Misconstrued, p.26
Misconstrued, page 26
“Doing what?”
“Having sex. You are always upset after. With Romeo, you cried, but you blamed Erika seeing. With Mac you were very upset and didn’t touch any of us for days. I thought it was the attack,” he explained, “but you just tried to hurt yourself with the pillow.”
“I’m what with the pillow?” I asked.
“Pillow over your face so you can’t breathe. I am worried.”
“What? Hell no! I’m embarrassed and didn’t want you looking at me!”
He sat up and moved to the edge of the bed so his back was to me. “You don’t want to look at me,” he corrected. “I can understand why you are embarrassed. I am not a good choice.”
“It’s not like that,” I hurried to assure him, putting my hand on his shoulder. “Women don’t usually have four boyfriends at the same time.”
“You don’t have to,” he repeated. “Everyone can just pretend you like us.”
“I do like you, dummy!” I insisted. “I just don’t always understand you.”
“Romeo will be your favourite. I’m okay with that,” he explained. “I’m happy just to be here.”
“What makes you say that about Romeo?” I wondered, then I kissed his shoulder just because it was there.
Iago gave me a happy hum. “Lots of reasons. He changed his voice for you. He went first. He will fix your stove.”
“He’ll fix my stove?”
Iago tensed under my fingers. He just sounded worried when he added, “I did not let you and Erika move into the building she wanted.”
“Thank you,” I murmured. “This isn’t a trade, you know. I really am here because I want to be.”
“That is kind to say.”
“Well, I was right. That’s you overthinking this.” I shivered and hugged him. Part of it was wanting comfort, part of it was wanting warmth. “I’m cold. Come warm me up.”
I ended up using Iago as a heated and weighted blanket. His head on my chest and the rest of him splayed out over me. I ran my hands over his back and tried to just relax into his warmth.
“I don’t like being watched, either,” he admitted. “That is a problem.”
I looked over at Romeo’s empty bed. “No one’s watching.”
He hummed against my chest, then. It was like feeling the bass line at a good concert, but it wasn’t entirely a happy sound. “This isn’t allowed.”
“What isn’t?”
“Me holding you down,” he explained. “But I learned how to read.”
“You aren’t making any sense, Iago.”
He chuckled darkly and rubbed his face against me, warm skin and cool smooth tusks making an interesting contrast against my breasts. “Females—orc females—use us. They don’t want to be covered. It is too much like the bad parts of our history. Then I found books about humans mating. It is different. I want that.”
I suddenly had so many questions but was almost afraid to ask, “Are we talking about sex ed books here or porn?”
He stretched up and nibbled my neck without answering my question. “If Romeo was here, he would make me stop.”
“I don’t want you to stop.”
- - - -
When we got up in the morning, the house was empty. Iago was unconcerned. He led me through the shower and fed me breakfast. Eventually, I insisted he tell me what was going on and we went to the orchard.
It was swarming with orcs. They were carefully stripping the trees of the last of their fruit, and a team with shovels was already digging out the floor for my new house. Jo was buzzing around shouting orders and being obeyed. I headed over to talk to her first.
“Good morning, sleepy head!” she called when I got close. It caused a number of orcs to look up from what they were doing and briefly smirk at me before going back to work.
“Um …” Shit. I had no idea how to respond to that.
“Feeling better?” she continued. “I hear the final rusting place of your stove was really dusty. You could have come to the med bay for help with that, but I guess Mac is trained, too.”
“What’s going on here?” I asked in a desperate attempt to change the subject away from me.
“Oh! The stove is going there,” she explained pointing to the excavation site. “It will be fairly open. Sleeping room in the back. The garden has to go on the south side, so once Romeo mapped out how big you wanted it, we just started to work. If the weather doesn’t completely mess us about, it should be up and running in short order. Which is good, because we have to get the plants in before it’s too cold to move them. Fortunately, these boys work a lot faster than us humans were. Part of that is we have a better idea of what we’re doing now.
“We’re getting the barn fixed up for alpacas rather than sheep. There’s a herd we will move here once we have the orchard fenced off. There’s a lot of debate about who will be the other family to take care of them. Erika could have it if she wants, but between you and me, I’m not sure she’s up to farming.”
I blinked and tried to get my head around the idea. “She might try because they’re cute. She wasn’t interested in farming animals to eat, but this would be for wool, right?”
Jo wrinkled her nose at me. “Mostly wool,” she agreed. “I’m not sure she would be happy if we eat some of the babies. The orcs don’t have the resources to make lab meat for all of us.”
I was almost afraid to ask. “Lab meat?”
She blushed and looked away. “Yeah. That's how I felt when I found out, too. The meat the orcs eat is either meal worms or grown in a petri dish. They don’t have enough for all of them. Orcs in charge of humans are higher up the food chain—ha!—and so they eat better than the average orc, who gets the same cafeteria-style meals they serve in the camp.” Jo thought for a moment, then leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “Us offering to raise our own food helped, but I think there was already a raging debate among the orc elite about how to feed us all before we started talking about farming.”
“Huh.”
She nodded. “They’re so precious about the idea of taking care of women that they forget that we can do a lot to take care of ourselves.”
We watched the builders for a moment. They could pack a tire full of earth in a fraction of the time it had taken the human team.
“Do you have plans for the house I can look at?” I finally asked.
“Back in the office,” she assured me. “I also have a copy of your list, so that kind of dictated how the build would go.”
I froze. “How did you get a copy of my list?”
She snorted. “Honey, any of your boys can recite the damn thing. They’re all taking this very seriously.” Jo must have seen something on my face that made her add, “It’s a good list though. Well thought out. Practical.” She nodded at someone over my shoulder. “That one insisted on a bigger-than-standard bathroom, so you’re getting the sort of thing that makes me think of the word ‘grotto’ in the cheesy 1970’s sense of the word. I’m trying to keep it tasteful for you.”
She kept talking, but I was staring at Tybalt shoveling dirt into a tire and had stopped listening.
“Mina?”
I realized she had said my name more than once and I turned back to face her again.
Jo gave me a worried look. “This isn’t my place, but you have no one else to tell you.”
I panicked a little at that. “What?” I demanded.
She looked away and chewed her lip for a moment before making eye contact again. “Rumour has it that you aren’t overly fond of that one, but he has been working his ass off to get things set up for you. Just … give him a chance, okay?”
- - - -
There was a new blank book sitting on my pillow when I got home. It had a purple cover and thick cream coloured paper. There was a fountain pen in a pretty box and a bottle of green ink on the bed side table.
When I opened the book, there was a note on the inside in bubbly, girly handwriting.
“To Mina. You deserve the best. All my love, Tybalt.”
There was no way he had written that, but I didn’t want to demand answers from him when it had already been a long day.
When I cornered her at breakfast at her house the next day, Erika confessed that she had printed the dedication for him.
“I don’t think it’s cheating!” she insisted. “He found it. He picked what to say. He just can’t write in English. Hell, they don’t read in English, they use a little translator thingie when they need to.”
I thought about that, but she wasn’t done.
“I wanted to print it on the inside cover, you know. Tybalt was the one to insist on a separate piece of paper. Do you know why?” Erika demanded.
“Why?” I asked dutifully.
“So you would keep the book when you got rid of him! My heart nearly broke!” she explained, punching me in the arm.
“Ow! I didn’t say I was getting rid of him!” I protested.
“Did you tell him you were keeping him?” she countered.
“Yes!” I insisted, but I was starting to wonder if I had.
I was getting my house, but it was time to start getting my house in order. That was easy to say, but I wasn’t sure how to actually do it.
“Romeo is in the garage, obsessively tinkering with the stove. Everyone else is out at the orchard. I don’t think I can hitchhike on one of the bigger transport units by myself, and I don’t know how to use the smaller transport the guys usually borrow. How do I even get out there to see him?”
Erika laughed at me. “As though Romeo won’t drop everything if you asked him.”
I frowned. “I don’t want to interrupt,” I protested. “Besides ‘stop working on that thing you are doing for me and drive me to talk to another guy’ isn’t exactly—”
“Yes, it is,” she interrupted. Then she looked over my shoulder. “Lucky! Go get Guildenstern! I want to fuck him until he’s walking funny!”
I blushed. She took me by the shoulders and turned me to see the absolutely delighted look on Lucky’s face.
“It really isn’t going to be a problem for him,” she assured me gently. “Just like it won’t be a problem when they come back and I tell them I changed my mind. They’re different.”
Except, maybe they weren’t. Maybe they were just pretending to be. Iago had told me he wanted things that weren’t socially acceptable in their society. The orcs we got weren’t the choir boys, they were the prisoners sent for transport.
“Do you let them watch?” I asked softly.
Erika shrugged. “Sometimes,” she admitted. “Sometimes they let me watch. That took longer to negotiate. I get the impression that everyone does it and no one talks about it.”
I thought about seeing Mac and Tybalt together early on. We hadn’t ever talked about it. Lucky had been aware of what I had seen and was more worried about me being left out than about what they were doing.
Guildenstern walked in, looking pleased. Erika waved him away for a moment. “How do we get Mina out to the orchard safely without interrupting Romeo?”
“I will take you, if it pleases you Mina,” Lucky offered. “Guildenstern will be busy.”
I groaned and covered my face with my hands.
“Or Rosenkrantz, if you prefer,” he continued.
Erika reached over to pull my hands away. “Off you go. It’ll be fine.”
I nodded and stood up. “How do you feel about farming alpacas?” I asked.
“What?” she just looked confused.
“I can explain,” Guildenstern mumbled, looking sheepish.
Lucky was suddenly in a bit of a rush to get me to leave.
- - - -
Tybalt was easy to pick out from the selection of dust-covered, half-naked orcs working on the house. He was among the few without extra tattoos, for one. He was also way more focused than the rest of them.
“Go say hi,” Jo suggested, as she came over to watch me staring.
“He’s a bit busy.”
Lucky grinned. “He won’t mind. It’ll be good for him.”
“Are you staying today?” Jo asked him.
Lucky considered that, then nodded and started walking toward the barn. Jo followed him. As they headed out of ear shot, I heard him rumble, “Guildenstern is talking to her.”
“It’s about time!” Jo replied.
I snorted to myself as I started walking towards the berm they were building. The excavation was already bigger than Miriam’s house. Someone shoved Tybalt, who glared at the guy like he was looking for a fight. The other orc pointed at me, and Tybalt’s expression just softened. I smiled and gave a little wave. Tybalt waved back, but seemed uncertain. I walked over to him, ignoring how the other workers stared.
“Hi,” I said when I was close.
He gave me a dorky smile. “Hello, Mina.”
“I wanted to say thank you for the book.”
Tybalt grinned a little harder. “You are welcome. There will be a book holder over there,” he pointed, “by the cupboards. I found, um, shelves that match. Iago likes books too. This will be a good house for you.”
“For us,” I corrected. He nodded. “Come on,” I suggested. “I want to talk to you, and I think I’m in the way.”
Tybalt nodded again and led me towards the trees. “The fruit is gone for this year. Jo says we have to keep the seeds. Someone is organizing that. More orchards later. Some persons is talking about making each human camp feed themselves. Able to feed themselves. I’m learning.”
I nodded. “Me too. I’m trying to learn about you, anyway.”
“About orcs,” he suggested.
I smiled at him. “Well, yes, but mostly about you. About you as part of my family. You’re hard to understand, Tybalt. I know more about the others.”
He looked confused. “I am easy to understand. I want you to be cared for. I want to care for you.”
You want to be recognized, I thought. You got mad when I thought the first book was from Romeo, but that makes sense. Doesn’t everyone want to be recognized? “Can I hold your hand?”
He wiped his hand on his pants, which may not have made it any cleaner. I took it, and we walked between the trees for a while. “Do you need to stop for some water or a snack or something?”
He shrugged. “I’m happy to spend time with you. Are you thirsty?”
“I wasn’t working in the sun. I want to hear how you got the book.”
He smiled shyly. “Stop for food with me.”
“Yeah, okay.”
We ended up having an impromptu picnic between the apple trees. Tybalt sat and watched me. “I go look for nice things for you while you are busy,” he explained. “There are lots of houses to be taken down, but there are also lots of things being saved for later. I have found a few empty books now, but I need to leave them in case someone else wants it first. Your book is almost full. I don’t read, but I watch. Time for a new one. You got the best I found, but someone knows how to make more. If you know how to take care of trees, someone knows how to make books.”
“Thank you.” I patted his hand. “What made that the best one?”
“It’s clean. No missing papers. No bent wire. No bad smells. The paper feels nice when you touch it. It will be good for you.”
“I’m sure it will be.” Then I added, “I want you to be good for me, too.”
Tybalt smiled at that. “I try. Others try to help me think the right way. I’m not—” he stopped. “I’m not the right person to be here, but I want to be the right person for you.”
“What does that mean? Why aren’t you the right person to be here?”
He frowned. “It will upset you.”
I squeezed his hand again. “I’ll try not to be upset. I want to understand.”
He pulled away and looked over my shoulder, biting at his lower lip. “I don’t want to say bad things about the others. I don’t … it doesn’t matter. Things that were bad at home are different here. They … knew for a long time that they were not wanted. I thought I was. I was—” he stopped and was clearly looking for words.
“Better than that?” I suggested.
“Hmm.” He needed to think about that. “No,” he said carefully. “More complicated than that. Married? Sort of?”
“You were married?” I was shocked.
“Not like here. Different.” He thought some more. “No,” he corrected himself, “just like here. I am with you. I am not a favourite, but I am with you. I was with another family. I worked for her. Until I didn’t, and she wanted me gone. Now I work for you, until you want me gone.”
