Page 1 of Snowed In

If I Had the Chance

A Beginning of Always Short Story

E.M. Lindsey

Chapter One

Adam

For the first time in his life, Adam wasn’t the messy one, which was kind of an unfair statement since his friend was in the hospital and no one ever looked their best there. But he supposed if anyone could pull of a suave hospital look, it was Piper.

But Piper also looked tired. He looked like a man whose job had taken a massive toll on him. Like maybe Adam reallyshouldbe worried about Piper’s message about how his heart wasn’t doing all that great and he was regretting his last trip up to the ISS.

“I definitely can’t do the conference,” Piper said, his voice hoarse. “I don’t think I’m getting out of here any time soon, and when I do, Phoenix isn’t going to let me leave the house for at least a couple of months.”

Adam had only met Piper’s brother a couple of times. He’d been a young, wide-eyed, inquisitive teen back then, who was now a wide-eyed inquisitive man. He was also protective of Piper. He’d looked Adam dead in the face and said he’d kill him where he stood if anything happened to Piper.

Just, matter-of-factly. Like he meant it.

And Adam believed him.

A small part of him wished he had family like that. He wasn’t an only child—not technically. But his parents had never kept it in their martial bed. They’d carried on with affairs until they couldn’t deny they were miserable. When Adam was fourteen, he’d been abroad visiting family and came home to his family in shambles.

His dad was spending a few days in the drunk tank for taking down a fifth of whiskey and trashing the house, his mom was throwing his stuff in the yard with one hand and moving her new boyfriend’s things in with the other.

His brother had fucked off to God only knew where, and Adam wouldn’t see him again for a full two years.

Adam just hunkered down and prayed he’d be able to get through his last year of high school. Which he did. He graduated with honors, got a full ride, and never looked back. The last time he bothered calling his mom was after he’d let a friend do some DNA experiment on him and found out that his dad wasn’t actually his bio-dad.

It had been a wholething, but apart from feeling cheated out of knowing his birth family, he was happy. His dad had never liked him and now it all made sense.

It was lonely at times, though. Adam had never been great at making friends. No one was interested in the universe or physics, and they got tired of listening to him pretty early on in his life. He had a few fumbling sexual encounters in college when friends dragged him out to clubs, but it wasn’t until he got into grad school that he found himself in actual relationships.

And those turned into nightmares because he kept getting drawn in by pseudo-intellectuals who made their IQ their entire personality. They were pretentious and obnoxious and exhausting. Part of him wondered if that’s how people felt when they were around him.

Which, he supposed, made his sorry love life make sense.

Now he was content to just hang out with his colleagues, go home to his cat, and occasionally fill in at conferences for his friends at who were stuck in the hospital four days before Christmas.

“I have everything you need put together, but it’s on a jump driveat the rental I was supposed to share with Johansson,” Piper said, then broke off in a coughing fit. “He was letting me stay over on the way to the campus.”

Johansson.

Magnus.

Adam knew him—not necessarilywell, but very few people knew the inner workings of Magnus’s mind. He was infamously famous, and Adam always thought it was a little cruel that his notoriety wasn’t for his work in astrophysics, or his contribution to CERN, or to the fact that he literally helped invent one of the new models they were testing for Mars habitation.

No, it was the fact that he was blind, and in his spare time he turned nebula sound waves into art for fun.

Adam had watched Magnus reduced down to a sort of parlor trick by their colleagues, and he could see it taking a toll on him because he rarely made more than polite small talk with people before quickly exiting a room.

They’d worked together in labs over the years, but Magnus was always set up in a private space with all of his equipment.

Adam did have bragging rights though. He was one of the few people that Magnus ever took lunch with, and one of the few people he let near his things. He’d even sent Adam several nebulae prints he’d done over the years—and Adam wouldn’t tell anyone this, but he had them all hanging in his room.

Which, he supposed, probably meant he had something like a crush on the man. It was hard not to. He was gorgeous—tall and lanky and kind of like a Renaissance angel with his very blond wavy hair and pale skin. His cheeks were dotted with freckles, which were always darker in the summer, and he wore designer shades because people never, ever stopped asking questions about his eyes.

Yeah, okay, he was a little bit obsessed.

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