Chapter 4
GUNNAR
I needed to watch my mouth around Sebastian, or I would get myself fired the moment the satellite interference cleared up.
I hadn't meant to insult him, or his dead mother of all things.
Whether it was the disorientation of being in space, the muzzy head after waking up, or my overall addled state when I was around him, I'd screwed up.
Then, the arrogant, privileged man scared the shit out of me when he'd misjudged the force needed and charged out of his bunk, running right into me. He'd had the audacity to think my flashlight was a boner!
Thankfully, he left before doing permanent damage to my ego.
If he'd stayed in my cubicle a moment longer, I would have sported an erection.
He smelled like ocean breeze, sun, and sand.
I'd never lived by the beach, but it had been my dream once, before my family situation went to shit and I had to focus more on survival than wish fulfillment.
After we returned home, I could fulfill a wish or two with the raise and bonus money Dr. Bunting had offered.
He'd run so many tests on me. I didn't know much medical science, but I was pretty sure I should have been radioactive after my last round of shots.
He didn't explain, but I'd had an MRI before, and he'd injected me with the same glowing liquid, except it shone brighter than the MRI stuff.
Maybe it was a new vaccination for space gunk, or something. My arm had stung a little the next day, but I'd felt energized, and my contacts had gotten too blurry, so I'd taken them out … I hadn't needed them since.
All my senses had improved since I'd started working on the shuttle project. I swore I felt the grease from other people's fingertips. I could hear the tinny feedback of the space station's satellite feed. And I knew the Mexican astronaut, Mari, was menstruating by smell alone.
My sense of smell had alerted me to the sabotaged shuttle before the ship's computer had, if only I could have understood the input.
The shuttle should have been sitting empty after our final checks on the cruise ship the day before.
It should have smelled the same as it did every morning when we started work.
Instead, a third scent permeated the chamber before Sebastian and I entered.
When we returned home, I would find the culprit and tear him to shreds.
I meant … have a sternly worded conversation. I wasn't the type to tear anyone to shreds. I was small, insignificant, and quiet with most people on our team. If only I could act the same way around Sebastian.
After a few hours tinkering with the shuttle, Sebastian declared it safe to continue on our path to the moon. This time, the only scents in the cabin were ours. We'd both scrubbed clean before suiting up, but Sebastian's scent overwhelmed me in the tight cockpit.
I couldn't wait to conduct the experiments in the larger compartment behind our seats.
Not that there was much hope of getting away from Sebastian's scent with the recirculated air, but some distance, even a few feet, would help.
Right now, I wanted to rip his clothes off and fuck myself on his cock while he was strapped into his pilot's chair.
I bit the inside of my cheek for some clarity, a trick I'd learned during my first stay in foster care. The pain helped me focus on something other than the need to claim Sebastian and make him mine.
A whine escaped me, and I glanced to my left. Sebastian studied his screens, oblivious. He tapped at one of the monitors, and it blinked before returning with a clearer picture.
"That's more like it," he muttered under his breath.
He ignored me, but he was all I could see, hear, and smell. I swore I heard the whisper of his hair growing. His pupils dilated and shrank as he flipped from one screen to the next, but I shouldn't have noticed that. What was wrong with me?
Sweat rolled down my temples beneath my helmet.
My helmet. I dropped the face shield. At least this way, I would smell myself first. I kept the airlock open to the cabin air. I needed to save my suit's canisters for our experiments in the shuttle's airlock. It would be like we were in space, only not.
"Are you all right?" Sebastian asked without looking at me.
I withheld my immediate snappy response, "Like you care," and gave myself a mental pat on the back. I could act like a rational adult around this man, after all. "I'm fine."
"Then do your preflight checks."
I mentally kicked myself for being forgetful. It was as easy as pressing a button and letting my console run through our flight plan code, projecting the path on the shuttle's dashboard.
I tapped the key with my knuckle and watched as the display between us lit up with our trajectory. The shuttle's path followed the green line, marking the optimal path around the moon and back toward Earth.
The events on screen took only a few minutes, but we would be trapped in the tiny shuttle together for over two days before we touched down in the Atlantic Ocean.
That seemed like endless torture while I fought off the strangest illness I'd ever had.
I loved not wearing contacts anymore, but the changes in my senses of smell, taste, hearing, and touch, all at once, were overwhelming.
Sebastian paused, his thumb hovering over the remote for the space station's ejection booster. "Are you sure you're ready? You look like shit."
"It's nothing."
He pursed his lips into a tight line and nodded. "Nothing we can fix, anyway. If we don't leave now, we'll miss the trajectory."
I nodded. "Let's do it."
Sebastian pushed the ejector button. It seemed so strange to hear nothing happening outside the craft.
In the training lab, I'd practiced for this moment with the metallic whir of gears and the solid clank of the clasps unlocking before a small explosion rocketed us across the pool meant to imitate space.
The silence reminded me of the tagline from my favorite science fiction movie. "In space, no one hears you scream."
The shuttle rocked from side to side as we catapulted away from the space station. I glanced over at Sebastian to find him gripping his armrests, eyes closed, sweat beading across his brow.
"You all right?" I asked. I hoped we hadn't both caught the weird space bug.
"I hate that part," he said. "It seems like we should hear something."
Plain old fear of sudden movements. I couldn't judge him for that, though. I'd tried to time it by counting the seconds between the clamp release and the controlled explosion, but it was never the same. To top it all off, it happened even faster in space, with no gravity or air resistance.
"I wish we could see," he continued. "That would help a little."
"We'll be in the airlock soon enough." Each of the doors had small windows, though the outside window was far thicker than the one behind our heads.
From my seat, I only saw the white insulated panels that made up the airlock's interior.
Sebastian wouldn't be able to see into space from his seat, either.
"Twelve hours." He huffed a frustrated sigh. "Might as well do what we can to prepare. Walk me through the experiments."
He was testing me, but I didn't mind. It would pass the time. I went through the process from unbuckling my seatbelt to completing the experiments and returning to our seats afterward. The activities would take us all of fifteen minutes. Describing them took less than five.
Sebastian unhooked his seatbelt and unzipped the top of his suit, exposing a V of wet t-shirt beneath. "It's hot in here," he muttered.
"It's supposed to be cold," I said. "Doesn't seem right."
"It was like this the first time." He fanned his face with his equally sweaty palm.
"How many times have you been up here?" I asked.
"This is the second," he said. "I'm surprised Bunting didn't tag along."
I swallowed hard at the name and double-clicked on the Paskal logo at the top right of my screen. I'd recognized the strange blue glow, like a link, during our flight to the space station. The link opened a new window, displaying a camera feed from the airlock behind us.
Dr. Bunting was tagging along on our flight, in a sense.
I assumed he was the one who had installed the secret camera in the airlock.
It didn't seem to go anywhere, though. It wouldn't take much to bounce the feed off a private Paskal satellite once we were back in range.
We still had our privacy in the cabin, but once we were in the airlock, the camera would capture our every move.
"If you see me strip out of my flight suit, you should do the same." Sebastian lowered his zipper another inch.
"Like, now?" I asked.
"When we're in the airlock," he said.
"It'll be colder back there," I said. "Why—"
"Trust me. If you don't, you'll shred it when you …" He trailed off, staring at the monitor. "Are we drifting away from the line?"
I leaned toward the console, studying the trajectory. I ran the simulation again, and it followed the original path around the moon without crossing out of the Lagrange points' influence.
"It's working as planned."
"I don't trust it," he said. "Something feels off." He snapped his seatbelt back into place and adjusted the straps over his shoulders. "I'm going to try to take a nap until the alarms go off. You should, too."
He shut his eyes, and I recognized the box breathing pattern he used. After a few minutes, his shoulders relaxed and he loosened his grip on his armrests.
I repeated the simulation and set an extra alarm on my watch for five minutes before the shuttle's computer would warn us to prepare for our experiments.
Then, I attempted to relax in my seat, practicing the deep breathing techniques I learned in group therapy.
I succeeded until Sebastian shifted in his seat, breaking my concentration.
"Your company's astronaut training kinda sucks," I blurted. I might have relaxed a little too much.
"Not my company," he said. "Aeronautics is all my dad."
"We didn't have any psychological training."
"Bunting thought you didn't need it. He said your heart monitor stayed within the calm range, even when he thought you should be freaking out."
"He told you that?" Any discussion of my medical records seemed like a breach of privacy, but then, so did sticking an unauthorized camera in the airlock and not telling anyone about it.
"I overheard him talking with … well, it doesn't matter. I shouldn't have listened. I didn't always hear this well."
I glanced over at him. Neither of us was sweating as badly now, and he looked much more relaxed.
"What happened the first time you were up here?" I asked.
"It's a long story," he said. "Probably best saved for after our experiments."
My intuition kicked in at mention of the experiments we'd be conducting in the airlock. I couldn't disable it from my console, but I could make sure the feed never left the shuttle. While Sebastian dozed, I worked through the mainframe, searching for the communication uplink rendezvous.