He deployed this tactic with precision. He was, of course, capable of being polite and professional; that had been a survival requirement, and he knew exactly when and with whom it was necessary. And sometimes professional etiquette sufficed to keep people at a distance. Even so, it was defense.
Some situations required offense, so he had looked right at McCreery and said, “No one befriends me or offers me anything unless they want to use me.”
When he said something uncomfortable, the overly friendly stranger he was talking to would look stricken and mumble an apology and then the conversation would halt. Future interactions would be as brief as possible, because Lange said true, upsetting things that no one knew how to respond to. People avoided that. Social overtures would dwindle to nothing after a while, and he would remain safe. Not from people using him, but that couldn’t be avoided, and when it had to happen, he preferred his transactions bare of the guise of friendship.
McCreery had looked stricken, so Lange had thought things were off to their usual start. But instead of stumbling through an apology and retreating, he’d said, “So what’s this grilled cheese worth, then?”
“Not even a tenth-grade algebra assignment,” Lange snapped, though it wasn’t true. Back in high school, he’d thought the people asking him for favors were his friends. He hadn’t known to charge them.
“Ouch,” McCreery had said. “I guess it’s a good thing for both of us that I dropped out. Maybe you’re using me.”
Lange had scowled—also an excellent tactic for keeping would-be friends away—and said, “Why?”
“I make a good grilled cheese. You’d know if you’d eaten any of it.”
“No, why did you drop out?”
“Didn’t wanna be there, and nobody else wanted me there, either,” McCreery had said. “I’m not as useful as you, I guess.”
“Oh,” Lange had said, stunned—and irritated that someone else could use his own tactic on him. Now he had to be the one to offer sympathy and withdraw.
“That’s shitty, about people using you,” McCreery had said. “I’m sorry. If it helps, I don’t have any pressing multidimensional physics problems for you to solve. Or any algebra homework.”
McCreery didn’t need anything from him. Perhaps there was nothing to guard against. Cautiously, Lange had cleared his throat and said, “Likewise, I am… sorry that you felt unwanted in your youth. Or, ah, a moment ago.”
No matter the words, this was not an exchange of platitudes. This was personal, and earnest, and Lange had to turn away from McCreery, who had tricked him into having a real conversation. About his feelings. Worse, his fears. And Lange couldn’t even blame him for that, because Lange had brought it up in the first place.
Lange had swallowed around a lump in his throat and collected himself.
He’d been outmaneuvered in a handful of sentences. No, that made it sound like McCreery had been calculating, when really he’d been anything but. No one had ever taken Lange’s deliberate rudeness in stride like that. Lange had risked a glance across the table, where McCreery was eating his grilled cheese like nothing unusual had happened.
Lange ate his own sandwich. It was, as promised, good. Crisp and buttery and gooey inside. It shouldn’t have moved him, this small and simple comfort, but it was too late for that.
After some time, McCreery had said, “So you wanna go another round of awful shit we’ve lived through, or you wanna talk about something else?”
“Why are you in the kitchen in the middle of the night making grilled cheese?” Lange had asked, the question tantamount to admitting that he wanted to talk about something else. That he wanted to talk. Remarkable. Embarrassing. He should have wanted to flee the room.
McCreery had shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep. I used to work the late shift at an all-night diner, so it felt natural to come in here.”
Lange had asked him about the diner, and then they’d talked about the work, and the food, and tricks for falling asleep, and the whole thing had been shockingly pleasant.
They had not discussed what was keeping them awake. In Lange’s case, the answer had been the machine.
Perhaps in some other timeline, he’d said so, and then McCreery had convinced him not to rip a hole in reality.
He grimaced and tried not to think about that. It couldn’t be undone; it could only be repaired. He had to live in this timeline, the one where he’d fucked up.
Right here, in the cabin with McCreery, that didn’t feel like such a punishment.
Lange relished the opportunity to study McCreery without being observed in return. His hands worked with a speed and precision that Lange couldn’t imagine matching.
McCreery wasn’t beautiful, his buzzed hair somewhere between brown and blond, his features some bland mixture of western European heritage, but the way he moved was fascinating. Everything about him was deliberate. Was it because he was so big?
His bulk wasn’t decorative, but useful. Even a little intimidating, though he’d probably never intentionally threatened anyone. With a body like that, he could be as quiet and solitary as he liked, and still no one would trouble him.
Perhaps I wouldn’t have honed my tongue quite so sharp if I’d had shoulders like that. A worthless hypothesis. Too many variables. Untestable.
The top of McCreery’s half-unzipped flight suit hung down around his waist. The shirt underneath was grey cotton that had been washed within an inch of its life, the thin fabric stretching over the softness of his middle and baring his thick arms. McCreery looked, Lange thought, like he would give pleasingly solid hugs.
No. Absurd. Lange didn’t want hugs. Affection was a trap. He wanted orgasms, which McCreery also looked like he could provide.
“Lange,” McCreery said, interrupting his unruly thoughts. “Are you pulling on me?”
Lange made a choked sound that would have to serve as a reply. Upon reflection, it was… not impossible that the answer to McCreery’s question was yes.
“Because I’ve had to work really hard just to stand here, these past few minutes. It feels like the floor keeps slipping under me, or like the stove keeps getting farther away. I’ve been resisting, but it really feels like some invisible force is pulling me toward you.”
No point in dissembling, then. “I find you distracting.”
McCreery paused, the wooden spoon in his hand no longer stirring the pot of tomato sauce, but pointed aimlessly upward. He cleared his throat. He didn’t make eye contact. “Yeah, about that—”
“We should have sex.”
McCreery looked at him just long enough for Lange to catch the whites of his eyes. His face turned a dull red. He stirred the sauce with furious concentration. “I don’t—that’s a bad idea, Lange.”
“Why?” Lange asked. “I remember sex. I’ve had a lot of it.”
“Wha—you have?”
“I assume you’re surprised because I’m not good with people,” Lange said. “But I have very symmetrical features, and in my former life, I had impeccable personal hygiene.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen your bathroom,” McCreery said, sounding a little dazed. “You’re hot and you smell good—that’s all that’s necessary?”
Lange didn’t require confirmation. It was nevertheless satisfying to hear McCreery say you’re hot. The words suffused him with pleasure in a way no mere statement of fact should have, simply because McCreery had said them. The skeptical question that had followed meant nothing.
Lange answered, “I didn’t say I’d had a lot of relationships. I said I’d had a lot of sex. Mostly, but not solely, with men. That’s a combination of personal preference and the availability of the kind of unattached encounter I prefer—”
“Yeah, okay,” McCreery interrupted. “Don’t need your whole CV.”
“I’m qualified, I assure you.”
“Not the issue,” McCreery said. “What you were doing just now, pulling on me. Was that on purpose?”
All his possible answers seemed equal
ly undesirable, so Lange told the truth. “No.”
“Yeah. Like I said, bad idea.”
It was, unfortunately, a good point. Lange would develop perfect control in time, he had no doubt, but he didn’t possess it now, not to the degree needed. After a moment, he said, “That wasn’t an outright refusal.”
“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t a ‘yes.’ We’re not talking about this anymore.”
“I apologize for broaching the issue,” Lange said stiffly. “My previous rejections have all involved putting physical distance between myself and the other party. I don’t know what to do when that’s not possible. Should I now make an empty promise that this won’t make things ‘weird’ between us?”
“Not if it’s empty,” McCreery muttered. “Jesus Christ, Lange, ‘weird’ is our default. I’m not gonna fuck you. Change the subject.”
“An interesting assumption on your part.”
“Lange,” McCreery said, loud and exasperated.
In the ensuing silence, McCreery dumped a pound of pasta into the pot of boiling water on the stove. There was no longer a need for him to pay close attention to his cooking, and there hadn’t been for some time—watched pots, and so on—but he hadn’t turned around. There was tension in his posture that hadn’t been there before, and Lange felt a pang of guilt.
“I did take music lessons as a child, of a sort. My mother taught me,” Lange said, offering the answer to McCreery’s long-ago question like an olive branch. “She can play anything—any instrument, any genre, any work. She can sing, too. For me, it was only ever the guitar.”
McCreery didn’t comment on the non sequitur; he was the one who’d requested the change of subject, after all. His shoulders dropped minutely.
McCreery didn’t ask any questions about Lange’s mother, and Lange couldn’t say if that was a relief or not.
Lange had never asked McCreery about his family. At least, Lange couldn’t recall asking when they’d been in the Facility 17 kitchen that night, and his memory was devoid of other details. McCreery hadn’t mentioned them, not even in passing. It felt unwise to bring it up.
“Do you remember how to play the guitar?” McCreery asked, turning to face him at last.
“I think so,” Lange said. “I’ve never been as good as her.”
“There’s a guitar case in the corner over there,” McCreery said.
The instrument had been untouched for months. It would need care before it could be played. Lange curled and uncurled his fingers, splaying his hands on the table. “I doubt there’s much overlap between what my mind remembers and what my hands can do.”
“Practice makes perfect, so I hear.”
“I couldn’t. Not in front of you.”
McCreery snorted. “And yet you proposed—”
“I thought we weren’t speaking of that,” Lange said.
“Right,” McCreery said. “Go get that book of crossword puzzles. God knows we need it.”
Discussion of crossword clues—impersonal crossword clues, mercifully—saved Lange from further conversational missteps over lunch. Afterward, McCreery made a show of going by himself to check the pod for damages, leaving Lange alone in the cabin. Lange picked up the instrument and began to tune it.
8
Friends
Jake took Eliza back down to the clearing with him and spent a peaceful hour with only the sound of her whirring and beeping. There was nothing wrong with the pod.
He almost wished Lange had damaged it in their telekinetic experiment. Then Jake would have something to do.
And no choice but to stay.
“What the hell is wrong with me?” he asked Eliza, who was sitting at his feet under the perfectly functional console.
He hadn’t given her the ability to speak—too weird, choosing a human voice—and her language processing was internal, not hooked up to a bank of servers with all of recorded speech at her disposal. Most of the time she just beeped in affirmation. But she recognized when she’d been asked something. His tablet buzzed with a message.
I do not understand the question, she’d written.
“Yeah, me either,” he said. A moment later, he put in a call to the team at Facility 17. It was work, just a regular check-in, but all the same, it’d be a relief to have a conversation that wasn’t a hundred different layers of discomfort and desire.
“How are things going up there?” he asked.
“Good.” After the short delay from lunar orbit, it was Emil’s voice on the other end of the line. “They’re good. I’m as surprised as you are.”
“That’s a nice change of pace.”
“Yeah,” Emil said. “The breach has slowly but steadily decreased in size. What about you? You heading back up now?”
Jake had checked in yesterday after their landing to confirm that they’d made it despite their troubles. He’d said he thought he could finish his repairs by today, so naturally they were expecting him to come back.
He was expecting that himself. What was he doing down here except enduring a series of awkward conversations and another night on the cabin floor?
Fuck, he’d extended this pause too long. This conversation was choppy enough without him overthinking everything.
“Do you need me up there?” Jake asked.
“There’s a leak in the greenhouse I think you and your robots could fix, but it’s not urgent. Wouldn’t mind having you examine the outside of the facility, just in case, but like I said, none of that’s time-sensitive. Are you thinking of staying?”
Fuck, he wanted to lie and he didn’t know how.
“I, um—if you’re okay up there without me, maybe I’ll take a little more time,” Jake said, his face heating. Good thing it was a voice-only communication.
“That’s kind of you,” Emil said.
Jake hadn’t specified why he was staying. He could have food poisoning for all Emil knew. He should have said that. Be back soon, just don’t wanna shit myself in the pod, you know how it is. Less embarrassing than the truth.
“You’ll be okay to get back up here when you need to?” Emil asked. “If the pod’s beyond repair, Kit can come get you.”
“The pod’s fine,” Jake said. He dragged a hand down his face. What he wouldn’t give to be a better liar or a worse mechanic.
“Okay. Keep checking in regularly. Let us know if you need anything.”
“Yeah. Hope things stay good up there,” Jake said. They signed off and he stared down at Eliza. “I guess we have to go back now.”
The whole walk back, he tried to organize his thoughts and work out what he would say to Lange. He didn’t know if he’d set the right boundary.
Every attempt to clarify what he wanted sank back into the morass of feelings lurking in the bottom of his brain. Jake rarely thought about the stuff that everybody else obsessed over. Smiles, eyes, hands, hips, whatever. Sex. Back in high school, people had asked him who he thought was hot, and that little social ritual had felt like a puzzle he couldn’t solve. Other people seemed to be able to look at a stranger and think wow yes them, and that had never once happened to him.
He only ever thought of that fact with relief. Falling in lust with a stranger sounded like a hell of a lot of trouble.
Sex had crossed his mind on a handful of occasions—always with someone he knew as a friend—but he’d never acted on the impulse. Curiosity, physical loneliness, those weren’t reasons to risk a friendship. Until a couple of hours ago, he’d always assumed that nobody would be interested. He was quiet and weird and not particularly good-looking, and on top of all that, he had no experience.
I find you distracting. We should have sex.
Lange probably had no idea that Jake was still reeling from those two little sentences. It was hard to imagine approaching sex so casually.
Fuck. Jake had been content without all this. He had two good hands and was inclined to DIY projects in all other areas of his life. He could take care of himself. Being demisexual was luck, and being
single was a choice. None of this was a problem.
The problem was that Jake had noticed Lange.
Sort of the same way he noticed, now, trudging through the woods, that the sky had thickened with grey and white clouds. A snowstorm was coming. Nothing to be done about it.
Lange had smiled at him and he had thought oh no.
Attraction didn’t feel much like a lifetime’s worth of pop songs had told him it would. It felt, actually, very similar to Lange telekinetically pulling on him. Except Lange hadn’t been doing that when they’d been outside this morning. Jake was the origin.
He liked Lange.
He was sexually attracted to Lange.
It made no goddamn sense. Lange, of all people. He was handsome, of course, but that had never mattered before. And brilliant, but that shouldn’t count for anything. Jake knew plenty of smart people and none of them had ever done it for him.
God, he wished they had. Anyone else would have been simpler. Jake could toss a dart at the people in line for a docking permit at Franklin Station and have an easier time of it than he’d get with Solomon Lange. Their relationship was complicated enough already. And Lange had been a dick even before his return from the Nowhere. And Jake didn’t know what the fuck he was doing when it came to sex or romance, and if he wanted either, he’d have to talk about his feelings—with Lange, who had enough to deal with already—and that was no guarantee the whole thing wouldn’t go to shit anyway.
Fuck. Why did his body only want to play this game on hard mode?
“I wish you could reboot me,” he told Eliza.
She beeped in sympathy.
Snow began to fall, littering the two of them and the surrounding trees with huge, lavish flakes. They melted on contact with his bare skin, leaving him to blink droplets out of his eyelashes.
He’d lived in space so long, he’d sort of forgotten about weather. Earth weather, not solar flares and micrometeoroids. Would’ve been nice if the snow had started a little earlier. Then Jake could have told Emil he was stuck on the surface waiting out the storm, instead of... whatever he was doing.
Nowhere Else Page 9