Chapter 37
With the shuttle settled, Roys stood to kiss my cheek. Quick. Simple. Breathtaking. My mind was a worthless puddle of goo. After slipping on his visor, the cabin doors opened. Roys left, clueless about how he utterly ruined me.
My body wouldn’t listen to my desperate pleas. Roys had my full attention, gaze drifting over him, following his form into the cabin where he checked on everyone. Though his shoulders drooped, he held himself better than expected.
I wanted to tell him to stay. He could watch the shuttle, and I’d go out in the heat so he could rest. The words nearly left my mouth before I bit my tongue.
The shuttle doors opened, and out Roys went, followed by the rest of our group.
The survey team descended last, giving Maddy an opportunity to catch my eye.
I swiftly turned away, worried she'd caught me ogling Roys like a dog after their favorite toy. I’d beat my face against the dash if I thought that would knock any sense into me. Alas, I was truly a lost cause.
Falling in love kind of made you a complete idiot, didn’t it?
Feelings caused strange things to happen, like paranoia.
I checked Roys’ tracker continuously over the next couple of hours.
He never moved far from the team. Arana remained close to Zavir, but my gaze always returned to Roys.
My mind itched with the desire to open a private comm with him because I wanted to hear his voice, and if that wasn’t fucking disgusting then I didn’t know what was.
“You are a loser, Lucky,” I muttered.
An obsessed loser because I sat there in the cockpit wishing Roys would visit. That had me kicking my feet against the dash, hoping the throbbing in my toes would distract me. It didn’t, but the tracker suddenly moving toward the shuttle did.
Maddy. The cabin door opened, and her footsteps came closer. My breath caught before the cockpit doors opened next. She stood in the doorway holding a visor under her arm. She had a pale sheen to her skin, and her hair stuck to her cheeks.
“Are you,” I didn’t finish the question before she collapsed into the copilot seat to chug her water.
“It’s hot.” She reached over the console to take my canteen.
“Yeah, it’s a bad one out there.” My attention drifted to the trackers. Roys remained close to Arana.
“Checking on your boyfriend?”
“What?”
Maddy chugged more water, then said, “The captain.”
“No, and we’re not dating.”
“About to be dating then?”
“What could give you such a bad idea?”
“You using me to hide from him that one day and the way you two watch each other all the time.” She pointed to her eyes and then swept a hand over the dashboard. “How he panicked when you ran off, and earlier, you might as well have been drooling. You’re clearly interested in each other.”
“Interested,” I scoffed and crossed my arms. The cockpit felt too small and stuffy, but I kept my visor on, fearful that my expression would give me away.
“Is there some kind of protocol that you can’t date each other, so you’re being all secretive?”
“Corporate forbids them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen. Regardless, we’re… we’re not in a dedicated relationship.” I watched Roys’ tracker, wondering if he ever worried over this too.
Did he ask himself what we were? Had he thought about what we could be? Did he care? Did he want me the same way I wanted him? Did it feel harder to breathe when he wasn’t near?
“Why are you asking, anyway?” I muttered.
“Am I not allowed to ask?”
“You don’t care.”
“I never said that.”
“Damn well implied it.”
The silence suffocated us, making my heart rate monitor blare across the visor’s screen. Watching the rate go up and down, up and down, only worsened it all. I ripped the visor off to hold in my lap.
“It’s not that I don’t…” Maddy settled the empty canteen on the floor by my feet. “It’s complicated.”
To put it mildly. We were on opposite sides of the same gorge with nothing to bridge the gap, or so we thought, because we made ourselves believe that.
We were the ones digging that gorge, making it wider and wider by avoiding each other, truths, any form of connection because that meant the connection could snap and we’d fall, fall, fall.
But at least we’d fall together, and if that was the bare minimum I could get, so be it.
“I love him.” I couldn’t look at her, so I stared at Roys’ tracker moving across the screen. My chest ached, and for a moment, I thought I’d pass out. Imagine that. Passing out from admitting a truth.
“Uh, that’s nice. He seems… nice.” She tapped her fingers. I wasn’t sure what expression she wore. I wouldn’t look at her. “You’re sure?”
“You think I’d stupidly say that if I wasn’t?”
“I guess not, but why did you?”
My mind reeled for an answer that wouldn’t appear. Mouth opening and closing, I finally clamped it shut so hard my jaw ached.
Maddy took a measure of mercy on me. “Does he know?”
“Like I’d tell him.”
“Why not?”
“Him being my captain does make this troublesome.” Although that was the least of my worries.
Having any feelings toward him other than lust was the genuine horror.
I didn’t do feelings. I didn’t date. Relationships were fleeting and pointless.
They would leave you disappointed, and I had been disappointed enough.
I had hurt enough. I didn’t want to hurt more.
“Like anyone cares. If anything, you will be perceived as the easy way out of trouble. Keep you happy, the captain gets laid, so the captain is happy,” she countered.
“Gee, thanks for the pep talk.”
“I don’t know what else to say here other than he seems good for you.” The copilot chair squeaked and my eyes shifted to catch her fingers tapping the visor in her lap. “All of them, actually.”
“What do you mean?”
“This little group you have.” She waved at the trackers on screen. “Your friends — you care about them and they care about you. That’s what we always needed.”
“We had each other.”
“And that wasn’t enough.”
I flinched.
She observed the trackers, swaying from one to the other. “What I’m trying to say is, if we had more people on our side back then, things would have been different. We had each other, but we were kids. We needed people who gave a shit about us, like our parents.”
“Yeah.”
But life wasn’t easy for most. Those lucky enough to have friends, family, the people who gave a shit, were few and far between, and yet, somehow, I found this ragtag team.
All accidentally, with a lot of reluctance on my part, but we were a team, a family of sorts, one I needed.
I cared about them more than I was willing to admit for a while, and they cared about me, also more than I was willing to accept.
“You have people too. The survey team likes you,” I half said, half asked.
“They do. They’re good people, all of them, and they’ve done a lot for me. I…” The bridge of her nose wrinkled. “Syrox found it humorous that you left. He figured you would come running back for me. It’d be a fun trap and, even if you didn’t return, the mental torment amused him, too.”
My already aching stomach lurched. The thought had been at the back of my mind, always wondering how she survived while, deep down, having a good idea of the answer.
But I wanted the answer to be different.
I wanted to hear her say her life hadn’t been horrible, that she somehow lived better than we could hope for.
“He got any knowledge about Benno’s operations that he could out of me, then sent me out to work.
Whatever work brought in the most credits.
The acquaintance I mentioned with the gem collection lived in the upper ring.
They wanted company. I didn’t hate being there, especially when they offered a way out.
They worked on a survey team years ago, and we talked a lot.
They even introduced me to their work. I showed promise, so I took the opportunity and got out of there. ”
“I’m so—”
“Don’t.” She held up a hand, her voice stern and unyielding. “Syrox did that.”
“Because I left you there.”
“You did, and for a long time, yes, sometimes even now, I put all the blame on you. I woke up every morning hating you more than the one before. I still do, sometimes. I was young, angry, alone, and you were easy to blame, easier to hate, so I hated you with everything left in me because it was the only way I could get myself to wake up in the morning, but…” A broken sob escaped her that had me biting back mine.
“I grew up, and I looked back, and I had to ask myself, what would have happened if you had come back for me?”
“We would have escaped. We would be like we used to be, a family.”
“No, Lucky,” she whispered. “You would have dragged me half dead onto that ship where I would have bled out in your arms. I wouldn’t have made it without immediate medical attention. And if we didn’t get out, we would have been more bodies Syrox’s goons would have thrown in the incinerator.”
She stood to rest a heavy hand on my shoulder.
Her voice drilled a hole into my skull, words my mind needed to hear yet couldn’t comprehend.
“It took me a long time to realize there wasn’t a damn thing to be done, and that is the hardest part to accept.
I certainly haven’t yet, but I’m… I’m trying. ”
The door shut upon her departure. It wasn’t until the ramp grumbled into place that I cried.
The traitorous tears fell and fell. I indignantly wiped away the evidence of my turmoil.
No one was heading this way, but I felt like they knew I was breaking apart after years of cutting myself on the pieces I shoved into place.
I wanted Roys, childishly, as if he could solve every problem merely by being here.
I never called for him, sitting there in the cockpit alone for hours and replaying that moment on the dock a thousand times.
The memory didn’t hurt as much after Maddy’s words sank in.
There wasn’t a damn thing to be done. We were lucky to have a chance to mend what remained, and…
I would mend it. I would do anything for a glimpse of what we once were. If I could do it all over again, if I could put myself in her place instead…
“We’re heading back in,” Roys said over the commlink.
I wiped at my eyes and shoved on my visor. “Copy that.”
The group returned huffing from the humid day. They crowded into the cabin, voices carrying through the closed door. Roys entered the cockpit carrying the visor under his arm.
“Miss me?” he teased after shutting the door.
“Hardly.”
Chuckling, he leaned over to catch his finger under the hem of my exoskin. With a tug, he revealed a swatch of my neck for him to kiss. My skin broke out in goosebumps, and my core tightened when he dragged his teeth before departing.
“Tease,” I grumbled, although I wouldn’t risk taking my visor off. Roys would notice something was off, and I didn’t want to talk here. “Nothing troublesome happened?”
“Nope.” Roys got comfortable while I finished the last of my checks. “Arana said she hasn’t received any more messages, which could actually be a bad thing.”
“Yeah.” It pointed toward our worry of pirates being on their way.
Roys went over the messages on his commlink. “The habitat is clear, too, with no signs of anything unusual.”
“I don’t know if that’s relieving or not.”
“Me neither.”
Once everyone was ready, we departed. Roys slept most of the way, much to my relief, and I thought of Maddy back there, trying her best and told myself I would try my best, too.