He does not make it past the bookshelf.
He stands there, wedged in my hallway, dripping onto my welcome mat, radiating heat and the smell of rain and that deep, earthy warmth that I have been clocking all evening.
"I am," he says, with immense, careful dignity, "slightly lodged."
I stare at him.
He stares back.
He is wedged between my Organisational Behaviour textbooks and a coat rack shaped like a tree that I genuinely cannot look at without mild shame, he is soaking wet, his glasses have a raindrop balanced perfectly on the left lens, and he is the most unexpectedly spectacular thing that has ever stood in my hallway.
I start laughing.
Not a polite laugh. Not a small, controlled, date-appropriate laugh. A real one, the kind that doubles me forward at the waist and steals my breath, because the absurdity of the entire evening is suddenly compressing into this single, perfect image, and I am helpless against it.
I hear him make a sound. Low, warm, slightly self-deprecating, and when I manage to straighten up and look at him properly, he is laughing too, a deep, rumbling sound that is entirely different from the growl but registers somewhere in the same neighbourhood of my nervous system, and his eyes behindhis rain-dotted glasses are creased at the corners and soft, warm and entirely unguarded.
"Okay," I manage, wiping my eyes, which are definitely wet from laughter and not anything else at all. "Okay. If you angle left—no, your left, the other?—"
"This is my left," he says, and the sheer earnestness with which he announces it, coupled with the fact that he is objectively facing the wrong direction entirely, makes my ribs ache with the effort of not dissolving back into laughter.
"That is absolutely not your left," I say, and I can hear the helpless fondness creeping into my voice despite my best efforts to sound remotely professional about any of this. "You know what, never mind the left-right thing, just turn yourself towards the bookshelf, the one with all the spines facing out, that direction."
"If I turn towards the bookshelf," he says slowly, his eyes widening slightly behind his rain-speckled glasses as he clearly runs some kind of internal spatial calculation, "I will knock your books from the shelf. Several of them. Possibly all of them in the immediate radius. I have already caused sufficient disruption to your organizational systems tonight, and I would prefer not to compound the damage with additional?—"
"I reorganise them every six months anyway," I interrupt, waving one hand in what I hope is a reassuring gesture, though I suspect it looks more frantic than soothing. "Honestly, it is completely fine, they are due for a reshuffle, just turn, please, before you get permanently wedged in my entryway and I have to explain to my landlord why there is a very polite Orc living in my hallway."
There is a mild avalanche of my management accounting volumes. There is also a successful pivot, and then Narod is free of the coat rack, standing in my hallway at a slight angle with two of my coats on the floor and a copy of FinancialReporting Standards Volume II resting against his left foot, and his shoulders are still almost the full width of the space, and my flat is simply not going to recover its previous sense of scale.
He looks at the fallen books. He looks at the toppled coats. He looks at me.
"I will replace the coat rack if I have damaged it," he says.
"The coat rack is fine. The coat rack has survived worse." I step forward, crouching to retrieve the books, stacking them back roughly in order, and when I straighten back up he is right there, very close, and the warmth coming off him in the narrow space is considerable, and my soaked cardigan is extremely cold, and the contrast of those two things does nothing to reduce the five-alarm situation that my body has been running since the growl.
I tilt my head back to look at him properly. It is a significant tilt.
"Welcome to my flat," I say.
"Thank you for having me." He pauses. "I apologise for the structural implications."
"Narod." I look up at him, at the water still dripping from his jaw, at the careful, slightly anxious set of his expression, at the way he is standing very still in my hallway as though afraid that any sudden movement will cause further damage to my property or my composure, and I think about the probability of me surviving the rest of this evening with my practical, sensible, spreadsheet-based self-image intact, and I put it at roughly twelve percent, which seems, under the circumstances, fair. "Stop apologising."
"I will attempt to," he says. "I find it challenging."
"I know." I reach past him to pull the hall cupboard open, where I keep the spare towels on the second shelf, and I have to lean into the narrow space between him and the wall to reach it, and I am abruptly, comprehensively aware of exactly how smallthis hallway is and exactly how large he is and exactly how warm, and I grab the towel by feel alone because I am absolutely not looking at him from this distance.
I pass it to him.
His fingers close around it and around mine for just a second, inadvertent, and the warmth of his hand against my cold ones is acute and immediate, and neither of us moves for a breath longer than strictly necessary.
"I should—" I start.
"Yes," he says.
I take a deliberate step back into the slightly wider space of the hallway and gesture toward the living room, which is larger, by which I mean that it has a sofa and a coffee table and a window and he will probably only fill approximately sixty percent of it.
"Through there," I say. "I'll find something dry. I'm serious that I do not have anything remotely your size, but there might be a large jumper somewhere that could—" I stop again, re-evaluating his chest. "No. There is not. But I have a very good heating system and the sofa is comfortable."
