I turned back to the bar and asked the bartender for a damp towel. Taking it, I dabbed it across Gunnar's defined pecs. "Look, I'm sorry, all right? Emotions are a little high tonight."
"Fuck my life." Gunnar twisted away from every touch, so drying his shirt took twice as long. "It's your birthday, right? This whole shindig is for you?"
"I didn't mean to turn the conversation to me," I muttered.
"Why not?" Gunnar rolled his eyes. "Every conversationI've had since I started working here has been about you. 'When Sebastian takes over, he'll hire his own coders. When you circle the moon, he's in charge of experiments, not you. When Sebastian wants to use you like a whore, get down on your knees and beg like a good boy.' Yeah, I've heard it all."
I dropped the towel back on the bar and grabbed Gunnar's arm so he couldn't vanish into the crowd. I pulled him into the corner, thankful for his short, slim build. Since he couldn't see past me, he turned his withering stare on me instead.
"I'm the one who might end up somewhere else after our mission, not you. Bunting fucking loves you." I couldn't keep the disdain from my tone. He was Dr. Bunting's favorite pet, and I didn't know why. When I didn't understand something, I didn't trust it, and I didn't trust Gunnar, pure and simple.
"I will be in charge of our mission," I continued, "but only because I've been up there before, and I don't want what happened last time to happen again."
He frowned. "What happened last time?"
"It's not important. That last thing … I would never treat a teammate like a whore. I have enough money to pay for entertainment whenever I want it." My word choice made his frown even sharper. He probably won every argument with that withering glare. "We're coworkers, Gunnar. I would never … I'm not like that."
He pushed at my chest. "Right. You trapped me in a corner to intimidate me, but you're not like that."
I took a step back and sucked in a breath for my rebuttal, but he was already gone, shoving his way through the crowd of tall, beautiful people.
So much for mingling. I no longer wanted to speak to anyone. I pulled out the bar stool I'd been leaning over for the last fifteen minutes and asked for another bourbon. This one, I sipped as I contemplated the too-pretty-for words man assigned to fly a single orbit around the moon with me.
Gunnar was as smart as he was beautiful, but he didn't belong on the team. Dr. Bunting said his coding for a new airplane flight simulator had been flawless, and I didn't doubt it, but the rest of our colleagues had doctorates more impressive than mine, or had written papers in the aerospace journals I read each week.
Gunnar Grayson was an unknown. Another reason not to trust him.
I sipped my drink and glanced around the boat deck. After dinner, the crew had cleared the tables away so we could use it as an open-air ballroom. The breeze was a balmy eighty degrees from the east, probably blowing up that storm from Africa. It didn't matter. Our morning launch would be well before the storm reached us, and we would depart the space station after it passed, crashing back into calm water to do it all again in a few months.
If I survived the night. The odds were in my favor. Dad would have to cancel the launch without me, unless he already had a backup in place.
During the altercation with Gunnar, I'd lost track of my father. Dr. Bunting still nursed a clear drink at the other end of the bar. A glass of seltzer water, if I knew him at all. I scanned the room, searching for my father, only to find him a few feet away and closing fast. Shit.
"Ivan." I held out my hand, hoping to stall him from whatever speech he had planned.
"You know I hate it when you call me that," he growled. "Why couldn't you call me Dad like a normal child?"
"For starters, you never treated me like a normal child," I reminded him. I held out my drink. "If you're planning to poison me, go for it."
"Poison you?" He glanced around us, as though hoping I'd attracted an audience with my outlandish claims. I hadn't. Most of the folks here tonight worked with us, and they knew to move out of earshot for plausible deniability, should anything happen. "Not now, not after all the success we had with the," he paused for effect, "radiation."
He meant whatever he'd done to turn me into a fucking wolf. I sighed and sipped my drink. "You won't give your company to a guy who turns furry on the dark side of the moon, though, right?"
"I knew you had the potential long before I transferred my earthly assets to you. I have no intention of backing out now."
I blinked. "You fucking knew?"
He glanced over his shoulder. The crowd had shuffled away from us a few steps further. "Keep your voice down," he whispered anyway. He studied me for a moment, and then gave a stiff nod. "It's time to share the files with you, all the research we conducted on you and your mother, that summer we spent in Ukraine."
The summer we spent too close to the devastating fallout from Chernobyl, in other words. A driver and two of my tutors had fallen ill on the trip. When wereturned, my mother was diagnosed with stage four uterine cancer, all thanks to the radiation sickness she most definitely brought home with her. Dad had worn his special suits and spent his nights outside the red zone, but mom and I had been trapped in a concrete facility, waiting to have our blood drawn every few hours. My numbers rebounded after the first night. Hers did not.
"You killed her," I whispered. "Who's to say you won't kill me, too?"
"I need you, Sebastian. You're the future of this planet. Your people will populate Mars one day."
"My people?" I scoffed. "I'm gay, dad. Unless you want to fill a turkey baster with my sperm and inject a bunch of women with it ..." It was one thing to think it, but speaking it into the universe was a bad idea. I slammed my mouth shut so hard my teeth clicked together.
I didn't need to give him ideas. He was resourceful enough. Hell, he probably collected my sperm every time I ejaculated down my shower drain.
