Page 7 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"It's a bold statement about visibility."

"It is a good color for a search," he says, and then, with no change whatsoever in the delivery, "I will take the ridgeline. You will need to learn a taut line hitch."

"I can tie a taut line hitch."

The lie leaves my mouth on rails, smooth and warm and automatic, before any part of me has been consulted.

He nods once. Accepted. Filed. And the nod is so completely without suspicion that something goes sideways under my sternum and stays there.

"Good," he says. "Then we will be dry."

Up close, the arms are the argument, and never the height. The height is a headline and headlines are cheap. It is the forearms, roped and scarred in short white lines that run the same direction, over and over, like a man has been catching the same thing wrong for twenty years and correcting it a little better each time.

"What do you do?" I say. "Outside."

"Timber frame."

"Which is."

"Buildings held together by the wood itself." He turns his hand over, and the palm is a landscape. "No steel in the joints. You cut the shapes so they hold each other."

"That works?"

"There are barns doing it four hundred years now."

He says that the way other men say the name of a woman they used to be married to.

Cade is still talking. Cameras are still rolling. Somewhere behind me Coby says something about the size differential and Stitch says say it again toward me.

We break for the shuttle. There is a folding table by the trailer with two urns on it, coffee and hot water, and I go straight for it because my hands have started doing a thing I would prefer nobody price.

I am pouring when the charcoal blazer arrives on my right.

Up close she smells like rain and expensive shampoo, and she pours her own coffee, and she does it without looking at the cup, which means she has stood at a lot of urns.

"Junie. Delia Prine."

"The executive producer."

"You've been reading name tags."

"I've been reading everything."

"Mm." She tips the urn back upright and gives me a smile that goes all the way up, warm, unhurried, the smile of a woman with absolutely nothing riding on the next ten seconds. "I wanted to say. I loved the elk story."

The rain keeps arriving sideways.

"Thank you," I say.

"No, sincerely." She blows across the top of her coffee. "The diaphragm. That detail. That's the thing people don't have unless they've been in there."

Nine years at tables. Nine years of holding a face together over worse cards than this.

"Not everybody's favorite dinner conversation," I say.

"It's my favorite kind." She taps the cup twice against her thigh, which is a thing people do when they have finished and have chosen to stay anyway. "We're going to have a wonderful three weeks, you and I."

She walks off toward the trailer.