Snowed In: Jude and Cal

By Jessie Pinkham

Jude knows he isn’t relationship material. The entire population of Mars made it abundantly clear he’s damaged goods, and he agrees. His issues are why he works a remote job flying around the galaxy prospecting for metals, and why he ruthlessly quashes any feelings for Cal, his surveying partner.

Cal has been looking for an opening to suggest he and Jude could be more than friendly coworkers. When they crash on a tundra planet, the men have a lot of free time, and they put it to good use having sex. It’s fun, but Cal wants Jude as a boyfriend, not a friend with benefits.

Marooned on a hostile world, with Jude’s demons rearing their heads, Cal’s first task is to keep the two of them alive. His second is to convince Jude that, no matter how much he’s suffered, romance can still be in the cards.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JMS Books LLC
• Release date: Dec 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781634867849

Jessie Pinkham

Some kids have imaginary friends. Jessie grew up in rural Maine where she needed to entertain herself, so she created an imaginary village and she has been dreaming up stories ever since. These days she writes romances which reflect her love of hot guys and a good happy ending. Married to her own Mr. Right, Jessie gratefully acknowledges his support and encouragement. She enjoys exploring the diversity of the universe and therefore cannot commit to a single subgenre of male/male romance. She’s also a chocoholic, avid reader, and travel enthusiast. Too often she rushes out at the last minute because she lost track of time while writing. For more information, please visit jessiepinkhambooks.com.

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Epilogue

Chapter 1

For an individual looking to put maximum distance between themselves and another person, there was no better gig than Alston Mining. The conglomerate sent its employees to various far-flung and uninhabited planets, moons, and asteroid belts, then compensated for the isolation with a generous salary.

Management believed their workforce was driven by a sense of adventure, or at the very least enticed by the income. Employees knew better. The jobs tended to tedium more than excitement, and the money could draw new hires but was rarely sufficient to keep them more than a year. If, however, one wanted to be far away from a specific person or situation, Alston Mining couldn’t be bested. It was understood among employees that anyone who stuck around after claiming their one-year bonus had something or someone to which they didn’t care to return.

Jude was halfway between his three- and four-year bonuses, nearing veteran status, with no intentions of leaving his job any time soon. Isolation suited him. Out in the far reaches of the explored galaxy, his wasn’t a recognizable face. He was just a man looking for minerals.

He’d been promoted half a year earlier. Now, instead of remaining at a single mining station, he flew around the sector in a two-man survey ship, scanning and collecting samples which the higher-ups would use to determine where they wanted to mine next. Jude had never objected to the dull life at a remote outpost, but the changing scenery of a survey man’s lot was inarguably pleasant.

Of course, spending months at a stretch cooped up in a small vessel with another person would be miserable if the individuals in question didn’t get along. To that end Alston’s HR utilized compatibility tests in which their employees placed only minimal faith.

Maybe it was the tests, maybe it was luck, but Jude had been paired with a good man. Cal had been with the company for a few years, which meant he knew better than to pry into Jude’s reasons for staying out in deep space, same as Jude never asked what drove Cal to the job. That was the most important qualification in Jude’s book, because greenhorns were damned nosy. Moreover, Cal was a highly competent navigator, knew the computer backwards and forwards, and didn’t insist on talking just because he was afraid of silence.

They worked well together and had a routine down. Cal navigated, Jude scanned, and if they sometimes landed on moons to collect samples in person which the drones could’ve handled, well, there was nobody around to tell them they couldn’t go for a scenic walk.

Cal was a good-looking guy in a generic way. Jude envied him that—not being attractive as much as being of generic appearance. His own face was angular in the extreme, with each feature attempting to be sharper than the next. The result was neither handsome nor homely, a face which was best described as ‘memorable.’

For the first few months, Jude hadn’t paid any attention to Cal as more than a coworker, if admittedly a pleasant one to look at. As it happened, though, one day he accidentally started playing porn on the large shared screen when Cal was sitting not two meters away.

Now, Jude wasn’t ashamed of his porn. When two men worked together on long trips in a small ship, they damned well knew when the other guy went to have some quality time with an adult video. All the same, it seemed the polite thing to keep his personal videos on his own devices, not the big screen.

Before he could even apologize, Cal had said, Is that Dick Boone in a four-way? I don’t have that video, will you send it to me?

It was shortly after this incident that Cal started creeping into Jude’s fantasies, such as the one where they had a threesome with Dick Boone. He wondered if a shared interest in gay porn had come up in the compatibility test, but to the best of his knowledge he hadn’t answered any questions about his porn preferences, so he guessed not.

Anyway, as Jude saw things, life could’ve been a lot worse than a roommate worth fantasizing about, and since his worst complaint regarding Cal was how the man sometimes hummed quietly without realizing it, he counted himself lucky in the mining partner department. Though he didn’t let Cal heat up his food. Really, who burned MREs? Jude hadn’t even known it was possible until he saw Cal do just that.

They were currently en route to their last stop before heading to a waystation for supplies. The destination was a planet not yet exciting enough for a name other than the boring designation HR 6416 IV. If the long-range data extrapolation had been correct, the planet was basically a tundra. Jude wouldn’t like to stay in such a place long term, but he was itching to stretch his legs and get out of