“Nah. I come from a long line of Penns. My family only throws boys. I think the last woman born with the Penn name was in the fifteen hundreds. It turned out that she was trans. On the plus side my family has a strong history of trans support, and I’m pretty proud of them for that.”
Darcy chuckles, shaking his head as if he doesn’t believe me. “No, I get that your family only throws boys. It’s your attitude that surprises me.”
“My attitude?” I didn’t think I’d been giving him attitude.
“You’re very chill about”—he waves around us, which draws my attention that we’ve left Earth’s atmosphere—“all this.”
I shrug. “I don’t see any point in getting my underoos in a twist, ya know? I’m not in control here, and trying to take control will probably result in a long, hard fall with a short, sudden stop.” I’m not jumping off the magic light platform that’s providing me atmosphere in the vacuum of space.
“It’s uncanny how much you remind me of—”
“Butcher! I got a letter from a guy named Romily Butcher. He was very into my plants. He also house-sat for me even though I didn’t hire him to do it. It was a little weird but also nice of him. I think he left some books at my apartment.”
Darcy presses his lips into a thin line, studying me for a second before giving in and smiling. “That’s the Butcher I was thinking about. He’s as blasé as you are. You two would probably get along well.”
I think about that for a moment. “He did leave my apartment in better condition than he found it in.” I’m not going to admit it aloud, but I’m not the best at cleaning. It’s not that I don’t know how, it’s that I don’t want to do it and I’m bad at doing things I don’t want to do.
“Most people would be upset that someone was squatting in their house,” he points out, and I shrug again.
I feel like I'm doing that a lot—shrugging, that is. “He didn’t steal my stuff, and in fact, he left me some freezer meals and some books. It was kind of nice of him. Well, I guess he took my plants, but those were gifts from my ex who thinks everyone’s house should be a jungle. When she finds out they’re gone, she’ll replace them.”
Darcy’s eyes narrow in interest. “I was under the impression that your ex was male and a stalker.”
“Well, yes, according to Romily’s note, but a person can have more than one ex. Sam was an ex before I ever dated Stalker Steve.”
“I don’t have any exes that I know of,” he murmurs.
I’m saved from having to say anything about that by our arrival at the “space station.”
4
“It looks like a planet.”
It even has rings. The “planet” part is clearly metallic, and for some reason lit up on the outside. I mean, we’re in space—why would they put lights on the outside?
“Well, maybe a moon is more accurate.”
We pass through the wall of the space station and come to a stop in what looks like a commons or a promenade. There's something like a street fair going on—I bet it’s like a farmer’s market but for space travelers.
“You talk to yourself more than anyone I know.” Darcy’s voice doesn’t stop me from examining as many of the stalls as I can.
“Yeah, my inside thoughts become outside thoughts more than I want,” I admit. “Where is this place? It feels like it would be hard to hide a whole space station from people who look at the solar system as much as we do.”
Darcy chuckles, and the deep, resonant sound hits me in the dick. I really need to get away from him, or possibly get laid by him. No. I have terrible taste in men. “Resist, Elijah.”
Darcy cocks his head to the side, thinking for a moment before replying. “We’re orbiting the sun in the space between theasteroid belt and Jupiter, and the space station is cloaked from humans by magical interference.”
Good to know. There are a lot of aliens here, and I think me and Darcy might be the only ones who look/are human. I don’t know if Darcy’s human or other. That’s a good question to ask, though.
“Are you human?”
Darcy scrunches up his face in disgust. “I look human, and I might have some relationship to humans, but I definitely ain’t the same species as you.”
I nod a couple times. “Yeah, I didn’t think you were, what with all the magic.”
Darcy gives me a strange look accompanied by a weird half smile. Then that fucker steps off the light-platform, and it immediately disappears from beneath me. I drop, stumbling at the sudden change in elevation, but his quick reflexes save me from falling on my ass as he grabs me around the waist and steadies me so I can get my legs back under me.
“A little warning next time, dude.” It’s just polite.
