Page 29 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"Orcs run four degrees warmer."

"Four degrees is not what this is. This is a wood stove with opinions."

"Six degrees, on a cold night, if I have eaten." Which I have not, in any real sense, in three days, and my hands have started doing the thing at the ends of the fingers where they go stupid before the rest of me does. "Turn around."

"Excuse me?"

"Turn around and put your back to me. The heat comes off my sternum and my belly, and you are lying with your spine to the wall, where the cold is. You are heating a tent wall."

She is quiet for a second.

"That's romantic," she says. "That's the most romantic thing anyone has ever said about my spine."

"It is thermal."

"It's thermal, sure." But she rolls. She rolls and backs up until her shoulder blades are against me, and the whole line of her, and she goes rigid for about four seconds and then something comes out of her all at once and she goes soft.

I do not move at all. There is nowhere to move to.

Outside, the storm works on the deck edge, and somewhere down the slope a tree gives up a limb and it goes down through the canopy in three separate crashes.

"Forty-one thousand one hundred," I say.

"What is?"

"The roof. And the sill work under the north corner, which is worse than the roof and which she has stopped mentioning." The words go out into the dark of the tent and there is nothing to do about them. "There are four buckets in the upstairs hall. She names them. There is a bucket in that house named after my grandfather."

Junie does not say anything, and her not saying anything is the good kind, and I have started to be able to tell them apart.

"And they gave you a card about it," she says eventually.

"They gave me a card that said tell us what winning would mean."

"And you said?"

"Forty-one thousand one hundred dollars."

She laughs. It comes out of her before she can put anything in front of it, one short crack of a laugh, and her back moves against me when she does it.

"They hated that," she says.

"The producer put his hand over his mouth."

"Ghorlan, that's the number, that's not the sentence. They wanted the sentence."

"The number is the sentence."

She turns around.

She should not be able to. There is no room in this tent for a person to turn around, and she does it anyway, in about three inches of clearance, and now her face is right there in the gray light coming off the deck, freckles and dirt and a scab on her eyebrow from the bog, and her breath comes across my jaw warm and smelling of almonds and nothing else.

"Nobody's ever said a true thing on this mountain," she says. "Except you. Constantly. Like a man handing out bricks."

"You said a true thing."

"When."

"Yesterday. On the trail from the east bench. You said it was a bad deal and he did not understand it."