“Please.”
She filled the shot glass with more tequila and walked away to another customer at the end of the bar. Jason eyed his drink and shook his head. He felt like a complete idiot. He’d returned to the home he’d abandoned and begged his brother to take him to far-flung depths of space. He was amazed his ass hadn’t been kicked all the way back down the Argo’s rear access ramp. Tyler had every right to hate him. They all did.
He picked up another shot and gulped it down his gullet.
“So, the prodigal son returns after ten years, and you can’t even come and say hello?”
Jason put the glass down and turned around. He shouldn’t have been surprised. “Aly?”
Like Tyler, she was all grown up. No longer a girl. Now a woman. Her blue eyes sparkled, and her blonde hair radiated under the warm lights. It was in contrast to her grimy overalls.
She took a seat beside Jason and her eyes narrowed. “What’s with that beard?”
Jason scratched at it. “Yeah, your dad wasn’t too fond of it either.”
“It makes you look like a hobo.”
“Not far off, to be honest.”
The barwoman walked back over.
“Do you want a drink?” Jason asked Aly.
“Water’s fine,” she said to the barwoman.
Jason slid the shot glasses across the bar. He’d had enough tequila for one day. “I’ll just have a beer.”
“So, are you going to answer my question?” Aly said.
Jason tried to remember if she’d asked one.
“You didn’t come to see me,” Aly reiterated.
“Oh? Well, you know, I didn’t come back to the ship for a reunion.” He could tell she wasn’t convinced. “I’m sorry.” He tried to change the subject and prodded at her overalls. “So, you’ve become the Argo’s engineer.”
She wiped some grease from her clothes. “Well, someone had to take the reins when your dad died.” She stopped and corrected herself. “I didn’t mean that. You leaving—”
“It’s okay.” When his father was captain of the Argo, he was also responsible for keeping it flying. When he passed, someone had to replace him. Jason was glad Aly was the one to fill the void. “You’ve done a good job. It’s still in flying order. You don’t see many E-Class ships running anymore.”
“Just takes a bit of TLC.” She bit her bottom lip. “And a hell of a lot of work.”
The barwoman came back with Aly’s water and Jason’s beer.
“I’m surprised you haven’t upgraded by now. There’s some serious hardware out there these days.”
“Replace the Argo?”
“Well, yeah. It’s—”
“Jason, the Argo’s our home.”
“Yeah, but—”
“It was yours once, too.”
“Yeah, I know.” A pang of guilt washed over Jason. When everything was all said and done, he’d been born and raised on that old rust bucket.
“And it’s not like we have the money. Just upgrading to a Mark IV FTL engine was expensive.” Aly took a sip of her drink. “Those new ships cost a bomb.”
“Business hasn’t been great?”
“We have good times. We have bad times. It’s difficult with a crew of four.”
Was that a hint?
“Tyler’s a good captain, my dad still steers the old girl and mends our bumps and bruises, and Althaus still gets us all the jobs he can wrangle, but it’s a lot of hard work,” she said. “There’s more competition out there than there used to be.”
“Have you ever thought of hiring help?”
She chuckled. “Again, we don’t have the—”
“Money. Right.” He took a long gulp of his beer. “Sometimes you’ve got to spend money to make money.”
Aly put her glass down. “Should you really be doling out business advice?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’ve been out of the service, what, three years now? Instead of coming back to the Argo or, say, heading to Earth to make a go at it, you’ve come to Vesta.”
She was no longer being jovial, and Jason didn’t like it.
“What have you been doing with yourself here?” she asked.
“Mostly courier work. A lot of big corporations run out of here.”
“Who are you with at the moment?”
Jason hesitated. “I’m between jobs right now.”
Aly smiled, but it was a facade. She obviously felt sorry for him. He didn’t like that either.
“And why Odyssey Station?”
Jason slammed his glass down with a violent bang. “Because I can be alone here!”
Everyone around the bar stopped and looked in their direction. Jason glared at them and they quickly returned to their business.
Aly leaned in toward him. “And how’s that been working out for you?”
The question caught him off guard. In the mirror on the opposite side of the bar, he stared at himself. They were no longer children, and a lot had happened since they’d last seen each other.
Her voice softened. “Tyler filled me in with what happened before you left the service.”
Jason didn’t want the world to know about Nash and what’d happened that day in Nebula TPA-338. But he had little choice if he had any way of convincing Tyler of taking him to Frontier’s Reach.
“Is that why you came here?” she said. “I mean to Odyssey Station.”
Jason polished off his beer in another sip. She seemed astonished at how quickly he drank it. He waved down the barwoman for another. “You think I ran away?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but Jason cut her off. “You think I ran away from the Argo when Dad passed, and you think I ran away from the service when Nash died.”
“You said it, not me.” Aly was straight down the line. Honest.
Just like her father.
“It’s not that simple, Aly.”
“Tell me.” She put her hand on his and her warmth flowed through him.
“I sent him out there. It should’ve been me in that pod. I should’ve died, not him.”
“You can’t blame yourself.”
He pulled his hand away. “You don’t understand.”
The barwoman returned with his beer, and he stared down at it, doing his best not to make any eye contact with Aly. Silence lingered between them for several moments.
“See, this is why I didn’t come and see you. It’s all too hard.” He sighed. “Just walking back onto the Argo again was agony enough. Remembering Dad. Not
