Below Zero (The STEMinist Novellas, #3)

by Ali Hazelwood

Caring what others think is a lot of work, and—with a handful of exceptions—I’m not a huge fan of work.

I wanted to stop feeling as though I were rotting in my own aimlessness, and I wanted my head to stop spinning all the time.

Who would have figured that being a little shit for the first one and a half decades of my life would bring lasting consequences? Not me.

I did not come here to make friends, but hurt my weird Cheez-It friend or my other weird soccer friend and I will beat you up with a lead pipe till you piss blood for the rest of your life.

He is fully smiling now. He has a heart-stopping dimple on his left cheek, and . . . Okay, fine: he’s aggressively hot.

He is, very simply, a never-before-experienced mix of cute and overwhelmingly masculine. With a complex, layered air about him. It spells simultaneously Do not piss me off because I don’t fuck around and Ma’am, let me carry those groceries for you.

Wow. A male engineer who’s not an asshole. The bar is pretty low, but I’m nevertheless impressed.

“Beautiful. You are very, very beautiful. Probably the most . . . And you’re obviously smart and funny, so . . .”

“Hannah.” The shock of hearing my name—in Ian’s voice, cocooned by the whistle of the wind, and through the metallic line of my satphone, no less—has me instantly shutting up. Until he continues. “Just relax and think of Mars, okay? I’ll be there soon.”

He’s still staring at me. Like he’s found his long-missing house keys and is afraid he’ll lose them again if he looks away.

The good thing is, the more rejections you get, the easier they are to swallow. What had me punching pillows and plotting murder in the first year of my Ph.D. barely fazed me in the last.

He smiles, and the thought that I could have died—I could have died—without being smiled at like this, by this man, has my lips trembling.

He says it—you—like I am a remarkable and important thing. The most precious data point; his favorite town; the loveliest, starkest Martian landscape. Even though I pushed him away, over and over, he still came in a rocking boat in the middle of the coldest ocean on planet Earth, just to get me warm.

“Is that why you came to rescue me?” I tease. “Because you were thinking about it? Because you have been secretly pining for years?” He meets my eyes squarely. “I don’t know that there was anything secret about that.”

“Hannah, if that changes. If you ever find yourself able to believe that someone could care about you that much. And if you wanted to actually . . . have dinner with that someone.” He lets out a laugh. “Well . . . Please, consider me. You know where to find me.”