Then I look at the door of my office, through the glass panel of which I can see, across the open-plan floor, the front desk, and behind the front desk, Grukka's massive shoulders, and in front of Grukka's massive shoulders, a woman who is carrying a canvas tote bag and standing with her weight on one hip in the specific posture of someone who has decided to be unintimidated and is succeeding through sheer force of intention.
The conditional formatting in Column G continues to be flawless.
I press the intercom button.
"Please send her in."
CHAPTER 9
LIVIA
The receptionist, who is as large as a small building and has a scar running from her left tusk to her right eyebrow in a diagonal line that suggests a very decisive opponent, holds up one hand as I approach the front desk.
"Human." She says it the way a customs official saysnext, flat and final and utterly without malice, which somehow makes it worse. "Do you have an appointment?"
"No." I set my tote bag down on her desk, which brings it to roughly mid-thigh on her, and I straighten my cardigan. "But I have a very specific grievance and about forty-five minutes of annual leave I haven't used, so I'm going to need you to tell Narod Guumstrop that Livia Chordas is here, and I would strongly recommend doing it quickly, because I did my hair this morning specifically for this and I would like to still be angry when I walk through that door."
She peers at me. Her amber eyes, a shade darker than Narod's, do a slow, thorough inventory of my person, cataloguing, I imagine, my sensible flats, my dark-framed glasses, and the fact that my hands are shaking very slightly despite my best efforts. Whatever she finds in this assessment,her expression shifts by approximately three degrees in a direction that I choose to interpret as respect.
She presses the intercom.
Whatever Narod says on the other end makes something in her heavy brow do a complicated, private thing, the ghost of what might, on a less weathered face, be called amusement. She lifts her hand and points toward the glass-panelled office at the far end of the floor, and I walk.
I do not look at the other Orcs. There are many of them, arranged at reinforced desks in neat rows, wearing variations of Narod's particular brand of office-worker sincerity, and every single one of them is watching me cross the floor. I can feel it, the collective weight of a dozen pairs of large amber eyes tracking my progress, and I keep my chin level and my stride purposeful and think very deliberately about amortisation schedules, because focusing on amortisation schedules has historically been my most reliable method of keeping my heartrate at a functional level.
I push open the door to his office. I close it behind me. On reflection, the word "slam" is accurate.
"Livia," he says. His voice does the thing where it is simultaneously very large and very small, filling the room and retreating from it at the same time. "I was just?—"
"Were you writing me an email?" My voice comes out at a register I recognise as the one I use in review meetings when the numbers don't reconcile. "Were you genuinely sitting here, the morning after the best night I have had in two years, writing me a formal apology email?"
His jaw does something complicated. His large hands, folded on the desk in front of him with the careful intentionality of a man trying very hard to look composed, tighten against each other. "I was attempting to address several areas of concern that I identified upon reflection?—"
"Narod."
"—specifically regarding the potential for physiological incompatibility in terms of?—"
"Narod."
He stops. His eyes, behind the delicate wire frames, find mine and stay there, and they are doing the thing they did last night on the sofa, that warm, overwhelmed, helpless thing, and I feel it hit me somewhere in the chest with the same force it hit me then.
"You ghosted me," I say. Flat. Direct. The numbers don't lie. "You were there and then you weren't, and I woke up to a blanket tucked around me, which was a lovely gesture that I would have appreciated significantly more if you had still been attached to it, and then there was nothing. No text, no note, no low-probability follow-up." I pull my glasses off, rub the bridge of my nose once, put them back. "I had to get your work address from the bar, Narod. I described you to the bartender and he said, and I'm quoting directly, 'oh, the big sweet one who apologised for the water glass,' and he gave me your business card, which you apparently left on the table along with an extremely generous tip."
Something in his face shifts, a kind of flinching that doesn't involve any actual movement, internal and entirely visible. He looks down at his folded hands.
"I thought," he says, and then stops, and he does the thing I've now seen him do three times, where he measures each word before releasing it, making sure of its dimensions, checking it for sharp edges. "I thought that when you woke up, and you saw me there, me in your space, taking up your sofa and probably your entire living room, you would be—" He pauses. "I know how I look in the morning, Livia. Without the effort. Without the filed tusks and the pressed shirt and the rehearsed small talk. I thought you would look at me and the numbers would change."
The room is silent. Through the glass panel of the door, I am peripherally aware of the open-plan office existing, but it feels very far away.
"What numbers?" I ask, and my voice has done the thing it does when I stop performing practical and start being it.
"The ones that made you stay." He lifts his eyes to mine, and they are entirely unguarded in a way that makes my ribs feel insufficient. "You stayed for the appetisers. You said you would. And I thought that was—I thought that was conditional on the version of me that was managing his presentation correctly, and I don't know what I am when I stop managing it. I haven't—" He exhales, a slow, controlled breath through his nose. "I haven't stopped managing it in front of a human before."
I come around the desk. This requires navigating a significant gap between the desk and the wall that was clearly designed with an Orc in mind, and I have to turn partially sideways to achieve it, which does slightly undercut the dramatic momentum of the gesture, but I manage it, and I end up standing beside his chair, close enough that I have to tip my head back to properly look at him even though he is sitting down.
"Stand up," I say.
He blinks. "What?"
