The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut, #1)(77)

My eyes stung and I blinked them clear. “You are amazing.”

“I am in love. That’s an important distinction.” Nathaniel turned to kiss my forehead. “Without you, I’m just an average guy.”

I laughed and poked him in the ribs. “You. Are not an average anything.”

“Eh. I’m a pretty good administrator. Not bad with numbers.”

My hand drifted lower. “Good with rockets.”

He grunted and stretched under my touch. When he relaxed, he pulled me on top of him so that our bodies were pressed full length against each other. “I … I would say that you’re better at handling rockets than I am.”

“Is that so?” I pinned his arms to the bed and lifted myself up to kneel, straddling him. “Well, Dr. York…”

“Yes, Dr. York?”

“In that case, I have a very…” I kissed his neck. “Serious…” My tongue licked the sweat from his jawline. “Question.”

“Yes. Whatever it is. God, yes.”

“Would it help…” There was a rough spot under his chin that he’d missed while shaving. My heart sped up and I raced ahead to get my words in front of my fear. “If I explained the equations to the committee?”

Nathaniel twisted to look at me, though I couldn’t have been more than the same sort of shadowed blur that he was. “Elma…”

In my name was a wealth of unsaid thought. Yes, it would help. No, he didn’t want to ask me to do it. Yes, he was terrified I would break. No, he didn’t want to see me hurt. Yes, he loved me for offering. No, he couldn’t accept.

I slid off of him to sit on the bed at his side. “Remember how when I was in university, I was the only girl in class, so instructors would ask me to explain a math problem in order to show the boys up?”

“I know. That’s why I can’t ask you—”

“Hush. I’m not done.”

“Okay…” He sat up next to me, shoulders hunched forward. “Sorry.”

“The thing is … it worked. They were always shamed into doing better because they couldn’t stand to have a little girl understand something that they couldn’t.”

“And it was hellishly cruel of the professors.”

“Yes. Yes, absolutely. But … but if I’m choosing to do it, it’s different.” True, but I was still sweating, and it was no longer from sex. “And … I’m taking Miltown now.”

“Oh.”

“It helps.”

“Good.” He kissed my forehead. “Thank you for telling me.”

“So … With this new dataset, let’s return to my point.” The faster we could stop talking about my anxiety, the better. “Senator Mason keeps making you go over the equation that caused the rocket to go off course in the first place.”

“Yes…” I couldn’t see his face, but I could imagine his brows knit together in concentration.

“He will keep making you explain over and over again that the problem was a transcription error when the program was transferred to punch cards. Let me explain exactly how leaving out a single superscript bar caused the program to break. If a woman tells him, he’ll have to either pretend he understands it, or admit that he’s not smart enough to be making a decision on this.”

“Huh.” He rubbed his head. “Okay. So that might hopefully, finally, make Mason stop harassing us about the error, but … the real problem wasn’t the transcription failure, and they’ll still hound us on that. God—”

I reached for his hand and pulled it away from his head. “Are you still having nightmares?” The nights that he’d woken in a sweat or cried out in his sleep didn’t leave this much of a question. It was more an opportunity for him to come clean with me. And yes, I’m aware of what it means that we had both been lying to each other, and ourselves, about how we were feeling.

His shoulders slumped farther. “Yeah.”

“I told you mine…”

“Heh.” His thumb found my ring finger and rolled the wedding band left and right. “The latest was that I was the idiot range safety officer and knew the rocket was going to crash, but couldn’t order the destruct sequence. I was glued—literally glued—in my chair. Only, of course, it wasn’t my chair, it was a seat on an airplane, and I had to watch the whole thing.”

When the rocket veered off course, the range safety officer, who was responsible for making the call about the self-destruct sequence, didn’t. He waited to see if the course would correct. It didn’t. As a result, eleven people had died on the Williams farm where it crashed. Two of them were kids.

He sighed and bent forward at the waist, pulling his hand free of my grip to wrap his arms around his head. “Senator Mason is going to use this to tank the space program. People are already agitating about the resources that are going into it instead of relief here on Earth. It’s dead simple for him to use the deaths to sway public opinion.”

“So let me explain about the new safety procedures. Let me recommend moving the launch site to the equator.” We’d wanted to do that years ago, but couldn’t get budget approval, since the Sunflower facility had already existed. “Let me explain what’s going to happen to our planet, and why space is so important.”