Orc Rut

Dani has been with Tarokh for nine months.

She knows the cedar-and-stone scent of him. She knows the slightly old-fashioned lilt of his voice, the way he fusses over light fixtures, the careful way he kisses her like she might break.

She does not know about the orc rut cycle.

She finds out the way no one is supposed to find out: by coming home a day early, walking into her own kitchen, and discovering her enormous, careful, beautiful boyfriend pacing barefoot in the dark with his pupils blown black and his sweatpants holding on by a thread.

He tries to send her away. He’s been trying for hours. He’s been trying, in some sense, for nine months — because he never figured out how to ask her to share this with him. Because he was so certain it would be too much.

It is not too much.

What happens over the next forty-eight hours is hungry, possessive, and a little bit ruinous to the bathroom door. What happens after — over coffee, in the bathtub, in the small hours of the morning — is the conversation he should have had with her months ago.

And the song, it turns out, he’s been humming to her all along.