by D. Brumbley
“How the fuck are you gonna help me from orbit, exactly?” Liam’s question was more confused than accusation, and he actually laughed afterward, shaking his head. “It’s great that families of pioneers get preferential treatment when it comes to settling a planet on the other side of the galaxy, don’t get me wrong, but that’s gonna be years from now, and there’s no guarantee me and Larissa are even gonna want to go by then. A lot can change in a few years. So I realize you’re doing your best for humanity and for us, and I’m all for that. I’m proud of you for going, if I’m being honest. But you going isn’t gonna do shit to help me here. You don’t need to do that anymore. I can handle it as well as you can.”
“Well, let’s not get crazy. I do a pretty damn good job.” Logan teased with a smile that Liam returned weakly, since he was still looking out for whatever was going to make him angry about the discussion. “I know you can do it. I know you’ll be great. But one thing you do suck at doing is looking out for yourself in the process. That’s usually what I’m here for, and it’s what I’m here for now.” Logan looked down at the pitchfork to make sure it was still in place, then looked back at Liam warily. “You ready to want to punch me?”
“Man, I was born ready. Just fucking spit it out already, will ya?” Liam was starting to get angry just at the fact that he was being prepped to get angry. “What the fuck is the big fucking secret?”
“I asked all three of your girlfriends if they would marry you. All three of them, at the same time. Plural marriage straight out the gate. Right here, before Anna and I leave for Jannah.” Logan only gave Liam a moment to let the full implications of that set in, then put the final nail in the coffin. “They all said yes. Wedding is going to be the weekend before I lift off.” Logan sighed, glad to finally have that off his chest. “Try not to break the bars. I won’t be around to fix them, so it’d be on you.”
Liam’s eyes had first gone wide as his mouth dropped open, but his jaw clenched slowly and his eyes narrowed at the announcement of the wedding date. “You shady mother…” he attacked the bars and rattled them as he screamed unintelligibly, but he didn’t quite break through them as he vented his anger at being backed into a corner.
It was a long while before he stopped screaming profanities at Logan, but eventually he stood back from the bars and growled about it, pulling at his hair and swearing under his breath until he finally quieted down, eventually leaning against the side of the lift.
“You good now?” Logan finally asked from the doorway.
“Yeah, I’m good. You can take the pitchfork off. I’m not gonna punch a guy on his wedding day.” Liam sounded defeated as he said so, and didn’t even watch Logan remove the pitchfork or open the gate. He rolled his head to one side to look at Logan once the door was clear again. “How the fuck did you get all three of them to say yes? I mean, Brianne I get, and Rachel maybe, but Margo?”
“She realized that it was either this or lose you. She’d rather share you than lose you.” Logan explained with a shrug, since it had seemed like a logical choice to him at the time. “Eventually your roulette game is gonna wear out and you’re gonna get one of them knocked up. For your sake, I hope you hit all three of them at the same time. But they’re all into you enough to want to be your wife, even if they’re not the only one. And you’re rich enough not to have to worry about taking care of all of them, no matter how many miniature versions of yourself you manage to create.” Logan actually chuckled at that possibility, looking off toward their house. “You could fill that place, if I know you. And I hope you do, in the few years between now and the next time I might be able to get back here to see it.”
Liam stepped out of the lift, still glaring at Logan with his hands in his pockets, possibly to keep himself from throwing punches. “I get it. You know how much I hate it when you handle me like this, or Larissa, but I get it. It’s your prerogative to arrange shit like this, and eventually, I’m sure I’ll probably be grateful, since it makes sense. I can never make up my fucking mind about my own shit most days. You’d just better realize, eventually you are gonna get the shit kicked out of you by me for pulling this stunt. Not tonight, I’ll let you off because you’ve got a honeymoon to get to and I’d never do that to a guy, but eventually, you’ve got an ass-kicking tab that’s gonna need to get paid.”
“I can live with that.” Logan stepped back, starting on the trail back toward the party with Liam eventually following. “I just barely talked to all of them tonight, so they know I’m talking to you about it. Go on and make your plans and announce to everybody whenever you want to. You can even tell everybody it was your idea if you want, I don’t need credit for that, and it would probably make the girls feel better.”
“I’ll deal with it.” Liam still shook his head and sighed as he walked, completely floored by the future he was walking into. “Fuck, man. Can’t I just tie you up and leave you here to deal with this shit and fly off to Jannah in your place? We’re basically the same person, how would they even know?”
“Anna would know. And then she’d castrate you for trying to slip into my place.” Logan said with a grin.
“True, that’s true. Yeah, that would be worse.” Liam agreed with a weak chuckle, still shaking his head. “Get out of here, man. Your party is just getting started. I’m gonna go back and see about straightening up this mess you’ve officially made of my fucking life.”
“You’re welcome.” Logan said with an arm around his brother’s shoulders. “I love you, Liam. You already know that’s why I’m doing this.”
“Yeah, I know. Doesn’t make it any less of a mindfuck.” Liam returned the hug briefly, then shoved Logan aside toward the house. “Fucking go. I’ll see you in a few days.”
Logan watched his brother return to the party, but he was too close to the house to actually see his reunion with his wives-to-be. He wanted to see what happened, but the knowledge that Anna was waiting for him was more of a draw than the drama in his brother’s life that he had created. It would be up to Liam to handle what he’d been handed. If Logan was going to start bowing out of things, there was no time like the present.
He closed every door on the way into his wing, for the sake of soundproofing, and he was grinning as he stepped through the last door into his bedroom. No, not his bedroom anymore. Officially their bedroom. His and Anna’s. The door was around the corner from the bed, and he didn’t see her at first, since the room was dimly lit. “What, did you go to sleep already?” He asked as he stepped inside.
Anna stepped out of the bathroom at the sound of his voice, and he could see that she was working on taking the flowers out of her hair and shaking it loose from the fancy braid that had been woven into it. She was still in her dress, as promised, but she was barefoot. “No, I didn’t go to sleep. How could I go to sleep? I was too worried about your survival and what I was going to do if you died.”
“It’s alright. I locked him up in the lift on the watchtower until he was done throwing a fit about it.” He grinned, but he realized that part of the reason he was grinning so much was because he was relieved to have actually pulled it off. He stopped by the door to pull off his boots and toss them aside, happy about the fact that he wasn’t going to be wearing clothes for a good long while once he got them off. And neither would Anna. “He says he owes me an ass-kicking eventually, but if I know him, he’ll be too busy dealing with his new wives to deliver it. I should be in the clear.”
“I can’t believe you got them to agree. You’re even more charming than I give you credit for.” She sauntered up to Logan as he finished taking off his boots, then she helped him take off his shirt and vest. “I can only imagine their responses. You must have sounded insane.”
“I’m sure I did. But crazy can be a good thing once in a while.” He let her do as she liked when it came to undressing him, glad to be free of the shirt and tie. “The important thing is that he’s in on it and he’ll deal with it. It’s his problem now and his crazy to deal with.�
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“I’m glad you’re not like your brother in your tastes.” When she straightened herself up, one of the thin straps of her dress fell down off her shoulder. “I wouldn’t be able to share you. It would tear me apart.”
“Nothing’s going to tear anybody anywhere. I’m not interested in sharing or being shared.” He promised as she pushed his shirt off over his shoulders and got to work on his pants, slowly edging her back toward the bed. “I’m glad you’re not like any of his girls. Liam and I share a lot of things, but we’ve never once had the same taste in women.” He leaned down to kiss her as she finally got his belt free and tossed to the floor. “I want you to be you. Nobody else.”
“I’ve never changed myself to fit what anyone wants me to be, and I don’t intend to. I am just me, and just-me wants you and loves you.” Anna unbuttoned his pants as she continued to kiss him, and the tension between them built by the second. “We do make sense, but this is so much more than that.”
His kisses agreed, pressing her back until her knees brushed the edge of the bed. The cut of her dress dipped slightly between her breasts to show off her cleavage, and his hands moved up over the smooth fabric to take the cut of it in both hands. A single rip was enough to tear the dress straight down the center, all the way through the gossamer fabric covering her midriff with flimsy wisps of studded gauzy nothingness. His hands moved quickly down over her exposed breasts and ribs to grab the fabric a second time at her waist to rip away what was left. The rip of the skirt was less straightforward, but in the end, she was left in nothing but the tatters of her dress with her naked husband pressed against the bare entirety of her, flimsy fabric barely hanging on by the single remaining strap hooked over her shoulder. “I think all your clothes should be that easy to destroy from now on. Just dress in tissue paper and make things easy for both of us.”
Anna’s chest rose and fell quickly as her whole body tingled with need after he had literally ripped the dress off of her. She felt so ridiculously turned on by it that she couldn’t even think clearly or speak, especially with his body pressed against hers. Anna would never have worn the dress again anyway, and it was worth the purchase to have him rip it off of her. “Fuck, I want you so bad right now. That was so hot.” Her skin was blazing as she dipped her shoulder down once to let the dress fall away, and she pressed her breasts harder against his skin. The lingering tension alone was enough to light a torch with the heat between them.
“You’ve got me, Mrs. Bickford.” His hands moved up over her thighs to hold her around her back while the rest of him pressed her backward onto the bed. He kissed her the entire way down, allowing no space between them while the sheets hit her blazing skin like silky ice. “Anytime you want me, anywhere you like, you’ve got me, now and forever.” He kissed her until it felt like she was the oxygen the fire inside him needed in order to keep burning, his arms wrapping around her shoulders as the full weight of him pressed into her. She was really his, and he was really hers. He wondered if that would ever feel like anything but a ridiculous fantasy. Even if it never did, he would still live in it happily.
15
Mercury and Orion had only been on Seven for two days, and she could already tell Orion was not enjoying his stay nearly as much as he’d hoped. She got up before he did so that she could make him breakfast, though it was strictly with healthy ingredients. She was allowed to order some bacon to fry up because his allowance was larger than hers, but the rest was more of what she was used to than what he’d had on Three. Mercury whipped up some healthy omelettes, filled with mostly vegetables and just a tiny bit of cheese, then put bacon on his plate and filled two small glasses with synthetic orange juice. She carried the plates on a tray back to her bedroom and set it down on a side table so she could crawl into bed and wake him up.
The return to the structured life on Seven never once bothered her.
It bothered Orion.
“Hey, sleepy.” She slid into bed next to him and then kissed along his neck. “Today is the big day. I made breakfast for you.”
“Mmmm.” He groaned low in his chest, moving a little to put an arm around her shoulders to keep her close without opening his eyes. “I thought I sensed something delicious on its way back to me.” He turned into her and left his own kisses along her neck and down over the slope of her breasts before he just rested his head against her sleepily. He sniffed once, and finally got a whiff of the bacon. “Oh, and there’s food too. Even better.” His words slurred against each other and against her chest, the stubble on his cheeks scratching her a little as he spoke.
Mercury giggled as his stubble scratched her skin. “Yes, I brought food. I figured we would both need it.” She ran her hands over his head and then scratched at the back of his neck. “You should eat it while it is still warm. I didn’t know if my request for bacon would be granted, but we must have burned off enough calories to get it. For you, I mean.”
He opened his eyes and tilted his head back enough to look around with teasing suspicion on his face. “Are there cameras watching us eat so they’ll know if we share?”
“No, but they do a bio screen on us when we sleep. Not with cameras, but with room scanners. It’s how they monitor our health so that we remain within ideal parameters.” She glanced over at his plate and then back at him. “It’s not as though anyone would punish me, certainly.” Mercury had never heard of anyone being punished for pushing back against the regulations of the station, but she had heard of people being put on very restrictive orders for ignoring regulation for an extended amount of time. “I know it sounds very controlling and cold, but it really is for our benefit. When I first started my training as a doctor, I was staying up too late every night to study and my bio screens showed poor sleep patterns with insufficient time in REM. I was informed that I had been screened consistently for poor sleep for two weeks before they prescribed me a sleeping aid. It really did help me, and I learned not to push myself so hard.”
“Well, you definitely got into REM last night. You were talking in your sleep.” Orion kissed along her chest one more time lazily and then pushed himself up in the bed so that he could sit up against her headboard with the sheets still draped over him. It was the closest he was willing to get when it came to actually getting up at the moment, since he was still mostly asleep. But the unit would continue getting brighter whether they got up or not, until it was impossible to sleep. For their health, of course.
“I was talking in my sleep?” Mercury was surprised to hear that, especially because she’d never read anything in any of her personal health reports that mentioned sleep-talking. She passed his plate and utensils. “I didn’t realize that I do that.”
“You don’t seem to normally, unless you’re very, very tired and you pass out mid-conversation.” He smiled back at her and bent a knee to hold the plate in place as he got started, making sure she had her own as well. “What you said didn’t make much sense. We were talking through the list of your cousins when you fell asleep, so at first I thought you had just kept going with that, but then you started talking about some kind of project that was tracking for immune system anomalies in relation to the Crisis Virus. That’s pretty much all I caught of that. Then you said something about bears and strawberries. That’s where you lost me.”
“Oh.” She replied with an embarrassed chuckle, then turned her attention to her plate in her own lap. “Some information I requested about some research I started before I left came through yesterday. We have research librarians that dig things up for us when we don’t have time to do the digging ourselves, and so I was thinking about that yesterday. Since we’re going down to Earth, I was looking at data collected over the first several decades and then the most recent several decades about babies and CV. It has a very strange pattern, and I’m still trying to figure it out.” She looked confused for a moment, but she took another bite before she continued.
“The data shows that instances of CV strength aren’t going down, they follo
w almost a wavelike pattern. There will be years where the CV strains seems less invasive in the babies at birth, and then when the pattern goes down, it spikes again a few years later. The babies with less invasive strains of CV are adults that live longer, and are less sick, obviously, and then babies with deadlier strains die particularly young for an Earth lifespan.” She looked over at him since she didn’t know if he even cared, but it was nice to talk it out. “And then, strangely, in the last hundred years or so, there have actually been babies tested that have no traces of CV at birth. They show up as red numbers on my data sheet, but then even stranger, they have the shortest lifespan of all. They end up dying as children. I can’t make sense of it. Over time, everyone is exposed, but it’s strange that mothers who have it don’t always pass it on to their babies.”
“That is really strange.” He knew much less than she did about all of it and almost nothing about immunology, but he enjoyed watching her when she got really excited about something, and if it was something she was interested in, then he wanted to understand as much as he could of it. “In looking at the patterns of occurrence, is there any kind of trend so far as geography goes? I heard something when I was growing up about some religious group that basically holed up I think somewhere in the Ural district east of Moscow and said they had completely cured themselves of CV. They isolated themselves, allowed no contact, and then they apparently all went crazy a few years later and the whole place turned into a bloodbath. So not a happy ending. But it made me wonder if it was possible to isolate instances geographically.”
Mercury just shook her head. “The only geographical connection that I can see is that the heavier-populated areas show more distinct trends, but you would expect that from areas with a larger population.” She shook her head again as she thought about the religious groups that he mentioned. “There will always be someone down there claiming that God has given them the answer and the cure. If he had, he wouldn’t wait this long to do it after so many people had died. The fact is that there isn’t a cure, so long as they stay on Earth. We can only target and eradicate the virus if someone removes themselves from Earth. And those religious groups cause more problems for themselves when they close off the world because inevitably it leads to infighting, eventually to inbreeding, which only exacerbates the problems that CV causes in the first place. It ends up attacking their neurological pathways from a very young age due to the increased concentration of CV and genetic deformities, and the occurrences of mental illness skyrocket. It’s really quite sad.”