Lover’s moon

 

For time uncounted lovers have looked to the moon to inspire their desire; but with me on the moon, it’s a curse.

Never have I felt such an ache for any woman as I do for Hilda.

But she’s not sure it’s right that two of us from competing corporations should be on intimate terms.

This is the kind of thing that gets people fired, she says, and with jobs as high paying as ours aren’t easy to come by.

I’m persistent.

I find every excuse possible to contact her every day.

Of course, I’m careful to keep our communications casual so as to not draw attention.

I’m confident that despite our living in different bubbles on the moon’s surface we will eventually connect.

This sustains me and even calms down my otherwise unbridled desire.

As careful as I am, our bosses on both eyes are still suspicious.

Our companies compete for a contract for a permanent base on the moon, and my regular communications with Hilda draw attention.

Hilda panics and tells me to stop.

I panic when I think maybe we won’t connect after all.

So I stare forlornly at her bubble, my desire made worse by the circle of Earth hovering so romantically above it.

I decide I’m going to meet up with her anyway. Somewhere in the middle, which each of us driving a rover.

Away from the prying eyes of either corporate boss.

It takes a lot of hinting to get my message across and significantly more to convince her to do it, but she does.

I’m in tears as I drive out to the spot we agreed upon and see the other rover making its way out from the distant bubble.

She’s so scared I think she might faint.

She certainly doesn’t have love making on her mind.

Not that we can do much bundled up in our space suits. We can barely kiss.

This makes me even more frustrated. It is one thing to be miles apart, separated by the vacuum of space, and quite another to be inches away, but just as unable to connect.

At this point, the communication light on the control board starts to blink with my boss looking for me, and we both know a similar light in blinking in her rover with her boss looking for her.

I calm her down and tell her we still have a way out of this.

All we have to do is drive back to our bubbles and pretend like we didn’t get the message.

The fear, of course, helps me forget my lust for a while.

But only until I see her rover rolling away and realize we may never meet up again, separated again by space. By her speed, I can tell she’s so scared she will never agree to meet no matter how much I beg.

Only when I reach the bubble do I realize just how confused I cam, how we both are, since we both drove to the wrong bubble.

Now I’m back where I belong, and I almost accept my firing, and how Hilda has been fired, too.

If there is a bright spot in all this, it is the knowledge that we are both headed back to earth, where we maybe we can meet again finally without fear.

But I’ll tell you this. If we do meet up, we’re not going to be looking to the moon for any inspiration.