangs all the way open. His eyes lock onto mine, and for the first time since he blotted out my sun, I hold his complete and undivided attention.

"You want that workshop," I say. "You've wanted it a while. Two other people are trying to buy it out from under you, and you're short, and you're slow, and you are going to lose it if something doesn't change in the next few weeks."

"You cannot state that as fact."

"I'm guessing it. From one forum comment and the expression on your face right now." I pull a breath and lay the whole hand on the plywood. "Triple. Triple your day rate, every day, for one month, plus a completion bonus the day the barn is finished on schedule. I ran the math four times last night. It clears forty-five thousand dollars. That's enough to walk into that lot and pay cash by the end of the month. This year, not next. This month, not next season. Before either of the other buyers can even schedule a showing."

The number lands and settles between us in the gravel.

Everything hangs on the next three seconds. My mortgage. My channel. The lumber rotting in a stack behind the barn. The four hundred thousand people who follow a girl who has, very quietly, already run out of money to keep being that girl. I have gambled before. Never like this. Never with a stranger's want as my only chip on the table, never with the whole truth laid bare on plywood between us. He owes me nothing. He does not even like me. All I hold is a guess about a workshop and the shape of hunger that moved across his face when I said the word.

He does not move. Wind combs through the pines behind the barn. Somewhere Patsy's car door opens, because she physically cannot resist a silence this loaded, and I hold his gaze and I do not blink, because this is the whole game in one hand of cards and I am all in.

His jaw works. I can practically hear the arithmetic grinding behind those dark gold eyes, the numbers stacking and squaring, the future rearranging itself into a shape that fits a workshop.

"The barn finishes on schedule," he says. "My schedule. Structure before decoration, always. I will not frame a pretty wall over a rotten sill so it looks good on your channel this week and kills somebody in ten years."

"That," I say slowly, "is the single most attractive sentence anyone has said to me in my adult life, and I would like the record to reflect that I am receiving it with enormous professionalism."

Something at the corner of his mouth shifts. Almost a crack. Almost.

"You film me working," he says at last, slow, testing each word against his teeth. "You do not stage me. You do not put words in my mouth. You do not dress me up."

"I film you working."

"No lights in my face."

"No lights in your face."

"And when the barn is done." His jaw works again. "When it is done, we are done. I take the money, I buy the lot, I never do this again."

My heart is one beat from cracking a rib. "When the barn is done, we're done."

He studies me for a long, long moment, this enormous quiet man I have known for one day and one phone call and eleven minutes of talking, and then he steps down off the threshold, and the gravel crunches under his weight, and he holds out one massive green hand.

It swallows mine whole. My fingers vanish to the second knuckle inside his grip, and his hand is warm and rough and careful, so careful, as though he has spent his whole life learning exactly how much of his strength the world can survive. A callus rides the base of every finger. He holds my hand the way he probably holds an egg he does not want to crack.

"One month," Oggan Warhip says.

"One month," I agree, and my whole arm hums where he touches it, which is a problem I file away under later.

Behind me, Patsy makes a sound like a kettle reaching temperature.

And that is how I sell my entire future on a handshake, in the gravel, to a man who stood three seconds from driving away, without the faintest clue that I have just invited the one person alive who can look straight through me to move into my life for thirty days.

He releases my hand. He glances back at his truck, then at the barn, then at the ruined ceiling, and something in his shoulders settles, the resigned set of a man who has agreed to shoulder a load he has not yet weighed.

"Tomorrow," he says. "Seven. I start on the subfloor before your camera is even awake."

He climbs into his truck and backs down the drive without another word, and I stand there in the gravel with my swallowed hand still humming, grinning like a lunatic at a cloud of exhaust.