Dave sighed. “All right. Set me up with your cousin. He better not look too much like you, because that would be weird.”
“Nah,” Rio said. “I mean, weird, yes, it would be, but no, he’s, like, a prettier me. Like, imagine I got photoshopped to look like I’m in a boy band.”
Dave closed his eyes and shook his head and let out an even heavier sigh. “All right,” he said again. But then he checked his phone. Still no text from the loser.
“I’ll give Luc your number,” Rio said. “In the meantime, get your distraction on by doing some math.”
“I’m on it.” Dave reached for the map.
“Do you remember that night I babysat for the McCoys, and I called you in a panic?” Tasha asked as Thomas finished up bandaging her foot.
“Syrup of ipecac night or the massively bleeding head wound one?” he asked. Her entire heel had been bloody and raw. Her feet were small but still very Fred-Flintstone—wide and square. In her tweens, she’d complained, loudly, about the way they looked, and he used to tease and tell her she was lucky—she didn’t need flippers when she went for a swim.
But Fred definitely didn’t take care of his feet the way Tash did. Hers were soft, with carefully pedicured toenails that were painted a very bright shade of pink.
The blister was bad—and he’d seen more than his share. Chafing and the damage it caused were a common Navy SEAL experience, and one of his many important tasks as the team’s hospital corpsman was to teach his teammates methods and tricks to avoid blisters. Prevention was absolutely the best medicine, but he also knew plenty about how to stop a blister from going full-Melvin after it started.
“You should’ve said something,” he’d chastised her when she’d first let him look. God, every step she’d taken, probably shortly after they left the burning SUV, had surely hurt like hell.
“And you’d’ve done what?” she countered, chin held high. “Given me one of your socks, which would’ve left you barefoot. Nope.”
“I would’ve packed the back of your shoe with moss,” he shot back.
“What moss?” she asked. “We would’ve had to stop to find moss, and I was already slowing you down.”
“Out in the world, something like this could easily get infected,” he’d informed her. “We’re lucky we have soap and water—and a first-aid kit with antibiotic ointment.”
He’d found a large, up-to-date first-aid kit on the shelf in the pantry. Near the many, many boxes of condoms. Not that anyone was having sex in here any time soon, despite the bad-porno-worthy red bathrobes they were both wearing.
He’d always heard that gingers should never wear red, but that was clearly an urban legend. With Tasha’s newly-washed hair curling and gleaming around a face clean of makeup and down her red-robed shoulders, she looked like anything but a fashion-don’t.
It was weird. Without all that makeup, he would’ve thought she’d look even more like the Tasha he’d known back when they were both kids. And yeah, her freckles were more prominent with her face clean, but that was where the comparison ended. Sure, her eyes were the same deep, rich blue they’d always been, and they still held a touch of the same wiser-than-her-years, slightly sad, slightly amused wariness. But her face was a full-grown woman’s face, complete with lines made from laughter around her quick-to-smile mouth and eyes. Eyes that could flash with badly hidden longing and desire, when she thought he wasn’t watching.
Note to self: hide the vodka and Kahlúa and whatever else went into a White Russian. Cream. Ah, there probably wasn’t any cream, and almond milk wouldn’t cut it, so he was probably safe.
Thomas had gotten out of the bathroom to find Tash had set the table for him with a bowl, spoon, cornflakes, and almond milk. She’d already eaten and had put her clothes—with the exception of her winter jacket and her sweater—into the kitchen sink to soak. While he ate the world’s most delicious bowl of cereal, she added his clothes to the soapy water.
Only then was it time for first aid.
Tasha laughed a little now as he finished securing the bandage. “I forgot that there were two nights of crazed babysitter-panic at Chez McCoy.”
“Two that I witnessed,” he pointed out. “It wouldn’t surprise me if there were a dozen more that I never knew about, at least with other, non-Tasha babysitters.”
Captain McCoy’s daughter Joanna was a teenager now, focusing her intense energy into playing soccer. But in her pre-team-sports days, she’d been a lightning bolt in a bottle, running rings around her brother and their friends, with frequent visits to the ER. Fortunately her mom, Lucy, was a badass who wasn’t at all fazed by her daughter’s propensity to be embraced by trouble.
Come to think of it, Jo was a lot like Tasha, which was probably why she’d been the McCoys’ favorite babysitter. Thomas knew that Tasha understood their spirited daughter in ways most people didn’t.
“Massively bleeding head wound panic-night,” Tash told him now as she slipped her foot gingerly back into her too-large slipper. “That much blood coming from one tiny girl really freaked me out.”
Thomas had arrived at the scene before both the ambulance and the McCoys. He’d found Tasha not just keeping herself together, but keeping Jo and her little brother calm. It wasn’t until after, when he was driving her home, that she’d let herself cry—and at that point, her emotion was mostly relief.
“Heads bleed a lot,” he said.
“Yup. I learned that from you, that night,” she said. “Speaking of bleeding heads, let me look at yours.”
“I’m fine,” he reminded her.
Tasha stood up anyway, tightening the belt of her giant robe as she motioned for him to sit on the couch, in the spot beneath the overhead light where she’d just been. “I just want to look, which is something even you haven’t been able to do, Super-SEAL, so guess what? I’ll be the one to decide if you’re really fine.”
“It feels fine.” Thomas grumbled, but he sat where she’d directed, and tipped his head forward slightly. “I checked it out in the shower—shaved around it. It feels like it’s starting to scab.”
“It is,” she said, her fingers cool against the heat of his skin.
He pulled away slightly and looked at her over his shoulder. “Your eyes feel oddly like fingers.”
“What are you, four, Mr. Literal?” she said. “I just want to look, in medical-ese means there might be gentle touching to further assess. In fact, in my expert assessment—expert, due to having eyes that can see it—you need to put some antibiotic ointment on that because it looks a little angry. Out in the world, something like this could easily get infected.” She tossed his own words back at him. “And—just to be clear—when I said You need to put ointment on that, I meant that I need to do it for you, since your eyes have neither fingers nor cool Martian expandable stalks that allow you to see around to the back of your head.”
Martian Girl.
That had been one of Thomas’s nicknames for Tasha, back when she was just a kid. It first came out of his mouth on the day he’d found her, wandering alone at the beach.