Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

She leant over and kissed him. He was the sweetest thing she had ever tasted. All night, fear and starvation had filled her mouth with the bitter taste of blood and metal, but Jesse was like glacé cherries. It was as if he had never kissed a girl before. He pulled away from her in surprise, tiny beads of sweat erupting from his fingertips.

‘Your heart is beating so fast,’ she said, laughing, although she could feel her own pulse throbbing in her veins. They smiled at each other, Jesse’s tooth caught on his bottom lip. Juno leant in to kiss him again, this time savouring everything, the warmth that spread through her, the way his hair felt through her fingers, like spiders’ silk. For the first time in a while, she was joyfully grateful for her whole body.

He told her that he thought she was beautiful and even before it happened, Juno could tell that he was already picturing it; the caution lights splashing her skin amber and rose, strands of her hair fluoresced chrome green, the arc of her spine and the backs of her thighs a study in electric blue.

‘Tell me when to stop,’ he said, taking off his top. Juno gazed for a moment at his skin, at the muscles he’d formed over months of labour in the greenhouse, jet hair in baby curls around his temples. She leant forward, and then her body was a warm weight on top of his. She saw, then, what an uncomplicated thing this was.

When she rolled onto her back he was slow unzipping her flight suit because his hands were shaking. He found a bleached cotton vest underneath, the same as his, and when she pulled it over her head, her breasts were like sandalwood moons, nipples like black coins. He kissed her stomach in a way that made her muscles jolt. His breath was hot on the little downy hairs that sprang up around her navel and he ran his fingers in circles along her hipbones, then lower down. Under the lace-trimmed edge of her knickers, the private warmth between her legs. It was a shock to feel someone else there, but Juno didn’t tell him to stop. His fingers were like ice, but she stared up at him, and his familiar face was all she could see, circled by a dark nimbus of stars.

‘I love you,’ he said again, and then the rest was easy.

It was a strange mix of intuitive and utterly alien. After a little embarrassed fumbling, he was inside her and she closed her eyes. They stopped, then started, then smiled at each other. Each time she felt herself clench against him with anxiety, Jesse stroked her and told her it was okay, to relax, and finally her mind was centred in her own body, drawn back the way it was sometimes when she was running, and her flesh became a Roman candle, her nerves electric. After a few minutes, their breathing grew heavy and irregular. Finally, the jolt came. She bit down hard on her bottom lip. It happened, quickly, almost accidentally, like skidding down a sloping street of black ice, one moment of terrible wonderful weightlessness and then the slap of hitting ground she forgot was there. Jesse tumbled with her with a sigh of gladness, and as soon as they finished they remembered the cold. It descended upon them like a net, the sweat on the nape of Juno’s neck freezing. Jesse had already begun shivering again.

Everything washed back on a low tide of despair. Jesse’s hair still smelt of smoke, and there was a smattering of bruises spreading across the tight ridges of his stomach.

They were running out of air.

She wondered if they could try again, and if her body would welcome her back into oblivion.

The heavy material of her flight suit was cool as a tomb when she climbed back into it, and as she did up the zip again she could tell that Jesse was still staring at her.

‘Hey,’ he whispered, and Juno was glad that when she lay back beside him he couldn’t see her. ‘Are you okay?’

She examined herself for a moment. Here were the familiar pricklings of trepidation and embarrassment – as she had expected – but then, gazing up at the stars, she realized she could feel something else too, something kinder and new.

Chapter 42 ASTRID

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THE FIRST AMERICAN TO perform a spacewalk was Lieutenant Colonel Ed White, on a mission for Gemini IV. Unlike modern spacewalks, which could last for hours, he had only twenty minutes until he ran out of oxygen.

What had it been like? Astrid always wondered. The first American to behold his home from low earth orbit: the California coast, the unobscured sun. People said that those were the shortest twenty minutes of his whole life.