Page 22 of Love Below Zero

22

EMOTIONAL CONNECTION

JAMES

Note slipped under Rebecca’s door:

If you replace the sun with a black hole of the same mass, nothing would happen. Well, we would all die, but the planets would stay in the same orbits.

The temperature dropped drastically during the night, making sleep nearly impossible. I can hear Rebecca’s teeth chattering next to me. We all migrated closer to each other as the night wore on to take advantage of our combined body heat, but it isn’t doing much for us.

I held out as long as I could, but I can’t stand listening to Rebecca freeze any longer. I do not count this as flirting or anything of the sort, it’s purely survival instinct.

I move closer to her, lifting her covers and sliding underneath them.

“What are you doing?” she whispers, a hint of alarm in her voice.

“I can’t sleep with your teeth chattering so violently,” I tell her, wrapping us both in her blanket and mine before wrapping my arms around her and pulling her flush against my body.

“What if the others see us?” she asks softly, but she makes no move to pull away from me. Her arms wrap around my waist and she burrows into my chest. Eli is snoring so loudly the entire continent can probably hear him, and both Frances and Joanna’s breaths are even.

“They’re asleep,” I assure her. “I’ll move away before they wake up.”

She nods into my chest, body relaxing against mine. She stops shivering, and the heat between us rises steadily.

Perhaps I didn’t think this all the way through. I honestly just want to keep her warm, and now her soft body is pressed against mine. Sure, there are plenty of clothing layers between us, but that doesn’t stop my hands from wandering over her waist and hips.

I’ve never wanted to touch someone so badly as I want to touch her. She tangles her legs between mine and I hear her breath hitch softly. Her hand traces my back lightly, sending a shiver up my spine for a different reason.

“Firm touches, love,” I tell her, hiding my face in her hair. Her hand stills before pressing firmly against my back.

“Like that?”

I nod, letting myself inhale her sweet scent.

Right, this was a fucking terrible idea. Being so close to her in the dark, practically alone but not quite, should not turn me on, but it does. We are straying out of friend territory and heading neatly for complicated. I don’t want complicated, but with her so close, all rational thoughts fly out the window.

It would be so easy to catch her mouth in another searing kiss. To let my hand wander between our bodies, dip between her legs ...

“James,” she moans softly, and the sound sends my already dirty thoughts into overdrive. I want her to moan my name again, scream it, if she has to. “Whatever you’re thinking about, you have to stop.”

How did she ... oh. Right.

I shift slightly away from her so she won’t have to feel my erection pressing against her, but she holds on, not letting me move.

“Just breathe,” she says, and I do. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

“I’m sorry,” I mumble into her hair. I feel like a teenager who just discovered his right hand and dirty magazines for the first time. “This is ... new for me,” I confess.

“What do you mean?”

“I haven’t been physically attracted to anyone in a long time. I need an emotional connection, and those are rare for me.” I don’t subscribe to the notion of coming out, since being straight isn’t the default and I don’t enjoy explaining my identity to other people. The internet is out there and free to use, and if other people assume my sexuality, that’s on them. But she’ll understand.

She stills, looking up at me. I wish I could see her face properly, but the dome is dark. A little light comes from one of the heaters across the room, just enough for me to make out her silhouette, but no facial expressions.

“You’re physically attracted to me? ”

I raise a brow even though she can’t see me. “I thought that was painfully obvious, Rebecca.”

She shakes her head, the movement sending tiny vibrations through me that do nothing to calm my dick.

“No, I mean ...” She seems to struggle with the words for a while. “You like my body?”

How do I even begin to tell her that I more than “like” her body?

“I like your brain. And I like the face you make when you’re plotting my demise,” I say, bringing one hand up to cup her cheek. “And if we were anywhere else, I’d show you just how fucking much I like your body, but for now you’ll have to take my word for it.”

“I ...” Her breath is a little shaky. “You don’t care that I’m ... bigger than most girls?”

Oh. Now I understand what this is about. While I might be oblivious to other people’s bodies, that’s not the case for everyone.

I thought her weight loss had simply been a side effect of her trying to reverse her pre-diabetes. I didn’t take into account the added pressure she must have been facing as a public figure and a woman.

Lord, I want to kiss her so badly. I want to shield her from the world that taught her that being different is somehow bad. I do the next best thing, leaning in slightly to press my lips against her forehead.

“It didn’t even cross my mind, darling. I was too busy thinking about pushing my hand down your pants.”

She laughs, but it still sounds too wobbly for my liking.

“You’re very horny for someone who doesn’t experience sexual attraction unless there’s an emotional connection. ”

“We’ve had an emotional connection from the start, darling.”

This time her laugh sounds more genuine. “Oh, so our verbal sparring matches turn you on?”

I shrug. “Perhaps.”

She nudges me with her elbow and I chuckle.

“Asshole,” she grumbles, but she snuggles back into my chest. “You know, friends don’t usually admit out loud that they want to get into each other’s pants.”

I rest my chin on top of her head, closing my eyes. “They do when it’s clear their friend needs to hear it.”

She hums in agreement, her breathing becoming slow and steady. I hold her tight, drifting off beside her.

Joanna and I spend a harried week trying to sort out our power issues. On top of that, our water recycler breaks, and we have to use buckets for our waste for two days until the correct parts can be printed. No one is happy about that, but we soldier on. I can already hypothesise that the data will show a drastic caloric dip this week. Everyone is on edge, and meal times are difficult. Joanna and I have to be forced to eat during the day, and I can tell the rest are forcing themselves too.

There are just so many problems to solve, it feels like I’m trying to keep the dome together by sheer force of will. Around Thursday, I became paranoid that the ground crew was somehow sabotaging us. We were facing real problems that astronauts on Mars would face, but everything was happening in such quick succession I thought for sure it was staged .

Frances dissuaded me of that delusion rather quickly.

“They were very upfront about the condition of the dome, and we didn’t sign up to be psychologically tortured,” she reminds me gently, after she finds me face down in a manual for the generator at 2 am in the kitchen. The ground crew couldn’t find the schematic I needed, so I tried going through the manual we had on hand. Only it was in Swedish, and despite my and Eli’s combined efforts we only understood every second word or so.

“These things happen, and the added pressure of the study is making them worse.” Frances puts a cup of coffee in front of me before settling into her usual chair. She looks tired. Her hair is wrapped in a silk scarf, and her sleepwear hangs differently on her body.

I push the manual aside, grabbing the coffee like it’s a lifeline. Which it is.

“It’s likely the constant power surges that caused the recycler to fail,” I point out.

“Exactly.” Frances nods. “That would be the root cause. We’ve been treating the symptoms, not the actual disease.”

“Joanna wants to take apart the entire generator and rebuild it from scratch.” I sigh, tugging at my hair.

“You don’t approve?”

“No. I think it’s too risky, and would take too much time. On the other hand, we can’t seem to find the issue.”

“Yes, that’s what worries me. We’re losing more and more sunlight every day, and I can tell that going outside is taking a toll on Joanna.”

I agree. The spacesuit is cumbersome, and the snow makes it difficult to navigate the short trip to the generator. It’s even more frustrating trying to fix a generator over the walkie-talkies, with Joanna giving instructions from inside and Eli and I trying to execute them outside. It’s easier for Joanna to come along, but hard on her body. I haven’t seen her or Rebecca train once this past week.

“If only we had a way to store more solar power, then we could function for a few days without the generator and Joanna could take it apart.” The 3D printer is handy for printing spare parts, but it can’t print spare lithium batteries. I doubt the ESA would leave lithium batteries in storage, and we can’t just order one to be delivered.

“Or we conserve more power during the day,” Frances says, tapping her fingers against the table. “How do we make that happen?”

It takes a few minutes of pulling system reports and schematics and making calculations before I can provide an informed answer.

“If we cut the water recycler, Eli’s grow lights for his garden, and lower the heating to fifty percent we should be able to store enough to get us through the next few nights. I can give Joanna two days.”

Frances nods. “Looks like we’ll be shitting in buckets for another couple of days, then.”