The Loneliness of Distant Beings

Chapter Fourteen

Mariana and I are checking stock in the storeroom and even though I've managed to resist the urge for days, I suddenly can't help myself grilling her about Dom.

'So are your dads brothers?'

'No, Domingo's mum, Tia Lola, is my mum's sister.'

'What's she like?'

'Super guapa. That's where Dom gets his looks. She used to act in the Cultural programme shows, so you've probably seen her.' She smiles to herself.

'And his dad? What's he like?'

'Tio Fernando can sing like a . . . ' She frowns. 'Wait, why are you asking all these questions?'

I shrug, turn away, pretend to be absorbed in protein shakes. 'Just taking an interest in you.'

She lowers a box to the floor and I feel her gaze on me. 'In me? Or in my hot cousin?'

'Mariana, that's not what this is. I did think he seemed interesting, but as a friend. We're allowed to be friends, right?' I turn to meet her watchful eyes in the half-light of the storeroom.

'To be on the safe side I'd probably advise against it,' she says.

But I just laugh, because she has no idea how right she is.

Whatever Dom and I are, we're not just friends. Every moment we've found to be alone together has only made it clearer that we could never have been just friends. Not with how when we talk it unspools everything in my head and rearranges it in a way that suddenly makes sense. Not with how when he looks at me it feels like I have always known him, like he's the other half of me that has been missing my whole life. Not with how when he touches me I feel him in my bones, my flesh, in each breath, in every racing beat of my heart.

For weeks, I've been dreaming about Huxley-3 almost every night. I am there. I am the one flying over her surface. It feels like I don't exist any more and all of it is happening through me, flowing through my soul. She is beautiful, she is a whole, beautiful, perfect world. She is music, a sweet, sad sound that plays in my ears and in my heart. She is mountains covered in snow, she is endless forests of green, she is orange deserts bathed in setting sun, she is bluest seas, she is beaches. And she is ours.

And then one day, I have this feeling when I wake up that there is this other life I was born for – that we were born for – Dom and me. I can hardly make it through my shift that day – every hour is a week – especially when some half-cut off-duty engineers decide I'm their sport and start giving me hassle about there not being enough energy drinks in the machines on their mess deck. I'm in a good mood but no mood is good enough to put up with much of what they have to dish out, especially since they have their hats on backwards and overalls undone and are like: 'You're Lomax's woman, aren't you? The feisty one.'

I just shrug.

'What are you doing working Maintenance?'

'Why wouldn't I be?' I heft a box of muesli bars.

One of them shrugs then. 'Can't he get you out of it? Pull strings? Knock you up or something?'

'I'm ignoring you now,' I say, so at least he knows the situation, not that he seems to care.

'There are rumours about you, hot stuff.'

'OK, move along,' I tell them.

'Why don't you come keep my berth warm tonight?'

'In your dreams, loser,' I tell him, and they're gone, sniggering like a couple of kids, shoving each other around, and yeah, the whole thing is weird, it makes me think, I guess, but I don't let it get to me, not too much anyway, because maybe I feel like there's a way out of this for the first time.