Page 41 of Alien on the Moon

“You think someone hurt her?” The idea of it sent a solar flare of protective anger through his chest. How could anyone hurt someone like her?

“I don’t know.” She scooped out the last dregs of her granis. “That’s the kind of question you should be asking her. But people like us tend to be left out for some reason or another. We’re too bad at reading the room, or we feel like we have to be invited into the social gathering, or, once they strike on a topic we’re interested in, we go from quiet to rudely dominating the conversation.”

“So, she feels like me giving up on this…” he gestured widely to indicate the base and the project, “is the same thing as giving up on us? It doesn’t make sense.”

She shot him a pointed look. “Like I said, it’s emotional thinking, not logical. Two different things.”

“So, I’d better find her and apologize?”

She nodded. “So, you’d better find her and apologize.”

He finished his food and got to his feet. “Thanks for the talk. I probably needed that.”

“Any time.”

Well, there was no time like the present. Odds were that Elena skipped breakfast in favor of spending more time in the lab. As he approached, he saw her through the window talking with Jaku.

She looked more cheerful than she had the day before as she talked and laughed with the other scientist. Jealousy flashed through him like a lightning bolt. It wasn’t a rational feeling—he knew Jaku was married and not at all interested in Elena—but it still stung.

Still, even though their fight had only been going on for about a day, he missed the way she smiled when she looked at him and laughed at his stupid jokes. He missed working together and their conversations, whether related to the project or just about life in general. Her conversation with Jaku reminded him of exactly what he had been frozen out of.

And then he heard what they were talking about.

“I mean, you did see his memo. Right? He said he wasn’t giving up on the project just yet,” Jaku said.

“Well, yeah, he said it to keep morale up, but you should have seen him.” Her voice lowered in register as an imitation of Rylan’s. “‘I’m sure your planet also has a concept of the sunk-cost fallacy.’Ugh, what a condescending ass.”

Rylan clenched his jaw. A part of him wanted to walk into the room and confront her right there, but instead, he turned and walked away. Jaku didn’t need to be caught in the middle of this fight. They would resolve it in private like adults.

But doubt started to wriggle into his mind. Maybe everything was a failure after all. He left Thryal because he chose to make history over making friends. But nothing he tried seemed to work. The plants refused to grow and when they did, they grew sickly. The squigs all died. Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong.

And his romantic life wasn’t doing much better. He was on the verge of losing the most amazing woman he had ever met because he was too oblivious to see what she really needed from him. And when she tried to express it, he was condescending to her without even meaning to be.

Until this point, he hadn’t actually been ready to give up. But now, there really seemed to be no point. He couldn’t make plantsgrow. He couldn’t make love bloom. It seemed like nothing he did would ever work out. Was there even a point in trying?

Chapter 15

Elena

Elena’s comms beeped, and a message from Rylan popped up.Come see me.

A part of her didn’t want to go, but she knew the sooner this was resolved, the sooner they would no longer be in this uncomfortable limbo. They would either stay together and workon this project or break up and accept their failure in both science and romance.

She got to her feet and dragged herself to the conference room Rylan had asked her to meet him in. Hesitating, she steeled herself before knocking on the door.

“Come in,” Rylan said.

She slipped inside and paused, just taking him in for a moment before sitting down in the chair across from him. Instead of thinking about the memories of the day before this dredged up, she focused on him.

Rylan looked exhausted, like he hadn’t slept at all the previous night. But his jaw was clenched, and his back was straight. Something had pissed him off.

“I would appreciate it if you didn’t undermine my messages to my crew about this project,” he said. “Do you want them to have enough morale to try and fix this or not?”

She crossed her arms. “Well, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t eavesdrop on private conversations.” It was a weak defense of her venting, and she knew it, but she was too mad to fully concede to his point.

Crossing his arms, too, his posture matched hers. “Well, I was going to apologize, but then I heard you talking about what acondescending assI am and thought you wouldn’t want to hear it.”

She blinked, his comment putting her on the wrong foot. “You what?”

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