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 nevermoved 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.
