“So you wanted to let it hurt you, too?” Jake asked. He wanted to shake Lange by the shoulders, but one of his gloves still had alien goo on it. With his clean hand, he pushed Lange down until his boot soles clicked against the floor. Probably he was gripping Lange’s shoulder harder than necessary, but Lange had better fucking stay down here. “What exactly was your plan?”
Lange made a noise of frustration deep in his throat. “Not letting it get away.”
“That was reckless. You—” Anger choked off the rest of his thoughts. He glared. Lange’s dark brown eyes, lit up with fury, filled his field of vision.
Lange blew out a breath, hot against Jake’s skin.
Jake kissed him.
They crashed together, too hard and fast. Fuck. Jake hadn’t meant to, he was shit at this, Lange was pulling away—oh. Lange was adjusting the angle. Now he was kissing Jake.
Jake had never kissed anyone before one minute ago, but he’d been kissed. Or he thought he’d been kissed. Lange was proving him wrong. Jake had been the confused recipient of a couple of quick, teeth-clacking surprises that had left him wondering if this was really the experience everyone else wouldn’t shut up about.
It wasn’t.
With Lange, kissing was different. The answer rang through every living, breathing inch of his body. He pressed his mouth to Lange’s, wanting the sensation and the taste not for their own sake but because they belonged to beautiful, brilliant, occasionally infuriating Solomon Lange.
Lange made it easy, angling his head so their noses didn’t bump, parting his lips so Jake could slip his tongue into the velvet softness of his mouth. It was unhurried, and that was its own wonder—not just that kissing was good, but that he wanted to keep doing it, that he knew within an instant that he would want this again.
Patient but not passive, Lange pulled him closer by the hips. It was the gentlest of touches, one that would evaporate at the first hint of resistance, but it was a touch, not a telekinetic pull. Lange had wanted not only to shorten the distance between them, but to put his hands on Jake, to feel the shape of him. Jake went willingly. He hadn’t anticipated the feedback loop: knowing that Lange wanted him made him want Lange more. He was fully hard by the time their bodies pressed together. He wished he could feel Lange.
The synthetic material of their suits crinkled between their bodies. Lange broke the kiss, pressed his forehead to Jake’s, and said, “We have to patch the leak.”
“Fuck.” Reluctant to disentangle himself, Jake stayed still for one last moment. In the ensuing silence, he heard the hiss of the can of sealant. It startled a laugh out of him. “Are you fixing it? From here?”
“The other option involves you moving, which doesn’t appeal to me.”
Jake hummed in agreement. He tightened his arms around Lange and, with a boldness he hadn’t known he possessed, kissed the side of his neck. His body brushed up against Lange’s.
The hiss went silent. Lange exhaled. “I can’t—you can’t—I have to concentrate.”
Jake laughed again. It was thrilling, having any kind of power over Lange. He hadn’t realized, when Lange had said I find you distracting, what pleasure there was in that.
Even though Jake wanted to be the sole focus of Lange’s attention, he stilled. He wanted to live long enough to kiss Lange again.
He wanted a lot more than kissing.
13
The Scientific Method
It was not possible for Solomon to think when in proximity to McCreery, which would probably get both of them—and everyone else—killed.
The sealant hardened in seconds, blocking the flow of air through the crevice. The leak was fixed.
It was only one problem among many. As much as Sol wanted to kiss McCreery again, they would need to exercise caution. He needed his faculties. Even now, something worried at the back of his mind. Not the air leak, or the pipes, or the darkness, or the broken gravity generator—
McCreery backed away and turned toward the cabinets. He tucked his flashlight into the crook of his right armpit and opened the doors with his left hand.
That didn’t make sense. McCreery was right-handed.
“You’re injured,” Solomon said. The organism had flowed over McCreery’s right glove. McCreery hadn’t touched him with that hand when they were kissing.
Shit. This was serious. The kiss had distracted him. He took a few steps so he was next to McCreery again and breathed through the first vibrations of panic.
“I’m fine,” McCreery said.
“You yelled when it touched you. Let me see,” Solomon said.
McCreery offered his arm without a word. Solomon drew it close to his face and hovered McCreery’s flashlight nearby. The gunmetal grey material of his glove was marked with an iridescent track over the knuckles. It was the same clear, viscous liquid that had been on the greenhouse pipes. Solomon tried to manipulate McCreery’s fingers without touching the mucus. “Does it hurt?”
“You don’t have to do that, I can move my fingers just fine,” McCreery said. He wiggled them in demonstration. “I had worse burns working in the diner. We’ve got bigger things to worry about. Let’s decontaminate my glove and then go tell the others what we saw.”
McCreery sounded so sure. Solomon furrowed his brow. Safety first. “Your glove appears intact, but protocol requires that we examine your bare hand. We don’t know what the organism is composed of. Something might have seeped through.”
“Pretty sure it was just heat, Lange. Besides, if any of that stuff oozed through the glove, my skin won’t present much of a barrier,” McCreery said.
“Then let’s hope it’s not a contact poison,” Solomon said, the dryness of his voice matching McCreery’s, belying the distress that pierced him. It meant nothing that McCreery wasn’t in pain. Something might have affected his nervous system. He could be dead in minutes.
They shouldn’t have wasted time kissing, not if McCreery was going to die of some symptomless, painless, undetectable, incurable alien neurotoxin absorbed through his skin. Kissing hadn’t felt like a waste of time, but— Now Solomon would have to live without McCreery, but with the knowledge of what it was like to kiss him, which would be neither symptomless nor painless. He’d rather go back to the Nowhere.
“I didn’t expect you to be the one freaking out about a kiss,” McCreery said. He’d already twisted his glove off and had, perhaps, been holding out his hand for examination for some time now.
Solomon had failed to take it. He blinked.
“I am not ‘freaking out,’” Solomon said in a tone that didn’t convey his point quite as well as it might have. “And if I were freaking out, it would be about your imminent death, and thus justified.”
“Oh, it’s imminent, huh?” McCreery held open his palm and then rotated his hand, which appeared uncontaminated. His blunt-nailed fingers showed no trace of the liquid that clung to his glove, though a red streak crossed his knuckles diagonally. The pale peach coloration of his skin appeared otherwise healthy and undisturbed. His movements were steady.
Solomon’s thick gloves disguised the tremor in his own hands. He took McCreery by the wrist. Despite every concern and safety protocol, he wished he too was barehanded, as if he could absorb McCreery’s unruffled certainty through his skin. A contact antidote instead of a contact poison.
All evidence pointed toward McCreery being more or less uninjured, yet Solomon could not release his wrist. It was unbearable to care for someone, knowing they too were mortal.
“You called me Jake,” McCreery said, causing Solomon to realize they’d both been silent for a long moment. “When you pulled me away from the alien, you called me Jake.”
“I’m sure you’re mistaken,” Solomon said, clipped. Lying was the last resort of the trapped, but he could not afford to be drawn any further into this. It was bad enough to have feelings in private. For someone else to pry back the screen and peek inside was too much.
“I know what I heard. But more imp
ortantly, are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? The potentially lethal, unknown entity didn’t touch me,” Solomon said. He dropped Jake—McCreery’s wrist. “We have work to do.”
McCreery’s calm expression slipped, his face tightening with worry for an instant. “I don’t get it. You’ll kiss me, but you don’t want to call me Jake or talk about whether you’re okay? What do you want?”
“There is a high probability that one or both of us will die in the immediate future,” Solomon said. It was less terrifying to say that than anything pertaining to kisses, or wanting, or whatever havoc neurotransmitters were wreaking on his poor brain.
“If that’s a fancy way of saying you changed your mind and you don’t want to kiss me again, it’s okay.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I mean, that’s not what I want, but I get it.”
“You want me to kiss you again?” Solomon hadn’t meant to say that, at least not in such a hesitant, pathetic way. He was a good kisser. People usually wanted him to kiss them again.
But this was Jake.
“Well, yeah. I liked it. Did you not—”
Rather than endure the end of that absurd question, Solomon surged forward and kissed him, putting both hands on his precious, unbearable face. Jake was ready for him this time, parting his lips and letting Solomon slip right in. It was sweet, too sweet, and of course he liked it, he liked it entirely too much, he wanted to do it forever.
That was the flaw. Forever wasn’t available.
When they broke apart to breathe, Jake said, “As much as I like this, which is a lot, we both need sleep. After we tell the others what we saw. But maybe we could sleep together?”
“As I recall, you objected strenuously when I asked for the same thing.”
Jake turned a dull pink. “I, uh—I didn’t phrase that right. I meant literal sleeping. Like what we did at the cabin. But if it’s anything like the kissing, then maybe we should. Your control has gotten a lot better, so it would be safe if we did, I think.”
Solomon had never slept with anyone who had tiptoed around the subject like that. Jake’s nervousness was endearing, but enthusiasm would be better.
His silence caused Jake to keep talking. “Um, leaving all of that aside for a minute, I do actually think it’s a good idea to be in the same room in case anything weird happens.”
“Practical,” Solomon agreed.
“I’m fine, but I’d rather not be alone. And maybe… you’d rather not be alone either?”
This question was a kindness, allowing Solomon to say “yes” in a way that had nothing to do with the future or his feelings. Still, not wanting to be alone was a step beyond the utilitarian “in case anything weird happens,” and it took him a moment to find the courage to say, “I would prefer some company, yes.”
“Thanks,” Jake said, relieved and happy like Solomon was doing him a favor and not the other way around. “To be clear, you want to share a sleeping bag?”
Solomon forced away all thoughts of slippery slopes—of slippery anything—and said, “Yes.”
The way Jake’s eyes crinkled at the corners disarmed him completely. “Oh. Good. Because I liked last night and I want to do it again.”
If Jake continued to say earnest and hopeful things, Solomon’s defenses would crumble. He might even admit how terrified he was.
“I might want to do more than literal sleeping together,” Jake continued, and this time Solomon understood that his nervousness was not a lack of enthusiasm. Jake wouldn’t bring up the subject a second time unless he wanted it. He was shy.
Sol wanted to kiss him senseless, strip him slowly, and lay him down, which was impossible because they were in microgravity and also because it would betray just how absurdly emotional he felt about this whole thing. Unprecedented. Nonsensical. He did not have time for this.
Besides, it was just sex.
“We could do that,” Solomon said. He’d always been able to maintain a sex life uncontaminated by sentiment before. Surely he’d work out some new method. “We can sleep together. But it’s a temporary arrangement only.”
With far more cheer than was merited, Jake said, “Around here everything’s a temporary arrangement.”
That was precisely the problem.
Jake couldn’t figure out what had happened between Lange kissing him and then getting all weird before begrudgingly agreeing that they could sleep together. It bothered him all the way through their brief meeting with Miriam and Chávez—the two team members on watch—about the strange blob they’d encountered.
He should probably have been more focused on the meeting than on Lange, but he’d had his fill of dangers and space bullshit for the day. The only thing he could reliably hold in his brain was the dream that soon enough, he’d be unconscious. In bed. With Lange.
When they got to Jake’s room, Jake tossed one sleeping bag to Lange and unrolled the other. They zipped them together and then tethered each of the double sleeping bag’s four corners to hooks embedded in the walls. The cords would hold the sleeping bag in place so Jake and Lange didn’t accidentally run into a wall while they slept.
It was useful as hell that Lange could hold their flashlights in place with no hands. Made working in the dark a lot easier.
Jake stripped off his suit, shoved it into the closet so it wouldn’t drift off somewhere, and then floated up and slid himself into the sleeping bag. Lange joined him a second later, wearing the clothes he’d had on under his suit, which Jake knew was way more dressed than he usually slept. Lange switched off the flashlights and stored them in the closet.
They were side by side. At the contact, all the fatigue Jake had been carrying around suddenly lifted. Who had he been kidding about sleeping?
He rolled to his side.
“I know you said this was a temporary arrangement, but—” Jake cut himself off. Better to do it than to stumble through talking about doing it. He pulled Lange by the shoulder, slow and deliberate so Lange could get away if he wanted to. Jake might be bigger, but Lange had no reason to feel intimidated.
When their faces were aligned, Jake leaned in and kissed Lange. Without the adrenaline rush of survival driving him forward, the kiss he offered was careful and tentative, not because he didn’t want to, but because he wanted this more than he could ever remember wanting anything. He didn’t want Lange to back away, to tell him they couldn’t, to say the other times had been a mistake.
Lange didn’t. He moved closer—no, he moved Jake closer, dragged him in until he could wrap his arms around Jake and slide his warm hands under Jake’s shirt. The embrace brought their hips together, and this time there were no spacesuits between them. The hard length of Lange’s cock slotted next to his own, and Lange rocked against him.
A ragged breath broke free of Jake’s lips. He only regretted it because Lange stopped kissing him.
“Tell me what you like,” Lange said.
“Everything we’re doing,” Jake said. It felt impossible to think of anything he could like more than the feeling of Lange’s hips rolling, Lange’s cock catching against his.
“And? What else do you want?” Lange asked.
Lange was peeling Jake’s shirt off, and Jake helped him. Tossing it out of the sleeping bag and letting it drift was a reprieve from answering the question. Jake pulled at Lange’s shirt, but Lange put a hand on his wrist to still it.
“Jake,” Lange said in that deep, authoritative voice of his, and fuck, but his name alone was enough to make pre-come pearl at the tip of Jake’s cock. “Have you ever done this before?”
Ah, fuck. Goddamn geniuses and their deductions. “If I say no, are you going to stop?”
“Do you want me to stop?"
“God no,” Jake said, grateful the lights were out since all signs pointed to him blushing the whole damn time. The only advantage of feeling this goddamn horny was that desperation made it easier to spit out the truth. “I’ve never done this before and I probably never will again. We might die tomorr
ow. Please keep going.”
Lange made a sound between a hum and a laugh, and they were so close Jake could feel the lift of his ribcage when he breathed. “Am I to assume, then, that you don’t know what you like?”
“We can figure it out,” Jake said. “Make a hypothesis and test it already.”
Lange laughed again. “Well. The scientific method it is, then.”
He stripped off his own shirt and let it go. Then he drew Jake in and kissed him. With Lange’s tongue in his mouth and their bare skin touching, this was closer than Jake had ever been to anyone. God, people were so warm. Lange. Lange was so warm.
In zero g, one of them couldn’t lie on top of the other. They’d naturally drift apart. The confines of the sleeping bag kept them near each other—being together would have been near impossible without it, although as soon as he’d had the thought, Jake couldn’t help engineering imaginary scenarios involving handholds on the wall and mag boots. Telekinesis, too. He didn’t know very much about sexual positions, but he couldn’t resist a mechanical problem.
The sleeping bag could keep them in the same vicinity, but it was their grip on each other providing that heat. That satin press of skin. That friction he wanted so much.
“Fuck, you feel good,” Jake said, touching his forehead to Lange’s, lining up their noses. Whatever shyness or nervousness he might have felt dissolved in a hot rush of desire. “I don’t want to let go but I really, really want us to be naked. Can we make that happen?”
“You did choose a challenging set of circumstances,” Lange said, and then a moment later, when his hands took hold of the waistband of Jake’s underwear, “Don’t mistake that for a complaint.”
Lange tugged down the tight, stretchy material of Jake’s shorts. Jake huffed out a laugh when he realized they were wearing essentially the same thing, a practical garment intended for use under spacesuits, and Lange paused.
“No, don’t stop,” Jake said. “Just didn’t expect us to be wearing matching underwear, that’s all.”
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