Page 76 of Grumpy Pucking Orc
The door swooshed open, and Escellates hopped down the stairs. The team rose and walked along the narrow space between the row of seats as if we were sedated. Bwat and I were the last to leave Bus, grabbing our bags from the pile alongside the transportation beast. Inside the opulent building, we waited for Escellates to procure our key cards and inform us which rooms we’d have. I’d expected that we’d share rooms, but I was annoyed to find that my roomie for the next two nights would be Eng.
Eng didn’t seem pleased either, but he probably wouldn’t have been pleased to share a room with anyone since he considered himself above us all.
The pair of us took the lift-box up to the sixteenthfloor in silence. It took us a bit of walking around to find our room, then longer to figure out how the cards worked to open the door. Once inside, we dropped our bags and looked around, each of us scouting out how to divide up the minuscule territory.
There were two narrow beds separated by a tiny table with a plastic lamp, a clock, and a blocky plastic device with a glowing set of numbers. Two feet from the right-side bed was an open closet door and another door leading to a cramped room with a toilet, a sink, and a shower so small I wasn’t sure either of us could comfortably fit in. The left-side bed was so close to the heating device that the thinnest human couldn’t squeeze between them. Over the heating device was a thick swath of curtain. At the end of the left-side bed was a narrow desk with a chair barely wide enough to accommodateoneof my butt-cheeks.
“This is the shit of Morfests,” Eng snapped. “Do they know I am a prince of a kingdom? An orc of significance.”
“You’re nobody here,” I informed him. “Just another oaf entertaining humans on the ice.”
“Well, this entertaining oaf is claiming the bed on the right.” He threw himself down on the mattress before I could protest.
Mine would be the bed on the left—the one inches from the heating device. I sighed and headed into the bathroom. Eng might have claimed the better bed, but I was going to shower first.
The hot water washed away the grime of travel but did nothing to soothe the ache I felt all through my body and heart. Thinking of Jordan, I brushed my teeth, taking special care to scrub my tusks to a shining white. When I went into the room with the beds, I noticed Eng was fastasleep, even though he’d slept the entire ride from Baltimore.
Naked, I sat on my bed, pulled aside the curtains, and gasped.
We were high above many of the buildings around us, and our tiny room with its minimal luxuries more than made up for any deficiencies by this view. In a straight line between two high-rises, I saw the giant lake before me—the inland sea of Michigan. Tiny waves rippled toward the shore. The lake was so vast that I could not see anything but an expanse of water before me. A boat bobbed in the dawn light, and as I watched, a woman breached the surface of the water, arching her back and flinging her red water-drenched hair over her shoulders. A pod of mermaids followed her path.
I smiled, awed by the wonder before me. Homesickness always retreated when I saw these sights. Children at a playground. Judy-the-cat playing with a reflected light. Jordan’s expression when she looked up at me as we cuddled together.
Would it be so horrible to stay here? Could I? There were promises I’d made, a life I’d mapped out. What would happen if I remapped that life? What would happen if I tried to create a new future for myself?
With Jordan. Because without her, the old plans of my future seemed empty.
Chapter 33
Jordan
“He hasn’t texted me back,” I fretted to Willa and Abby.
It was an emergency friend meeting. With ice cream. And Judy sitting on the coffee table with her tail swishing back and forth as she sent a narrow-eyed glare my way. I’d told my friends the whole story from proposal to my panicked refusal. I’d hated that Ozar and I had left things that way, that Ozar had gotten on the bus with so much unresolved and unsaid between us.
“Do you think it’s over?” I asked. “That him ghosting me after my text means we’re done?”
“I’m sure he just needs time to process this whole thing.” Abby patted my arm sympathetically.
“Yeah. Process the fact that you kicked him to the curb,” Willa said, much less sympathetically.
“I didn’t kick him to the curb,” I argued. “He surprised me. With the proposal and the whole going back to his clan to live forever thing. I said no because I could hardly accept his proposal with those strings attached.”
“Strings.” Abby snorted. “More like chains.”
“I’m sure Ozar didn’t consider them chains,” Willa countered. “Seriously, you guys never talked about this before? I mean, you really never imagined that he might intend on going back home after a short stint here, and that a relationship with him might involve moving on your part?”
“No,” I snapped, annoyed at her taking the orc’s side in this.
“Willa does have a point,” Abby said. “You had to have known he’d want to go home at least to visit.”
I stared at her, feeling betrayed.
“My friend Marisa married a guy who was here from Taiwan for his postdoc,” Abby continued, seemingly unaware of my glare. “It’s an insanely long and expensive flight, and they both obviously wanted to be near friends and family, and to bring their children up immersed in each parent’s culture…it took a lot of negotiation for them to work it all out.”
She wasn’t wrong. Ozar’s and my situation actuallywassimilar to Marisa and her Taiwanese husband, except her husband and his family and friends were human, where Ozar’s weren’t. But did that really matter? Cultural and language differences along with geographic distance had destroyed many a human romance over the centuries, too.
“What happened with Marisa and the postdoc guy?” Willa asked.
