Major Montgomery had been at the bunker for several months now. Bee knew that, because almost every day, around noon, Chuck would show up at her desk in the tower — which he was still not supposed to be allowed access to —  in order to fetch her for lunch. While she gathered up her things, he would proceed to give her a play by play of his interactions with his boss.

‘Did you know that the red dust of Moonbase Beta is a natural phenomenon, Bee? Archie told me all about it! He said that it’s a great base for a dye but it can’t be artificially replicated, can you imagine? Oh, and today we had a snack together, and he takes two sugars in his coffee but no cream, that is soooo interesting, Bee. I saw Archie in the rec room today! His pants were the same pants as he wears every other day but for some reason I think it’s interesting to tell you all about them anyway. I bought a book about colour theory, do you think he’s already read it? We had a long chat about Space Mega Black and I stared deep into his eyes because apparently speculation about pigment manufacturing process is sexy or whatever,’ and so on and so forth.

 To her great chagrin, this daily report — which she had very much not asked for — was usually accompanied with either whining, a breathless sort of admiration, or lewd comments. She’d tried several times to get him to stop, but much like a pop-up ad on the holofeed when you weren’t paying for the subscription, he just kept making noise and was impossible to ignore. Praying for patience had the same effect, which is to say: none at all.

“Heeeey Honeybee,” he grinned that particular day in December, appearing suddenly over the low wall that separated her desk from the other cubicles and leaning his arms nonchalantly over the top of it. The privacy field hissed and sparked angrily around him. She rolled her eyes. These delicate particle fields really weren’t meant for one big slab of a man to shove half his face through and then stay there, leaning on the wall with his arms hanging down her side of it and his ass sticking out on the other side. One of these days he was going to break one for sure, and she would probably get in trouble right along with him.

She turned off her screens and returned all of the objects on her desk to their default position. Pens went in the pen holder, tools on the tool mat in a very specific order, papers in a neat pile, classified files in the file folder that was located in the locked drawer, and most importantly, her washed coffee cup upside-down on it’s neat little coaster right next to her water bottle. The more spotless she left her desk when she wasn’t around, the more she minimized the chances that the cleaning staff would need to touch her stuff. 

Chuck watched her go through the entire ritual with the same goofy smile still plastered on his face, drumming his hands on the cubicle wall. 

“Guess what Archie did today,” he finally blurted out, and she valiantly fought the urge to groan. 

“What did he do today,” she prompted flatly, knowing that he’d tell her anyway whether she wanted him to or not.

“Well this morning he had to do that space walk with the engineers to check the shield array, right, you know the one?”

She nodded. Every officer on base had to do the space walk every few months or so, for two reasons: one, they were technically the ones to sign the engineer’s reports, so when the engineers said that everything was good with the shields or a repair had to be made, it helped if the officers on the moonlet had any idea at all what they were talking about. Technically, CSS Trout was a civilian moonlet. But the port authorities were a joke and had all too easily allowed the bunker’s staff to take over all of the maintenance duties for the station’s engines and life support.

Two, it unofficially served as an extra opportunity for them to stay fresh on their zero-g emergency training. You never knew when it could come in handy.

“He was pretty nervous, you know,” continued Chuck as they stepped into the elevator.

All of her coworkers had already gone down to lunch, because it was taco Tuesday and they all wanted to be first in line. Which, jokes on them, the cook was sweet on Chuck so both of their plates were probably already prepared and set aside, with extra cheese and the good hot sauce. Bee had a love-hate relationship with tacos. They were pretty great, taste-wise, but it was a bit of a shame that they were so annoying to eat. Over the course of her life, Bee had managed to figure a way to eat most food without touching them with her fingers. Popcorn and chips were easy if you knew your way around chopsticks. There were adorable little tools that you could buy for corn on the cob. Even hamburgers could be handled with a fork and a knife if you weren’t afraid of getting stared at. Tacos, though…

While she thought deeply about the inevitable vexation of tacos, Chuck was still going. “I don’t think anyone had clearly explained to him that he doesn’t need to actually know anything about engineering to do the shield check. Anyway, I told him that the techs would do all the work, and all he needed to do was to smile and nod and then sign the reports. But then — oh, Bee. Then as he was getting ready, he asked me to help him with his gravity belt!” 

Chuck slapped both of his hands to his chest and pretended like his knees were giving up.

She frowned, only now tuning in to his story. “The heck does he need help with a grav belt for?”

Her friend was almost vibrating with glee by that point, and she gave him a suspicious side-eye. 

“He wanted me to explain the controls! He said he wasn’t used to that particular model!”

She felt her lips curl up in weirded out judgment. “Okay, I call bullshit. We haven’t upgraded the grav belts models in twenty years. Anyone who’s gone through, like, one day of basic training knows how to use a goddamned gravity belt.”

“I know!” he trilled, bouncing up and down, the elevator cage rattling in time with his excitement. “It was so transparent! I told you, he likes me, Bee! He wanted my haaaands on his beeeeelt~” he sing-songed. 

He sounded positively deranged, but even her couldn’t really deny the reality any longer.  Major Montgomery was hot for Chuck, and he was going to use any and all possible excuses to spend time with him. Up to and including coming across like an incompetent civie who’d never seen military equipment before, apparently. She supposed that she could be offended on principle that the major turned out to be the kind of man that would flirt with a supposedly married soldier, but then again there was a very real chance that no one had told him about their marital status. Definitely Chuck hadn’t told him. She wouldn’t, either, because while she was a jerk she wasn’t that much of one. Even if it would probably be better for Chuck in the long run if she put a stop to all of this now by having a clarifying talk with the major before somebody went and got their heart broken.