Aurora's Bored With Alice: A Sapphic Romance, page 1
AURORA’S BORED WITH ALICE
A SAPPHIC ROMANCE
ASHLEY HALLADAY
Copyright © 2025 by Ashley Halladay
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.
CONTENTS
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
The Sapphic Inquisition
Prologue
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CHAPTER 1
AURORA
Nuvuk Research Station sits at the far northern point of Alaska, on a spit of headland surrounded by frigid cold water and windswept tundra that stretches out to the horizon.
There is no place like it on earth. At least, not that I have seen.
And I have seen quite a few.
The ice sometimes is white and bright and blinding. And other times it is a harsh dark gray, a forbidding expanse of slate that seems to press in, until somehow it feels claustrophobic.
But best of all is when it is a dozen shades of blue, from deep aqua to a glacial teal so deep it looks unnatural. When the sun catches it, it’s like an azurine kaleidoscope scattering cerulean and cyan and robin’s egg. At those moments, the station feels like a boat out to sea, the ocean all around.
It is a remote place. Ninety-eight percent of the world—and an even larger share of its population—lies to the south. To the north lies only dark cold water and great sheets of ice whose strength has not yet been spent in this warming world.
But to the west lies Nuvuk City, a small frozen place with only a few thousand inhabitants. It was once an Inuit hunting village and the majority of the population is still Alaskan Natives. There is little in the way of hunting anymore, a bit of fishing—old traditions kept alive in a world that has moved on—but the heart of Nuvuk City is the port, the northernmost in the United States.
Oil and gas moves through it, brought hundreds of miles from the oil fields through pipelines that cut across pristine country. From the air they look like creeping vines, stretching out across the expanse of natural beauty, strangling it.
But into the port comes life too—for the citizens of Nuvuk, and for our station a dozen miles east.
The station requires only two engineers or scientists to keep it functioning, though usually a dozen or more are in residence at any one time. There are ten now, but by tomorrow, we will be down to the essential two.
And I will be one of them.
I wake, tangled in sweat stained sheets, having slept fitfully—when I managed to sleep at all.
I have been at the station for a total of six months across three different stints, but this will be the first time I have been trusted as part of the ‘Core Crew’, the two researchers left behind to run the station.
Bleary eyed, I make my way to the commissary, where Alex sits alone at one of the metal tables. The whole place—this room and the station—is spartan, utilitarian, and just a little bit bleak. It was built in the seventies, all of metal and glass, hard angles and straight lines, more for the aesthetics than out of real need.
The whole thing at times feels like a Hollywood set, how you might imagine a remote research station to look, if you had never set foot inside one. There’s a certain charm to it, I find.
Though not everyone agrees with me.
Alex’s eyes meet mine over the rim of his oversized coffee mug. “There’s still time, you know. To change your mind. Marcie is champing at the bit to get her crack at the Core,” Alex says, using the shorthand for the crew that stays behind. “She’s been here off and on for half a decade. She doesn’t find it fair.”
I scoff as I pour myself a cup of coffee and take a seat across from him. From this close, I can’t help but notice the dark circles under his eyes or the way the smile he gives me is lips only. The rest of his face remains placid, as if the muscles there are too exhausted to move.
His shaggy unkempt hair seems more gray this morning, flat and lifeless, rather than its normal stark shimmering white. Between that and the bushy eyebrows and the ‘spare tire’ he carries around—his words, not mine—he looks a bit like Santa Claus. Though right now, he looks like Santa Claus on December 26th.
“Someone has to be here when your code inevitably breaks something. Is Marcie going to do that?”
In the past, the two researchers left would have been engineers with practical backgrounds: mechanical, electrical, the kind of skill set that would let you fix whatever broke. But in recent years, the reliability of the base has improved as part of an effort to reduce maintenance costs. Most repairs now are a simple swap of one modular component for another.
The easier repair requirements mean that there’s more flexibility about who stays behind to run things, though at least one of the crewmembers is always someone with a programming background. While the physical and mechanical maintenance of the base has grown simpler over time, the work required to troubleshoot all the software that coordinates the various systems and subsystems of the base, along with all the sensors and data streams that power the research done at the station, has grown more and more complex.
“Please, we haven’t had an issue so far this year,” Alex says. “You're just going to end up being a glorified babysitter. It’s bad enough being here when there’s a full crew. You really want to be stuck here with Jeff?”
I don’t. I mean, no offense to Jeff, but he’s certainly not the reason I’m staying. Jeff is the resident geologist, who just so happens to have been an ER doc in a past life, as well as an avid climber, naturalist, and cross country skier. If you had to design someone to babysit an isolated research station in the frozen northern reaches of Alaska, you would probably come up with Jeff.
“Jeff’s not that bad,” I say, taking a sip of the burnt watery liquid that passes for coffee at Nuvuk Station.
And that’s the truth, because Jeff keeps to himself. Which is not something that can be said about all the researchers at the station.
“He’s certainly better than some of the other options,” Alex says, giving me a smile that makes my stomach twist, almost like he knows something that I don’t.
“Hey there, fellow scientists!” A chipper voice calls from behind me. Nervous laughter follows.
I’ve only had a few swallows of coffee and am very far from awake. I jump.
“Good morning, Alice,” Alex says, giving me a look that makes it clear he’s enjoying how very much I’m not going to enjoy this.
A few seconds later, a bright neon pink smudge slots itself next to me on the metal bench, close enough that for a moment our legs brush.
I turn toward Alice, glowering. “There’s plenty of room on the bench,” I grumble. “Do you mind?”
“Oh, right, umm, sorry,” Alice says, scooting a few inches to her right. It’s still too close, but…well, I’ve learned to pick my battles. “I’m just so excited.”
It’s barely four-thirty in the morning and somehow she looks like this. Blonde curls spill over bare shoulders down to the neckline of her bright pink romper. She sports a dozen rings on her fingers, two diamond stud earrings, and too many bangles and bracelets to count. She has a purse—why in god’s name does she have a purse?—slung over one shoulder. Her deep blue eyes are bright and curious, vividly awake, as though the coffee clutched in her hands is just another accessory.
Even Research Barbie—if such a thing exists—would be rolling her eyes if she saw Alice right now…or if she saw Alice ever. She certainly doesn’t dress like any other scientist I’ve ever met.
In case it’s not clear, Alice isn’t exactly my favorite person here. She’s…nice. And that’s about all that I can say about her that doesn’t violate what my mother used to call the Thumper Rule. You know from Bambi? Don’t say mean shit or whatever.
But I, in more ways than this, am not my mother.
“You’re excited?” I gulp down more coffee and then stand to refill my cup. “You’ve been here two weeks and you’re already leaving.”
There’s a normal rotation of researchers and scientists coming and going from the station, at least usually there is. But this coming exodus is not one of the regularly scheduled changeovers. Technically, the next change should come at the end of the month, still three weeks away. And even then it shou
ld have only been half the crew, with the other half, including Alice, staying for another five weeks.
Instead, by tomorrow only two will remain, because tomorrow the workers at the port are set to strike. After months of tense negotiations, the two sides are no closer to resolution. The port is going to shut down.
Which means nothing—and no one—in or out until a deal is struck.
The station runs lean. There’s a stockpile of supplies for emergencies—food and fuel and the like. But the issue here is liability.
The station is run through a consortium of universities and private labs in conjunction with NOAA, and the decision has come down from on high that the risk of medical incident is simply too great without the port being open. Even with Jeff’s past medical training, there’s only so much that can be done out here away from a major hospital and without any way to easily bring supplies in or sick people out.
In a pinch, there are medivac services—much of Alaska’s interior is reachable only on foot, sled, or helicopter—but with the weather this far north, it’s not uncommon to have whole weeks where a chopper has no hope of a safe flight.
So, we are consolidating, whittling the crew down to only what is needed to run the base. For some researchers—like Alex, who keeps coming back here, but always counts the days until he can leave—this is an early end to their sentence. With most of their research complete, the disruption is inconvenient at worst.
But for others, like Alice, who only arrived a few weeks ago, the strike basically scuttles their entire research plan. Without enough time to even get their experiments up and running, and with future slots filled two years in advance, the whole thing is a major missed opportunity.
One they might never get again.
Alice and Alex share a look. Alice looks genuinely confused, while Alex looks downright gleeful.
Alex speaks first. “What time did you head to your room last night?”
I shrug, eyeing the two of them suspiciously. I take a seat next to Alice, leaving an appropriate amount of space between us.
“Like seven-thirty, why?” Unease bubbles in my stomach. I attempt to drown it with more caffeine. “Don’t tell me there was actually something important discussed at the nightly meeting.”
Alex puts his mug on the table, the heavy ceramic rattling the thin metal table like an out of tune gong. “You mean the mandatory nightly meeting? The one that I have been telling you for weeks you need to attend.”
“Yea, that one,” I say, trying to keep the edge from my voice.
Alex turns his eyes to my left. “Alice? Maybe you should fill Aurora in. It might be a good way to start your working relationship off, and work on getting to know each other.”
My heart skips a beat as I struggle to make sense out of the words Alex is saying. Like I know the words, all of them, individually, but as they combine to form clauses and then sentences and then more, my brain revolts.
What does he mean by ‘working relationship’? My working relationship with Alice has an expiration date: today.
“So, umm, there was an accident,” Alice says, as her face reddens. “A minor one. But, yea, so Jeff? You know Jeff? I mean, of course, you know Jeff. He…well, he broke his ankle. So…”
“Jeff broke his ankle,” I repeat the words back as the weight settles onto my shoulders.
A broken ankle means Jeff won’t be my partner on the Core Crew, which means…
Suddenly, Alice’s excitement and Alex’s cryptic words earlier make an unpleasant amount of sense.
I pinch the bridge of my nose and let out a deep sigh. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
CHAPTER 2
ALICE
“She’s going to kill me, Tabs.” My head sits in her lap as her fingers move in my hair.
“Unlikely,” Tabitha says, her voice steady. “She can’t run the station herself. And Aurora doesn’t strike me as an overachiever. She’ll keep you around out of sheer laziness if nothing else.”
I sigh, eyes rolling. “Not helpful.”
“Oh, you’ll be fine.” She shrugs. “Besides, isn't this like your fantasy come to life? You out here, the only thing standing between the station and the frigid cold outside.” Her voice dips lower. “You out here, nothing standing between you and that shaved headed hottie.”
I don’t have to look up to know that her eyebrows are dancing with suggestion. I bite back a laugh.
“That is not my fantasy,” I huff. “The second part I mean. Besides she’s not shaved.”
Tabitha laughs. “Oh, and how do we know this?”
“That’s….I meant her head. Her head is not shaved. Completely, I mean. She has that braid.” I clear my throat, hoping that Tabitha doesn’t hear the longing in my voice.
My hopes, as always, are dashed.
“That braid, huh? And what exactly are you thinking about with regards to that braid?” She apes my tone back to me, tremulous and breathy.
“Nothing,” I say, then repeat that word silently to myself.
I’m not thinking about anything about the braid or about Aurora or about what it might be like to pull it…
“Uh-huh,” Tabitha says, clicking her tongue teasingly. Mercifully, though, she doesn’t press too hard. “So are you going to tell me what happened in the commissary? I have a few minutes before I need to head.”
I ache at the reminder, like my whole body is protesting the thought of being separated from my best friend.
“It’s not fair,” I mope. “We’ve barely seen each other the last few years, and now…This was supposed to be our time.”
Tabitha and I have been best friends since the first day of middle school. I wouldn’t have survived without her. High school and college and grad school too. We did it all together, more or less. She was getting her medical degree, while I was getting my doctorate, but we were roommates through it all.
But after school, it’s been harder. She had residency and now a fellowship as she finishes her own doctorate—because being one kind of doctor isn’t enough for Tabitha. It wasn’t easy for us to end up here together at the same time: strings were pulled, pots sweetened, and even then it was no guarantee. It felt like divine intervention, the universe's way of telling us that after all our time spent apart, we deserved to be back in each other’s lives. At least for a little bit.
We were ecstatic to end up here together, because there are so few places in the world where our disparate skillsets and interests are both in demand. I’m studying the way that magnetic particles from the sun interact with parts of the ionosphere near the earth’s poles. Tabitha is studying emergency and disaster medicine in remote locations. For the last few years, she’s been around the world: Haiti, Syria, Uganda, anywhere people need help really.
I love that about her, how endless her desire is to help other people, how much of herself she gives. But sometimes I wish there was a little more held back, a little more for me.
“I know, hun,” she says, running a finger along my hairline. “It’s kind of bad luck. Hopefully, the strike will be over soon, but…”
But Tabitha has a schedule to keep. She’s only here for the three month stint and then she’s back to globetrotting with trips planned all over South America, the next stop on her world health tour. Which means, everyday the strike happens is a day stolen from us, from this…not that that’s the point. Of the strike, I mean. It feels selfish to be thinking about us and getting to spend time together, but I think it all the same.
I can feel a faint hint of tears forming: a bit of pressure behind my eyes, the wobble of my jaw. I clench my teeth, willing it away, hoping that Tabitha won’t notice.
Her thumb brushes away a tear before I even realize that it’s falling.
I laugh and then snort at the gross mucus-y noise that it produces, which only makes us both laugh harder, until I have to stand and reach for tissues to clean away the disgusting snotty mess.
I plop down next to Tabitha on the bed, both of us leaned back against the painted cinderblock wall.
“Come on, Alice,” she says, her hand falling over mine. “I need a good story for the trip back home. Tell me what happened.”
