The rain is just starting.
I flag a cab.
The ride takes twenty minutes.I spend it with my forehead against the cold glass and my phone in my hand, which I haveopened to his contact three times and closed again, because I do not want to give him the option of preparing a response. Narod's prepared responses are very polite and completely impenetrable. I need the version of him that's still sitting in the feeling, not the version that's had time to build a spreadsheet around it.
I know his neighbourhood now. We've walked it on the two Sunday mornings I've managed to drag him out of his apartment before noon, which requires a negotiation that I've begun to enjoy unreasonably. The cab drops me on the corner with the all-night newsagent and the Orc-scaled bus shelter, which always startles me slightly because it's about four feet taller than the human ones and makes me feel like I've shrunk in the wash.
I pull up his number and call.
It rings. And rings. And clicks to voicemail.
"Narod." I start walking. "I know you're doing the thing where you decide what's best for me without consulting me, and I need you to know that I have some very serious notes on that methodology." The rain picks up. I tuck my chin into my collar. "Also, I'm outside. So."
I hang up.
His building is three streets north, a converted industrial block that the building company fitted for mixed occupancy ten years ago, which in practice means the Orc residents have the upper four floors where the ceilings are higher and the structural reinforcement is heavier, and the lifts have two sets of buttons at two different heights. The lobby buzzer is enormous. I press his flat number and wait.
Silence.
I press it again.
I hold it.
I reach into my bag for the key.
He gave it to me two weeks ago, Tuesday. We weren't even having a significant moment. I was leaving his flat and couldn't find my left shoe, which had somehow ended up on top of the refrigerator, and while I was constructing a frustrated theory about this—"Okay, there isnological explanation for how footwear achieves that kind of vertical displacement unless you physically relocated it, and I need you to know that I am keeping a mental spreadsheet of these incidents"—he pressed the key into my hand with no preamble, just placed it in my palm and closed my fingers around it and went back to making his coffee.
I stared at the small piece of metal. "What is this?"
"It is a key," he said, not looking up from the French press.
"Iknowwhat it is, Narod."
He was quiet for a moment, his massive shoulders hunching slightly the way they did when he was calculating how to phrase something. "I did not want you to have to wait in the corridor," he said finally, "if you arrived before I got home from work. The corridor is draughty. I find this thought... unacceptable."
I stared at him. At his enormous green back, at the way his wire-rimmed glasses had slid down his nose, at the careful, deliberate way he was measuring coffee grounds like he hadn't just handed me a key to his home on a random Tuesday morning.
He cleared his throat. "You are also welcome to reorganise the kitchen shelves. If you would like. I can tell that the current configuration bothers you."
Which was the single most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me in my entire adult life.
The key is heavy and slightly oversized and it opens the ground floor door, then the stairwell door, then his flat on the third floor.
I climb the stairs.
His door is reinforced steel,matte grey, which I thought was excessive when I first saw it and have since been told is entirely standard for Orc residential lets because standard doors do not survive the combination of large bodies and the particular spatial unawareness that comes from living for years in slightly-too-small spaces. There are two small potted plants beside it on the floor. He waters them on a schedule. Of course he does.
I knock anyway. Hard, three times.
Nothing.
"Narod, I'm going to use the key."
I use the key.
The flat opens into a short hallway, which is a completely ordinary flat hallway except scaled like the world should have always been scaled, with a ceiling high enough that I could probably stack two of me and still have clearance, and hooks on the wall at a height that means I have to actively reach for them, and a shoe rack beside the door that holds two pairs of his shoes which are approximately a small canoe. I shrug my coat off and hang it on the lowest hook, which is still above my shoulder.
The lights are low. He didn't leave them off entirely, which means some part of him knew someone might come, or maybe he's just always careful about not walking back into a completely dark flat.
