Page 33 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

The rain has stopped, which it does for about forty minutes a night, as a joke.

"Your turn," he says.

Six nights. Six nights of me giving him small clean nothings. I lashed the wrong end. I banked the fire too high. I put the vase under the drip line, which he had already told me, so I got to admit to a thing he had already fixed, which is my whole personality in a sentence.

"Okay," I say.

And something in my throat has gone the wrong way.

"The elk story," I say.

Ghorlan does not move.

"On Day Minus Two they sat me on a stool in front of a paper backdrop and asked me for the elk story, for the sizzle reel. Second week of October. My uncle's place, up past the fork. The part about the diaphragm, where it's a sheet of muscle across the chamber and you have to cut it loose all the way around the ribs before anything else will come out, and you're in past your elbows, and there's steam coming off your arms."

"I have not been shown that."

"Four million people have." My hands are doing something in my lap so I put them under my thighs and sit on them. "There's no uncle. There's no fork. I read it on a hunting forum at two in the morning eleven days before I got on the bus, third page of a thread, posted by a man in Montana who spells definitely with an A."

The fire moves. His face does not.

"The application says verified field experience," I say. "Underneath it, in gray, it says they may request documentation. They never requested documentation, because casting wanted me, and casting got me, and I have been up here for six days pretending I lost a fight to a tarp because I'm charmingly out of my depth instead of because I have never in my life put up a tarp."

I stop.

The stopping is not a choice I make. It arrives, the way the bottom of a staircase arrives in the dark, and I am standing on it with one more step still in my leg.

Because the next part is page nineteen.

Page nineteen says the team is the unit. Page nineteen says material misrepresentation on the application voids the appearance fee, and it does not say voids the appearance fee of the person who lied, it says of the team, and I have read that paragraph eleven times in six days and it says the same thing every time.

Forty-one thousand one hundred dollars. Four buckets in an upstairs hall. One of them named after his grandfather.

I sit on my hands on a deck he built and I do not say it.

"That is the whole error," I say. "I lied to get up here."

Ghorlan looks at the fire a beat too long.

Then he stands, and takes the rock off the water trough, and sets it on the coals for the morning, and says, "That is a good one. Sleep."

That is it.

He does not ask what else there is. He does not ask about the fee, or the forms, or what happens to a team when one half of it turns out to be a story. He asks nothing at all, and he lets it go the way he let it go on Day One, and he goes and banks the fire with his back to me.

I lie in a two person tent next to a man who is a hundred and two pounds over its design case and I stare at eighty-four inches of nylon.

If he had asked, I would have had to answer.

He did not ask.

And that, it turns out, is the worse of the two.

CHAPTER 14

GHORLAN

DAY 7