“I made it worse,” he told her now. “Because our having this... kind of brutally honest conversation was too... hard. Too scary. And I’m the asshole, because I chose killing our friendship over facing this... discomfort. Having to sit with you, face to face, and really talk about what happened, and why it... we... couldn’t work.”
“You think of me as a sister,” she said. “And you just don’t have those kinds of feelings for me. I was still pretty drunk when you drove me home, but I did hear you.”
“No, I’m talking about a real conversation,” Thomas countered. “When you could talk, too. When you weren’t at risk of dry heaving again.”
She closed her eyes and scrunched up her face. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, see, I know I failed you, because five years later, and you still haven’t gotten the apology out of your system.”
“You didn’t fail me,” she said. “I mean, it was my delusion—that we’d end up together, living happily ever after...? And in a way, it was really safe for me—like having a crush on a pop star. I could be in love with you and never really get my heart broken. Although, Rachel came close. And I know that you brought her to those cookouts to try to, I don’t know, reset my weird obsession with you...? Look, Tash, I have a girlfriend!”
Who wasn’t fourteen.
Rio and some of the other guys in Team Ten—including higher ranking officers—had started referring to Tasha as Thomas’s fourteen-year-old girlfriend. It was supposed to be funny, but it wasn’t okay. He’d started to worry that someone who didn’t know better would hear that and think it was true—and that Tash would somehow suffer for it. And yeah, okay, that he would, too. His fourteen-year-old, red-haired, blue-eyed, little white girlfriend... Damn.
“I was supposed to grow out of it,” Tasha continued. “My crush on you. And I just never did.”
Until now, because of Ted. Thomas waited for her to say it, but she didn’t.
She’d been picking up her nearly-empty jar of peanuts every now and then since he’d come out of the shower, looking at the meager contents, rattling it, and then looking again, as if more peanuts might have magically appeared. Now, she extracted exactly one and put it in her mouth, chewing it carefully while she resealed the jar.
He held out his jar, offering some of what was inside to her, and now she was looking at him in horrified shock, as she shook her head no.
Okay. He put his jar down, forcing himself to stay seated, to stay present, to stay focused—to at least give her that.
The silence dragged on, so he finally said, “Well, I want to apologize for not trying harder to work things out with Rachel. If I’d married her, White Russian night never would’ve happened.”
Tasha laughed, but then realized he wasn’t making a joke and gave him a facial WTF. “You do realize that my only possible response to that is Thank God Rachel got away. Because that’s the bullshittiest reason for regretting not-marrying someone that I’ve ever heard. Ever. To avoid the mutual embarrassment, and to keep me from, what, getting my feelings hurt? No wonder you’re still single.”
“Actually, I have been seeing someone—”
“Eee-ooh, eee-ooh, eee-ooh!” she mimicked the French siren sound from the Pink Panther movies. “It’s the You’re-Lying Police! One of your tells, by the way, is the no-eye-contact. You might want to work on that.”
“Okay, but I just went on a date, and I’ve been meaning to call her again, but I’ve been busy and...” He stopped himself because he’d gone to see Fourth of July fireworks with Sandra, and even if he squinted hard it was absurd to consider an early summer date something that had just occurred. Still, he exhaled hard. “Okay, I’ll admit it. Yes, you’re right, I’m still single, and I suck at dating, I always have, and I do regret not fighting harder for my relationship with Rachel, for not being patient with her fear. I regret it very much, for reasons that have nothing to do with you.”
“Okay,” she said. “That’s better, but in a weird, my-inner-fourteen-year-old-is-still-jealous way.”
Jealous. Jesus. Okay. She was shifting the conversation back to the fact that she’d wanted something from him that he couldn’t give her, and that was good.
Ish.
No, it was good because they needed to talk about this. And jealousy was a weird emotion. He was jealous of Ted. Fucker was a prince who was living with Tasha. And it wasn’t just about them sharing a bedroom and a bed, but fucker got to eat dinner with her every night, and go to movies and plays, and talk about books they’d both read and loved and... Okay, maybe telling her that would make her think his jealousy wasn’t strictly platonic, so he went with fourteen-year-old. Yeah, that was safer to discuss.
“My inner fourteen-year-old still tears up at Christmas when I realize I don’t have to find the perfect present for my grandmother,” Thomas told her. “But my inner fourteen-year-old also insists I make mac and cheese from her recipe a coupla times a year, and I always love it when I do. A little self-kindness—and acknowledgement that that was then and this is now—goes a long way.”
That was then and this is now. He was congratulating himself for pulling that tired but useful adage out of his ass when she again went point-blank and blew him up.
“But what if that was then, and this is also then?” Tasha asked. “My inner twenty-three-year-old is still mortified as fuck.”
And yes, she was currently twenty-three, which meant that she, sitting right there, wrapped in her blanket, was currently still mortified as, and yup, she’d said fuck. Because adult women—which she was one of—said fuck. It was children who were discouraged from using more salty verbiage—grown-ass women had earned the right to use whatever words they damn well wanted.
“For ambushing you,” she continued earnestly. “God, for thinking it was a good idea to climb into bed with you—hello, consent...? And for thinking that you’d just... automatically want... me. Like that. And at the same time, I’m still so disappointed that you didn’t.”
She was still disappointed that he didn’t want to have sex with her.
Okay. Okay.
He’d wanted brutal honesty, and he was getting it. But damn... Thomas forced himself to meet her gaze steadily, trying to figure out what on earth to say in response. Brutal honesty was good, but damn. “Right from the start, my job was to protect you—”
She interrupted. “And it’s not just about sex,” she explained. “It’s the Thomas-and-Tasha-ness, too. The ease of being myself with you. I mean, I’ve been feeling little bits and pieces of that even here. Jeez, even when we were in the hide with the spiders, when you, like, let yourself forget that I’m now some horrible annoying problem to be handled.”
“The annoying problem here isn’t you, it’s the dozen armed men who are—” he started but she cut him off again.
“What if you just let that go?” She leaned in, and again he forced himself not to move. To sit still instead of leaping up and pacing—instead of running away. “Just let go of everything you think you should be to me and everything you think I should be to you? Because what if you’re wrong?”