An experiment of sorts. Testing the waters. Taking the temperature.

I wait for him to shift back, but instead he studies me and says, “It’s a few hundred lines. I’m supposed to be helping you. Are you sure—”

“It’s fine. When I write my report, I’ll just pretend I asked you a bunch of questions about your journey and make up the answers.” Just to mess with him, I add, “Don’t worry, I’ll mention how having the clap did not set you back on your road to NASA.” He scowls, which has me laughing, and then I’m going over the code with him for five, ten minutes. Fifteen. The light softens to late-afternoon hues, and over an hour goes by while we’re side by side, blinking at the monitors.

Honestly, it’s pretty basic rubber duck debugging: he’s explaining out loud what he’s trying to do, which helps him work through critical chunks, and also figuring out better ways to go about it. But I’m a pretty happy rubber duck. I like listening to his low, even voice. I like that he seems to consider every single thing I say and never dismisses anything outright. I like that when he’s thinking hard, he closes his eyes, and his lashes are crimson half-moons against his skin. I like that he builds meticulously pristine code with no memory leakage, and I like that when his biceps brushes against my shoulder all I feel is solid warmth. I like his short, crisp functions, and the way he smells clean and masculine and a bit dark.

Okay. So he’s not my type.

I do like him, though.

Would Mara mind it if I shamelessly offered myself to her kin at the informational interview she kindly set up? I would normally just go for it, but this friendship business can be a bit of a burden. That said, maybe I can safely assume that she won’t care, considering that she doesn’t seem to know how exactly she and Ian are related.

Plus, she’s a generous soul. She’d want her friend and her cousin-or-something to get laid.

“Did you get randomly assigned to the Attitude and Position Estimation team?” I ask him when we get to the last few lines of code.

“No.” He lets out a small laugh. His profile is a work of near perfection, even with the broken nose. “Clawed my way there, actually.”

“Oh?”

He saves and closes our work with a few rapid keystrokes. “For Curiosity, I joined the team pretty late into the development stage, and I mostly focused on launch.”

“Did you like it?”

“A lot.” He angles his chair to face me. Our knees, elbows, shoulders have been brushing so much, the closeness feels familiar by now. So does the liquid warmth under my belly button. “But after that I began working on Perseverance and I asked for a change. Something actually related to the rover being on Mars as opposed to three hours in Cape Canaveral.”

“So they put you on A & PE?”