It would be so easy to turn and kiss him. Her broken ribs wouldn’t stop her. With all the adrenaline pumping through her veins, she couldn’t even feel them.
But he’d told her today he didn’t want a relationship. He’d said nothing was going to happen between them physically. Maybe she could get him to change his mind if she turned right now and pressed her body to his. But what if he didn’t change his mind?
She’d already shared so much with him. She’d made herself vulnerable while he kept all his secrets. That, at least, had to change.
The question she’d just asked echoed in the space between them. He’d stopped brushing her hair halfway through a stroke, and for a few heartbeats they stayed like that, all movement arrested.
Then he finished the stroke. “Go ahead,” he told her.
“Why don’t you like talking about your parents?”
Stillness again. This time he stopped between strokes, so there was no point of physical contact between them. They were joined only by the energy that crackled in the air like a static charge.
“That’s a hell of a question,” he said finally, the brush moving through her hair again.
All the tiny invisible hairs on her arms were standing straight up. “You know things about me. I want to know things about you. It’s only fair,” she added.
Another stroke. “You have a way of putting things that’s not like anyone else. You say things out loud that other people don’t.”
Did she? “Well, it’s up to you whether you talk to me or not. All I can do is ask questions. You know what my childhood was like. What was yours like?”
Two more strokes, and then he answered. “It was pretty decent, for a while. My brother and I grew up on a ranch in Colorado. It was my dad’s ranch, in the family five generations.”
“And your mother?”
“She was a singer. Dad saw her at some bar in Colorado Springs and fell head over heels. They got married three weeks later.”
“Three weeks? Wow.”
“Yeah. In retrospect, not such a great decision. I think my mom was happy for a while, but when I was thirteen she took off.”
“Took off? You mean . . . she left?”
“Yep.”
“Did she ever come back?”
“No. Caleb and I would get postcards once in a while. She started singing again, traveling to honky-tonk bars in Las Vegas and Mexico and California. I still get postcards sometimes. The last one was six months ago, I think. She was in Bakersfield.”
She tried to imagine her own mother abandoning her like that. Just . . . taking off one day, never looking back.
There was a pain behind her breastbone that had nothing to do with her ribs.
“That must have been so hard. On your dad, too. He had to be both mother and father to you and Caleb.”
He was still brushing her hair, slowly and carefully. How many strokes was he up to now? Fifty? Sixty?
“Yeah, it was hard on him. Too hard. He killed himself a year later, when I was fourteen.”
Oh God.
Why had she started asking him questions?
The ache behind her breastbone spread through her whole body. She wanted to turn around, but not to kiss him. She wanted to look into his eyes and comfort him, but she didn’t know how. What could she possibly do? What could she say?
“Hey, Airin?”
She swallowed. “Yes?”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
Had she spoken aloud? Or did he just know what she was thinking?
“Okay,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to be sad, either.”
The brush still moved through her hair, and the sensation mingled with the pain she was feeling until she was almost overwhelmed.
She closed her eyes. “How can I not be sad?”
“Because I’m not. Not anymore. I’ve had a lot of years to deal with it. I even saw a shrink when I was at the Air Force Academy. A really good guy.”
“What did he tell you?”
“When someone commits suicide, it’s like they had a terminal illness that finally killed them.”
She thought about it. “And that . . . helped?”
“Yeah. It did. It helped me stop blaming myself.”
That made sense. But her heart still ached, and there was a lump in her throat she couldn’t swallow past.
“Who took care of you after your father died?”
“My aunt Rosemary. She’s an incredible person. She did a great job with me and Caleb, and with the ranch, too. I just saw her at Caleb’s wedding. She gave him away.”
“Gave him away? But he was the groom.”
He chuckled. “Yeah. He and Jane decided they both wanted to be given away. Jane by her parents, and Caleb by Rosemary. It was nice.”
It sounded nice. But the lump was still in her throat.
“I’m glad your aunt was there for you. After . . . after everything.”
There was a soft stroke on the side of her neck, as though he’d brushed her skin with a fingertip. “Do you wish you hadn’t asked me about my childhood?”
She shivered. Everything felt intense—so intense that every word, every movement, every breath of air felt strange and powerful and poignant.
“No,” she said. “I don’t wish that.” She paused. “But I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”
“That’s not what’s making me uncomfortable,” he said, his voice low. He stopped brushing. “Okay. One hundred strokes—more or less.”
She felt him shift behind her, and she heard the clatter of the brush on her bedside table.
“Good night, Airin.”
She turned her head in time to see him disappear through the doorway. “Good night, Hunter.”
He was gone. But that one glimpse had been enough to see the erection straining against his jeans.
Airin woke up late—after nine in the morning. Her torso was stiff, and she got up slowly, going over to the window.
Last night’s rain had left everything fresh and sparkling, and the white and yellow plumeria blossoms looked like velvet in the morning light. There were no vehicles in the driveway—Hunter’s truck, Val’s Toyota, and Dean’s electric car were all gone.
The house was empty. She was alone.
Wow. When was the last time she’d been able to say that? Had she ever been able to say it?
Her torso was aching badly. She took some Tylenol and got an ice pack from the freezer, bringing it back to her room so she could lie in bed to ice her ribs.
As soon as she rested back against the pillows, thoughts of Hunter filled her mind.
She ought to be thinking about the day ahead. Her stay here on Oahu was about figuring out what she wanted to do with her life, so she’d made some appointments at the university. Her next step would most likely be a master’s degree, but she still wasn’t sure what she wanted to study. Medicine was at the top of her list, but there were plenty of other subjects that interested her.
She wanted to explore all the possibilities.
The University of Hawaii probably wasn’t where she’d end up, but she relished the idea of exploring a campus in person after years of distance learning, and UH was only a short bus ride away. Val had given her a bus schedule after dinner last night, unaware that this would be the first public transportation Airin had ever taken in her life.
She relished the idea of that, too.
Yet even as she tried to focus on the coming day, going over mental checklists of what she wanted to do, images of Hunter kept intruding.
Thoughts of what he’d told her about his childhood got tangled up with the memory of him brushing her hair, until attraction and affection and concern and admiration were all jumbled together in her mind.
The concern was for what he’d gone through as a boy. The admiration was for the man he’d become. The attraction and affection had been there all along, almost from the first moment she saw him.
And they’d been growing ever
since.
Is this what it feels like to fall for someone?
God, she hoped not. Because Hunter had made it very clear he had no intention of falling for her.
Instead of hoping she wasn’t falling for him, she had to make sure she didn’t. Hunter was an amazing person, and she wanted to know him better, but if she let herself get all starry-eyed over a man who’d never be with her, she was just asking to get her heart broken.
It was time to stop mooning and start figuring out the rest of her life. And in order to do that, she needed coffee.
That simple thing turned out to be more of a challenge than she’d expected. Because when she got down to the kitchen and stared at the coffeemaker on the counter, it occurred to her that she’d never used one before.
She’d never had to.
Thank God Hunter, Val, and Dean weren’t here to witness her ignorance. Only the entitled daughter of a billionaire would be baffled by the prospect of making her own coffee, and she didn’t want to be seen that way.
Besides, she wouldn’t be baffled for long.
Human beings can solve any engineering problem they face, whether it’s large or small. When confronted by a machine you don’t understand, you just have to be smarter than it is.
Dira had said that to her once. It was mildly irritating that she still heard her mother’s voice in her head sometimes, but in this case, the voice was useful.
So. There were three elements involved here, right? Water, coffee grounds, and heat. The coffeemaker heated the water and then forced that water through the coffee grounds, resulting in a delicious morning beverage.
The controls were simple: just On and Off. The water reservoir in the back was easy to identify. When she pulled on the plastic handle above the empty pot, she discovered used coffee grounds in a damp paper nest—the coffee filter.
Okay, good. She could reverse engineer what to do on the front end from what she saw here on the back end. She took out the wet filter and set it on the counter, rinsing out the detachable plastic basket that had held it and setting it on the counter as well.
Next step: finding the coffee and the filters.
She didn’t have any luck finding coffee, and she finally checked the trash to see if they’d used the last of it making this morning’s pot.
No empty coffee container, but there was an empty box of coffee filters.
Great.
Okay, one problem at a time. Where else would you store coffee, if not in your kitchen cabinets? A memory of her grandmother came to her, and she checked the freezer.
There it was: a bag of coffee. When she set it on the counter and opened it, a delicious scent arose.
Now for something that could approximate a filter. What was its function? To keep the grounds out of the finished product.
All right, then. She just needed something that would accomplish that.
Like paper towels.
She used two, wanting the base to be sturdy enough not to fall apart, and folded them to fit in the basket. Then she measured out coffee until she had an aromatic pile that looked similar in size to the one in the used filter.
She slid the basket into place, rinsed out the coffeepot, and filled it with cold tap water. Then she poured that into the water reservoir, set the pot on the burner underneath the basket, and turned the switch from Off to On.
Then she waited.
A mechanical noise began: the heating elements, she assumed, beginning the process of boiling the water. It sounded like steam. Once the water was hot enough, it would be introduced into the basket, where it would work its way through the coffee grounds. She waited and watched, and after a few minutes a small steady stream of brown fluid began to splash into the pot.
She was making coffee.
It was ridiculous to feel so excited about such a tiny accomplishment. But as she poured out a mugful and added milk and sugar, watching the liquid turn the perfect shade of medium brown, she was grinning. And when she took her first sip, it was the best coffee she’d ever tasted.
Still, she might experiment tomorrow, using more coffee or less water to adjust the strength of the brew.
Whatever she decided to try, she could figure it out.
She figured out the bus, too, and spent the day on the university campus. She’d made her appointments while she was in the hospital, and she’d been cynically unsurprised when busy professors and department heads had agreed to meet with her. They knew who she was—or rather, who her mother was—and Airin was sure they had dollar signs in their eyes as they imagined Dira Delaney’s daughter matriculating at their university. Donations, endowments, a new science building funded by and named after her . . . no doubt all of those possibilities had motivated people to find space for her in their schedules.
She wasn’t sure what to expect when she went into the meetings. But when she came out of the last one and met Val in the library parking lot—her new housemate had offered her a ride home when they’d bumped into each other at the science center—she had a new and sort of wonderful problem.
“I’m interested in everything,” she said when Val asked her how the day had gone.
Val grinned as she pulled out of the parking lot onto University Avenue. “You should be an astronaut. They’re interested in everything. Science and exploration, adventure and philosophy, engineering and physics.”
Another reminder of the one career she knew she couldn’t have. People with medical issues didn’t become astronauts.
She was quiet for the next few minutes, looking out at the houses and gardens they were passing. University Avenue became Oahu Avenue, and half a mile later they turned right on Manoa Road, heading deeper into the valley.
Only when they turned onto the network of smaller roads that led to their house did Val speak again.
“Did I upset you somehow? I’m sorry if I did.”
Airin shook her head. “You just reminded me of a conversation I had with Hunter last night.”
Val accepted that answer without comment, and Airin realized that she was very comfortable in the other woman’s presence. It was nice to be around someone who could let some things go.
“Thank you for the ride,” she said as Val pulled into their driveway.
“Anytime.”
All three of her housemates—Hunter, Val, and Dean—were doing so much for her. She was paying rent, but did that make up for adding another person to the household? It was no small thing to go from three people to four. They’d increased their population by 33.33 percent, and now Val was giving her rides. Was she contributing enough in exchange for what they were giving her?
“Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked as she followed Val through the door into the kitchen.
Val looked confused as she went into the living room and set her laptop case on the coffee table. “You mean around the house? Or in general?”
“Either. Both.” She rested her forearms on the granite countertop that separated the kitchen area from the living room, where Val was taking her usual seat on the couch. “I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling useless. I’d like to start feeling useful.”
Val nodded. “I get that. If you’re serious, I’ll take you up on your offer. I’m always looking for help in the lab.” She grinned as she kicked off her flip-flops and tucked her bare feet underneath her. “As far as doing stuff around the house, that can wait until your ribs heal up.”
Airin grinned back. “It’s a deal. What are you working on? The Mars terrain simulation for Dean’s drones?”
“That’s more of a side project. What I’d really love help with is my ISRU procedures.” She paused. “That’s—”
“In-situ resource utilization,” Airin finished. “The ability to harness Mars’s own natural resources for survival.”
Val looked delighted. “Right. Exactly. That’ll be the key to creating a self-sustaining community on Mars someday, one that won’t depend on endless resupply ships from Earth. I’m developing techniques for extr
acting water and carbon dioxide from volcanic rock. It’s a good analog to Martian regolith, and there’s plenty of it here in Hawaii. Would you want to help with those experiments?”
“I’d love to. That sounds amazing.”
And it did. Someday, those techniques would be the difference between a mission to visit Mars and a mission to live there.
Even if she couldn’t go into space herself, she could find ways to help the people who could. People like Val and Dean.
And Hunter.
Chapter Fourteen
Hunter stayed out late that night—late enough that Airin was already in bed when he got back, which was exactly what he’d been hoping for.
Not that he didn’t want to see her. The problem was, he wanted to see her too damn much.
He’d sent a group text to her and Val and Dean earlier. It said simply, Working late tonight. See you all tomorrow.
Val had sent a thumbs-up emoji in reply. Dean and Airin hadn’t responded.
Maybe they’d all been together when they got the text, and Val had answered for the group. But now he was wishing he’d texted Airin separately. Because twenty-four hours had gone by since he’d seen her, and he didn’t know how she was doing. She’d been planning to spend the day on campus. How had that gone? How was she feeling?
Did she want him to brush her hair tonight?
And there it was. The reason he hadn’t texted her separately. The reason he’d stayed out so long, putting in extra hours on Jones’s pilot simulation project.
Something about Airin pulled him in deep whenever they were together. He needed to break that cycle before it led to a place they shouldn’t go.
There was a light showing under Val’s door when he got home, but Dean’s room was dark. When he went upstairs, Airin’s room was dark, too.
It was hard to tell which was stronger—his relief or his disappointment.
He checked his email before he went to bed, and Caleb had sent a photo of him and Jane on their honeymoon. Their arms were around each other’s waists, and they were grinning like fools.
See you in eight months, Caleb had written under the photo.
He and Jane had gotten married when and where they did because of Hunter’s biosphere mission. He still hadn’t told them what had happened.
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