I am also a person who just watched a six-foot-nine Orc stand up to his full, terrifying height and dismantle my ex-boyfriend using nothing but bone density statistics and the tone of voice of someone who genuinely might, under slightly different circumstances, do exactly what he is describing, and then sit back down and look at me like I am the only data point in the room that matters.
So I ask for the check.
The bartender produces it with admirable speed, and Narod reaches for it before I have even registered its existence on the table, his large hand covering it completely, and I open my mouth to protest on principle, and he says,
"Please."
Just that. One word, low and careful, and he is looking at me with those soft amber eyes behind the wire-rimmed glasses, earnest and slightly desperate, and I close my mouth again.
"Fine," I say. "But I'm splitting the next one."
"There will be a next one?"
I look at him. He is asking with total sincerity, his heavy brow slightly furrowed, his pen hovering over the bill, and the fact that he is genuinely uncertain, that after all of tonight, the cosmopolitan and the listening and the Chad demolition and the growl, he is still sitting there calculating odds and coming up uncertain, does something to my chest that I refuse to examine in any depth right now.
"Narod." I lean forward slightly. "There is going to be a next one."
He gazes at me for a long, suspended moment, and then something in his expression shifts, the careful, guarded blankness that he wears like armour just cracking open at the edges, and he writes the tip with a slightly unsteady hand.
We collect our coats from the rack near the door, and the bartender says something cheerful and entirely irrelevant to us as we leave, and then we are outside.
The city hits us both at once.
The rain is not a drizzle. The rain is not even a downpour in the polite, cinematic sense, the sort that descends gently on people making significant life decisions in romantic comedies. This is a full structural assault, fat heavy drops driving down sideways on a sharp April wind that shoves itself immediately up my sleeves and under my collar, and I gasp at the cold shock of it and spin to face Narod, who is standing on the pavement looking up at the sky with a genuine, deeply scientific interest.
"The precipitation index for this evening was forecast at forty-two percent," he says, raising his voice slightly over the roar of it. "I underweighted the humidity data."
"Narod!" I grab his arm, or attempt to, my fingers closing around approximately half his wrist. "My flat is two blocks. Run."
He looks down at me, blinking rain from his lashes. "I can—I could carry?—"
"Run," I say firmly, and I start running.
He runs.
He runs like something with a very different relationship to physics than the rest of us, his long legs eating up the pavement in strides that I have to triple to match, but he sees almost immediately that he is pulling ahead and adjusts, shortening his gait so that we are side by side, and I am half-laughing, half gasping, my shoes filling with water at the kerb crossing, my hair plastered flat to my skull in approximately four seconds.
The street lamps blur and double through my soaked glasses, and I pull them off and shove them into my coat pocket for the last half-block, navigating by sheer muscle memory toward the familiar shape of my building's door, and then we arethere, under the shallow overhang, and I am fumbling with my keys with hands that are cold and slightly shaking, and Narod is standing directly behind me, shielding me from the worst of the wind with the sheer physical fact of his body, and he is drenched, his sweater vest dark with water, his broad shoulders streaming, and he looks, objectively, deeply absurd and completely wonderful.
The key goes in. The door opens.
"Come in," I say.
The lobby of my building is narrow and lit by the flickering bulb on the second floor that the property management company has been promising to replace since March, and Narod steps through the main door with automatic, practised caution, ducking his head, angling his shoulders, performing the particular geometry that I realise he must perform constantly, every door, every room, every public space designed for a human body and not his.
We take the stairs because my lift is also a conversation with the property management company that I have been losing for eight months, and Narod fills the stairwell in a way that makes the stairwell feel like a different sort of space entirely, warm and close and deeply aware of him.
Third floor. My door. Keys again, steadier this time, and I push it open and reach in to flick on the hall light and step inside, turning back to him with what I intend to be a casual, welcoming gesture.
"Come in, I've got towels, obviously, and I think there might be something that could fit—" I stop, because I am re-evaluating the "fit" portion of that sentence in real time while looking at his shoulders. "There might be something in the general vicinity of your torso that?—"
"I am certain I can manage," he says. "Thank you."
He steps through the door.
The doorframe is standard width. Narod is not standard width by a significant margin, and the hallway beyond it is narrow in the particular way of old city buildings, with the bookshelf that I have been meaning to reorganise since I moved in pressed up against the left wall, and the coat rack that my mother gave me as a flat-warming gift taking up the right.
He makes it through the door.
