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“Do you think he knows?”
Johansen had pulled up a chair across from Mark in the NASA cafeteria and asked this question with no preamble. Understandably, he was a little confused.
“Am I meant to know what the fuck you’re talking about?” He asked, mouth full because Rocky wasn’t here to make disgusted noises at him. “Do I think who knows what?”
“Grace!” She hissed, as if that narrowed it down. Ryland simultaneously knew a lot of things, and also almost nothing, depending on what the topic of conversation was. Mark had once seen him have a forty-minute conversation with one of the molecular biologists he corresponded with on some kind of cell waste emission, and then look confused when Mark made a joke about the Kardashian’s. So really, Johannsen needed to be much more specific.
“Does Grace know what?” Beck sat down next to Johannsen, slinging an arm around her shoulders casually, grinning at her when she tried and failed to look annoyed. Mark would have been annoyed, being the last remaining single person on the Ares III crew, except he didn’t really know if he could count himself as single anymore. Are you still single if you’re in the universe’s first interplanetary queer-platonic relationship? What would he even say to a potential partner at this point? “Hi, my names Mark, and this is my life partner Ryland, his life partner Rocky, and this is Rocky’s spouse Adrian. Also, I’m fucking off for the next decade to another planet. Wanna come back to my place?” Yeah, he didn’t think so.
Funnily enough, it turns out that’s exactly what Johannsen is referring to.
“Do you think Grace knows all the people propositioning him are asking him to have sex with them?” She asks, insistent, and Mark chokes on his juice.
“Fucking what?” He gasps out, as Lewis comes over, drawn by the familiar sound of Mark making a fool of himself in public, and pats him long-sufferingly on the back. “They’re what?”
Johannsen drops her voice low, like they’re in fucking middle school talking about crushes during lunch period. “Listen, I heard him talking to Alan- you know, the guy from IT, with the moustache? And Alan was saying if Grace ever needed his help with any hardware,” and she puts so much emphasis on the word it’s impossible to miss the connotations, “then he was free any time, and maybe Grace could give him a call. And Grace just kind of smiled and said, “thanks Alan, but I think I’ve got it covered,” and walked away like nothing had happened. Do you think he knows it was a sex invite, or is he really that oblivious?”
Mark feels like he has a concussion. “Alan?” He asks Johannsen, incredulous. “Ry can do so much better than fucking Alan.”
“That’s what I thought!”
Lewis looks considering. “I’ve seen a few people flirt with him,” she tells them, and Mark feels briefly homicidal, “but Johannsen’s right, I’ve never seen him actively acknowledge it.”
“He’s not noticed Mark’s crush either,” Beck points out. “And he’s been really, really obvious.”
“He hasn’t noticed yours either, Dr Oh-Your-Thoughts-On-Alien-Physiology-Are-So-Interesting,” Mark grits out, deciding if he’s going down, he’s taking everyone else down with him. Beck flushes and darts a quick look at Johannsen, who looks more amused than anything else.
“Everyone has a crush on Grace, Mark, that’s my point,” Lewis looks like she’s trying not to laugh.
“What are we talking about?” Martinez asks, placing his tray down while looking at Mark’s red face with the dawning joy of an older brother seeing an opportunity to torment their younger sibling. Vogel sits much more sedately, a beacon of calm amongst the other lunatics Mark is friends with for reasons he can’t currently remember.
“We’re trying to decide if Grace knows that everyone wants to fuck him,” Johannsen explains, and Mark puts his head in his hands. Some of the greatest minds ever sent to space, and this is what they do in their downtime.
Martinez looks considering. “He’s gotta know,” he decides. “I saw one of the women from Comms fellate a pen while making direct eye contact with him on Monday. There’s no way to misunderstand that.”
Jesus Christ. Mark genuinely can’t believe this is his life. If he’d known having hot friends was going to cause this level of upheaval in his life, he maybe would have picked another career path. He could have been an accountant- he didn’t think accountants had these problems.
“Should someone just… ask him?” Vogel tries, the sole voice of reason.
Everyone turns to look at Mark. “Absolutely the fuck not,” he says firmly.
“It would be better coming from you,” Johannsen wheedles, and Mark scoffs.
“You think I’m the best person to have a delicate conversation with someone? Have you met me?”
Johannsen wilts. “That’s a valid point.”
They all think for a moment, and Mark can’t believe anyone ever let them go to space when they all share one collective brain cell.
“We need more information,” Lewis decides. “We wait, and we watch; we can figure this out.”
“Figure what out?”
They all jump in unison, whipping their heads around to look at Grace, who is looking back at them like they’re insane. This is not an unusual expression for him to have around Mark and his crew, honestly; he hasn’t made it a secret that he thinks insanity is a prerequisite for being an astronaut, and really, the Ares III crew haven’t done much to dispel this notion.
They’re all still staring at him like idiots, and Grace asks again, slower this time. “What are you guys figuring out?”
They all chorus, “Taxes,” without even looking at each other, because they’d all mind-melded long before they went to Mars, and the two years they spent away from each other had done little to change that.
Grace looks dubious, but sits down anyway. They all breathe a collective sigh of relief; crisis averted. And now, the game was on.
**
The thing is, it’s not like any subterfuge is needed for their investigation. Mark doesn’t exactly need to tail Grace, they’re basically glued together at this point in their relationship. They sleep in the same bed, they work in the lab together, they go over all their plans for the trip back to Erid together. If Ryland isn’t at least in the same building as him, Mark starts to get antsy. So really, all Mark has to do is wait for someone to express interest in Grace, and observe.
He doesn’t have to wait long, because apparently, NASA is full of fucking deviants who have no qualms about outright propositioning Grace in full view of an entire lab full of people. Mark watches, in complete and utter disbelief, as three separate people approach Grace within two hours of their arrival, like someone had sent out a fucking building-wide alert that the world’s hottest man was in the lab. He watches, in stunned silence, as these people come one after the other, and flirt so openly that it couldn’t be more apparent what they were looking for if they were dancing naked in front of Grace. And then he watches Grace not react to any of it.
Mark is absolutely baffled. Grace isn’t exactly the king of social cues, but this is like, Olympic levels of deliberate ignorance. One woman, who Mark is fairly sure works for HR and should therefore be aware of the inappropriateness of what she’s doing, spends a full five minutes at the coffee station in the lab, which is on the other side of the building to her own office, dropping things and bending down suggestively. She does this until Grace, who had been oblivious to the show until she dropped the third coffee pod, told her off-handedly that she should maybe see a doctor, because if she’s this off-balance she might have an inner-ear issue. She storms off while Mark is still fuming at the audacity, and Grace doesn’t notice any of it.
Mark takes the risk of leaving Grace alone with his adoring fans to go and see Mindy. Partly because Mindy is the most terrifying person he’s ever met, and once he tells her about the frankly egregious levels of harassment he’s just witnessed, she’s going to handle it in the same way she’s handled every other issue Grace has encountered since he got back; with aggressive finality. Maybe escalating the issue directly to the new World-Dictator is a slight overreaction, but Mark doesn’t care one fucking bit.
He also goes to see Mindy because she’s the only person, other than Rocky, who spends as much time with Grace as he does, and so might be able to help with his investigation. Because, try as he might, he does not understand how Grace could possibly be missing this. There’s missing social cues because you’ve spent more time in a spaceship with an alien than you have on Earth, and then there’s whatever the fuck this is.
“Believe me, I’ve noticed the situation,” Mindy says dryly, once Mark has ranted for five minutes, already typing something on her much-feared iPad that he assumes is some kind of reprimand for the coffee woman. “It’s hard to miss.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying! How has he not noticed, Mindy?”
Mindy is looking at Mark like he’s dumb. “Why in the hell are you asking me? Can’t you just ask Grace?”
“No, Mindy, I can’t. That’s why I’m here.”
Mark doesn’t want to admit that the primary reason he doesn’t want to bring this up to Grace is that, if he does, Ryland might start noticing these things. And if he starts noticing things, he might think back to any of their interactions since he and Rocky did their Mars drive by, and realise that Mark’s one errant look away from taping a poster of him to his wall, like Mark’s a teenage boy and Grace is Megan Fox. It’s been difficult enough keeping Rocky from spilling the beans; there had been bribery involved, and even then he was convinced Rocky was just biding his time until Mark was trapped on the Mary and unable to flee the country when he brought it up.
From the way Mindy’s looking at him, he’s guessing she’s already deduced his reason for staying quiet; it’s not like he’s been subtle. She very tactfully does not comment on it, although he can see her filing the information away for later; like he said, she’s fucking terrifying.
“Maybe he’s just not interested in any of them,” she suggests.
“There’s not being interested, and then there’s not reacting to dozens of people very obviously implying they want to fuck you. Really, Mindy, they are not being low-key at all.”
She hums. “You know, I heard a rumour,” she says, eyes twinkling in such a way Mark knows whatever is about to come out of her mouth is going to piss him off, “that everyone thought Grace and Stratt were sleeping together on the Vat.”
Mark’s brain blue-screens. “Ex-fucking-scuse me?”
“Yeah,” Mindy continues, faux-casual like she isn’t enjoying the dawning horror Mark is currently experiences, “and apparently, Grace was completely unaware of this until it was brought up. He was incredibly confused, according to my source, that anyone would think he was sleeping with the woman who was toting him around all her meetings like her pet chihuahua. Like, completely baffled that anyone would ever come to that conclusion.”
Mark doesn’t think he’s ever going to sleep again, now that image is in his head. He also has a horrifying feeling that Mindy’s source is Stratt herself, and the idea that the two most terrifying people ever have taken time out of their busy schedule of running the worlds governments, to gossip about Grace, is too much for him to handle. The only plus side to the nightmare-fuel he’s just received is that now he knows he’s dealing with something long-term. It’s not some kind of manifestation of the non-consensual-space-travel related trauma they’re still picking apart; it’s a pattern of behaviour.
“So, what, exactly, am I meant to do now?” He asks, already despairing.
“Well,” she says, already dialling, “it looks like you’re going to just have to either have a conversation with him like a normal person, or live with not knowing.” She looks up at him, smiling her Benevolent-Dictator smile. “Now, please get out of my office; I have actual fucking work to do.”
Mark makes a speedy retreat; he’s curious, but not that fucking curious.
**
Now that Mindy is out, he’s back to observing. And believe him, there is a lot to observe. Whatever memo Dictator Park had sent out had done its job, to some degree; the more aggressive overtures have stopped, thank God. Mark had been one ill-timed innuendo from losing his shit entirely.
However, even with the intensity of the flirting dialled all the way back, he still feels like he’s losing his mind. Now that he’s started looking for it, he can’t stop seeing it. They go out for coffee, the barista gives Grace a free cookie along with a napkin with her number on it; Grace tosses the napkin on the way back to the lab, oblivious. They’re in the lab, working on the plants that are coming to Erid with them, when a lab tech Mark only vaguely knows compliments Grace’s shirt, eyeing Grace’s arms while Mark grinds his teeth. The whole situation is going to drive him insane if he isn’t careful.
He drags Johannsen into an empty room the next time he sees her, and tells her everything he’s been witness to. She considers the new evidence for a moment.
“He can’t know,” she decides, “if he knew, he’s have said something. He hasn’t talked to you, he hasn’t talked to Mindy; has he said anything to Rocky?”
Mark doesn’t know the answer to that, because handing Rocky this kind of blackmail material sounds like a fun new way to make his life incredibly difficult. Rocky is never happier than when he’s finding better ways to call Grace and Mark, or, you know, the human race at large, fucking stupid. He wonders what the Eridian delegation is going to think, when they get to Earth, about Rocky telling everyone and their mother that they’re dumb; he then decides that’s not his problem. He has enough issues of his own, frankly, without worrying about diplomacy.
Mark does eventually give in, and goes to track down Rocky, who’s the last person he wants to be discussing this with. Well, that’s not quite true. The person he wants to keep this little investigation from the most is Grace himself, because if Ryland ever finds out he’s been walking around NASA talking about how many people want to sleep with him, Mark is going to die of sheer mortification. So, he corners Rocky in the lab when Grace is in a meeting to have the conversation, even though the thought is causing him legitimate pain. This will likely result in months of incredibly targeting teasing, but currently this is the only option he has that won’t make his head explode.
“Mark ask Rocky if Grace know humans want to reproduce with him.” Rocky makes it sound like less of a question, and more like he’s repeating back the stupidest fucking thing he’s ever heard. This is fairly par for the course where Rocky is concerned, and Mark can’t exactly say it’s not well deserved in this case.
He soldiers on regardless. “That’s exactly what I’m asking, pal.”
Rocky considers this briefly, then asks, “why Mark want to know?”
Mark is fairly sure Rocky understands the why of the situation, and is only making him explain because he thinks it’s funny as hell to see him flustered. However, desperate times call for desperate measures, so Mark explains the whole thing to him.
Rocky is quiet while he processes the nonsense that has been going on behind his back.
“When Grace come back to Erid,” he says eventually, “after fix scurvy, fix food problem, Grace Rocky meet other Eridians. Lots of parties, people happy happy happy. Lots of interest in Grace, lots of Eridians tell Rocky ‘sol friend Grace have nice voice, very smart, very brave’. Ask Rocky if Grace have mate, ask if Grace interested.”
Mark stares at him. “You’re telling me this is an interplanetary issue. Like, you’re telling me he’s hot enough to stop traffic across two separate solar systems.”
“Rocky not know what temperature has to do-”
“Earth colloquialism, ignore me, it’s fine.” Mark sighs. “Did he know? Did he ever actually acknowledge to you, out loud, that people were interested in him? Because I’ve been watching, and he’s either got the best poker face on the planet, or he’s genuinely not aware of it.”
Rocky tilts his carapace, thinking. “Grace say how nice everyone was, that everyone very friendly. Not mention mating at all.”
Fuck. He’s officially out of options, unless he wants to explain to Grace exactly what he’s been doing for the last few weeks. Given that he’d rather go back to Mars with nothing but potato plants and an iPod full of disco music than ever admit to Grace that he’s been speculating on his sex life, or lack thereof, to this extent, the likelihood of him confessing is precisely zero. It looks like he’s just going to have to live with not knowing.
**
It all comes to a head when they’re at one of their publicity stops. The closer they get to the arrival of the Eridians, the more tourist traps Annie seems insistent on sending them to; Mark is sure she’ll be shipping them off to visit the world’s largest ball of yarn any day now. He wasn’t actually aware the US had this many tourist attractions, and he would have been happy to go on not knowing that. He feels like he’s being punished for having the audacity to survive being left on Mars; he expresses this to Annie, who responds with predictable levels of scorn.
“Oh, boo hoo, cry me a fucking river, Watney,” she tells him, not even looking up from her phone. They’re pulling up to an amusement park, and Mark can already see the hoards of press at the gates, waiting for them. Annie had been pushing for Disney World, but Grace had put his foot down, citing the sheer amount of work he had to accomplish without taking time to go to fucking Florida, and also his absolute refusal to get on any airborne craft that wasn’t taking him back up to the Mary. Given his completely reasonable and proportionate trauma regarding launches of any kind, no one had argued.
“Annie-” he tries to cut her off, while Grace tries to stifle laughter, and Rocky doesn’t even bother to do that.
“Poor baby, being forced to go to an amusement park on the clock. My heart bleeds for you, it really does. We should alert the media-”
“Okay, Jesus Christ, I get it.” He wonders if the Eridians are going to be this pushy; probably not, with how fondly Grace talks about his time with them. If that’s the case, Mark is considering moving their departure up to yesterday.
Really, once they get inside past the ravenous journalists all wanting to see them (or, really, if Mark is being honest, see Grace and Rocky; he’s old news now, compared to his interstellar roommates, and he’s grateful to be in the background every day), it’s not that bad. Rocky, once he gets over his initial alarm at the engineering behind rollercoasters, turns out to be an adrenaline junkie, which isn’t exactly a surprise. As Grace points out almost constantly, astronauts are insane as a general rule, and apparently this also applies to theme parks. Ryland I-Put-The-Not-In-Astronaut Grace, therefore, is less than thrilled about the ride aspect of their field trip, and decides to try his hand at some of the carnival games.
“Good luck with that, man, everyone knows those things are rigged,” Mark tells him, before following Rocky to the next ride. He has to eat his words when, after they get off the coaster, still dizzy and laughing, they find Grace standing smugly next to a reasonably sized pile of stuffed animals he’s won. He is, apparently, inhumanly good at fairground games; Mark and Rocky watch in stunned silence as he demonstrates this secret ability by winning yet another stuffed bear, before turning back to them with a grin so bright it’s nearly blinding. And that’s when Mark realises they have a problem, because every single head in the vicinity has just turned towards Ryland like his smile has its own gravitational pull.
He watches as Ryland, oblivious, kneels down to present his new prize to a starstruck child, while their equally starstruck parent eyes Grace like he’s a particularly juicy steak. Annie is eating it up, evidently thrilled that they’re getting such good footage, and everyone else watching has melted. Meanwhile, all Mark can think about is that he needs to get Grace out of here now, before he causes a fucking riot.
He and Rocky exchange a glace (as much as a glance can be exchanged when one party doesn’t have a face), clearly in agreement. As soon as Grace is finished handing out his prizes, they whisk him away from the ogling parents and an irate Annie, and bundle him on to the nearest ride before he has a chance to protest.
As it turns out, this was a miscalculation. Because unfortunately, the closest ride is a flume ride; they all get absolutely soaked, and as it turns out, the only thing hotter than regular Grace was Wet-T-Shirt-Contest Grace. He pulls his shirt up to wring out the water, laughing at something Rocky says, and Mark watches the ride operator sigh dreamily, literal cartoon hearts in her eyes. Mark decides he’s had just about enough, and hustles them out of there before anyone has a chance to do more than just look.
He waits, with what he considers remarkable restraint and forbearance, until they get home, before he brings it up. He needs every single second of the car ride back to steel his nerves, because by this point, he’s half convinced that Ryland is going to be offended, or mad, or upset, and even though he knows he’s overthinking, he’s still on edge. If he makes Grace cry, he’s throwing himself back off the planet.
**
When they get back to the house, Rocky makes himself scarce. This strikes Mark as odd, because he’s never known Rocky to give up the opportunity to see him or Grace make fools of themselves; maybe he’s developed some tact? Or maybe he thinks this conversation is going to cause an explosion, and he wants to be out of the blast radius; that’s more likely than the tact thing, Mark thinks mournfully.
He braces himself. “So, I need to ask you something, and I need you to promise not to get mad.”
Grace, the consummate middle-school teacher, sighs like Mark is a thirteen-year-old about to tell him that his dog ate his homework, as opposed to a fully grown adult man about to ask his best friend if he knows everyone on the planet wants to sleep with him.
“Okay,” Grace says warily, because he’s met Mark, and knows the question could be literally anything. “What’s the question?”
“Have you noticed,” he asks carefully, “the way people act around you?”
Grace blinks at him. “What do you mean?”
Jesus, this is excruciating. He’d rather be back on Mars, inside the airlock he blew himself up in, than having this conversation right now.
He continues, pained. “I mean, have you noticed people being… friendly. Not like, normal friendly, but like a really intense kind of friendly-” Jesus Christ, he is not the right person to be having this conversation. It’s difficult to think straight when he’s wishing he could just drop dead from sheer embarrassment.
“Sorry Mark, I don’t know what, exactly you mean? Could you be a little more specific?”
Mark closes his eyes briefly, in legitimate physical pain. He thinks if he says the words out loud, it might actually kill him. He looks to the sky, praying to whatever deity might be up there for strength; surely he deserves a little help, since there had been no evidence of any benevolent god when he was on Mars. When no help is forthcoming, he looks back at Grace, and that’s when he sees it. Ryland is still looking at him, wide-eyed and innocent, but the corner of his mouth is twitching, just a little. Mark zeros in on it, and suddenly, Rocky’s absence makes a hell of a lot of sense.
“You-” he splutters, aghast, “you dick! You knew! You knew all along!”
Grace manages to hold on to his innocent expression for another half-second, then he breaks into laughter, while Mark stands there, mouth agape.
“You- you,” Grace is gasping, almost unable to speak through uncontrollable mirth at Mark’s expense, “you should have seen your face.”
Mark can’t fucking believe this. He’s been engaging in espionage for weeks, and the whole time Grace has been entirely aware of it. He puts his head in his hands, groaning. This isn’t exactly worse than the miscommunication they had one the Mary, but it’s up there with one of the most embarrassing things he’s ever done.
“My God, I hate you,” he moans. “Who told? Who do I need to enact vengeance on? Other than you.”
Grace’s laughter is petering out, and he’s wiping his eyes, still grinning at Mark like he isn’t evil. “Mindy told me, weeks ago, and then Rocky asked some questions after your little talk with him. It wasn’t hard to convince him to tell me the rest.”
Mark’s head whips towards the other room, where Rocky is presumably hiding from the consequences of his actions. “TRAITOR,” he bellows, as Grace starts laughing again, and Rocky joins in from a safe distance. His vengeance on Rocky will be swift and absolute, he promises himself. Unfortunately, in Mindy’s case, his retribution will have to be long-distance, because he’s not stupid enough to try anything until he’s in space, and therefore not under her jurisdiction. He’s betrayed, not stupid.
“I can’t believe you went through all that effort to avoid asking me a question,” Grace is still chuckling. “A question with a really obvious answer, no less. I’m not blind, and even if I was, I’d still have noticed the coffee pod lady. And the pen thing was really obscene.”
Yeah, Mark is getting that. He’s used to being the stupidest person in the room now; it’s necessary, when you’re living with people like Grace and Rocky, who are so smart they’re statistical outliers. But usually, he has the upper hand when it comes to social situations. Grace is out of practice with social norms, and Rocky thinks most of them are stupid and therefore don’t apply to him. Apparently, their usual roles have been suspended for the purpose of driving Mark insane.
“A really intense kind of friendship,” Grace repeats his own words back to him, mocking tempered somewhat by the fact he seems genuinely amused. “I know what flirting is, Mark. I’m older than you, even if I was in space for a long time; I was in my thirties before I got sent to space, I know when someone’s propositioning me.”
“Then why didn’t you say anything?” Mark asks, still mortified.
“I didn’t think I had to,” Grace smiles. “It’s easier to ignore it; most of them aren’t bold enough to say anything outright, and it’s not like it happens all the time.”
“What about the staring; it doesn’t creep you out?”
“Nah,” Grace waves a hand. “I think the staring is more of the Look-At-The-Freak-Who-Didn’t-Die-In-Space variety than anything else; once the novelty wears off, they’ll stop.”
It’s right then that Mark realises Mindy has, in her own way, done him a solid. She’s only asked Grace about the more overt flirting, only told him about Mark’s campaign to find out if he’s noticed the advances. She hasn’t told him that the entirety of the human race is looking at him like they want to eat him, and apparently, Grace hasn’t noticed. Which means, for now, Mark’s own blatant eyeballing has flown under the radar. Thank Christ, he thinks, almost lightheaded.
“It’s sweet,” Grace is saying, when Mark tunes back in after his moment of fervent relief, “that you’re so worried about me, but really, it’s fine. I’m a big boy; if someone gets really pushy, I’ll tell them I’m not interested.”
“I can’t believe you knew the whole time.” Mark is laughing too now, because yeah, he’s a fucking dumbshit, but he’s a dumbshit who’s made Ryland Grace laugh, so that’s something. “And you just let me go around thinking you were oblivious, like a jackass.”
“It’s just easier, to pretend I don’t notice,” Grace shrugs. “And in the interest of full disclosure, this isn’t the first time someone’s felt like they have to have this conversation with me. When I was in college, my roommate’s girlfriend had to explain to me that everyone wasn’t joking about the whole sex thing, and the people getting me drinks at parties wanted to sleep with me. I knew what to look for, after that. So, I used to be that oblivious; you’re just a few years too late with the concern.”
Mark barks out a laugh. “You what? Did you think sex was a myth?”
Grace shakes his head, smiling. “I thought it was like, a social construct everyone was pretending was important,” he explains, laughing again. “I didn’t know everyone was serious about thinking about it all the time.”
Mark considers that. “You know,” he says carefully, “I think there’s a word for that, now.”
“There’s a word,” Grace confirms, “but if I say the word, I’ll probably get to work tomorrow to find Annie working on a line of NASA merch with pride flags all over it, wanting me to do a photoshoot. As long as I know the word, and you, Rocky, Mindy, and the other people I care about know the word, I’m good.”
“If you change your mind-” Mark starts, and Grace rolls his eyes.
“You’ll be the first to know,” Ryland promises, and Mark feels marginally better. Really, this could have gone a lot worse, if you ignore the embarrassment that’s probably going to be keeping him up at night for the foreseeable future.
“So, if you’re both finished making fun of me for the evening,” Mark says, as Rocky rolls in to the room, clearly finished hiding now the truth is out, “can we do something that doesn’t involve me embarrassing myself any further?”
“Watch movie?” Rocky trills, and Grace tugs Mark towards the couch.
“Movie,” Ryland confirms, settling them both down. Mark relaxes; he can put his revenge plans on hold until tomorrow. After all, there’s been no mention of the Eridians who had asked Rocky about Grace during the night’s revelations, and it hadn’t escaped his notice that Rocky was very deliberately not mentioning it.
He smiled; he’ll save that little titbit for later. After all- it’s a long trip back to Erid.