“Well, yeah,” she said. “Because when I was really little, you told me you couldn’t marry me because I was too short.”
Thomas laughed. “Yeah, okay, I remember that. You had no time for any rules that said seventeen-year-olds couldn’t marry five-year-olds, so I went with height as my main can’t marry you excuse.”
“It got me to eat my vegetables religiously, for years,” Tasha told him.
“You were such a funny kid,” he said. “That pink settee...?”
“Oh, my God!” she said, laughing. “Right?”
When she’d first moved in with Uncle Alan, he’d taken Tasha furniture shopping to buy a bed, a desk, and a dresser for his empty second bedroom. In the center of the showroom, she’d spotted a pink upholstered sofa—the perfect accessory to the I’m a Russian Princess in Exile fantasy that she insisted upon playing ad nauseum.
Alan had read the tag aloud—nearly fainting at the price—and it was described as a “settee.” After that, she refused to call it anything else. It became the beginning and end for her—the absolute pinnacle of her hopes and dreams. Her uncle had ended up buying it and putting it in his tiny apartment’s living room. His SEAL buddies had laughed their asses off—until they started having kids of their own.
“You know, it’s still in Alan and Mia’s playroom,” she told Thomas.
“Oh, yeah.” He smiled back at her. “That shade of pink’s hard to miss.”
Tasha had to look away then, because of the wave of sadness that hit her. For the past five years, she and Thomas had—through careful, strategic planning—only been in Alan and Mia’s playroom when the other was absent. After all those years they’d spent together, reading or watching movies while sitting on that pink settee...
Thomas either misread her emotional shift—or got it exactly right. Either way, he focused on the furniture. “That thing was your home base,” he said. “Like, your life was a giant and really scary game of tag, but when you were sitting on that pink sofa—”
“Settee.”
“Right. When you were sitting on that pink settee—” he accepted her correction the same way he always had, with a smile and an acknowledging tip of his head “—you were safe. You could relax. Still, that thing had nothing on your desk, in your bedroom.”
“I never had a desk before,” she told him, then backed up a bit. “I never had my own bedroom before I stayed with Uncle Alan. And with furniture I got to pick out...? It was unreal.” She shook her head. “Sometimes Sharon would hook up with guys who were older—divorced or widowed—so if they had a daughter or a son who was grown up and gone, I’d sometimes get to stay in their room and, you know, be sternly told not to break anything. Which is the stupidest thing to tell a kid, by the way. Like being sent an engraved invitation to your inevitable failure. So that was hard, plus I always knew it was temporary. Even if the room was really nice, it always belonged to someone else, and I was just borrowing it.”
“You used to give me the grand tour of your room at Uncle Navy’s, every time I came over to babysit,” he said. “You were so proud. But that writing desk—and the pens and pencils and crayons you kept in that top drawer... You loved that extra hard. That’s why I got you that bookshelf for your birthday that year. Everyone was like, man, she’s ten, get her something she likes—”
“I loved that bookshelf!” His friends Mike and Rio had gotten her a gift card to a local indie bookstore. And even though she was only ten, she knew that idea had been Thomas’s, too, to help her populate her new shelves. “It was the perfect present.”
“Oh, I know,” he said.
“That bookshelf helped me stake my claim,” she told him. “It meant that even when I moved back with Sharon, after she got out of whatever halfway house she was in at whatever point in her recovery, I always knew there was a permanent place—a safe place, a home base, yeah—waiting for me at Alan and Mia’s.”
“I wish we’d fought harder for you,” Thomas said quietly. “Talked you out of going back with Sharon, all those times.”
“Yeah, well, I was supposed to want to be with her,” Tash said. “And part of me really did—although a lot of that came from her telling me that of course I wanted to live with her. But she was my mother, so... And part of me, well, a lot of me needed the time to learn that normal didn’t have to be the chaos of living with her and her demons—that I could love her and still want a better life for myself—that I mattered, too. And once I realized that staying with Alan and Mia didn’t have to be only for special occasions, or the result of Sharon’s dysfunctional life crossing the line into dangerous... I dove in.”
It was right before The First Year of Rachel that Tasha had finally stopped bouncing. She’d asked Alan and Mia if it was okay if she lived with them, even after her mother got out of her latest rehab. Of course they’d said yes. They’d asked her to stay from the start—but never with any pressure that might make her feel bad about her choice to keep trying again with Sharon.
“I had to be the one to make that choice,” Tasha told Thomas now. “And you and Uncle Alan and Mia all gave me the space I needed to do that on my own time. And part of it was learning something that you helped teach me through example. You never treated me like I was some kind of inconvenience or problem to handle. I remember Sharon used to look at me and say, What do we do with Tasha? All the time. Because I was cramping her style, or making her life difficult in some way. Sometimes I’d hear it more than once a day. I was an annoying problem to be solved.”
He was shaking his head now, with a Don’t let Sharon near me anytime soon because it will get loud look on his face.
And that gave Tasha the courage to whisper, “That’s what really gutted me most about the night of the Five White Russians. After what I did that night, I could see it your eyes—What do I do with Tasha?—whenever I walked into the room.”
“Ah, Jesus, Tash...”
“After working so hard to convince myself that I wasn’t the problem, that the issues were Sharon’s, I managed to turn myself into your annoying problem. And it was... unbearable because, well, out of all the people in the world... I just didn’t expect it from you.”
“I am so sorry,” Thomas started.
“Oh, God, no,” she said. “I said that wrong, and it sounded like... No. I was the bad friend first. What I did was so selfish, and self-absorbed, and I deserved it—the way you looked at me. The way you... still sometimes look at me.”
Chapter Seventeen
Thomas closed his eyes because, damn, she was right. He was definitely emoting a whole hell of a lot of What do I do with Tasha? right now.
And then he opened his eyes, because his hiding from this—hiding from her—had been his equally giant and shitty contribution to the enormous mistake that had started with Tasha drinking those five White Russians on that night five years ago.
Nah, actually, the mistake had started many years earlier, when he knew she was crushing on him, and he did a huge ball of absolutely-nothing to stop her. He’d liked being the kind of shiny that she’d made him feel when he saw himself through her adoring eyes.