"He was worried about you," I translate.
Narod's amber eyes do the thing, the softening thing, which I am now categorically powerless against. "That is a less precise but not inaccurate interpretation." He reaches up and straightens my glasses, which had migrated to approximately thirty degrees off-centre. His fingers are very careful around the frames. "We should return to the building."
"We should absolutely return to the building," I agree, and reach up on my toes and kiss him once, firmly, on the corner of his jaw where his tusk curves, because I have learned over the past three weeks that this is the precise location that produces the most interesting physiological response in a six-foot-nine Orc actuary, and I am a data-driven person.
The rumble I get in response rattles right down into my back molars.
We collect my cardigan from the railing.
The next three weeks are,by any measurable standard, ridiculous. Narod's reinforced desk chair gets moved to my apartment on a Tuesday evening, ostensibly so he has "appropriate ergonomic support" when he reviews actuarial tables after dinner, and it occupies approximately a third of my living room and I do not ask him to move it back. My kettle, which was a perfectly adequate kettle for one person, gets replaced with a commercial-grade model that can produce enough hot water for his preferred quantity of tea without cycling four times, and the new one sits on my counter like a small industrial appliance and I make my morning coffee standing next to it with a certain domestic satisfaction I refuse to fully interrogate.
He learns that I take my tea before I'm ready to form sentences. I learn that he has specific, strong, well-reasoned opinions about the correct ratio of filling to pastry in a sausage roll. He learns that I will tolerate any volume of actuarial table discussion if it's delivered in the low, even voice he uses when he's comfortable, the one that I'm becoming convinced has a direct neurological pathway to my capacity for rational decision-making. I learn that he sleeps with one arm extended at a perfect ninety degrees, which means he needs approximately sixty percent of the available bed surface, and I've started sleeping in the curve of his shoulder where there is plenty of room and the ambient warmth is extraordinary.
It's good. It's very, very good, in a way that sneaks up on me while I'm looking at a spreadsheet or eating toast, this sudden awareness that something has settled into the correct position.
Which is exactly why, three weeks in, I call my oldest friends and invite them to dinner.
This, I will later reflect, is an error of significant magnitude.
I tellNarod about the dinner party on a Thursday evening. He is reviewing mortality tables at his desk chair, which has a small throw blanket draped over the back of it because the apartment gets cold and he expressed concern once that it seemed draughty near the window and I bought the blanket the next day and didn't explain it, and he used it without comment, which is a form of communication we have both apparently agreed upon.
"A dinner party," he says, in the tone of a man hearing about a scheduled medical procedure.
"Six people. My oldest friends. Maya and her husband, Dev, who are completely lovely. Priya, who is mostly lovely unless she's had more than two glasses of Pinot, and her partner James, who is consistently inoffensive. And Greta, who is my best friend since uni and who has been sending me increasingly aggressive texts asking to meet you, so honestly this is as much to appease her as anything else."
"I see." He sets his glasses down on the table. He does this when he is processing something of significant emotional weight and needs his visual field cleared for thinking. "And these individuals are, to your knowledge, aware that I am."
"An Orc?"
"Physiologically non-human. Substantially sized." A pause. "Possessed of tusks."
"I told them. Maya said, and I'm quoting directly, 'oh my God, send photos, immediately,' and then when I did she sent back eleven fire emojis and a very long voice note that I listened to with headphones for reasons that should be self-evident."
The amber eyes warm considerably. "That is a positive response."
"Maya is a positive person. The others I'm slightly less certain about, but they're my friends and they're going to be perfectly nice, and you are going to be perfectly fine, and I'mmaking your favourite lamb dish." I cross to the desk chair and lean against the arm, which is the correct structural choice given that the arm is reinforced steel and can tolerate the weight. "Narod. You've been to my work. You've met my colleague Reena who grabbed your arm and asked to feel your forearm for what she described as research purposes."
"I found that interaction within acceptable parameters," he confirms.
"You are going to be fine at a dinner party in my flat. Where you have your own desk chair."
He looks at the desk chair. Something works through his expression that I'm learning to read as the specific intersection of affectionate exasperation and the reluctant acceptance that I am correct.
"I will require," he says finally, "my good suit."
The good suitis a deep charcoal grey, custom made, because Narod attempted to buy a suit off the rack exactly once, in his mid-twenties, and he describes the experience in the same tone other people use to describe dental emergencies. It fits him properly across the shoulders, which means it fits him properly across the shoulders, and when he turns up at my door on Sunday evening at the precise agreed time with a bottle of wine chosen with what I can only describe as statistical rigour and a small, careful bunch of flowers that he holds in one enormous green hand with the delicacy of someone handling unexploded ordnance, I have to breathe for a moment in the doorway.
"You look good," I tell him.
"I ironed the shirt three times," he admits, which is absolutely the most Narod sentence that exists, and I stand on my toes and fix his collar, which doesn't need fixing, because I want an excuse to put my hands on the lapels of the suit.
The guests arrive in a cheerful, slightly chaotic wave. Maya enters first, clocks Narod across my living room, and physically grabs Dev's arm with both hands in the manner of someone bracing for impact.
"Hi," she says, directly to Narod. "I'm Maya. I sent the fire emojis."
Narod's posture, which had gone to full nervous formality, shifts by approximately three degrees toward something more habitable. "Livia informed me. They were," he considers, "well-received."
Maya beams at him like he's just passed a very important exam.
