He huffs a little breath, like a laugh and says, “Will you keep me company while I do?”
“Of course.”
He exhales and unzips his jumpsuit as he goes, all of his arms working in tandem to get it down to his hips.
I follow behind him to the bathroom, ignoring the small robot vacuums that hurry out to deal with the dusty boot prints he leaves behind.
He strips down, and I watch the way his muscles move under his orange skin. When he places his jumpsuit and boots in a compartment that will clean them for him and turns back to me…
He looks exactly like the picture… except for the blue dust on his hands and in the lines of his face.
Otherwise, his orange skin is smooth—save for a few scars—all the way down to his thick, cock with its fun cuboid head and… the translucent balls I had only seen in the picture before.
He doesn’t mind my staring, so I keep looking.
“What do you do?” I ask as I hop up onto the counter and pull one knee to my chest, gaze never leaving him.
He steps under the spray and I don’t expect him to answer, but he does. “I am a line operator at one of the ore processing plants on the planet’s surface.”
“Yeah?” I’m a little distracted by the fact that he doesn’t seem to need to breathe. “Do you like your job?”
“Most of the time.” He scrubs at his hair with the provided soap. “It’s not easy, but no one’s died this year and I haven’t lost any fingers in the last six, so…”
He winks at me and the water twists down his back in deep blue rivulets.
I watch those streams for a moment before I remember I want to ask him more. “Do you live down there?”
“Thankfully no.”
“Thankfully?” I did not expect that.
He turns and looks at me through the open shower door. “The nice parts of the planet are touristy, which is fine if you’re a tourist. But when you’re not, it’s very easy to learn to hate those tourists, and besides that, it’s needlessly expensive. The rest of the planet… Anywhere that has easy access to the shuttles and the general necessities is going to be close to the mines or the plants. And in both of those places everything gets covered in a coating of yeveron dust, eventually.
“Even you?” I ask, pointedly looking at the last of the blue powder that has made its way down his legs.
“Even me.” Smiling, he starts to say something and then shakes his head, thinking better of it.
But I can’t let him get away with not asking “What?”
“I just remembered I’m not allowed to ask you questions.”
My smile fades and I’m glad he’s closed his eyes to wash the soap from his face. I want to know what he wants to ask me… but there’s a privacy restriction on that for a reason.
I can always lie if it’s something I don’t want to answer, or can’t.
I tap the bulkhead twice and the bot makes a small sparkly noise.
Mooralan looks up and then at me, but before he asks, I say, “Remove question privacy rules.”
“Question privacy rules removed until reinstated.”
“Thanks.” I look at Mooralan. “Ask away.”
He smiles at me, softly, and I clutch my knee a little closer, swinging my leg even though I don’t want to fidget.
“Do you like your job?”
Shrugging, I answer the same way he did. “Most of the time.”
