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“It is,” she replies. “Plan A is to work up the courage to finally talk to the cute security guard I ran into on my first day here.”
“Do you want to get dinner sometime?” I ask, surprising myself with my own forwardness. “I know a seafood place nearby.”
“Sure. Let’s exchange comm pad links.” She holds hers out, tapping a few buttons to send her info directly to mine. Now she’s on my contact list if I need to get a hold of her.
“How does seven in the evening sound?”
She smiles, revealing dimples. “Sounds like a date.”
The next day, I wait outside the restaurant for her to show. Ten minutes pass. Then twenty. Then thirty. She stood me up. She actually stood me up. That’s never happened before.
I’m about to go home and drown my disappointment in liquor when I see her hobbling towards me. She’s wearing her work clothes and swinging down the street on crutches.
“Are you okay? What happened?” I ask, my eyes drawn to the compression bracer on her right ankle. Anger flares within me. If someone did this to her…
Wait, where did that thought come from? I have no reason to believe that someone had attacked her. Why would I assume that?
“I’m so sorry,” she says breathlessly when she finally reaches me. “You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had.”
“Okay, let’s get you seated before you explain,” I say, helping her inside. “Because I really want to know.”
Apparently, she’d fallen down some stairs on the way out of work. It sent her to the infirmary, where they gave her a bracer and some crutches for her sprained ankle.
When I hear that it was a mundane accident, I deflate with relief, though I’m not entirely sure why. I didn’t have any reason to assume otherwise in the first place.
The next date is an outdoor concert, but it’s pouring rain the day we’re supposed to go, so we have dinner instead. The date after that, she sends me the wrong address by mistake, leading us both to believe that the other stood us up.
And then I get transferred to another area of the compound. We’re on a walk around campus grounds when I break the news to her.
For once, it’s a beautiful day. She’s off her crutches, and nothing has gone wrong, so of course, I have to ruin it. “They moved me out of your wing,” I say.
“Oh.” She frowns, disappointed. “Do they not like that you’re fraternizing with a lab worker?”
I shake my head. “We rotate every once in a while to mix things up. It just happens that the transfer orders arrived –”
“As soon as we started dating,” she finishes for me.
“I mean, it’s not like we can’t spend time together outside of work,” I reply. “We just won’t be seeing each other as often.”
She hooks her elbow with mine and chuckles. “I know. But you have to admit that it’s pretty funny timing, isn’t it? Sometimes, I feel like our relationship is cursed by Murphy's law or something.”
I furrow my brows, confused. “Murphy's law?”
“An old Earth saying. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
I nod. “That sounds about right.”
She stops short, making me stop, too, and face her. “But I don’t want it to end things or just let them fizzle out.” Standing on her tiptoes, she presses a kiss to my lips. “I like being with you.”
My hands go to her hips, and I pull her closer, deepening the kiss. “I don’t want to end things, either,” I say when I come up for air. I contemplate telling her she’s my fated mate, but I decide not to yet. I want to win her on my own, not on a technicality.
“Good. Then we won’t,” she replies. “How about we pick a specific date night? Like, on the last day of the workweek, we go out and have some fun.”
“That sounds like a plan,” I say. “And when our shifts align, we’ll have lunch, too.” I want to say that I’d move mountains to make more time with her, but that feels like too much too soon. “I’d like to be with you as much as I can.”
“Same.” She gets up on her tiptoes to press a chaste kiss to my lips. “And hopefully, we’ll have better luck on our dates from now on.”
CHAPTER 26
