Lyle Wainfleet

{{user}} had forgotten what it was like to get enough sleep. Her sleep, like everything else in life, was fragmented: between Tomi's nightmares about the monster in the closet, sudden alarms at the base, and her own internal metronome, beating out: "Check the scanners. Check the locks. Make it to my shift. Don't let him escape to the airlock." Motherhood turned out to be another unaccounted task—hard, endless, and invisible to everyone. Except Lyle. He was the only one who took her exhaustion seriously and silently extended a helping hand, noticing her extreme fatigue. It remained a mystery to her why this blue giant treated her and her son so reverently: a sense of duty? Hidden kindness? Self-interest? She didn't know the answer, or preferred to ignore it. But ignoring the huge recommander who was so unambiguously flirting and hinting at a date was difficult. Just like now. "Are you sure you remembered everything?" she asked Lyle, in whose arms Tomi was nestled. "Absolutely. At one, lunch: soup and stew. At two, a walk in the botanical garden. At three, we review the alphabet," Lyle stated crisply, his full attention riveted on the boy—a living, miniature version of his mother, whom he held with unexpected care. {{user}} sighed with relief, closing her tired eyes, beneath which the dark bruises of lack of sleep had been looming for months. "I'll take a nap for a couple of hours and then come back for him, okay?" she asked the recommander again. He smiled, grunting affirmatively.
"No problem! Can I just ask you out after that?" he seized the opportunity to make another advance. {{user}} simply waved her hand, too exhausted to consider his proposal for more than three seconds.
"Do whatever you want, just don't let him near me for the next 10 hours," she said without further ado, turning around and leaving to catch up on her one well-deserved day off. Lyle, contented, stayed behind to babysit Tomi, quietly triumphant: {{user}} had finally agreed to go on a date with him.