Love at First Bight

Chapter Eight

Emi rarely noticed the age difference between her and the men. It didn’t appear to bother them, and as the weeks turned to months, it wasn’t an issue for her. During training exercises, their age made their skill and experience obvious, comforting her, reassuring her that they knew their jobs and knew them well.

“Her boys,” as she’d come to think of them collectively¯“boys” being a term of endearment and not the slur the Braynow Gaston crew had intended¯were three unique personalities. Aaron was her serious, sometimes brooding, deeply passionate warrior. Ford was the intelligent, sensitive caretaker. Caph was the playful, rowdy protector.

Not just with her, but with each other, even though the dynamic was slightly different between the men than it was with her.

However, in training, whether working with her on the ship or in classes, that’s when their other sides appeared.

Professional, the men were never unfriendly or cold, but the flip side of the coin, the skills and experience that kept them alive all these years and made them successful in their field. And never condescending, as she suspected both the geeks and the grunts would have been toward her. They were always patient, always careful to make sure she understood something before continuing.

Ford best summed it up when she voiced her frustration at herself one afternoon, mad that she felt like she was holding them back.

He pulled the hand-held console out of her hand and sat on the floor next to her by the emergency override panel in cargo. He grabbed her hands. “Look at me.”

She did, fixed by his blue eyes.

“Emi, you’re the only one putting pressure on you. Graymard’s already told you there isn’t a solid departure date. We can’t take five years here, obviously, but if it takes a few extra months, we’ll do it.

Aaron’s not going to force you to say you’re ready if you aren’t.” The fear ran through her again, what had, despite her now totally uninterrupted sleep every night, haunted her dreams, pecked at her brain. “What if I’m not good enough and Aaron replaces me?”

“Oh, sweetie,” he whispered, pulling her into his arms as she finally let go and cried. She never let go like this in front of Aaron, and only rarely in front of Caph. Ford was her emotional safety net.

He held her, stroking her back, comforting her.

Ford, she knew, understood how she felt. “Don’t think that. He loves you as much as we do, trust me.” She trusted Ford to think like that, but not that he was right about it. “He’s never said it.” The twins said it to her every day¯multiple times, usually. And she knew they meant it.

She felt Aaron’s emotion, but he’d yet to voice it. She didn’t understand the contradiction and didn’t know if she wanted to.

“Babe, this is all tied in¯”

“I know, crew story.” She sat up and bitterly wiped her eyes.

Maybe she wasn’t ready to do this. The thought of losing her boys ripped her apart, nearly as strong a pain as losing her parents. She belonged on this ship, with these three men. That was one thing she felt through the depths of her soul.

He looked at his watch. “I think it’s time for lunch. You need a break.” He stood and helped her to her feet, leading her through the ship to the crew area. He seemed perfectly comfortable in the corridors, but she usually got lost at least once a day.

Caph was fixing himself a sandwich in the galley. “Hey, done so soon?”

Emi didn’t miss Ford’s imperceptible shake of his head. She sighed. “I’m okay, Ford.”

Caph grabbed her shoulders in his big hands and gently guided her to a chair. “Sit. We’ll make your lunch.” She knew Aaron was in the engine room with the refit crew, going through specs on the jump engine. She still wasn’t sure how that worked, but knew it would shave months, possibly years off the different legs of their trip.

Caph placed a sandwich in front of her, then sat with his own.

“What’s wrong?”

She couldn’t resist him and knew he’d get the story from Ford anyway. “I’m just being stupid, that’s all. I’m okay. I’m just moody.” He reached across the table and caught her chin, made her look at him. “Aaron loves you, sweetie. He just isn’t mushy like us two goobers.”

That made her smile. “Goober” wasn’t the last word she’d use to describe the twins, but it was so far toward the bottom of the list it didn’t matter.

“There’s my smile.” She couldn’t say she loved him like a big brother, because that kind of brotherly love was pretty much universally illegal. At least, on Earth it was. But the non-romantic part of their relationship felt a lot like that. Caph was the one who acted closest to her in years in many ways, and he didn’t look his age. All of the men were handsome and in shape, but Caph seemed more like thirty than forty. She’d seen him as serious as Aaron while they participated in a weaponry simulation, startled to see his green eyes dark and focused on keeping them “alive” during the battle. When it ended, he’d immediately reverted back to playful Caph.

Ford studied her. She felt his eyes and mind on her.

“Why do you always feel you have to push yourself harder?” he asked.

Caph released her chin and sat back, taking a bite of his sandwich but also interested in hearing her answer.

She shrugged, not wanting to be the center of attention. “I just needed to work hard, that’s all. I knew I needed good grades. I didn’t have a safety net. I didn’t have any family, and I didn’t want to spend my life working in a boring civil job just so I’d have a roof over my head and something to eat every month.”

“You do now, you know,” he said, his voice quiet. “A safety net.” When she didn’t respond he reached over and gently grabbed her wrist, waiting until she looked at him. “You have all three of us, babe.

We won’t let you fail, don’t worry. Your job is to take care of us and not drive yourself so hard you fall apart. Let us take care of the rest.

You think we’re letting you get away from us, you’re crazy.” Emi mustered a weak smile for his benefit. “Thanks, Ford.” Pain flared in her heart, and she struggled to push it back. She didn’t want to think about her parents, about their death and her emotional downward spiral those first months. She didn’t tell the men the whole truth. Part of her need to succeed was driven by her fear of failure.

Part of it was to escape her pain.

It was her drug, the thing that kept her going during the bleakest times after the two NSI officials showed up to break the news to her about her parents’ death. Work meant not thinking about anything but work, no time to grieve, why she drove herself to get an Alpha-ranking, psych minor, and empath training in the same amount of time most Beta-rankings took to get trained.

So she didn’t have to think. Not about her parents, at least.

Not about the loneliness.

Not about her grief or pain or if they died thinking about her.

Not about not being able to say good-bye and tell them she loved them.

Emi realized the men were watching her, and she forced another smile. “I’m okay, really.”

“You never talk about your family,” Ford observed.

Damn him. For someone who wasn’t the slightest bit empathic, he was eerily clued into her thoughts. Maybe the chips gave him the extra insight.

“It’s not something I want to talk about.” She smirked. “Family story. When Aaron wants to tell, we can swap tales of woe.”

Apparently sensing she was at the end of her endurance for the conversation, Ford and Caph focused on their lunch and diverted the topic elsewhere.

Emi still slept like a rock, and at the four-month mark her training schedule, as well as the crew sessions, were escalated. Emi focused and relaxed when Aaron praised her progress. He made no thought or mention of refusing her assignment or reconsidering their decision to add her to their crew.

All three men constantly encouraged her, telling her how great she was doing, and it didn’t fully hit her until one day when she walked from sick bay to the cargo hold to see if a scanner machine she’d ordered had arrived. The entire ten minute walk, she’d had her head bent over her hand-held, looking through messages, checking reports.

When she found herself in the cargo hold she looked up, startled.

Usually she got lost going to cargo. Not every day, but twice a week on average. Her navigation skills within the ship were better, but not perfect. She’d learned to focus on the men and use them as a type of homing beacon, knowing where they were helped her orient herself.

Ford walked in a moment later and noted her proud smile.

“What’d you do?”

“I didn’t get lost! And I was reading my console at the same time!”

He laughed and picked her up, swinging her around. “See, we told you it just takes time. You deserve to be proud of yourself.” Maybe she did.

Would her parents be proud of her taking this assignment? It wasn’t particularly scandalous in the grand scheme of things. Intra-crew relationship agreements had been standard for over a hundred years in the various space corps, and polyamorous marriages had been legal for over four hundred years on Earth, even if they were an extremely small minority.

She’d like to think they would, that she went on despite the odds and not only did well in school, but excelled. And that she was part of a group, not just a crew, but a make-shift family. She was, overall, happy.

Now if she could get that one niggling fear to crawl out of her brain and quit distracting her, life would be perfect. No matter how many times Ford and Caph assured her that Aaron loved her, it was increasingly obvious that every time they said it to her, Aaron didn’t.

The few times she’d said it to him, he’d smiled that sad smile of his and said, “I know,” or something similar, usually kissing her to distract her. It had reached the point where she conspicuously noticed that unless she said it to Caph and Ford around Aaron, the twins only said, “I love you,” when Aaron wasn’t around. As if trying to keep his lack of saying it from being noticed.

As training intensified, she barely had time to focus on it. While their lovemaking was intense, mind-blowing passion she loved to think about during her few spare moments, there were plenty of nights they were so exhausted at the end of the day that they all fell into bed together and immediately went to sleep, snuggled into one of many familiar configurations.

She was in one of the emergency pods with Caph one afternoon, learning the systems, when he broadsided her with an unexpected comment.

“You know you can talk to me, or Ford, about your parents, if you want. If you ever need an ear.”

She froze, her hands nearly crushing the hand-held console she’d been consulting. Forcing a harsh laugh, she shook her head. “Talk about a left-field statement.”

“I’m not an empath, but you’re getting tense. It’s building in you.

I feel it, so does Ford. If it’s about your parents, you can talk to us.” Relieved at his misinterpretation of her stress, she smiled. “That’s not it, but thank you.”

“Then what is it?”

Fear. Five years was a long time, but then what? What happened after?

She looked at him. “You guys have been together a long time.” He nodded. “We’re like family.”

“I’m going to miss this when it’s over. I try not to think about that, but I know I will.”

Alarm and desperate fear washed through him. “Who says anything about you leaving? You can’t leave!”

“Caph, you don’t know if Aaron’s going to request the DSMC

renew my assignment¯”

“Damn straight he will! Goddamn, girl, where’s your head?” This was the first time she’d ever felt genuine anger from him. “Do you really think he’s gonna let you go? That any of us would?” He grabbed her arms, gently shaking her. “You try to leave us, that’s pretty hard to do with me hanging onto one leg and Ford on the other, and Aaron blocking the exit.”

She swallowed. “But what if he’s holding the door open for me to go?” she whispered. “Or what if he decides to refuse my assignment altogether? I’m not ‘official,’ you know.” He pulled her to him across the seat, holding her. “Sweetie,” he pleaded, desperate, “you’re one of us. No, there’s no way he’d do that. We’re used to him, trust me, he doesn’t tell us either, but we know he loves us. He doesn’t have to tell us. Just let him be Aaron and love him the way he is.”

“Is it so hard for him to say it?”

Then she felt a hint of the same sadness she felt in Aaron, and a touch of grief shadowed Caph’s playful eyes.

“Yeah. It is,” he said, his voice soft as he sat back and released her. “It is hard for him to say.”

It’s not a big deal. It was her silent mantra, and it was a lie. It was a bigger deal every day. Emi was well aware of the irony, that if she’d picked the geeks or the grunts, she wouldn’t expect a declaration of love from them because she wouldn’t have fallen in love with them.

The first time she awoke in the middle of the night since moving in, she realized Aaron wasn’t there. She looked at the clock and saw he should have returned hours earlier from a captain’s meeting.

Ford and Caph had gravitated toward each other in sleep, making it easier for her to slip out of bed without waking them. Her foot brushed against a shirt. She pulled it on, not caring whose it was.

Caph’s T-shirt fell nearly to her knees.

In the corridor she closed her eyes and focused. Aaron was back, on the bridge. Barefoot and silent, she made her way upstairs in the dim light and silently watched him from the open doorway.

He sat in his chair. At first she thought he was staring at a console.

Then she realized he was staring out the large front view ports. In flight they’d be safely closed behind armored plates, large superimposed vid screens providing them a simulated view.

She watched him for several minutes, his gaze never diverting from the mostly dark dry dock view. There were a few retrofit crews still working, but most of the ships’ crews were either sleeping or the ships were vacant.

He was a strong man, but she wished he’d let her in and help him heal. It couldn’t be rushed, of course, any more than her own healing could. Yet in this point where their pain intersected, she wished, for once, she could make some headway.

Selfish? Yes. She admitted it.

After a while he stretched his left arm out to his side, palm up, waiting. He’d never turned his head in her direction, could not have seen her standing there.

He’d sensed her presence.

Without a word, she padded across the bridge to him and took his hand. He pulled her into his lap. She curled up, her head against his firm chest. She wanted to talk to him, but sensing his mood¯deep, contemplative, melancholy¯she changed her mind.

He sighed as he wrapped his arms around her, burying his face in her hair. A sense of calm relaxation gradually replaced his previous tense emotions. He’d always given her a sense of warm strength.

Maybe he gained the same from her?

Emi didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep again until she felt him lay her in their bed. A moment later he slid under the sheet next to her, holding her.

Despite her confusion over his actions and her desperation to know, she didn’t want to ask the question. Part of her feared his answer¯that he maybe didn’t love her the way she loved him, the way the twins loved her¯and part of her didn’t want to break his newly-calmed mood.

He held her, his heartbeat soft and strong against her cheek as she closed her eyes again. It confused her that yes, his actions spoke love, but why couldn’t he say it?