“I can’t believe you ate the rest of my noodles!Those were my favorite.”
A hint of pink colored his cheeks and that dimple winked at me.He must have been adorable as a kid.“I was hungry.And they smelled amazing.”He looked at his meal pouch and it was his turn to sigh.“Bottoms up.”
After seasoning the pouch with a few generous shakes of the hot sauce, I took my first, tentative bite.It was...not awful.Not good.Especially notnearlyas good as my noodles, but edible.I wouldn’t want to live on these.Then the hot sauce hit, eradicating my taste buds and I didn’t taste anything else.
My lips were on fire and my nose was running by the time I finished my pouch, but at least my stomach wasn’t growling any more.“Why did you stock up on these instead of regular food?”
Dax reached over and took my pouch, folding it up into a tiny square.He’d obviously done this a lot.“I didn’t know what to get.”
I stared at him, confused.“Food,” I said.“Real food.”
“But what kind?”He looked lost.
“Whatever you like to eat.”It wasn’t that complicated.
Dax looked away, that hint of pink staining his cheekbones again.“For the last ten years, I’ve served in the space corps.Three hots and a cot.Meal pouches when we were deployed.”
Ah.Gotcha.He didn’t know how to cook.“How long have you been out?”
“Three months.”
That made sense.The hair.The vibe.The reflexes.And the lack of knowledge about civilian spaceships.“I can help.Teach you to cook.How to stock a ship.”
The look he gave me was disbelieving.“Don’t worry about me, I’ll figure it out,” he said sharply.“Sounds like you should worry about your sister.”
Asshole.I was just trying to help.
But he was right too.He was a stranger.What did I care that he didn’t know what he was doing?I needed to focus on my family.“Fine.What do you want to know?”
After a long beat, he said, “Everything.”
Everything?I didn’t think so.
Ignoring the way he was watching me, I swung my legs up so I was sitting cross-legged in my chair.“Layla’s a year younger than me, so we’re pretty close.But where I’m more mechanically minded, she got all the book smarts.That girl always has her nose in a book.”
“She was talking a lot about books and libraries in those videos.And star maps.”
My breath caught.I forced it back into a normal rhythm and hoped Dax hadn’t noticed.“Yeah, whenever we were in port, she’d beg and plead to go to the library or a book shop or a museum.If she could learn something, she wanted to visit.”
“You grew up on a ship?”He sounded surprised.
“Yeah, my parents weren’t the homebody type.”That was an understatement.I’d been back and forth across the system half a dozen times by the time I was ten.
“And yet you were living on an asteroid station.”
His question was unspoken, but I answered it anyway.“I wanted to try something new.And, for me, new was a permanent station.”
“Interesting.So, you ended up stationary and your sister ended up the space-faring one.”
This was the easy part of the story.“Ever since she was little, my sister has wanted to be an archaeologist.She loved tales of lost civilizations.Lost treasures.That kind of thing.”
“So that’s what she does?”
“Not exactly,” I said, trying to figure out how to describe my sister’s occupation.Obsession?Our dad wasn’t really supportive of her dreams, so it’s more like she dabbles.”Andboydid she dabble.
“What about your mom?”
I rubbed the space over my heart, the place with a permanent hole.“She died when I was thirteen.Caught some exotic bug from one of our cargo runs.”
