“Maybe we’ll join you,” Lee said, catching Kat’s dreamy gaze again as she clutched her ceramic cup to her chest. They’d walked past the pool many times this week on their way to the gym or the grille, and back up to the Mezzanine floor, but they had yet to go for a swim.
They finished their fruit and cheese. Tonya carried in the empty cups while Lee went to slip on his swim trunks. To givethe girls their space while they changed, he headed down to the pool.
The water was still glassy smooth as he sat down at the pool’s edge with his shades clasped in his hand. He had the area all to himself. Easy refrains of timba music splashed out towards him, the late risers just sitting down to breakfast, while the cool water lapped against his shins.
A couple minutes later, his mom joined him, carrying a little umbrella drink in her hand from the grille. She dragged a pool chair over beside him, the legs scraping the pavement.
For a few minutes they just sat poolside, Lee with his legs dangling in the water, Tonya perching nearby. Together enjoying the stillness and the separateness of the moment.
He kicked his legs out one at a time, flexing the muscles there. He secretly thought Kat might have chosen to go back to sleep instead of brave the pool. He wouldn’t put it past her. He could feel the idleness creeping in, even with the quality workouts they’d managed to fit into the resort-planet’s odd schedule.
“She’s good for you, you know,” Tonya said. The ice swirled in her drink as she set it down on the ground between them.
Smiling to himself, Lee blew out a breath, imagining the warm breeze carrying it across the pool.
He and Katweregood together.
They were a lot of things—complicated. Restless. Borderline insane, depending on who was asking… They complemented each other in their own strange way. And they always came out stronger for it.
Kat had been the one constant in his life since starting at the Academy. The one to call him out on his shit. The one to challenge him and to laugh at his lazy jokes. And these last few weeks, she’d again been that constant for him. Even when he didn’t fully quite know where his head was with everything.
“Kat is…” But how did he explain the person for whom he got up to fight another day, the smile who chased down even the dimmest of nightmares, the shining star in an ever-bleak galaxy?
He swallowed past the thickness in his throat. “She’s everything to me. She’s my world. She’s the stars. She’s the whole damned universe.”
He glanced over at his mom to see what she made of his declaration.
She gazed down at him and out over the water with the soft gleam and quiet strength that only Tonya Waters could wield. “I know,” she said, just as his mom had very possibly known what she meant to him since the first day he brought up her name.
A round of laughter floated down from the grille. Lee could picture the drinks clinking, the stories being swapped by carefree hearts after another day lazing about. The same thing he and Tonya and Kat had been doing the night before—and for days now. But there were actual people, human and alien and creature, whose planets—whosehomes—were every day being destroyed and overrun by the very real and tangible dark radiation threat. He had personally played a role in displacing an entire people, robbing them of their home, and their lives, and sentencing them to live out there somewhere in the stars. It was the natural course of a raid for him.
And there was nothing he could do about it.
He didn’t know how long he sat there, lost in his own thoughts, the pale dew of morning evaporating and fading away to the dull hues around him. Had the music faded as well? Or maybe that was just him.
“These are people too, Leland.”
How Tonya knew where his thoughts had taken him, and what she made of the directional shift, he didn’t know. But when he turned to face his mom more fully, her gaze was instead castupwards in the direction of the breezy palms and the stars hiding just beyond the solar satellite’s reach. The universe’s constant.
“You may not see it at first,” she continued, “like the subtle shifts from morning to day to night. But everyone is working towards something.Forsomething. No matter how trivial they may seem in the moment.”
Light danced in her cheeks as her gaze finally lowered back down to Lee. The comforting, silly aura of Tonya Waters. Was there more she’d meant to do with her life and come up short? Had her life always revolved around him and his dad? Or were these simply observations from a sleepy belly and a Solar Flare?
She’d never tried to hold Lee back. Not when the Academy came recruiting, and not when she and his dad had dropped him off for his first transport. And even now, when she could sense something troubling him with that legendary perception of hers, she wouldn’t hold him back. Not when his future with the woman of his dreams yawned open before him.
Tonya wobbled a bit on her platform sandals as she stood, picking up her empty glass. She leaned down, kissing Lee on his forehead. A rare moment alone with her son. “I am proud of you, always.”
Lee watched the light from the solar satellite ripple over the water, and he ran a finger softly through it. Maybe Kat really had just gone back to sleep.
He had dropped his hand back down by his side when a shimmer across the other side of the pool drew his eye.
Lee glanced upwards slowly. His mouth had gaped open, but he didn’t have half a mind to close it. Not as she stared back at him.
His starflower.
Kat stood there on the painted orange tiles, fingers twisted shyly through the strands of her ponytail that hung loosely over her shoulder. A pale, flimsy bit of knotted linen hung over hershoulders. The white suit peeking underneath would have been fairly modest if not for the low dip of the neckline, the sides cut high to show off a pair of strong and capable legs.
He’d have to remember to thank Tonya some day.
