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"Nothing's wrong." My smile arrives on time, professional, camera-ready, and completely useless on a man who reads grain with his fingertips. "We should talk. About a table. And a sponsor. And, um. A pitch."

His brow lowers. "I do not like the word pitch."

"Yeah," I say, coming down one stair at a time. "You're really not going to like this one."

CHAPTER 14

OGGAN

Ihear her on the stairs before I see her. Fourteen steps, and she takes them at the speed of a woman rehearsing a speech she does not want to give, which is slow at the top and fast at the bottom, courage arriving all at once near the landing.

I keep sanding the windowsill. A man who wants to say a hard thing should have wood in his hands. It gives the tremor somewhere to go.

She comes down the stairs holding her phone like it might bite, and she pitches the thing so fast the words tumble over each other and pile up at the bottom.

Fake dating. A sponsor. Six figures. Matching mugs. Six weeks. A love story for the internet to consume in small daily servings, brought to us by a furniture company, and then a clean ending, a friendly ending, where we announce we are better as friends and everyone buys a couch.

I set the windowsill on the sawhorse. The grain of it is beautiful, old growth, tight rings, a tree that stood two hundred years to become the ledge where she'll drink her coffee. I run my thumb along it while she talks. Anchoring myself. The way my mother taught me, hands on the wood, before you say a thing that cannot be unsaid.

"So it wouldn't be real," Jilly finishes, breathless. "We'd just pretend. For the cameras. Hold hands, do the couple stuff, and they finish paying for the house, and after the build we quietly say it didn't work out, and nobody has to actually feel anything they don't want to feel."

"No."

The word lands in the sawdust between us.

She blinks. "You didn't let me finish the terms. There are terms. Patsy built a whole deck, there's a clause about how many hand-holds per week, it's very reasonable, she capped it at..."

"I do not need the terms." I turn from the sawhorse to face her fully. She has to tilt her whole head back, and I hate that, I hate towering, but the truth needs my whole height behind it. "Jilly. I will build every stick of furniture in this house. I will wear the shirts. I will let the small woman point her lights at my face and I will not break them, though I will want to. This much I can give you, and I will give it gladly."

"But?"

"But Orcs do not fake affection."

Her mouth opens. Nothing comes out.

I step closer. The floor announces me and I let it. "You must understand what you are asking, so I will use small words and I will only say it once. When a human plays at love, it is a costume. You put it on, you take it off, no harm done, the skin underneath is untouched. You have done it before. You will do it again. This is not an insult. It is simply how your people are built."

"And your people?"

"When I was young," I say, "there was a boy in my clan who loved a girl who did not love him back. To spare her, she agreed to walk out with him for one season. To let him save face before the elders. A kindness, she called it. A costume, she called it. She meant nothing cruel by it."

Jilly stays very still.

"He held her hand at the harvest fire, and something in him took root that could not be pulled up. When the season ended and she took the costume off, he could not. There is no word in your language for what happened to him. The closest is 'grief,' but grief is for a thing you lost. He grieved a thing he never had, because his bones had already claimed it as his." I set my palm flat on the walnut, grounding. "The elders tell that story to warn the young. Do not offer an Orc a costume. He does not have the skin to wear it. He only has the skin underneath."

"For my people it does not work this way." My hand rises on its own and stops in the air between us, hovering over the place where her heart hammers under her collarbone. I do not touch. I do not yet trust myself to touch. "We do not have a costume version. There is no rehearsal, no soft launch, no clean ending drafted in advance by a woman with a deck. There is only the real thing. When an Orc claims someone, it is not a season. It is not content. It is a bond you carry into the ground, and past it, and it does not come off when the sponsorship ends."

Her breath goes shallow. That flush climbs her throat again, the one I have memorized against my own better judgment.

"So I cannot pretend to hold your hand for a farmhouse table," I say, quieter now, because the volume has drained out of me and left only bedrock. "My hands do not know how to lie. I have tried. As a young Orc I tried, to spare a girl's feelings, and it went so badly the elders still tell the story to warn the children. If I take your hand for a camera, the internet will not be looking at a performance. They will be looking at the truest thing I have ever done. And I will not spend the truest thing I have ever done as pocket change for a company that sells lamps."

"So HearthGlow can keep its lamps," I finish. "And keep its clean ending. I have no clean ending in me. I looked. There is only the wood, and the work, and the one direction the grain wants to go, and it does not reverse for a spring campaign."

"Six figures, though," she says, and it comes out cracked, and I understand she is not arguing for the money. She is giving me the exit. Building me a door out of the corner I just walked us into, the way she builds everything, carefully, so no one gets hurt on the edges.

"You would keep the house," she says. "You'd get your workshop faster. All of it, done, paid, safe, and all we'd have to do is hold hands on camera and lie a little."

"I would keep the house." I take one step, and the floor announces me, and she does not step back. "And lose the only thing in it I have started to want more than the workshop."