by Noah Harris
Alden comes zooming at me, a huge grin on his face, and I know I look a lot more affected by the docking than I feel right now. It was a rough few minutes in the dark. But his concern feels good, even as I shake it off with a grin. And then the lights come back up, and it’s time to head out.
Though the outside is ugly, the waystation’s insides boast welcome amenities in bulk. Warm showers, gravity thanks to the spinning outer core, soft beds you can lie down on and wake up still in. All the comforts of home you’d never think to miss, right here in this place that smells like fireworks and gun oil. Strange stains and scorch marks litter the place, and a variety of porn from many lands lies scattered around the barracks dorms. Some languages are universal, military maybe most of all, and all this simply marks it as a soldier’s nest. As home.
The American suites were originally staked out with the old, four-person Orion in mind, so there are four berths. For five people. Alden volunteers the two of us to share before anybody really understands what’s happening. I can tell Pippa’s only barely containing her tiny salacious smirk, but she doesn’t say anything. We can’t very well bunk with superiors, and Pippa’s not the kind to offer her own space up if she doesn’t have to.
I shrug, hoping it comes across as nonchalant, and head back to the shuttle for our stuff. I’m just grateful for something to do with my hands, as I contemplate spending a week in Alden Armstrong’s bed.
It barely feels survivable, the way my skin is aching for him now, but perhaps this will be the best way to calm me down. Like when you’re afraid of snakes. First, they show you a picture of a snake, then a toy snake, and then a real snake, then you finally touch the snake, and then you’re not afraid anymore. Only instead of a snake it’s sex, and instead of fear, it’s hunger.
This is going to be torture.
6
Breathe
Alden
After settling our few things into our bunk and making sure Pippa’s experiments are all secured, I’m more than happy to walk Julian down to the galley and sit down with my crew. I’d spent a lot of time with Harbaugh and Hellstrom back home, and I guess by definition, living in the dorms means I’ve eaten every meal with Pippa and Julian for the last five years.
But now it’s a thick wooden table that seems about a million years old, with real chairs scraping the floor, and a dumbwaiter through which French robots constantly appear and vanish again, bearing real food that’s been pressure-cooked and oven-baked to perfection. Tonight’s welcome meal is a roast, steamed veggies from the hydroponics lab, baked potatoes, and some kind of chocolate tart. Basic, but so comforting. And it’s real food!
It’s nice to look at the team’s faces by candlelight, freshly scrubbed and wearing the station’s disposable jumpsuits. Harbaugh’s kind, handsome face looks a lot nicer without the bloat of zero-g, and Julian’s looking as healthy as ever, which is good. Life on the shuttle seemed to be making him a little green around the gills by the end there.
He stares at me for a moment, trying to think of something to say.
“Are they French robots? Or are they Japanese robots that speak French?”
I barely even register the coincidence that, once again, I was wondering the same thing. Maybe the jinx of Julian’s presence down on Earth has become a luckier kind of coincidence up here.
Meanwhile, our lab-grown beef is vegan but not vegetarian, technically, which is doing Pippa’s head in. Both things are cracking me up. Margot smiles up at Julian after a little research on the robots.
“The latter. I had no idea!” she exclaims.
Pippa laughs. We all know she’s more excited about being up here than the forthcoming trip to the moon, so she’s in the highest spirits of anyone. Once she and Julian get each other started, it’s generally all over. But here, they’re both as focused as they can be, Pippa with her algae cultures and Jules with his lasers.
I never would have expected it, but Margot’s happier up here than I’ve ever seen her, too. She’s a whole different kind of person. I’ve always liked the Sarge. She’s simple with solid values, even if her personal interactions could use some work. I just can’t think of too many times I’ve seen her happy before now.
It was a long-standing Flight School tradition for students and staff to spend the short break hosting one another. Many students didn’t have family in the United States, some had none at all, and for the rest of us it was a way to experience other families.
“Thanksgiving is the most American holiday, we should spend it getting to know each other,” is what Captain Harbaugh says.
Each year, I go home with Darius, or he comes home with me. We don’t usually invite anybody else. The years we stay in D.C. with my family, we travel up with Pippa and whoever her guest is that year. I know Darius loves it, because he thinks everything my boring middle-class family does is fascinating.
No matter how small, strange or uncommon, he thinks everything that happens in my house is traditional, ‘what Americans do,’ and there is no talking him out of it.
For me, I much prefer visiting his family, out on the west coast. In my house, nobody really speaks. My parents show their love through offering praise and asking questions. But in Darius’ house, which contains his mom and dad, an aged aunt, three little sisters and a baby brother, they show their love with constant screaming, tussling, laughing and storytelling.
There, everything that happens reminds somebody of something that happened to someone at some point. Maybe a hundred years ago, maybe last Thanksgiving, or last week. And though occasionally it’s somebody at the table being talked about, ready to blush and yell back, most of the time it’s somebody I’ve never heard of.
But the way their eyes shine when they tell stories, the tender laughter and sometimes, reverent silence, all of it makes it feel like all the characters from the stories are there. A hundred, a thousand of his kin, all with that curly black hair, warm dusky skin, and those haunting gray eyes. It’s loud there, but warm, funny, and even cuddly. It’s like living in stories.
It’s not just us in our bed when I go home with him, but a never-ending cascade of belly-flopping siblings, cousins and grandchildren, hopping in and out of bed with us the whole night long. It’s heaven. I’d never slept in a pile before then, and now I always miss it when we leave.
Thanksgiving was the happiest I’d ever seen Margot Hellstrom and being here with her now, at a table lit with candles, reminds me of it with a sweet ache. I don’t know that I would like her as much, maybe at all, if I hadn’t first gotten to know her over dinners a lot like this one.
Under strict orders from his wife, the elegant Dr. Harbaugh-Jackson, Captain Harbaugh invited me and Margot for Thanksgiving one year. I didn’t want to go at first. I’d heard they were childless and, given my own family’s history, I felt uncomfortable around that kind of sadness, no matter how much I loved him. Plus, he was my superior, making it even more awkward. I was afraid my mother and Darius would be upset, but they both immediately saw it as important to my career, which I’m not sorry to say hadn’t even occurred to me. So, we went.
“Doc? Is that them?” The captain’s voice boomed down the stairs, greeting us as a smiling, dark-skinned woman with white braids opened the door. We knew what she looked like from the picture in his office, but she was still stunning in the flesh. High cheekbones, and the same ageless, smiling eyes as her husband. I’d have known her by her eyes alone.
“Doctor Harbaugh-Jackson,” I said, resisting the sudden urge to bow as I presented her with a bottle of wine and a wrapped gift. Just a set of linen napkins, nothing spectacular, but I’d gotten the captain to sign off on them the week before. He said they weren’t at all necessary, but if I was trying to score points with her, definitely worth it.
She grinned and then winked at us both, ushered us into the foyer and shut the door. Off the front room two staircases led up to a second-floor landing, which she indicated with a hand as she wiped it on a kitchen towel and put down th
e gifts.
“Up the stairs, to the left. Two guestrooms are already laid out, just take your pick!”
After watching her for a moment, heading deeper into the house, Hellstrom and I took our bags upstairs. Both rooms were equally lovely, with half-baths attached and a decadently large shower between them. We dropped our stuff and then made our way back downstairs, separately marveling at the house’s easy elegance. The captain was such a calming presence, and his Doctor so sweetly informal, it made the silent, museum-quality beauty even more striking.
It smelled of cloves and orange, deep rich sauces for the lamb and turkey, and cinnamon-dusted pie crust. It smelled more like home than anything I’d ever experienced. In the kitchen, the Harbaughs were waltzing while they waited for water to boil and jumped for joy when they sensed our arrival.
Captain Harbaugh wore an apron that bordered on frilly, covered in the day’s smears and stains, and he had flour dusting his nose and one temple. It was the messiest I’d ever seen him, and both Hellstrom and I broke out in nervous laughter.
“Haven’t you ever seen a captain cook before? The Harbaugh men are excellent chefs.”
The Doctor, standing behind him, had a dubious expression on her face at hearing this, which turned our nervous laughter into full-on cheering, and after that it was like we’d been coming here forever.
“Okay, so it’s twelve hours between every launch window, right?”
I nod at Julian to continue. We all know this. The moon and the waystation are on orbits that bring them into alignment twice a day. Well, relatively speaking, the moon was still miles away.
“Actually,” Pippa coughs, “Is there any way to just…never get back on that shuttle? Ever again.”
We laugh, but of course the captain’s answer for now is a firm No. “Technically there are booster rockets that could get you to the surface, but that’s more of an escape pod scenario. A very hard landing, and you could end up practically anywhere. You’d have temporary shelter, and likely a good enough signal to call a roller out to pick you up, but depending on your location, even that could be dicey. Focus on rehabilitating the shuttle and getting us to that station.”
Julian acknowledges that, picking up his thread and pointing at the air with his fork. “And it takes about twice that, from here to there, at conventional speeds…”
We wait for his conclusion, but it never really comes.
“Jules?” Pippa clears her throat. “Did you have a thought, or were you just...?”
“Saying the obvious? No, I have a thought. I’m going to keep thinking about it, though. False alarm.”
Harbaugh laughs and Julian blushes, but I can’t help wondering what he’s thinking about. Obviously, we can’t rewrite our mission specs on the fly, so it’s not about anything changing. Maybe he’s just trying to figure out where the moon is, how close she’s getting.
I could answer that for him, though. Too close.
“Everything they say about full moons is true,” Dr. Harbaugh-Jackson swore, wiping her hands with a table napkin to open another bottle. “The ER load doubles, Psych ward is a disaster, Labor & Delivery is…”
“But why would that be,” Margot asked, quietly, as if speaking to herself. “What makes it any more special than a regular day?”
The captain leaned back to watch his wife speak, with such pride and devotion that it caught me a little off-guard. I could feel the love, somewhere between my gut and my dick. All I wanted—now it seemed like all I’d ever wanted—was for somebody to look at me like that. Or, I thought, what I really wanted was to look at somebody that way.
“The moon’s gravity is strong enough to affect the whole ocean, which is 70% of the planet. Do you really think you, or I, or anyone, is stronger than that? Than the whole ocean?”
I laughed, but it stuck with me. Put like that, it sounded like arrogance. I raised my glass, meeting the captain’s eyes with what I hoped was as true an expression of joy and love as I was feeling at that moment. And across the table, Margot gave me the same look.
People always talk about us being brother and sister, Harbaugh’s twins, Apollo and Artemis, but that was the first time I really felt it. I realized that I love her, too. And that meant the awkwardness and roughness she has about her isn’t anything I need to change or forgive. It’s just something to work with.
The first couple of nights, sleeping with Julian Forrester, were easier than I’d expected in a lot of ways, and harder in others. I tried, fastidiously, to stay on my side of the bed, not touching or bothering him. Trying to remind myself, strongly enough that even my sleeping body would remember, that he wasn’t Darius, this wasn’t that bed, and I should act normal.
But instead, all it did was keep me up, tossing and turning. Back on Earth, I would just slump off to the couch or something, so I wouldn’t bother him. Here, space was at a premium, and since we were being filmed most of the time, I couldn’t do anything off-protocol like go sleep in the shuttle or docking bay.
If I stopped worrying about where my arms and legs were, Julian would think I was trying to start something. He’d either flip out or he’d respond, and either way it would be a mess. It would be the latter, I thought, and then immediately ordered myself to be humbler. Even though I know it was true.
After about two hours, I was on the verge of legitimate panic. We only have a week on the waystation, I need to stay in tip-top shape, which means taking care of myself as much as possible. If I was going to get any sleep, I needed a solution. And it would need to work for the whole week, not just tonight.
I pictured Julian settling into my arms, just like Darius would. Our bed in the dorm was bigger than this bunk, which made it even worse. I wondered if I could somehow depress my side of the foam mattress deep enough that he would roll into me, or barring that, if I could somehow use the fact that he was lying on top of the sheets to whisk him on top of me, like a magician’s tablecloth, or…
And right then, Julian rolled into me all on his own, smacking his lips and quietly mumbling sounds that weren’t words. He settled into my arms with a barely audible hum of happiness, as if he’d been there all our lives. I held him close, thanking God or the moon or whatever was out there. I took one last sniff of him, and quickly fell into a sleep so deep I didn’t dream.
After that, it was as simple as getting into bed before he did, holding up the sheets for him to crawl inside, and curling myself around his heat. Darius had cold feet and I’m told I run hot, but Julian was like a furnace. After working ourselves to the point of exhaustion each day, all I wanted was to stay in that delicious warmth forever. So much heat for such a small guy.
“Forrester, I want a full breakdown of the shuttle’s systems before any of those launch windows are open. That sensor problem wasn’t the last of it, was it?”
Julian shakes his head at the captain, still chewing, and nods in agreement to the plan.
“I’ve got experiments to run,” says Pippa, happy to be getting back to work. She cocks her head at Margot, requesting her help, and Julian lingers as the captain turns his attention to me.
“Alden, you…what are you doing this week?”
You mean besides spending every possible minute in bed with my archenemy, and every minute out of it waiting to get back in? Not a whole lot.
“I’m floating, sir. I said I’d help Margot with tuning the exosuits, whenever she’s up for that, and in the meantime, I was going to offer to help Forrester with the diagnostics.”
Harbaugh nods. “I’ve got a million and one reports to finalize and contingency plans to certify, so that’s good. I leave them in your hands.”
Julian and I stand up, ready to file back out, when I get a sudden idea. “Sir, I could also do one-on-ones, while I’m waiting for Hellstrom?”
The captain’s sunny smile brightens the galley. “Top idea, son. I keep forgetting those.”
The production crew back home can’t pipe orders at us here like they could back on the shuttle, but t
hat hasn’t calmed them down much. Now it’s just strongly worded text blasts, ordering us to film more interviews and get more personal.
I’m grinning as I turn, and catch Julian smiling to himself for a moment before he notices me, sending him off blushing and in a hurry as usual. I’ll have to give him a half-hour or so before I try to get his attention again, or he’ll just completely shut down.
For once, Julian’s the scruffy one. I hadn’t noticed until I got him on camera, and now I can’t help but tighten the focus on his profile. He looks older, sexier, like he’s been through things. They’ll love that back home.
I remember why I’m here and scan around the data gallery where Julian’s working. It’s airtight and cold, since all the system’s servers are here, but at least there’s a huge bay window giving us a bird’s-eye view of the station down below, spinning like a giant ugly roulette wheel.
Julian finally looks up, taking me in from the corner of his eye, and cracks a smile. His voice when he speaks is a little higher than normal. The air mix in this compartment isn’t exactly Earth standard, just close enough to breathe.
“What’re you doing?” Jules wrinkles his nose at the sound and tries again, huskier. Maybe huskier than he intended. “What are you doing, Armstrong?”
I smile, gently mocking his growl. “Making a little movie, Forrester.”
I start moving around him in slow circles as he works, trying to get every angle and backdrop that I can. Pushing off every surface, floating like a wave.
“What’s your little movie about, Armstrong?”
Julian secured his tools to the bulkhead this time, so they wouldn’t drift. It’s gotten pretty easy to make him smile on video, although I’ve noticed it’s just with me on the other end. He’s still stiff and strange for everyone else, but when it’s us we almost forget the camera entirely.