2. Mika
MIKA
“Fucking shit balls,” I muttered under my breath as I stared at the screen in front of me in confusion. “That shouldn’t be possible.”
“I’m sorry,” Reno piped up, and I groaned, forgetting he was near enough to hear me. “Did you just say shit balls? Didn’t you once say that was the stupidest thing you’d ever heard someone say?”
I scowled. “The sensors need looking at again. I knew I should have done it myself.”
Reno whistled. “Boy, you should be glad Trev isn’t around to hear that. We both know how sensitive he can be.”
He was giving me shit, but he was right.
Trevor was one of the few guys at the outpost I considered ‘sensitive’.
The others would be Carter, though he loved to cover it with bluster, and of course, my ever-present, ever-patience testing brother.
As for the others…well, some were notoriously hard to read, but that was them being good at concealing their thoughts, or my hit-or-miss ability to read people.
“Yes, well, I’ve told him before, it’s not a matter of skill,” I said, knowing I was going to have to throw that batch of readings out.
Nothing was usable, and it definitely wouldn’t pass muster if I tried to turn it in.
Which was a problem because it was the third time in two weeks that I had to go without usable readings.
There was always room for error, but if I didn’t get something, I was going to get my ass reamed.
“This equipment is…not the greatest, and I’ve had more experience with it. He’s a great fixer, but I also—”
“Mika,” Reno snorted, and I didn’t have to turn around to see he was rolling his eyes. “I love you, but you’re rambling again.”
“You bother me,” I shot back. “I need to get on the roof and look at what’s going on. I’ll bet I know what it is, and if it is…Xander isn’t going to be happy.”
“Which means expensive,” Reno snorted, and I glanced over finally.
He was locked onto a set of samples he had with him, carefully examining them for…
I wasn’t sure. Probably making sure the quality was up to snuff.
I tried to ignore the pang of jealousy that shot through me at the suspicion that his day was going to turn out better than mine.
That much was obvious from the fact that he wasn’t muttering up an angry storm while he stared at the slides and containers of soil.
“You really bother me,” I grumbled, making him give me a confused look, then glance down at his work and snicker, which did nothing to improve my mood.
“Whoever said it was a blessing to be seen and understood was clearly delusional,” I grumbled as I pushed my chair back under the desk and got up to stretch.
The science building, as we loosely called it, wasn’t large, but it got the job done.
The only real irritation, other than constantly tripping over my brother, was that we weren’t well-funded.
Oh, we could make do most of the time, and we were good at cobbling together what we couldn’t outright buy, usually with help from Trevor, but it was still annoying.
I drifted over to the phone on the wall near the nook I used for my personal workspace and pushed the buttons to connect me to the garage in the main building.
The cell service had improved in recent years; the one thing we requested that had actually been given to us.
Except it was still a habit to use the landline to call around the outpost. That and Trevor was notorious for leaving his cell phone out of reach and usually on silent.
“Trevor’s office,” a loud, friendly voice announced.
“Jake,” I said wearily. “I’m not in the mood for—”
“Fun? A bit of whimsy? Yeah, I know. We’ve all known for the past week,” he said in my ear, and I frowned. “Huh, I wonder what could possibly have put you in such a bad mood…did something really random and awkward happen about a week ago? I can almost think of it, but—”
“Jake, is Trevor around or not?” I asked, trying for calm but having to settle for tense.
“He might be currently buried under a truck,” Jake told me with a snort. “Headphones in and in his own little world.”
“Of course he is,” I muttered, rubbing my forehead. “I need the repair logs for the science building. And considering he doesn’t upload them for days, I’m not going to bother looking to see if he’s changed his habits.”
“Good call, I’ll try to get an answer out of him and drop them off to ya, not like I have anything else to do around here right now,” he said and ended the call, leaving me to fear what could happen if Jake was left without something to do for too long.
“God, that man is the reason we were warned about idle hands,” I said, setting the phone back in the receiver.
Reno snorted. “That’s fine, I’ll drag him along with me. There’s still a few things I need to look at before I call it a night. Making him stomp around the forest with me is a pretty good way of keeping him out of trouble.”
I eyed him. “Really? Because you’ll have to explain how it always seems to work out that when you two are around one another, trouble follows right on your heels.”
“Not in the woods,” he said with a shrug as he tapped his tablet.
A tablet, I noted with a sense of annoyance, that he’d had to buy himself rather than through funding.
We lived in an age where technology was so integrated into everything, that not being up to date was the best way to be left behind.
He had accepted our lack of help a lot faster than I had over the years, and while I thought he was a little too comfortable letting things go, I had to admit it seemed to make his blood pressure lower than mine.
“He knows so long as he doesn’t screw with what I’m doing when I’m actually working, then he can screw around to his heart’s content. Lets him work off that energy.”
“God knows he has plenty of it,” I muttered, watching him with faint curiosity.
It was funny to see a man working with plants and soil when, as a kid, his aspirations were to be a vet, then a biologist, then a marine biologist, and then he contemplated being a soldier.
Then again, I had aspired to be a pilot and an astronomer, and toyed with the idea of being an astronaut.
In the end, though, my pie in the sky brother had remained focused on the earth, and I, the more grounded and practical one, had ended up in the sky.
Life seemed to love its little ironies.
“I’m just impressed you managed not to take his head off through the phone,” Reno said, and I tried to read his expression to guess what was about to come out of his mouth.
While I understood on an intellectual level what people meant when they said they couldn’t see the difference between us, being identical twins and all, on a personal level, I didn’t.
My brother and I were identical physically, but it was mentally where our differences lay.
Which I thought, was obvious, I could see it in the way he smiled, the way he was more prone to looking like he was up to something, hell even the way he stared off into space differed from mine, more unfocused and at ease rather than thinking deeply.
And right now? God, he was about to make a point I really didn’t want to hear. “Reno, don’t.”
“Love ya, Lil Bro,” he said, and I rolled my eyes, as I was sure he expected. “But it’s true.”
“You beat me out of the womb by twenty-two minutes,” I reminded him, as I usually did when he brought that up. “You’ve never been patient.”
“I can be patient,” he said with a snort. “And don't distract me with a sibling fight over stupid shit. I’ve given you plenty of peace, quiet, and space. But now it’s time for me to address the elephant in the room…or the ex-boyfriend, if you prefer.”
“I’d prefer not to talk about any of this, actually,” I told him, but there was no one on earth who knew my brother better than me, and the reverse was true as well.
I could tell on a level that felt foundational, instinctual, that I was not going to get out of the conversation.
Just as he knew I didn’t have the energy to divert him from the subject.
The conversation was going to happen, even if I tried to push him off or shut it down through silence.
“Man, then it’s going to really suck when I keep talking,” he said as if that was a surprise. “See, because I kinda noticed something.”
“Not your work, obviously,” I said pointedly. I might know where the conversation would inevitably end, but that didn’t mean I had to make it easy for him. “You're more focused on my love life.”
“Love life,” he repeated with a snicker. “Please, you’re almost as big a slut as Jake or Mav. You just have to go further out of town.”
“I get my needs met,” I told him.
“Your needs are very needy.”
“Hilarious.”
“Slut.”
I eyed him. “I noticed you haven’t been that worried about your needs.”
“Wow, you’re tracking whether I get laid or not?” he asked. “That’s fucking creepy.”
“You used to go out at least once a month, or at least try to go on dates. But for the past year, you haven’t,” I said, raising a brow. “Want to talk about that?”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” he said, and the flash of bewilderment across his face told me he genuinely believed what he was saying, so I let it drop.
Not because I believed it, because I didn’t.
Some part of me, the same one that had known how the conversation was going to go, knew there was more to the story.
So either he was good at pretending otherwise for this one specific thing, or…
he didn’t know the reason behind it, so there was little point in trying to push him.
“You’re the one who refuses to deal with what’s wrong. ”
“There’s nothing wrong.”
“I…that was a terrible lie, and you don’t normally lie.”
“I just mean, there are some things I’m…not fond of, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be talked about.”
“Pretty sure if you keep going the way you are, Xander will notice, and pretty much everyone agrees it’ll get bad if Xander catches on. You know how he can be.”