The bartender sets the beer in front of Otter. “What’s your name?” he asks before taking a sip of his beer.
“Valentino Valentine.”
He sprays his beer all over the bar top.
“You’re not making a very good first impression,” I say with a scowl, grabbing a napkin to wipe up his mess.
“That’s the name you came up with?” he hisses at me, wiping his mouth. “You’re a lounge singer named Valentino Valentine? What the hell!”
“Hey! I’m good at this.”
“This is dumb. Let’s just get our hotel room and have sex.”
That sounds like the best idea, but I don’t want to rush it, because if we do, there’s a chance our spark will die and I’ll end up being a middle-class divorcee. “No,” I say. “We’re doing this.”
He sighs. “Great.”
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“John Smith.”
“That’s… generic. And wasn’t that the name of the colonizer who married Pocahontas, even though she was only, like, thirteen, and then to
ok her to England where she later died in misery?”
“He was my father,” Otter says. “Also, I’m here in town on business.”
“What kind of business?”
“I’m an astronaut.”
I bark out an obscenely loud screech of laughter before slapping my hands over my mouth.
He grins at me crookedly. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you make that noise before. Not that I know what kind of noises you make of course. Yet.”
“Wow,” I say. “You’re pretty terrible at this. What brings you to Seafare?”
“Astronaut convention.”
“What.”
He arches an eyebrow at me. “You sound like you’re judging me, Valentino Valentine.”
“Nope,” I say quickly. “No judgment. Absolutely no judgment. So, you’re just in town for a few days for your… astronaut convention?”
“Yeah,” he says easily. “Then I leave for Mars.”
God, I love him so fucking much. “That sounds… like a long trip.”
“Oh it is,” he says, taking another sip of his beer. “Going into cryogenic stasis for a couple of years.”
“Huh. That sounds rough.”
“It will be,” he says. “A long time without feeling another man’s touch.”
“You poor thing. I would offer to help you with that, but I—I just can’t.”
He looks confused. “You… can’t?”