This is a book-length work, so not every chapter will involve sex. If you're just looking for quick wank, this probably isn't your story.
Thanks for reading!
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I woke up confused, with a cottony mouth and a pounding head. It had always struck me as extremely unfair that they pumped us full of these self-replicating, microscopic robots that could clean our teeth, keep us from getting sick, make us heal exponentially faster, and do the lion's share of the work in recycling organic waste, but hangovers were still a thing. It had to be intentional.
Knowing I was on my own for this, I rolled to the side and sat up. As I waited for the room to stop spinning, I noticed the mug holding the dregs of yesterday's coffee on the table and realized I was in my bed. Alone. Rubbing the ridge above my eyes, I tried to think through the pain. I was pretty sure Rusty had been here when I passed out. He was telling me some story about a terran kid who tried to join his crew and then - I just had a hazy memory of falling asleep next to him. The end of the story was lost in the fog as well, but I felt a looming dread, as if a terrible mistake was lurking in the gloom.
Oh, right, the video. But that wasn't it: my specific execution may not have been the best option, but getting out of celebutainment was definitely the correct choice. Rusty's reaction had surprised me, but we patched things up. Or I thought we had. Surely he wouldn't have stayed with me, lay in my bed, if he had still been that angry with me.
Though this felt closer to the cause of my foreboding, it was still like poking your tongue around the area where a tooth has gone missing. I could almost feel the edges of the thing and knew if I was brave enough to investigate the hole itself, touch that exposed nerve, I could surface the memory. As it turned out, I lacked the courage. At least before coffee.
Rusty didn't come to the office. He even managed to stay in the blind spots of the cameras in engineering. After the first few glances, I didn't check for him again until late in the day. He had made his point. I filtered another round of messages, keenly aware of how I was betraying the trust of my crew. The contracts they all signed permitted this and more - whether they realized it or not, they had basically signed away any expectation of privacy once they took their jobs - but it was never my intention to make use of it. In fact, I had made it a point to be as transparent with them as possible from day one. And then I did this the first time all of that open communication became inconvenient.
The self-loathing lit a fire under my determination to find a solution; as I reviewed my options, I became aware that my blunder with Rusty underlined the fact that I really was not equipped to guess how the crew would receive the news I needed to deliver. Forcing myself to wait until most everyone had retired for the night before going to his door was my compromise between the belief I truly was trying to do the best thing for my people and the suspicion that I was just conjuring up reasons to see the engineer.
I knocked quietly, if slightly louder than I had that first night. Counting back, I realized it had been less than a tenday since whatever this was between us had begun. Life was a lot like space in that way: a lot of empty nothing with scattered clusters of everything. To continue the metaphor, since my first night with Rusty, I'd been stuck in an asteroid field, desperately trying not to crash and burn.
When there was no answer, I rested my forehead against the cool material and waited. I stood outside that room longer than I wanted to, but I choked down my pride and stayed put. I didn't knock again - if he was in there, he had heard me and he had the right to ignore me. My hands clenched with how desperately I hoped he wouldn't.
There was only a moment of warning - some small noise - before the door slid open. I managed to just get my head clear before he was there in front of me, staring down with those inscrutable dark eyes. He had already shed his jumpsuit and I could feel the heat from his exposed skin even as I refused to allow my gaze to roam. "Hi," I said. It wasn't meant to be a whisper, but that's all the volume I could muster. Rusty didn't respond. Finally, he stepped aside and allowed me to enter. The door slid closed, but the absence of the latching chime shattered a small piece of me. It was a tiny thing, but a clear signal that it was different now.
We
were different. An aching emptiness began sucking away the limited confidence I had managed to gather, shredding it against jagged edges.
Turning to face him was more than I could manage, so I spoke to the tousled bed. "I owe you another apology. I don't ever let myself get like that and I shouldn't have done so last night. Thank you for taking care of me and I'm sorry for putting you in that position." I paused but Rusty stayed silent. Fine. "I know I fucked up how I handled the video, and I get that you're still angry with me, but I would really like to have your input on what comes next."
Rusty snorted. "I know," I said, soldiering on, "that it's rich of me to ask for your opinion now, but it's what I got."
There was a deep sigh behind me followed by the soft tread of bare feet on the deck. Rusty sat on the edge of his bed, arms crossed over his chest, and looked at me skeptically. "Tell me what you're thinking and we'll see."
I shifted and scrubbed a hand over my face. This was not going to be pleasant. "So, I have another confession." This time he let out a single, humorless bark of laughter, as if he had expected nothing less. "I get it, I'm a shit person. We know this, so can we please move on?" Internally I was screaming at myself, demanding what the fuck I thought I was doing. The guy had just agreed to listen to me and I was losing my shit on him already? But it hurt, knowing he thought so little of me, and I've never been great at not lashing out when in pain. Rusty made a go-ahead gesture with his hand. I thought maybe there had been a bit of regret on his face for a moment, but it was gone too quickly to be sure. Probably just wishful thinking.
Rubbing my eyes, I resigned myself to everything blowing up in my face and told him about filtering the crew's messages, censoring their news. "That actually makes a lot of sense," he said. "I wondered why nobody was talking about it."
