I play with Gia’s hair that I’ve let down as she sits on my lap. She surprises me as she speaks up, “The drones, like the shuttles, will be out of fuel when they get to us. I mean, to Mars. I don’t know how many we can get. Apollo Engineering will be building ships that never return and the people on Mars will have to figure out what to do with the massive vessels.”
“We could build homes, like apartments, out of them,” another woman offers.
Gia looks at me over her shoulder and I kiss the tip of her cute little nose as I totally caught her Freudian slip about her being on Mars someday. She smiles at me and runs her hand over my bearded face. “I think it should be of the utmost importance to see just what burns on that planet. So, we can make fuel of our own there,” she says, further insinuating herself as a future Martian.
“And just how will revenue be created to make all these ships?” Gary, from logistics, asks.
“I have that under control,” I say. “Not to worry, tons of money has already been invested to make sure Apollo Engineering stays not only afloat but prosperous. The last thing we want is for the company to go under while we’re trapped on another planet. Plus, I’ve added on affiliate partners to make sure there’s plenty of money.”
Gia looks at me with a smile and mouths, ‘Thank you.’
I added her family farm on as an affiliate partner. That way her family can sell their uniquely modified corn to us and after it’s processed in the plant we built to do that, they are the ones who can sell that fuel under the wing of Apollo Engineering, making money for them and us. A few more affiliates like that and the company will be set.
With a laugh, Gia, says, “Hell, we may even be able to use all the extra hair you men seem to be growing to burn and make fuel from too.”
I watch Donny, a certified genius, get a bright look on his face. “Hey, why didn’t I think of that?”
“I don’t really think you guys can make enough hair to have enough fuel for even one trip from Mars to Earth, Donny,” Gia says with a laugh.
“No, not just hair,” he says with a smile. “Our excrements too.”
“Yuk!” we all shout as his idea just sounds nasty.
“No, not yuk,” he says. “You’ll see. I’m about to make an experiment.” He looks at the other two men who have IQ’s near his. “To the latrine!” They all get up and run toward the bathrooms as the rest of us shudder at the thought.
“You can leave me out of that experiment,” Gia mumbles.
Everyone nods in agreement as I twirl a lock of her hair and leave a kiss on her cheek. “Do you want to go and see how Pam’s doing? Maybe give her a pat on the back or whatever one does to help a laboring mother.”
She nods and we get up to go see how things are progressing with the first birth in the dome. Holding hands, I swing them between us. “Things are so simple and yet so complicated, aren’t they?” she asks me.
I nod. “Life is life, no matter where or when. Nothing is easy. And nothing worth having is ever easy, anyway.”
A special tent was set up with laboring mothers in mind. Soothing sounds come from an audio box with a prerecorded track. A small blow up swimming pool was brought, just in case any of the women wanted to float in the water. Some say it helps ease the contractions or something like that.
I stop as we unzip the tent’s door and find Pam in the water, naked as the day she was born. “Perhaps, I shouldn’t be here?” I say, kind of shocked.
“Nonsense,” her husband, Peter, says. “We’re all going to be pretty damn close and things like vanity and being shy about one’s body shouldn’t be a thing we need to take with us to Mars. Please stay, Ryker.”
Gia looks at me with a smile. “We can sit back there, if you’re more comfortable with that. Then you’ll only see her back.”
Pam breathes in and out with slow breaths. “Yes, you’re going to want to learn from this process, so you’ll know how to handle it when you two have your babies.”
Gia gives my hand a squeeze and then a smile moves over her sweet lips. “See, this is a teachable moment.”
I take a seat and pull her to sit back on my lap, so her body covers some of what lies in front of us. “Okay, let’s learn.” I lean up and whisper in her ear, “But I thought you wouldn’t be going to Mars.”
She looks at me and runs her hands over my beard. “I’m up in the air about that, at this time.”
My eyebrows go up high, as she’s not said a word about even contemplating it. But I have been trying my best to show her how great it’ll be. Leaning in close, I whisper, “You should come to Mars, baby. I’d love to see how sex feels with you there. As opposed to how it would feel with someone else.”
She pulls back and narrows her eyes at me. “Ryker,” she hiss-whispers at me. “Don’t you dare speak about you and another woman.”
Jealousy!
So, I rub it in a bit more. “Well, if you won’t come, what else will I be forced to do?”
Her body tenses in an instant then I rub her shoulders. “Let’s never discuss that, please.”
I shrug and continue to rub her shoulders and move my hands down her back, feeling the tension, slowly leave her body. As I half-watch Pam and Peter work together to help her ease her discomfort, I think about what I want.
Venturing further, I whisper to Gia, “I’d like to have the first baby born on Mars.”
She looks at me as if I’m crazy. “The first one? And how would you even accomplish that? Tell the rest of the people to hold off while you impregnated your woman?”
“No, no one would listen to me, anyway. I’ve never thought about how I’d do it. I just want it, that’s all. It would be nice, is what I’m saying. You know it takes eight months to get to Mars and if you were, say a month pregnant or a little less, then you could have the baby on Mars. Then, we’d most likely have the first baby.”
She clicks her tongue at me. “You’ve thought about this, haven’t you?”
I nod and run my hand over the back of her neck and pull her in for a brief kiss. “Extensively.”
“But what about the fact, I haven’t signed on for that yet? Also, let’s just say I do sign up for it, am I to wait until we can go to Mars, to have a baby?”
I ponder her question. Getting to Mars is about five years away. That does seem like an awfully long time to wait. But then again, why would we have to. There’re no rules saying kids can’t go to Mars too.
“We could take whatever kids we already had,” I say, earning a frown from her.
“And subject them to that kind of rough life?” She shakes her head and I try another direction.
“You’d be bringing a new baby into that too. But I don’t think life will be rough at all. The first few days, while we set everything up, we’d live on the shuttle, just the way we’d have to as it takes us there. There’d never be any real hardship, like we had the first night here, in the dome.”
She nods and looks like she’s thinking about things. “You’re most likely right. I didn’t think about that.”
Pam makes a little scream and Peter looks at the woman who’s been trained to deliver babies, “What’s that mean?”
“It means she felt a little bit more than she was feeling. Let me give her a check.”
I close my eyes and bury my face in Gia’s back as the woman puts her hands in a place on Pam, I’d rather not think about. “Tell me when this part is over.”
“Will do,” Gia says. Her hand moves over my back as she watches the process.
“You’ve effaced and are now at ten centimeters. When you get the urge to push, you can.”
I open my eyes and feel a rush of adrenaline. “Is she about to have the baby?”
Margie, the midwife, looks at me with a smile. “She is. You two should come up here, so you can see this better. It’s not nearly as bad as your imagination makes it.”
With a tug at my hand, I find Gia has me in tow and off we go to get a better view of something I never imagined wan
ting even a bad view of. But here I am, watching a woman give birth in a blow-up swimming pool.
“Do you have to give birth in the water?” Gia asks.
The midwife shakes her head. “You can do it however you want. Some squat, some like to lie on the bed. It’s whatever you feel comfortable with.”
She nods and asks, “The baby can’t take in a breath if it’s under the water. Won’t that be bad for it to come out like that?”
“They generally don’t try to take in a breath until the air hits them,” the midwife says.
Gia nods again. “I think I’d like to have our kids the traditional way. In a bed. Preferably, in a hospital with an epidural. Yeah, that sounds good to me.”
When a horrible shriek comes out of Pam, Gia turns and buries her face in my chest. “Oh, my!”
I close my eyes as a streak of red has shot out into the pool. “Oh, my!”
“It burns!” Pam shouts. “Why does it burn so damn bad?”
“You’re probably stretching very fast as the baby’s head crowns. If you rip at all, I have the things I’ll need to stitch you back up,” Margie says.
“Do you have something to numb her if you have to do that?” Gia asks but doesn’t pull her head out of my chest. Her arms are wrapped around me, holding me for dear life.
“I do. Not to worry,” Margie says.
I open one eye and see her getting on her knees on the floor with a small blanket in her hands. “Do you see the head?” Peter asks as Pam grunts and pushes.
“Not yet. Patience, Peter.”
My eye catches how red Pam’s face has gotten and I stare in disbelief that anyone can go that shade without something terrible happening. “Is she going to be alright?”
“She is,” Margie says as Pam grunts again with a massive push. “Oh, yes! Here we go. We’re about to meet your baby, Pam, and Peter!”
With an odd sucking sound, a little mass comes out into the water and Margie picks it up and wraps it in the blanket. “Here you go, Daddy. Take your son, so I can get the scissors to cut the cord.”
Gia turns around, taking her head out of my chest and opens her eyes. “He’s not crying. Shouldn’t he be crying?”
“He will, just watch,” Margie says. “Ryker, will you do me a favor and hold the baby while Peter cuts the cord? I want to take a picture of this.” She pulls out an old-fashioned camera and I move to take the baby from Peter.
“Man, he’s really red and puffy, isn’t he?” I ask as I take him and Peter nods.
“I suppose that goes away,” he says.
“It will,” Margie lets him know then hands him the scissors and snaps a few pictures as he cuts the cord that she’s already placed a clamp on to stop us from being squirted with blood.
When my eyes leave the baby, I see Gia’s moved to kneel behind Pam and is massaging her shoulders. “He’s gorgeous, Pam.
No longer red in the face, Pam is beaming. “I can’t wait to see him.”
As I jostle him back into Peter’s arms, he makes his first sound. A loud cry that tells us he’s breathing. I follow him to take the baby to show Pam and find Gia with tears in her eyes as she looks at the little baby that’s wailing away now.
She gets up and comes to me, wrapping her arms around me and wailing like the baby is. “Oh, Ryker!”
I hold her and hug her and take her out of the tent, so the new little family can have some time alone. “Baby, it’s okay. Why in the world are you crying?”
We stop and I take her by the chin to make her look at me. “I want that! I want you and me to have a family!”
“Then let’s do that,” I say then pull her back into my arms. “Marry me. And tell me you’ll come with me to Mars.”
“I can’t,” she says then cries some more.
“You can,” I tell her as I move us to a more remote area, so no one can hear us. “What if I make it possible to travel back to Earth too?”
With a sudden jolt, her head shoots up. “Could you?”
I really don’t know if I can do that but here it goes, “I might be able to.”
“If you could make that happen then maybe, just maybe, I could do that!” She jumps up and down and claps and now I feel bad.
Trying to slow her enthusiasm, I take hold of her narrow shoulders and look her in the eyes. “The important thing is me and you, being together. Can you agree about that?”
She looks at me for a long time, so long I think she might be about to tell me something I don’t want to hear. Her lips part and she says, “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Pulling her in for a tight hug, I kiss the top of her head. “Me neither. Now that we’re in agreeance on that, let’s get some more things straight.”
“Like?” she asks as she pulls back to look at me.
“Like, I want you to marry me when we get out of here. I want it official. And where I go, you go. Along with whoever we create along the way. I know you have your family here but I promise, I’ll do everything possible to make sure you get to see them again. I swear to you, I will try. That’s going to be my number one priority.”
“You really want to marry me?” she asks with a sideways smile.
“This isn’t how I planned on proposing to you, at all. But yes, I want to make you my wife. Change your last name. Put my ring on that finger. And every other cliché that goes with that.” I laugh and she does too, making my heart pitter and patter.
Her sweet smile fades away and she looks off to the side. “On Mars, Damien will be there.”
“Not in our settlement, he won’t. And what the hell does that matter? I don’t care. He’s not going to be able to come between us.”
She pulls out of my arms and starts walking toward the tent, pulling me along with her. “It’s just that I really didn’t ever want to live in any kind of close vicinity to him.”
“We can’t let anyone stop progress, Gia.” I pick her up as we get to our tent and carry her inside.
She giggles as I do and asks, “What’s this for?”
“You and I are going to get married,” I say then take her straight to our bedroom. “We have to celebrate that.”
As I lay her down on the soft bed, she looks up at me with doe-like eyes. “Ryker, are we really going to do this?”
I nod as I unzip her jumpsuit and take it off her body that’s just begging me to kiss it all over. “We’re going to do this. We’re going to do all of this and we’re going to do it together. I knew from the moment I laid eyes on you that you were the one for me.”
She laughs as I pull my jumpsuit off. “No, you didn’t. You just lusted after me.”
“Well, maybe a little.”
“A lot,” she says as she runs her fingers over her nipple, making it hard.
I watch her do that to herself and get an immediate boner. “A lot. Yes, I lusted after you a lot and I still do.” Moving onto the bed, I take over what she’s doing. “Here, let me help you with that.”
She moans as I take over, placing my mouth on her pert nipple, giving it a hard suck. I wonder if she’ll let me tell everyone we’re engaged!
GIA
As I step out of our tent, I can hear the sound of a crying baby. It’s a different kind of sound that’s been added to life, here in the dome. Ryker comes out right behind me. With his hand on the small of my back, we make our way to the dining area to eat breakfast.
I stop and look back at him as he clears his throat, making everyone stop their chattering and look at him too. “Good morning, all. I’d like to make an announcement.”
“Ryker,” I whisper but he stops me as he runs his arm around me. My cheeks are already heating with embarrassment for some reason.
“Gia and I will be getting married when this test is over and we leave here. I want you all to know you’ll be invited to our wedding. It will be a lavish affair with tons of great food, dancing, and drinking.”
Cheers rings out and people come up to us, congratulating us and giving us hugs. I
find it a little overwhelming, as I’m not used to being the center of attention.
The little trio of people who’ve made a make-shift band come up to us after we take our seats. Their leader, Dylan, smiles at us as he tells us, “We’d love to play at your wedding, guys. Let us know what songs you’d like us to play and we’ll start practicing them right away.”
“How sweet,” I say as I take Ryker’s hand and hold it tight. “We’ll discuss that and get back to you very soon.”
With a nod, they leave us and Ryker pulls our clasped hands to give mine a kiss. “I caught you off guard, didn’t I?”
I wag my finger at him. “You could’ve told me you were going to do that.”
“I did tell you that last night, didn’t I?” he asks me with a sheepish grin.
Leaning in close, I whisper, “You know damn well I’d have a hard time recalling anything that was said last night. You wore me out, completely.”
He makes a low growl, igniting heat inside of me. “And more’s to come later on.”
“Ryker! You’re insatiable.”
“I am. And you’re all I crave. Damn, who knew becoming engaged would make one so horny?”
Shaking my head, I say, “You’re silly.”
“Over you, I am.” He pecks my cheek and we find Sabrina bringing our plates to us.
“For the happy couple, I’ve spritzed up your breakfast this morning for this special occasion. I do hope you think about letting us cater the reception and the rehearsal dinners.”
I find a few leaves of spinach on top of the freeze-dried, scrambled, fake eggs and give her a smile. “Thank you for the lovely breakfast, Sabrina. Of course, we’ll consider you and your team. With some real food, you could do wonders.”
Enthusiasm is bubbling in her eyes. “We’ll have to get together sometime soon to make the menus.”
“Yes, we will,” Ryker says. “I’m setting the wedding date for 31 days after we leave the dome. We’ll go get our marriage license and marry the day after the 30-day waiting period. I don’t want to waste a minute.”
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