Five-year-old Tasha had never seen the ocean before. She had no idea how to stay safe on a Pacific beach with its pounding surf and dangerous rip tides. She just ran toward the water, and would’ve splashed on in if Thomas hadn’t stopped her. He’d been afraid that his intensity had scared her a little—running after her, shouting, No!—so he’d quickly switched it up into teasing mode, asking her if she’d just arrived on earth from Mars.
“Go ahead,” he said now, tipping his head down again so she could apply the ointment. “It’s probably best to err on the side of caution.”
“You sure it’s clean enough?” she asked. “Or should I—”
“I scrubbed it plenty in the shower.”
“Okay.” Her robe brushed against him as she reached for the tube of ointment. “My hands are clean, so I’m just going to... I mean, unless there’s another way to do it that will hurt you less?”
“It’s not going to hurt,” he lied. “Just dab it on. But don’t touch the mouth of the tube with your fingers. Drop about a dime-sized dollop into your palm, then seal up the tube of ointment. Let’s keep that as sanitary as we can.”
“That’s a good trick,” she said. “Although now that I have a dime-sized dollop, good word, in my hand, sealing the ointment is...”
“Here, hand it to me,” he said.
She reached over his shoulder to hand him first the tube and then the cap, and each time the softness of her body brushed his back.
“So about that night,” she said as he was screwing the tube closed. His fingers fumbled and she noticed because she clarified, “Massively bleeding head wound night at the McCoys’.” She laughed a little as she began to dab the ointment on the back of his head. “You seriously thought I’d bring up Five White Russians night? While we’re sitting here, castaway on a desert isle, dressed only in ridiculous bathrobes?”
“You kind of just did,” Thomas pointed out.
“No,” she said. “You did. With your alternative to a classic spit-take.”
Alternative to...? “No, I—” This argument was not something he could win. “Castaway on...?” he asked instead.
“A desert isle. Alone together,” Tasha said. “You know. Trapped in an elevator. Snowbound in a mountain cabin—I guess that’s really the closest variation to ‘stuck together in a former bomb shelter that’s now a prince’s sex-pod.’ Oh, no, there’s just one bed, but will you look at that mirror on the ceiling!”
“The bed’s all yours,” he told her a tad desperately, because although he was following—she was talking about the romance novels she loved to read and, more recently, to write—there was still definitely something he was missing. What did the bed have to do with it? And ending any and all discussion about that mirrored ceiling was paramount. “I’ll take the couch.”
“Yeah, no, I know,” she said. “I was just... Forget it. It’s awkward, being here like this, but it’s way less awkward than being dead, right?”
“I will definitely choose awkward over dead,” Thomas said, “pretty much every single time.”
“That’s because you are mentally healthy,” she informed him. “Not everyone is.” She cleared her throat. “So. About that night. Alan and Mia weren’t home, so I called you, and you showed up like a superhero, in full medic-mode.” She corrected herself, and he didn’t need to see her face to know she was rolling her eyes. “Hospital corpsman-mode. Why does the Navy have to insist on being different? Not only is a Navy captain a higher rank than a captain in every other branch of the service, but helo instead of chopper...? It’s annoying.”
“See now, I think it’s everyone else who’s wrong,” Thomas said.
“Spoken like a true naval officer,” she said. “But, you know—and here’s my point of this lovely trip into the way-back machine—it was that night—massively bleeding head wound night—that I knew you were going to become a hospital corpsman.”
“Really.” Thomas laughed. “Because, back then, I certainly didn’t know it.”
“It just... Well, it made sense to me,” she told him, finally done with her nursing assignment, and wiping her hands on one of the extra napkins she’d brought from the kitchen. She moved to sit down on the sofa, on the other side of the L from him. Close but not too close. “I mean, I knew you wanted to be a SEAL like Uncle Alan, but I think, back then, I didn’t want to imagine you doing the really dangerous stuff. Plus, I couldn’t imagine you killing anyone, but I could imagine you saving them, so... I jumped all over that. Of course you were going to be a corpsman. Problem solved.”
“Corpsmen on the Teams don’t not take out targets,” he reminded her. “First and foremost, I’m a SEAL.”
“Yeah, I know, but shhh, I don’t really want to know.” Tasha reached for the thick, white fleece blanket that she’d found in the bedroom closet. Wrapping it around herself, she made a loose loop to go over her head like a hood that she held closed at her neck. “And I certainly didn’t know that back then, so...”
He laughed again, thinking back. “I do remember you saying things like, when you’re a medic and I taught you it was corpsman, so then you started saying that all the time. And it’s funny—I don’t exactly know the timeline, but I remember checking into it, to find out if I was qualified to be a corpsman and how much extra school I’d need. I remember Grandma saying, Why on earth would you want to do all that extra work? Isn’t it hard enough for you, trying to get into that private club?”
Even today, the SEAL Teams were overwhelmingly white. Out of around three thousand active duty SEALs, fewer than two percent were Black men like Thomas.
Tasha grinned at his imitation of his grandmother. “I can hear her saying that. God, I miss her so much.”
“Yeah, I do, too,” Thomas said.
“Do you remember introducing her to me?” she asked him, tucking her feet up under her blanket.
Thomas squinted, trying to remember. It had to have been shortly after he’d first met Tash, when she was mostly freckles and a huge cloud of red hair. “I really don’t,” he admitted.
“Oh, my God,” she said, helping herself to more peanuts from the second jar they’d opened. “You were so intense about it, like I think it’s very important that you meet my grandmother, so I insisted on wearing my very best dress.”
“Let me guess, it was pink. To match the famous settee.”
“Well, obviously,” she said. “I remember following you into your apartment, and we had to take off our shoes, and... everything was just so beautiful.”
Thomas had learned from an early age to take his shoes off at the front door because his grandmother’s religion included a belief that “clean enough to eat off the floor” was not just an expression. She also had a strict doctrine that everything belonged in its place; that organization created efficiency—which allowed more time for creative endeavors. “Grandma ran a very tight ship.”
“She was in the kitchen,” Tash continued. “Somehow cooking something that smelled delicious, while every counter—and the sink—was impossibly clean.”