Page 24 of Radiant Exception
It wasn’t the first time that Jordan had done this—sitting with me and talking me through breathing exercises to help me fill my lungs with air and work through a panic attack, transporting me from the depths of despair on Enceladus and back to my bright and safe bridge on theRadiant.
Once my ragged breathing had somewhat normalized, she helped me into my chair at the head of the bridge, eyeing me with concern as I slumped into the seat, already exhausted despite having slept solidly for the first time in a while.
“I don’t mind staying for a while,” she offered softly.
“You just worked a double to accommodate me,” I grumbled, my eyes unable to meet hers, so instead I focused on the floor just past her.
“I don’t mind—”
“No.” I shook my head.
“At least let me send someone up here to keep you company.” She released an exasperated sigh, always knowing the exact negotiating tactics to use with me.
“Fine.” I waved a hand at her absently.
“Sit tight.” She glanced back at the news report, still flickering on the big screen, then made her way out of the bridge.
It was too much. All of it. Meridian was too big. The Phoenix too elusive. This mission too impossible. I needed help. I needed Lark. It pained me to admit it. I’d been stubborn and selfish, and how many days had we lost because I’d refused to work with her? Could this have been stopped if I hadn’t been such a prick?
No.I couldn’t go down that path. What was done, was done. What mattered now was my path forward. This was too important to allow my pride to get in the way. There was a good chance the intel that assisted with this heinous act had been filtered through the illegal coding that had been introduced to my ship through the enemy. It needed to stop. All of it. Come hell or high water, I was determined to make it work. If she was my only salvation, I would find a way.
I was too close to my crew. I knew that now. She’d warned me—Darren had warned me, and I hadn’t listened, but I was listening now. I just had to figure out how to reverse course and get her to align with me, with full transparency.
After how I’d acted, I didn’t deserve her trust, and I wasn’t sure if she’d be willing to give me one last chance. But one shot was all I needed. This time, I wouldn’t miss.
Nobody was less shocked to wake up alone than I was.
Vaughn had even managed to straighten his pillow and neatly tuck in the sheets and comforter on his side of the bed.
I smiled at the thought of messing it up and leaving the bed unmade for him to find. I imagined him grinding his perfect teeth together, his brow creased with frustration, muscles tensed for a fight. How glorious it would be to unravel him so entirely over something so small.
But I’d save that for later. He wasn’t at the end of his rope yet, and leaving the bed in disarray would be the perfect thing to push him right over the edge, when the time came.
Still, sleeping next to him wasn’t as bad as I’d anticipated. He hadn’t touched me, just like I’d assumed, and he was a sound sleeper, a far cry from Simon, my last relationship…if you could even call it that.
Simon was a terrible bedfellow. When he actually slept, he tossed and turned and stole the blankets, and more than once kicked me in his sleep. And when I’d tell him about it the next morning, or suggest that he didn’t need to spend the night after we’d had sex, he’d get allgrumpy and sulk about it, not caring that my sleep was non-existent when he was next to me.
But most nights, he didn’t even sleep. He’d take work calls from bed, scroll through news feeds on his comm at full brightness for hours, and make comments aloud about whatever he was watching, oblivious to my discomfort.
But that, I came to learn, was just Simon. He didn’t think of other people, only himself. It was never in a malicious way; it was just the way he saw the world. And no matter how much I told him that he was an asshole, he insisted I was the one who was odd for not taking what I wanted, consequences be damned.
Although we both came from well-known families, his was the type that was more quietly wealthy, pulling strings from afar, whereas my parents were diplomats, and very public with their notoriety. But Simon always liked the attention, and I realized too late that it might have been the attention he got from being associated with me that made him want to pursue me in the first place.
Simon was the first relationship, if you could call it that, as we had been long-term, but casual, where he’d doggedly pursued me, and especially in the beginning, it felt like I was being properly courted, which had been nice. Unfortunately, it made it easier to overlook so many red flags that I should have seen, as I so badly wanted to be desired for more than my body and family name, but for my mind and for who I was as a person.
Unfortunately, when I’d lost my parents, it became clear, very quickly, that Simon had only been with me for name recognition, I supposed, and not for me. I guess dealing with me going throughdebilitating grief and a healthy period of mild depression was too much work for him.
And like the mature adult that Simon was, he’d stood me up at my parents’ funeral and instead hooked up with some famous starlet. The photos of their rendezvous were splashed all over the news by the time I exited the services.
So when I’d lost Xavier not too long after that, it made it that much easier to spiral and isolate. There was nobody left to pick up the pieces. The last I’d heard, he’d gotten himself a cushy emissary role for IA.
Simon and Vaughn couldn’t have been more opposite if they tried, but I figured the farther apart they were, the better. I learned a lot of hard life lessons from being with Simon, paramount of which was not to rely on other people, especially when they had proven themselves to be unreliable.
Clearing my head of thoughts of Simon, I tried to run through a plan for the day while I got cleaned up. I’d been talking to Natalie tons, or rather, she’d been talkingatme, but I needed to form my own thoughts and opinions on a few of the crew members I had yet to interact with outside of her presence.
Jordan would be the trickiest to run across now that we were on opposite shifts. But I thought maybe it would be best to save her for last anyway, as she seemed like the hardest nut to crack, based on my first impressions of her. I could gain insight on the second officer from the others and use it to gain her favor and get more information from her. I also knew she was the closest to Vaughn, so I would need to tread very carefully, so as not to upset either of them.
I was very curious about Ethan, the resident prankster and self-proclaimed himbo, which always got a loud giggle from Natalie. There had to be something behind all that bravado, some trauma I could exploit, no matter how awful that sounded. That was my talent, finding the emotional cracks to form a connection and weasel my way in, and Ethan had very obvious cracks; I just needed the right strategy to pry him open.
