The Venus Return

I was wiping the same glass for the third time when the docking tube coughed open and let the new arrivals in. That was normal. Five years on the Seven Sisters, you learn the sound of every hatch on this rock. What wasn't normal was my hand stopping on the glass like my arm had decided things without me.

He came down the tube in the middle of the pack, the ring workers first, then the two suits from the ore barge, and then him. Taller than I remembered, or maybe I was just shorter in my own head. Gray at the temples. That same crooked smile he used to aim at me across pool tables and cheap bar tops, like he knew something funny and wasn't going to share it yet.

Drake Yates. Forty-two years old now, which meant I was thirty-eight, which meant it had been twenty years since I made the biggest chicken decision of my life. I want that to be part of the official record. I did the math before he even reached my door.

"Ah, hell," I said to nobody, and put the glass down.

The bell over my hatch dinged when he came through it. Three stools, one bar, one window showing Saturn's pale fat curve. That's The Last Pour. I named it myself and I stand by it.

He looked around, checking the place for exits, then he looked at me, and I watched it land on him. The recognition. His eyebrows went up and the crooked smile got crooked.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said, walking up slow. "Lyn Forbes."

"Drake Yates." I set both hands flat on the bar like I was bracing for turbulence. "You look old."

"You look exactly the same, which is frankly unfair." He sat down on the middle stool like he owned the deed to it. "What are the odds? I fly nine months out from Earth, transfer at two stations, and the first bar I stumble into has you standing behind it."

"Small galaxy." I picked the glass back up. Fourth wipe. I was stalling and I knew it and he probably knew it too, the bastard. "What brings you out here? Nobody comes to the Sisters on purpose."

"Cargo run. Heavy water, ring skim, boring stuff." He tapped the counter. "Twelve-hour layover and then I'm gone."

Twelve hours. I did that math too and didn't like the size of the number.

"What are you drinking?" I asked.

"You still have the recipe?"

My hands stopped. Just flat stopped, like somebody pulled my power cord.

Because this is the thing. Back on Earth, in Houston, when I was eighteen and dumb and full of plans I never followed through on, I worked a dive bar called the Salt Lick. Drake came in every Thursday. And one Thursday, slow night, I invented a drink for him because I was showing off. I never wrote it down. I never served it to another living soul in twenty years. And I never told him what was in it.

"You remember that?" I asked, and hated how my voice went careful.

"Venus Return," he said. "You named it that because you said any man who ordered it twice was coming back for something."

"You ordered it twice that night."

"I did."

"And then I bolted like the place was on fire, so the name never got tested properly." I pulled the bottle down before my brain finished voting on it. Gin, the bitter orange, that syrup I still make from the powder packets because nobody ships real pomegranate to Saturn. I shook it hard, strained it into a lowball, and set it in front of him without looking at his face.

He took a sip. He closed his eyes.

"Oh, that's not fair," he said. "That's not fair at all. Twenty years and you just kept it in your pocket."

"Kept what in my pocket?"

"You know what."

"I really don't." I picked up the glass again. Fifth wipe. There was nothing left on this glass. I was buffing a ghost. "It's a drink, Drake. People order drinks."

"Then why has no bar from here to Earth ever served me one?" He turned the lowball in a slow circle on the counter. "I've looked. Houston, Galveston, two years on the Mars run. I ordered a Venus Return at every dive I found and every bartender looked at me as if I were making it up. Because I was. It was yours. It only existed in one place on Earth, and that place burned down with the Salt Lick in it."

"Insurance job," I said. "Owner did it himself."

"I know. I read about it. That's not the point."

"Then what's the point?"

"The point is you carried that drink across half the solar system and you're telling me it's nothing." He took another sip and watched me over the rim. "You always did argue like a lawyer with no client."

I laughed. I didn't want to but it got out anyway, one short bark. "You always did talk like a man who thought being persistent was the same as being right."

"Hasn't it worked out so far?"

"You tell me. You're the one drinking a drink nobody else in this system can make."

He grinned at that, the full crooked version, and I had to turn and grab a rag I did not need. The ion scrubbers were humming the way they always hummed, and the coffee smell from the recycler was doing its thing, and Saturn sat out the window being gorgeous and useless, and this man was sitting in my bar ordering twenty years off my shelf.

"So how long have you been up here?" he asked.

"Five years. Came up on a work contract, kept extending it. The pay's good and Earth kept being Earth."

"Married?"

"That's a hell of a leap from a drink order."

"It's a question, not a leap. I've got twelve hours. I'm efficient."

"No. Not married. You?"

"Divorced. Eight years back. No kids. She said I was married to the shipping lanes and she was right, which was the annoying part."

"Charming."

"I'm being honest. You used to like that about me."

"Did I?" I finally put the glass down, for good this time. "I liked a lot of things about you, Drake. That was the whole problem."

"Ah." He set his drink down too. "There it is."

"There what is?"

"The pride. I remember that. Eighteen years old, knew exactly what she wanted, would rather chew her own arm off than say it out loud."

"That is a filthy slander and also completely accurate," I said, and he laughed, a real one, and something in my chest did a thing I did not authorize.

"I waited that whole night," he said, quieter now. "You poured me the second Venus Return, you sat down on the stool next to me, our knees touched, and then you said you had to go count the register. At a bar where you were the only employee and the register had maybe sixty bucks in it."

"I counted it very thoroughly."

"I bet you did." He wasn't laughing anymore, but he wasn't mad either. He had that look, the patient one, the one that used to make me crazy because it felt like he could see the clock running inside me. "For what it's worth, I came back the next Thursday. And the one after. Four months of Thursdays."

"I know."

"You knew?"

"Ray the cook told me. He thought it was hilarious." I shrugged, or tried to. It came out stiff. "By the time I worked up the nerve to say something, you'd taken the long haul contract and you were gone."

"And you never once thought to look me up? Twenty years, Lyn. We had a whole internet."

"I had pride."

"Yeah," he said. "I got that part. I'm asking what it bought you."

I looked at him for a long second. Saturn hung out the window like a chaperone. The scrubbers hummed. My hands wanted something to wipe and I refused to give them one.

"It bought me a bar with three stools," I said. "And a drink with a name that turned out to be true, which is the worst part. Venus Return. Any man who orders it twice is coming back for something. You came back twenty years later and nine months of travel. That's either devotion or a very expensive coincidence."

"Can't it be both?"

"Drake."

"Lyn." He leaned his elbows on the bar, close enough that I could smell recycled air and gin and under it, still, somehow, him. "Here's my situation. I dock until 0400 station time. Then I'm on the outbound burn and you will never see me again, because my route doesn't come through Saturn again for three years, and I'll be honest, three years from now I'll be forty-five and maybe too tired to be brave."

"That's a lot of talking for a man who hasn't finished his drink."

"I'm building up to something." He picked up the lowball and drained it anyway, just to show off. Then he set it down empty and looked at me straight on. "So I'm going to ask you a question, and this time I'd like you to not go count the register."

My heart was doing something embarrassing. I wiped nothing off the counter and said, "Ask."

"Last time, you ran. This time, what do you say we finish what we started?"

"Finish what we started," I said. "That's your big question? Twenty years of shipping lanes and that's the best pitch you've got?"

"I figured I'd leave room for you to say something brave for once."

"Oh, that's low."

"It's honest. You used to like that about me."

"I really need to stop liking things about you," I told him, and he grinned like he'd already won, which was annoying, because he had.

Here is the thing though. I'd spent five years on this tin can telling myself the story where I was bold. The story where if the moment came back around, I'd grab it with both hands and not be the girl who counted the register. And every year the story got easier to tell and harder to believe. So when Drake Yates sat on my stool and asked me flat out, there was exactly one answer that didn't make me a liar.

"Bar's closed," I said.

"It's 1900. You close at 0200."

"Bar's closed," I said again, louder, like volume would make it legal. I came around the counter and hit the lock panel on the pod door and the bolt dropped with that heavy station sound, thunk, and that ended it. My heart was pounding as if I had just run the ring corridor in a suit failure.

"Lyn."

"Shut up, Drake. I'm doing a thing and if you talk I'll lose my nerve and I am not counting a register tonight."

"Understood."

I grabbed his shirt front and pulled him off