Sex on the Moon Read Free

shack, but Sonya was waiting on the front porch, her beautiful reddish-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and her white sweater tight against her curves. Thad ran up to her and held his hands out. She grinned, pulling the bottom of her sweater up to reveal the flat plane of her toned stomach. Then she took his hands and pressed them against her warm skin, shivering as she did so. It was a cute little ritual they had developed over the past few months of living together. Maybe it was stupid and maybe it was sweet, but Thad was certain he’d remember these moments for the rest of his life.
    A minute after that and they were inside. The living room was pretty bare: a few pieces of wooden furniture they had picked up at yard sales, a TV that was almost never on, a freestanding radiator that spat arcs of hissing water when it was turned too high. Thad led his wife to the couch by the TV and, sitting beside her, told her that he wanted to be an astronaut. He explained in detail what that meant, the things he would need to do and what they would have to reconfigure to make those things possible. It was going to take sacrifice, on both their parts. Sonya already had a full-time job as a dental assistant, and she had just started modeling in the evenings, had even signed with a local agency. But this would mean he would have to start school again, and take scuba and flying lessons. He would have to fill his résumé with the things that would impress scientists at NASA. It wasn’t going to be easy.
    “You want to be an astronaut,” Sonya repeated, looking at him.
    He half expected her to burst out laughing. Instead, she ran a hand through his tangled hair.
    “Cool. I guess I’m going to need to get another job.”

2
    One year earlier, astronauts, Mars, and NASA scientists had been the furthest things from Thad’s thoughts as he huddled, trembling, in the backseat of his parents’ oversized gray van, waiting for his father to murder him.
    The van was parked in the driveway in front of Thad’s family’s house, a ranch-style building on the outskirts of Syracuse, Utah. Syracuse was an isolated speck of a place, nearly impossible to find on a map, a pseudo farm town—which meant that everybody there was a pseudo farmer, except for the few families that actually lived on farms. Thad’s family lived on an acre-and-a-half garden, where they grew their own vegetables, next door to a small cow pasture that provided them with just enough meat to feed Thad and his six brothers and sisters. It was a simple existence, and on paper it might even have seemed pretty and quaint. Thad hadn’t seen it that way in a very long time.
    It had just started to snow outside the van’s windows, an angry whirl of gargantuan white flakes. Thad barely noticed, because he was too busy staring at his house’s front door. Any moment, he was certain his father was going to come through that door with a shotgun, march up to the van, and shoot Thad in the head.
    Thad hadn’t come to the conclusion that his father was about to murder him frivolously. In fact, he was nearly certain it was about to happen. He had watched the seething anger deepen in the redness that splotched across the back of his dad’s neck the entire hour-ride home from the Salt Lake City airport. His mother, silent in the front seat next to his father, had glanced back only once during the ride, and her eyes had only confirmed the thought.
    Thad believed he had finally pushed the man over the edge, and now his father was going to do what he believed was necessary.
    Thad fought back tears as he stared through the thick snow, wondering if it would hurt, wondering if he’d even put up his hands or beg for forgiveness. In his opinion, his dad was a heartless man, not yet physically aggressive but maybe what he was about to do was right. Maybe that was exactly what Thad deserved.
    The truth was, in the back of his mind he had expected this moment since the day he had met Sonya his