Page 36 of Collision!
“Sexy alien lovers?”Felicity threw herself onto the barstool next to Mariah.“Who was it?”
“Our sneaky chief engineer,” Remy supplied helpfully while Mariah sputtered.
“Oh yes.I guessed that one already.”Felicity waved away the coffee Remy tipped toward her and smoothed her blond updo.
Mariah frowned at the chic cruise director.“You’re keeping track of…” She couldn’t quite force it out.
“The dates and mates,” Remy said.
Felicity laughed.“Um, no.Matchmaking is one thing, but I’m not meddling anddefinitelynot monitoring.Not officially anyway.”She patted her omnipresent datpad as she slid a glance toward Mariah.“But if I make a few notes about whoever might want to leave a good review for the cruise when we get back…”
Remy rolled her eyes.“Ma’am, if you’re still hoping for five stars, you must also be drinking Miss Sunshine’s brand of rainbow-up-the-butt juice.”
Felicity looked confused.“Is that…better than the coffee, hopefully?”
Mariah groaned.“Stop.Whatever happens next on this cruise, I think we need to be ready for the possibility that this is all a…a crisis connection.”
“Nope.”Remy straightened.“Mine’s one hundred and eleven percent the real deal.”
When even the professionally cheerful Cosmic Connections Cruise director looked unconvinced, she held out both hands.A little tattoo that Mariah hadn’t noticed before glinted with starlit silver-blue on the inside of her wrist.“Okay, maybe I’m fooling myself again, like I did with my music back on Earth.And I still can’t find my feelings button, so I can’t prove anything.But Ikaryo and I aren’t just shooting for the stars; we’re aiming at forever.”
The declaration wasn’t loud, but the conviction in Remy’s voice rang clear.
As Felicity echoed Remy’s sureness with her own fervent, feelings-button-bright confession of love for their captain, lights blinked on the sensor Suvan had installed at the end of the bar.Mariah didn’t interrupt the other women to point it out, but her throat tightened.
If the resonark believed…
In her head, a cynical voice suggested that evidence of an electrical reaction was not a verification of love everlasting.The resonark was not a crystal ball revealing their romantic futures.
Why did it sound like Suvan’s voice?
She ignored it.“Are you both going to the supply bay later?”When they confirmed, she slid off the stool.“Then I’ll see you there.”
Felicity grabbed her hand.“Are we being too much?I know it’s silly when we’re on a collision course with the unknown.But—”
Before she could finish, Mariah hugged her, aghast that her qualms might erode her friends’ happiness.“You donothave to justify your joy,” she said.“And we’re all out here chasing that promise, right?”
But as she sat alone in her cabin later, knitting out her nervousness beneath the viewport, all her feelings roiled around in slow-motion chaos like the asteroid debris outside.She’d boosted the whimsical color effect on the screen to amuse herself while she worked, but somehow the prismatic streaks and sparkles looked…
Fake.
Technically, the elaborate arcs only enhanced the existing trajectory tracking.Not a lie; an embellishment to the view.
Almost reluctantly, she turned off the effect.
Now only distant starlight illuminated the leftover mining rubble, limning the icy edges in faintest silver.But mostly the rocks were black against the darker space—anonymous and indistinguishable in the emptiness.
Was she fooling herself about what she felt for Suvan?Or what he might feel for her?Adding rainbows that didn’t exist?
She looked down at the lumi-lace in her lap.Suvan had said the filament wasn’t the same tech as the feelings buttons, but as the yarn pulled up from the center of the ball, the strands’ pretty shimmers alternated with shadowed streaks—too much like her own misgivings.
Suddenly, the soothing metronome tick of her needles sounded like a tsk-tsk of judgment.The rhythm faltered, and she realized she’d dropped several stitches and the tension was uneven from the very start.
How was she supposed to knit a pattern when the colors kept changing?What if it clashed and looked ugly?
Why would she believe an austere, pragmatic engineer—prickly in both metaphoric and literal ways—would evenwanta sparkle sweater?
She let the rows unravel in her hands all the way to the first slipknot.
