"Stand up, please. I would like to make a point and I can't make it effectively when you are at this angle."
He unfolds from the chair slowly, the way a very large, very cautious thing unfolds when it is not entirely sure of its welcome, and then he is standing, and he is 6'9" in a blue shirt with his glasses slightly crooked and his massive shoulders pulled in and forward with that terrible habitual hunch, the one that saysI know I take up too much room, I know I'm too much, I know, and it hits me somewhere soft and specific, that hunch. It hitsme the way it hit me when he held the porcelain teacup with two fingers and looked genuinely afraid of it.
I reach up. My arms don't quite reach his shoulders at full extension, so I get his upper arms, my hands wrapping around approximately a third of each one, and I push. Not hard. Just the clear, directional suggestion of the motion. "Stop doing that."
He doesn't move. But his breath changes.
"The hunch," I clarify. "Stop doing it. You're not too big, Narod. You are the exact right size for someone who is also built like a small fortress and drinks cosmopolitans because he likes the colour and spent three hours practising small talk in a mirror before a date he gave a twelve percent probability of success." I keep my hands on his arms. My thumbs trace the fabric of his shirt. "The version of you that stopped managing it is the version that tucked a blanket around me. And that's the one I got on the bus in the rain to come and find."
The amber behind his glasses does something I cannot fully describe. The flinching quality of his expression dissolves, slowly, the way a very careful knot loosens when you find the right thread, and what's underneath it is just him, large and earnest and entirely present.
"I calculated," he says, very quietly, "the probability that you came here because you were angry."
"It's high. I'm still angry." I am still touching his arms. I have not moved my hands. "And?"
"And the probability that you came here because you wanted to find me." A pause. "That number is higher."
"Significantly," I confirm.
He breathes out. His shoulders drop, not forward, not the hunch, but down, the natural release of something held too long, and the effect on his posture is immediate and dramatic, a full inch of unnecessary tension gone, and he looks like himself, likethe actual shape of him, which is large and a little rumpled and entirely genuine.
His hand comes up, slowly, telegraph clear in its intention, and he tucks a strand of wet hair behind my ear where the rain walk this morning has made a liar of my straightening efforts, his touch careful in the specific way that large hands are careful when they have learned to be, precise and unhurried.
"I'm very glad," he says, "that you take the bus."
"The tube was quicker but I needed to stay angry for the walk," I admit.
The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile yet, but the infrastructure of one, and I feel the specific, structural satisfaction of a number that finally reconciles.
The fire alarm goes off.
It is not subtle. It is the full, immediate, no-ambiguity-available shriek of a building-wide system engaging, the kind of alarm that bypasses cognition entirely and speaks directly to the part of the brain that controls legs, and for approximately two seconds neither of us moves, we just look at each other while the sound tears through the ceiling above us.
Then the office outside his glass door becomes a sea of extremely large bodies all moving in the same direction with the coordinated urgency of people who have done evacuation drills and take them seriously, and his office door opens, and Grukka's head appears in the gap, her scar illuminated briefly by the emergency lighting that flickers on along the ceiling.
"Narod. Evacuation. Stairwell B." She glances at me with the flat, assessing expression she gave me when I arrived, and then back at him. "She comes too, presumably."
"Yes," Narod says, and he says it with a steadiness that has nothing to do with alarm management and everything to do with the fact that approximately forty-five seconds ago I told him to stop making himself smaller, and something in him is decidingto try. He puts his hand, briefly and carefully, at the small of my back to guide me toward the door, and even through the cardigan the warmth of it is significant, a whole-palm warmth that has a specific gravitational quality.
The floor empties fast. Orcs, I will note, are efficient evacuators. The stairwell door is at the end of the corridor, a heavy fire door with a push bar, and we reach it as the last of the office files through, the crowd compressing briefly in the doorway because even a wide commercial stairwell is only so wide, and there is a moment of collective shuffling and then we are through, and the door swings shut behind us with the solid, conclusive sound of a fire door's auto-latch engaging, and then the stairwell is dim, warm and entirely, abruptly still.
Above us, the retreating footsteps of the evacuation echo upward and then fade, the emergency exit at the top of the building swallowing the last of the sound, and then it is just the alarm, muffled now by the heavy door, and the two of us, standing on the landing between floors in the amber glow of the emergency lighting.
Narod pushes the door handle.
It doesn't move.
He pushes it again, deliberately, with the considered force of someone who is checking that they have the physics correct before escalating, and the door remains entirely committed to its current position.
"Auto-lock," he says. "Fire door protocol. It releases when the alarm system resets or when the emergency service override is engaged from the outside." He looks at me over his shoulder, his glasses catching the amber light. "We're locked in."
The alarm continues its muffled conversation with the building around us.
I look at the locked door. I look at the stairwell, its concrete walls, its emergency lighting, its complete and total absence ofother people. I look at Narod, 6'9" of him, filling the landing with his presence in a way that the landing was not entirely designed for, his shoulder a few inches from the railing, his collar slightly open, his expression carrying the specific quality of a man recalculating.
"Right," I say. My voice is very level. "Well."
He turns to face me fully, and the landing is not large, and the emergency lighting is doing something warm and low to the specific angle of his jaw, and very suddenly and very completely, I am still angry at him. I came here on a bus and I am also still thinking about last night, and the blanket, and his hands.
