She’ll know when I give her the song.
I just have to figure out how.
Across town, I’m almost certain, Grulk is telling someone he’s solved the problem.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Honey
Thursday at three, the Taproom still feels half asleep, the noise of the night not yet returned to it. There are two regulars at the far end of the bar. Walt is somewhere in the back. Grulk on his usual stool, which he has occupied since before the doors opened because Grulk operates on Grulk time and Grulk time begins whenever Grulk arrives.
I’ve been here twenty minutes.
I came because Kragen asked me to, which is a thing I’ve started doing—going where he asks, without making a project of whether I should. It turns out to be easy. This is the information I’ve been sitting with for two months: being with him is easy in a way that used to be theoretical. I knew easy was possible. I’d never found it in practice.
He’s behind the bar doing the things bartenders do at three on a Thursday—checking inventory, wiping down surfaces that are already clean, talking to the two regulars without quite facing them. He moves through his shift with one hand partly on me the whole time—not possessively, just continuously. A hand at my back when he passes behind me. His fingers finding mine on the bar for a moment before letting go and picking up a glass.
He does this without thinking. That’s the part that gets to me, if I’m being honest, which I’ve been trying to be: the not thinking about it. The hand at my back is not a decision he makes. It’s just where his hand goes.
He comes around the bar and leans against my side of it, close enough that his arm is against mine, and reads something on his phone. He mentions the beer delivery coming in Thursday instead of Friday and I say something about the disruption to his whole week and he gives me that look—the one that starts as a smile and becomes an entirely different conversation—and he puts two fingers under my chin, tips my face up, and kisses me once. Brief. Like punctuation.
Then he goes back to looking at his phone.
The domesticity of it lands somewhere behind my sternum and stays there, which is new. I’ve been letting things land lately. Stopped holding them at a distance. I’m not sure when that happened exactly, somewhere between the creek and the bar that night and my grandmother’s house. A door I’d kept shut for years opened, and I walked through it, and I haven’t wanted to go back. This is important information. I am a person who minds things. I have not been minding this.
It has occurred to me, quietly, more than once in the last month, that I might be enough. Not what I was at seventeen. Not exceptional. Just… this. Just me. It’s the first time I’ve thought that since the injury, and I haven’t examined it too closely because I’m afraid of what examining it will do. It felt too fragile to look at directly. Like it would dissolve if I named it.
The delivery buzzer sounds from the back.
“Give me ten minutes,” he says. He puts his hand on my shoulder as he passes—once, briefly, not thinking about it—and disappears through the back door.
Grulk moves from his stool to the one beside me with the unhurried certainty of a male who has been waiting for exactly this window.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” he says. “You know,” he says, “I’ve known Kragen since before the Emergence.” He settles his elbows on the bar, comfortable, unhurried. “I know what he looks like when something matters to him. I know what he looks like when it doesn’t.”
“Okay,” I say.
“What you made him.” He gives me a meaningful look. “The dulcimer. He told me. What you did with the flowers.”
And suddenly I understand everything differently, not in a way that feels survivable.
“He described them once,” I say. “Thevelara. I just followed where the work went.”
“Yes.” Grulk says it like I’ve confirmed something. “That is exactly it. You followed where the work went. You heard him describe a flower from his world, once, briefly, and weeks later you reproduced it from that single conversation. The paint matched the color he described. You covered the whole soundboard.” He pauses. “Do you know what that is, in Orc culture? Across all clans, not just StillWater?”
I look at him. “Tell me.”
“It’s calledor’nok.” He says it with the weight of something old. “The perfect gift. Not because it was expensive or difficult. Because it could only have come from someone who was truly, completely paying attention. You witnessed him. In orc culture, that’s the rarest thing you can give someone.” He shakes his head, wonder on his face. “You didn’t know you were doing it. You just followed your hands. And your hands gave him the most meaningful thing one person can give another.”
Something opens in my chest. Because that’s exactly what happened, I did see him. I followed my hands, and my hands followed what I’d heard, and what I’d heard was him, genuinely: the homesickness he didn’t perform, the flower he didn’t mean to miss. I saw him, and I made something from what I saw, and it mattered.
For a moment, before the next sentence arrives, I feel it: the clean satisfaction of having been right about a person.
The bar is very quiet.
I hear the regulars at the far end. The refrigeration units behind the bar. The faint sound of the delivery through the back wall.
“What happens,” I say, “when someone receives a gift like that?”
