The next few days went slowly. The new course didn’t really offer any new excitement. Cait monitored the passive sensor sweeps for anything of interest and occasionally boosted to active long range sweeps, but there was nothing out there. Interactions with Rhys had become stilted and he seemed to be avoiding her, though he was perfectly amicable when she needed to speak with him about something related to work. Nonetheless Cait was starting to have difficulty sleeping and she wasn’t sure if she was having her own issues or because she knew things weren’t sitting completely right with Rhys. The previous night when they’d gotten together for dinner he had barely said a word apparently not wanting to look at her, and wondered if he was deliberately trying to give her the silent treatment. It turned out to be more respectful than that – her single, a tight white ribbed material that had thinned with age had become slightly transparent and clingy with sweat after her exercise session. Not so much as to make anything under it actually visible, but enough to fuel imagination. She felt a pang of guilt and sympathy and had thrown the singlet into the disposal unit to be incinerated so she didn’t accidentally wear it again. Not that it wasn’t nice to have someone feeling interest in her, even if she was literally the only woman within two hundred million klicks, but she didn’t need Rhys dwelling on it.

Presently, she was drinking a coffee and reading a book on her tablet, which she had managed to stabilise so it floated in front of her and autoscrolled the text at a comfortable reading pace so long as the front-facing camera detected that her eyes were tracking the words. Rhys had joined her on the bridge and sprawled into the unused Captain’s chair, though not bothered to strap himself in so his relentless fidgeting made him kept drifting out of it. Eventually his constantly shifting shape in the periphery of her vision distracted her from her book and she finally turned her chair to face him, her book pausing as soon as she turned away from it.

“Not that your company isn’t a delight, but is there anything else you could be doing right now?” She asked, trying not to sound like a total bitch.

“Sorry.” Rhys sighed. “I thought I would feel less bored if I was hanging out with someone.”

“How’s the maintenance?” Cait asked, hoping a work question would at least give them something to talk about for a few minutes, most other avenues of conversation kind of exhausted without delving too deeply into personal territory.

“Done, done and triple done. Predictive algorithms suggest nothing will even need looking at for about three days, let alone actual work, barring any accidents. This Chariot hasn’t been in better condition since the day she left drydock.” Rhys said airily.

“And autopilot is, as always, autopiloting.” Cait replied with the same resigned tone. “Shame they never figured out safe stasis, huh?”

“Yup. So we get to sit here and go crazy.”

“Want to play a game?” Cait suggested, pulling her tablet from the air and closing her book app, scrolling through the multiplayer games she had installed, looking for one that might pique Rhys’ interest.

“Not really.” He pushed off the chair and swung himself towards the exit. “I’m going to lie down for a bit, kill a few hours with sleep.”

Cait started to say something but stopped herself, not really sure what she would have gone with. Rhys was the more experienced spacer and had made multiple Jupiter runs in his time with the company, but his current demeanour hinted at depression, which she felt responsible for. It could also be a ploy to guilt her, but even suspecting that didn’t stop it from working, and besides he didn’t seem like he’d do that, at least not deliberately.

She finished her coffee, disposed of the bag, then grabbed her tablet and launched herself down the hall to try and have a conversation with Rhys and see if there was any way she could lift his mood. The ship hadn’t been designed for pure zero G in mind – that was just a cost-cutting measure, so navigating wasn’t easy by design. It was strange to her to have to feel like she needed to be oriented with a distinct ‘up’ and ‘down’ as zero G ships and stations didn’t factor such directions into their layout. The mix of gravity-oriented design and the lack of gravity was something she was still getting under to after nearly two months of the ship. So it was that she took a few seconds to realise what she was looking at as she rounded the corner into the living quarters to find Rhys floating buck naked in the centre of the room, almost upside down, jerking off into what appeared to be the threadbare white singlet she thought she incinerated.

“Oh my god!” she exclaimed, trying and failing to back quickly out of the room. Instead as Rhys whipped his head around to see her a look of dumb shock on his face, she accidentally threw her tablet at him, bumped her head against the door frame as she scrabbled at the doorway for grip, and wound up tumbling into the hall curled up into a human cannonball as she clutched her head for protection. When she finally came to rest, Rhys was pulling himself out of the room – thankfully with his pants on.

“Cait, are you ok?”

“What the hell, man!”

“Hey, you coulda knocked!”

“The door was open! Plus, you’re supposed to tell me when you’re taking five.”

“Well… I feel weird about that!”

Put her hands to her temples, massaging away the beginnings of a tension headache.

“Was that my singlet?”

“Uh… yeah.”

“You know what, you keep it.