Kaylie pulled her personal computer from the pocket of the loose lilac dress she was wearing and slapped it down on the table. “Fun Valentine’s Day games,” she said, and the screen began to fill with words and images.
“Puzzle purses, love spoons, the lady’s glove...” Jaxson pulled his chair next to hers and read aloud, his broad form towering over hers.
He’s so big. You know it’d probably hurt with him. Why do you do this to yourself, idiot? Why do you dream about ruiningthings, about things you can’t have, about things he probably doesn’t even want?
But it wouldn’t hurt just to have him hold me in his arms.
He used to come and sit with me every day when I was recovering from hypersleep and neurosuppressants, a scared, kidnapped, lost girl in need of a hero. And there he was, holding my hand and talking. Telling me about life on the ship, about how to properly recalibrate an engine, about the importance of gyroscopic timing pins...
“All of these need groups! We should have played the lady’s glove and the puzzle purse at dinner,” Jaxson sighed, swiping across the options. “Carve a spoon? This has to be ancient, like from the 1900s, maybe earlier, when wood wasn’t a protected substance on Sapien-Three. Now, if I wanted to carve you a spoon, I’d need metal and a welding kit. Which I have, but—”
“Wait. What’s this one?” Kaylie cut him off, mainly to silence the thoughts rampaging through her head, confusing her hormones as his chest brushed her shoulder. “A Missing Heart. A heart-shaped piece of paper or other token was hidden in the room, and the lucky partygoer who found it would have the honor of selecting the lady he would escort to dinner or around the dance floor. We could do that. We don’t need a group. One of us just hides something somewhere on the ship, and the other has to find it. Here.” Kaylie grabbed one of the scattered paper hearts left over from the celebration. “You hide this in the lounge, and I’ll find it. Then I’ll hide it, and you’ll find it. Or, we could just watch something. Or go to bed.”
Jaxson stared at her for a moment.
Or go to bed.
Does he think I meant we could go to bed together? No, of course he doesn’t think that. He’s not a foul-brained, horny virgin who is thinking impure thoughts about her friend.
“In the lounge? Okay. Fine. What do you win if you find it? Do you take me to dinner?”
“I’ll make you a midnight snack.” She shrugged.
“Deal. And then you hide it, and if I find it, I’ll make you a batch of my famous Lupine chili. Lycen’s mama’s recipe.”
“Chili? Now? At this hour?”
It was his turn to shrug. “Why not? You got anything better to do? Hot date to rush off to?”
His words were casual, teasing, and yet the room was suddenly ten degrees hotter, and the tight ache in her middle a hundred times worse. “I wish.”
“Oh?” Jaxson easily slid his arm around her shoulder, and she snuggled into his side, her hand settling on his hip—an innocent gesture of support and camaraderie that had kept her steady when she was learning to walk again, her muscles weak and atrophied. “Do tell. What kind of lucky fella would you be after, and where would he take you on this date?”
“Anywhere with him would be the best date. I’ve never had one. It’d be special, just because it was with him. We could play games in the lounge, or cook in the kitchen, or watch a movie in my quarters... Jax, I wouldn’t care. If he made me feel like y— all the couples I see on the ship, that’d be okay. They don’t need fancy date nights. They just celebrate each other by being together. Doing stuff together.”
“And you’ve never had that?”
“Nope.” Kaylie hoped her voice didn’t sound too pitiful. She tried to inject a note of cheer into it as they strolled from the dining area to the elevator, heading up to the lounge. “I want something like you and Alana had, I guess. You didn’t care that you were from two different worlds, two different races, planets, even galaxies. Wow. And yet you always talk about her like she was the love of your life and your best friend. Your everything.”
“She was. She was my everything. And sometimes I think that you only get one love of your life. That this mythical Cupid can shoot you only once...” Jaxson let out a deep sigh, a sigh that was almost a whine. “But sometimes I think maybe he keeps one more arrow, hidden somewhere. Like Doc and Abigail. Here you have a widower, thrown into his work, busy rebuilding the world in honor of his wife and the four cubs she was carrying when the fever hit, and then...pa-twing!”
“Pa-twing?”
“That’s the noise of the arrow leaving the bow,” Jaxson hissed. “Marcus is hit, right in the heart. Abigail crash-lands into his life, jump-starts his ticker, and now they’re expecting two cubs and applying to adopt more. That’s pretty damn amazing. Shows what you can do with one arrow.”
The elevator doors opened, and Kaylie left his side, snatching the paper from his hand. “Hey, I wanna go first.”
“Huh? You—”
“I don’t think I can handle that chili tonight. I’m so full from the feast. And thebordeand the chili? We’ll be playing a whole different game of Blast Off if we’re not careful.”
Jaxson had to laugh at that. “Okay, well, I still expect a challenge. Let’s say we each get ten minutes to hunt for it, and we can ask for three hints?”
“Ten minutes, two hints, and I won’t make it too easy. You have to wait in the hall. No peeking!” Kaylie sprinted into the lounge and carefully smoothed out the paper heart as soon as she got to the snack bar—poorly stocked, but improving, thanks to Ardol and Kamau. She knew there had to be—yes! A knife, scissors, and some crafting shears that Jade had requested, since she had discovered a love of sewing and altering Felid clothes to fit humans.
She cut the heart into a new shape, cursing herself when she got to the back of the arrow and realized she had no ideawhat the ancient things really looked like, just a vague notion of a triangle on a long stick. She opened her personal computer again, searched for an image, and cut fast with sweating palms.
When she was done, she simply hid the arrow under the snack bar sink, putting it on a stack of napkins, the gaudy red of the wonky cut-out mocking her on a sea of white.
