Livia's head tips back. She is looking at me with that particular expression, the one that still, after five months, produces a cascade of internal processing errors that I have entirely stopped trying to troubleshoot. Her eyes are bright behind her glasses and her smile is wide and completely unguarded and she is, by every available metric I have ever developed, the most remarkable thing I have ever had the statistical improbability of being adjacent to.
"Did you just laugh?" she says.
"I produced a vocalisation consistent with genuine amusement, yes."
"Narod." She turns fully toward me, both hands coming up to press flat against the lapels of my jacket, a habit she has developed that I have catalogued extensively because it initiates when she is pleased with me. "That was a laugh. That was a real, actual laugh. About Chad."
"The probability of him completing his corporate diversity initiative this afternoon has dropped significantly," I say. "I estimate he will spend the remainder of the festival in the artisanal mead tent, reassessing his self-narrative. I find that statistically appropriate."
She laughs then, fully, with her whole body, and she grabs my lapels for balance, and I settle both hands at her waist because this is also a habit I have developed, the reflex to make myself into a stable structure whenever she needs one, and I find I do not wish to break this particular habit under any circumstances.
The festival moves around us. Drums pulse in overlapping rhythms from the eastern pavilion, and the smoke from Greta's grandmother's fire pit carries the smell of charred meat and woodsmoke and something sweet and resinous that is uniquely, specifically this, the smell of home that I had mostly stopped expecting to find anywhere outside of my grandmother's house. Children run past shrieking with excitement, several of themtrailing streamers in the traditional clan colours, their parents following at a dignified distance that deteriorates rapidly as the children accelerate. An elder from the northern delegation is engaged in what appears to be a deeply contentious debate about the correct ratio of grain to honey in the autumn festival bread, and two of my colleagues from the firm have set up an entirely unsanctioned probability betting pool on the outcome.
She has stopped laughing but kept her hands on my lapels. She looks up at me. "He didn't even make you twitch," she says. The note in her voice is not quite disbelief but something adjacent to wonder, something that sounds like a person watching a model function exactly as designed and being delighted by the confirmation.
"No," I agree.
"A few months ago you would have stood up and started quoting bone density statistics."
"A few months ago I was operating under a fundamental misapprehension regarding the comparative value of concealment versus presence," I say. I consider the words as I say them, the way they sit, and find them accurate but incomplete. "Also I was considerably more frightened."
She tilts her head. "Of Chad?"
"Of everything," I say, which is precise, and simple, and truer than almost anything I have said aloud in my adult life. "Of myself, primarily. Of what I was. Of what I might do to things I cared about simply by being fully what I am." I look at her face. I look at the gold bracelet, which she chose, which she did not allow me to make smaller or lighter for easier wearing. "I ran the model incorrectly for a very long time. I was using the wrong inputs."
Her hands slide up from my lapels to the front of my collar, a small, deliberate adjustment, and she straightens a seam that doesn't need straightening, and I understand this as the LiviaChordas equivalent of an extremely full and complete emotional communication, delivered in the language of small, precise physical gestures rather than words, because she is, among many things, a woman who speaks in the same functional dialect I do, and I find this almost unbearably wonderful.
"Better inputs now?" she asks.
"Substantially improved," I say. "Current model is performing within acceptable parameters."
"Narod."
"It is performing," I say, because I know what she actually wants, and I have been practising directness, I have been practising it with the same rigorous dedication I once applied to filing my tusks and moderating my posture, "exceptionally."
Her smile does the thing. The specific thing, the one that began this entire sequence of events, the one that destroyed my grip on a water glass on a Tuesday night in a cocktail bar and has been dismantling my more counterproductive operating assumptions ever since. It starts at the corner of her mouth and moves through her eyes and it produces, every single time, a chest-level warmth that I have entirely abandoned attempts to quantify.
I pull her in, both arms wrapping around her properly, at my scale, which means she fits neatly against my chest with her head at my collarbone. She doesn't stiffen or adjust or make herself smaller to accommodate the proportional difference, she simply settles. The festival continues its noise and warmth around us. I rest my chin on her head. Her arms go around my torso as far as they reach, which is approximately sixty percent of the circumference, and she holds on.
I am standing in the Orc Cultural Festival with my mate pressed against my chest, completely visible, not hunching, not performing, not calculating an exit from my own existence, andthe sensation of it is something my spreadsheets do not have a column for.
She tips her head back to look up at me. "Skewer," she says.
"Greta's stand is twelve metres to our left," I confirm.
She detaches from my chest with the reluctance she always performs about detaching, which I have come to understand as a highly meaningful data point, and takes my hand, and we move through the festival crowd together. The crowd adjusts around us in the way crowds always do around me, the instinctive parting, the glances, the small recalibrations of proximity, and I am always aware of it, but I have reclassified it in the past several months from evidence of threat to simply the physics of the situation, a large body displacing the air and space around it the way large bodies do, nothing more required of me on the subject.
Livia squeezes my hand. She does this when she registers that I have gone slightly internal, that the processing has turned evaluative rather than present, and the squeeze says, in her precise and efficient language, that she is here and it is fine and I can come back now. I come back.
Greta's grandmother is a woman of approximately eighty years who stands just over seven feet tall and has forearms that could arrest the forward motion of a medium-sized vehicle. She is operating her skewer stand with the intensity of someone who has been perfecting this specific recipe for six decades and takes the quality of the result personally. When she sees us approaching, her expression shifts into the warm, evaluating squint she adopted for Livia the first time they met, and which Livia, characteristically, met directly without flinching.
"You came back," she says to Livia.
"I told you I would," Livia says. "The skewer was worth it."
Greta's grandmother makes a sound deep in her chest that is the closest thing to approval her register contains. She produces two skewers from the coals, the enormous, full-sized ones,loaded with several cuts of meat and charred vegetables in the traditional festival style, and holds one out to each of us. Livia receives hers with both hands because the ergonomics require it and immediately takes a bite off the end. I eat mine in a considerably more efficient proportion per bite.
We walk. The festival stretches its lanes and pavilions out around us, and I know this geography well, I know the drum circle and the story tent and the metalwork displays and the seed blessing ceremony that Livia has already asked to attend because she found the agricultural symbolism historically interesting, which is exactly the kind of observation she makes that continues to produce the processing errors. I know the late afternoon trajectory of the light here, the way it comes gold and horizontal through the pavilion fabric, the way it makes everything amber and warm, the way it is making her look right now, walking beside my elbow with her festival skewer and her borrowed festival bracelet, slightly windswept, entirely unbothered.
