“Oops.” Rio laughed at himself. “Sorry, right. Still, you is a little too personal. Too wounded. He’ll know he got under your skin.”
Dave’s smile was forced. “Yeah, well, that’s a given.” His phone whooshed as he sent the text. “I’m glad he’s okay, I am, but...”
“Damn.” Rio finished his sentence for him.
“Yeah.” He very deliberately turned his phone off and stashed it in the glove compartment. “Conversation over, I wish him the best.”
“You’re a better man than me, my friend. I’m over here wishing he lets one rip during an important meeting with his boss and is forever after known as Air-Biscuit Jon. In fact, that’s what I’m calling him from now on, so you better not patch things up.”
Now Dave’s smile was more genuine. “Understood.” He paused, then added, “Thanks for the moral support.”
“Any time,” Rio said, and as they settled back in to wait, he kicked the heat up a little higher, wondering if—wherever they were—Thomas and Tasha were managing to stay warm.
Chapter Eighteen
Thomas was sitting there, his eyes unfocused, looking shell-shocked as hell, so Tasha had mercy on him. She was feeling lightheaded herself, having just bared her soul to him. And a large part of her wanted to stop time right here and now, so she could live forever in this moment of hopeful maybe.
She picked up her book and stood. “I think it’s time for me to lock myself into the Hall of Mirrors, so you can get some sleep. I know you want to get out to the extraction point at dawn, and that’s coming at us, fast.”
He looked up at her then. “I didn’t know,” he said. “About any of that. I mean, I knew things were terrible with Sharon, I just didn’t know you were... I mean, you were a kid, so the whole playing-princess Will you marry me thing was just... you being a kid. It was... cute. I thought. And I knew when you were a teenager, you still had a crush on me, but Tash, I’m so much older than you.”
Tasha sat back down, unwilling to stop him if he truly did want to keep talking. “Twelve years isn’t so much—”
“It sure as shit was when you were twelve and I was twenty-four.”
“Yeah, but I’m not twelve anymore,” she pointed out. “You know, Jake is more than twenty years older than Zoe.”
“I’m familiar with the fact that Admiral Robinson’s second wife is significantly younger than he is, yes.”
“Ooh,” she said. “So judge-y. Not a good look for you. He was widowed, you do know that, right? It’s not like he ditched his old wife to run off with the hot scientist babe who helped him save the world.”
“Their age difference raises eyebrows up the chain of command and in the Pentagon and... You’re the one who thinks I’m perfect,” he countered. “I know I’m not.”
“I don’t think you’re perfect,” Tasha corrected him. “I think you’re perfect for me. It’s different.”
“And I’m saying that I’m not perfect for you, because I’m too old.”
“No, I’m pretty sure you’re saying that I’m not perfect for you because I’m too young and hot and someone in the Pentagon who’s married to his third trophy wife might find out and think you’re the exact same kind of scumbag that he is, even though he’d be wrong—and the hell with what he thinks, anyway. Cravenness is also not a good look for you, Grandpa, but I promise that I, with my youth and hotness and a bit of time and patience, can help you learn to be more brave.”
He laughed at that, which was good, because it made him breathe. He’d been sitting so still, she’d been thinking she might need to start CPR on him.
But he was shaking his head even as he laughed, and she saw the resistance in his dark brown eyes. “I know you didn’t see me as a brother, but I... saw you as a sister,” Thomas told her. “You were the age my baby brother would’ve been, if he’d lived.”
“Yes, I know that,” Tasha said quietly.
When Thomas was twelve, his mother had died shortly after giving birth to an infant who’d been unable to survive outside of her womb, turning tragedy into trauma for Thomas and his family.
So he’d now not only just sistered her, but by bringing up the awfulness that had rocked his world and changed his life forever, he’d made it impossible for her to be funny or flip in any kind of counterargument.
She went direct. “But I’m not your sister. As much as I loved Grandma King, she wasn’t my grandma, she was yours. Her real name was Thomas’s Grandma King. I just left off the Thomas’s, but it was always there, unspoken. Same way that Uncle Alan was mine. You never called him that—it was always Uncle Navy—because he was my uncle. So again, I’m not your sister, I’m not your cousin. We were close neighbors for a while, yeah, good friends after that. But you didn’t start little-sistering me until I was thirteen years old. I remember when you started. I asked Grandma King about it, because it freaked me out. You were training with the Team, and you came back early because you were injured, and I went with Grandma King to see you in the hospital. And I got worried because I thought maybe you’d hit your head and had some kind of weird amnesia or vision trouble and actually believed I was Christine.”
When Tasha first met Thomas, he was living with his much older sister Christine and her family, in the same apartment complex where Uncle Alan lived. When Christine got her dream job as a librarian at Yale University, she and her husband and kids moved to Connecticut, and Thomas moved in with his grandmother. Christine was smart and beautiful—she had the most fabulous and varied pairs of funky and stylish eyeglasses—and Tasha would’ve loved to look just like her, but she didn’t. Not even a little.
The painkillers had made Thomas a bit loopy, Grandma King had told her. They’d made him overly emotional and a bit sloppy, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t as glad to see Tasha as he’d exclaimed. Just that he didn’t have the ability to hide what he was feeling.
It was a good thing, Grandma King had also told her, for Thomas to treat her like a sister—a little sister—considering her age.
Tasha hadn’t really understood that at the time. She just knew that she didn’t like it very much.
But Grandma King had more to say—that being in any hospital was always hard for Thomas, since that was where he’d seen his mother for the last time before she’d died.
And that was when Grandma King had told Tasha how Thomas’s mom had died—after giving birth to a baby who’d died, too.
Tash had been stunned. Even though Thomas had told her that his father had gone to prison after being charged with assault because he’d hit the doctor whose negligence had let his mom die, she hadn’t realized that his mother had died after giving birth. This wasn’t the 1800s. Childbirth didn’t have a mortality rate anymore—women didn’t die from it.
Grandma King had corrected Tasha, annoyance in her usually quiet voice. White women tended not to die in childbirth in the twenty-first century. The statistics for Black women were different.