“You’ll need to keep an eye on them as they start to bake. Callie, our kitchen AI, will send a notification to you when the first pizza starts to bake, so you just need to keep an eye out for it to come out and take it out to the buffet. It’ll time the first six, one after the other, and after that, there will be another pizza every fifteen minutes. There’ll be about twenty in all, so you’ll have to keep your eye on them. Don’t worry, you won’t be alone working the counter, and you can take turns minding the pizza and the grill. The burgers just need mixing up and put in the fridge when you first come in, as they are made to order, but we’ll wait until next week to have you handle that, as it’s done at the end of the lunch shift and Mark’s already gotten started on that.”
I glanced over to where Mark was. He had gloves on and was hand mixing what looked like dry crumbs of some kind with various seasonings.
“Those are the meatless burgers,” Rich said as I watched Mark add a small amount of broth to the mix. “Dried soya reconstituted with vegetable broth. We add salt, pepper, and a bit of paprika, and then press it into patties. Just that bowl’s worth, though, as most prefer our turkey and beef burgers. Those we mix in the larger bowls, and also add Worcestershire sauce, too. You’ll get the hang of it easy enough, I’m sure.”
“Yeah,” I replied, thinking that it didn’t look difficult at all.
Now if only everything else turned out to be as easy as it seemed, I’d be happy.
“You’ve got nothing to worry about, really, other than making sure the food’s ready to go and people have the right shoes. The Mylos run a tight ship, and even the kids keep themselves in line. It’s practically an episode of Leave It to Beaver when they’re here, honestly.”
I nodded, feeling that just maybe I really could do this. And according to my program supervisor, once I learned to do this well, I’d rotate over to another leisure activity center and learn the basics there. Once I’d learned them all and was proficient enough to work unsupervised, I’d get a chance to train as a youth counselor and get to help run the actual youth program itself, or I could open and run a leisure facility of my own. Though once they got around to having me come in to take the matching test, if I got matched and it was to a Dragonii, I suppose that it would be on one of their colony worlds. Maybe I’d be doing a sort of 4-H thing there? I didn’t know, but that was a big if anyway. Everyone knew getting matched at all to a Mylos was millions to one, and I was pretty sure it was just as big, if not bigger, a chance to get matched to a Dragonii.
“Okay, let’s take off that apron and hang it up, then get you behind the counter handling the shoes and lane assignments.”
I followed him back out, filled with a confidence I hadn’t felt in a long while.
14
KITTINIR
Carl was here, and as wonderful as seeing him was, I was puzzled as to his actual motivations. Carl never did anything spontaneously, despite any appearances he engineered to the contrary. I watched him carefully as he ate his Bratty Dog, his expression jovial. His eyes expressed happiness here as well, but there was also an air of calculation to them. I knew this look. It was the same one he got every time he hoped to elicit a positive reaction from me, along with an agreement to go along with whatever scheme he’d come up with. To date, I had been genuinely pleased with his ideas and happy to make an effort in whatever his proposals were. I didn’t wish to examine my reasons why, as I feared I knew the answer to that: Carl had become my happy place, as the humans phrased it. The person who made me feel the most at ease and who I wished to make as happy as he did me.
That was a problem, as I knew he couldn’t be my mate. I’d laid eyes on him first three years ago and spent immeasurable hours in his company without him triggering my mating drive. I might only be a quarter Mylos biologically, but everyone knew that it was the Mylos genes which were dominant. Every aspect of my physiology pointed to this being true, which heartbreakingly meant that Carl was destined to always remain in ‘The Friend Zone’, no matter how much my emotions tried to convince me I wanted otherwise. It simply wouldn’t be fair to enter into an affair that no doubt would turn torrid, only for my match to come up and for us to have to walk away from each other forever.
No, I’d rather keep the wall up around my heart and pretend he meant nothing more to me than a best friend. That way, we could remain close buddies all our lives, him acting as my best man at my wedding to my human mate, me doing the same at his when he met his forever love someday, and when the Fleet finally sent me to another duty station far from this solar system, we’d still have weekly vid comm chats and visits once or twice a year when returning to visit my mate’s family. It would have to be enough.
“So, I was hoping to spend the rest of this week and all of the weekend experiencing life within the Fleet,” he said. Oh, so casually.
“I have work after this and the rest of the week until Saturday. I get off at 1700 hours ship time, however, so we could not only meet up for lunch, but enjoy dinner together. I’m free to show you around over the weekend, though.”
He gave me a mischievous grin right before taking a long pull of his soda.
I glanced away, refusing to be drawn in by the way his throat bobbed as he swallowed.
“Actually, I was hoping to go with you for a few hours one morning or afternoon, to check out how the joint academic program is being set up. You see, I’m thinking about joining the team and basing myself here by running a few classes for existing students. I don’t need to be back on Earth to teach an extension course, and the option to relocate is on the table. Plus there’s you so we can continue our movie nights and just hang out like always. I even found out there’s a bowling alley on board and they have an inter-Fleet league.”
Everything slotted into place then. He feared losing his best friend, willing to follow me to the stars to avoid feeling lonely.
“You’d have to agree to join the mate matching program,” I reminded him, “And now, that includes the Dragonii. You could end up matched to a Dragonii and having to move across the galaxy to join him on his colony world.”
He let out a soft snort of disbelief. “Or, I could end up mated to a super hot Mylos right here,” he countered. “Besides, the odds of either happening are, well, astronomical for want of a better term.”
My heart plummeted. No. He couldn’t be hoping that he’d end up matched to me? Surely not. He’d never given me any of the overt romantic signals I’d observed other humans do when interested in someone. No, that definitely could not be it. He knew as soon as we Mylos laid eyes on our mate, that we went into mating fever, our mating display manifesting until we fucked, bit, and thoroughly claimed our mate. Carl must instead truly believe the odds were on his side that he would NOT be matched, and the math was clear that he likely would not be, leaving him free to work wherever I, his best friend in all the universe, happened to be.
I smiled at him, feeling a buzz of contentment knowing he was willing to go so far to remain in my life as my “brother from another mother”.
“Let me contact my supervisor and see if I can make that happen."
His answering smile held the warmth of a thousand suns, and I basked within it as I lifted my arms and activated my kunnarskyn’s text based message mode to do just that.
“Probably not today,” I told him.
“Oh, no, I wasn’t expecting that. But, um, Xero, uh, kind of posited that I should stay with you, seeing as officially this is a personal visit.”
I blinked in astonishment. Even during a personal visit, it was standard for guests to stay within guest quarters, but then a good many Mylos had been recalled from the surface and outlying stations, not to mention all the Dragonii who’d arrived. No doubt space was at a premium in order to properly accommodate them all.
“Yes, that’s fine,” I replied, ignoring the way my heart raced at the thought. In all of our three years as best friends, we’d never once stayed over at each other’s homes. We’d always returned to our own, and the time we went to a conference together in Pasadena, we’d had separate rooms at two different hotels as the one hosting us had also been hosting a large wedding, so had booked overflow guests to their sister hotel a few miles away. Carl had been put out that no one had been willing to swap rooms so we could both be at the same hotel, but we’d made it work. We simply ate breakfast together at my hotel at the free buffet and lunch at his, followed by dinner at the IHOP next to mine or the Outback Steakhouse next to his.
