"It holds two people."
"I weigh significantly more than?—"
"Narod." I take his face between my hands, which, given the proportional difference, amounts to me cupping his jaw with both palms, and I look up at him directly. "Sit down."
He sits.
The sofa makes a sound of protest but holds, and I follow him down, and there is a logistical negotiation of bodies that is partly awkward and partly something else, something that makes us both laugh briefly, the short breathless laugh of two people discovering the practical geometry of a significant size differential. He ends up partially reclined against the arm of the sofa, and I end up partially in his lap, which places me at roughly the right altitude, and his hands come to my waist and the span of them is remarkable, his thumbs nearly meeting atmy sternum, his fingers reaching my spine, and I feel this with a clarity that bypasses thinking entirely.
"You're going to tell me if I—" he starts.
"You're not going to."
"You can't know that with certainty."
"I'm good at risk assessment." I slide my hands back to his chest, watching his expression as I do it, watching the precision drain out of it, the careful maintenance of his features under which something considerably rawer is operating. "I've decided the risk profile is acceptable."
"That is not a scientific determination."
"It's absolutely a scientific determination," I say. "I've done the analysis." I lean in and press my mouth to the line of his jaw, just below his ear, and his whole body tightens beneath me. "My sample size is sufficient."
The growl that comes out of him at that is brief and low and vibrates through his chest and into mine, and his hands tighten on my waist, not painfully, but with a definitive certainty, a grip that communicates its intention clearly, and I am abruptly horizontal against the sofa cushions with a transition that happens so smoothly I don't quite track when it occurred, and Narod is above me, his weight distributed carefully on his forearms, bracketing me in a cage of green muscle and old scars, and he is looking down at me with those amber eyes that have lost every trace of the apologetic, hunched, careful calculation he's been wearing all evening.
"Hi," I say, because apparently that's where we are.
"Hello," he says, and the absurd formality of it in this context makes me laugh, and he looks briefly worried by the laugh, and I pull him down by the back of his neck and the worry resolves into something considerably more interesting.
He is thorough. That's the word that my brain, operating at reduced capacity, keeps arriving at. Where the first kiss wasrestrained and exploratory, this is thorough, systematic, the same focused attention he apparently brings to actuarial tables and spreadsheets, directed entirely at the question of what makes me make noise. He finds the answer with a rapidity that I find both impressive and slightly humbling. His mouth at my throat. The precise, careful pressure of his hands moving the fabric of my blouse, asking permission at each new point of contact not with words but with a momentary stillness, a pause that waits for my response, and I give it, consistently and without ambiguity, because I have done the risk assessment and I stand by my conclusions.
He works my blouse open button by button, and the concentration on his face is enormous and sincere, as though this is genuinely the most important task he has undertaken all week, which I find absolutely devastating in a way I couldn't fully articulate to anyone I know. When he presses his mouth to my sternum I make a sound I'm not going to repeat and his hands go still, and I think he's checking in, and I say his name, and the quality of stillness changes.
The restraint snaps cleanly and completely somewhere around the point where I slide my hands into his hair and say his name for the second time, and the Narod who was perching on my sofa holding a porcelain teacup like it was an explosive device is simply gone, replaced by something considerably more certain, something that knows what it wants and has stopped politely subordinating that knowledge to social anxiety and risk calculation. He is still careful. The care never disappears, it's structural, it's load-bearing, it's what everything else is built on. But careful and restrained are not the same thing, and he has stopped being restrained, and the difference is significant.
He is enormously strong. I know this in the abstract because he is a six foot nine Orc, but I know it now in a different way, in the way the sofa cushions don't give him enough resistanceand he compensates without effort, in the way he shifts me with one hand when the angle is wrong, in the way my entire body fits inside the frame of his attention with room to spare. There is something about being this comprehensively contained, every point of my periphery occupied by the size and heat of him, that trips a circuit in my brain that I wasn't previously aware I had.
"You need to tell me," he says, his voice a low rumble against my skin, "if anything?—"
"I'll tell you." My hands at the waist of his trousers. "I promise I'll tell you." A pause, and then, because I need him to understand this clearly, I add, "I'm not telling you to stop."
He exhales, long and slow, and lowers his forehead to mine for one moment, and his eyes are closed, and I feel the exact moment his last remaining calculation concludes, the final risk assessment filed and settled, and then he opens his eyes and they are dark amber now, deep and without reservation, and he says, very quietly and completely without hesitation,
"Good."
I wakeup and the first thing I register is that I'm warm, which is unusual, because my sofa throws are inadequate and I usually wake up cold when I fall asleep out here. The second thing I register is that I'm wrapped in what appears to be every blanket I own, tucked so thoroughly and with such structural intentionality that it takes me a moment to work out how to extricate an arm. The third thing I register is the silence.
Full silence.
The sofa cushions are back in place. The teacup is washed and in the drying rack, the delicate porcelain handle pointing upright at a careful angle. The towel I gave him is folded on the arm of the chair, a precise rectangle.
The apartment is immaculate, every trace of him tidied away with the methodical efficiency of someone who didn't want to leave a mess, or possibly didn't want to leave evidence, and I sit on my own sofa wrapped in all my own blankets and I look at the empty flat and I think, with a clarity that has not yet been blunted by sleep,
He's gone.
CHAPTER 8
NAROD
The spreadsheet has not changed in forty-seven minutes.
