As Thomas used the tweezers—a ridiculously tiny tool in his XL hands—as gently as he could to grab hold of another bit of fuzz and thread, he shook his head at her use of the word wrong. But before he could even inhale in order to comment, she’d already continued.
“But you waltzing into the bathroom and casually dropping trou is on a different level entirely.”
“Got another,” he announced, releasing her again. “One more to go.”
Tasha looked over her shoulder at him as he wiped off the tweezers. “You didn’t overthink. You just acted, because showering quickly was your mission. I’ve been around Navy SEALs all my life, remember, and... My point is that you treated me like a teammate, an equal. Not like—” she cleared her throat “—a child.”
“Because you’re not a child,” Thomas told her, and with sudden clarity, he understood why she needed to bandage her knees herself. It wasn’t entirely about wanting to free him up to allow him to perform other tasks. “Quick, build a time machine so I can go back a few months and tell that to myself.”
“I’m okay with this current timeline,” she told him.
Thomas had already moved around to look more closely at her poor, bruised, scraped knees—giving her a chance to take a breath before he finished poking at her injured arm—and he realized the awkwardness that came with no longer being positioned safely behind her. He was now directly facing her, and glancing up meant that he was he looking directly into her eyes.
He hesitated.
If he were Tasha, he would just say it. Just full-on blurt it, ass-chat and Pre-Shower Ass-ening style. So he did. “You don’t wish that I’d kissed you before you moved in with Ted?”
Tasha’s eyes widened. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Ted.”
Damn, she was young and careless. As Thomas focused on looking at her knees—after quickly checking in with Melvin, who was healing nicely, and taking a fraction of a second to note that her legs were soft and smooth against his hands—he hated that that was the first thought that had popped to mind, but there it was. Tasha obviously hadn’t given Ted a second thought before this—hell, she hadn’t given him much of a first thought. Not even when they’d first walked into this place that she’d quickly labeled a sex-pod.
Ted’s sex-pod.
She didn’t care that Ted had a sex-pod because she’s always loved you. And yes. The caveman part of his brain was into the idea of Tasha having loved Thomas forever.
Except, she hadn’t said no to Ted when he’d said Let’s move in together.
And Thomas’s caveman brain was definitely disgruntled about that, let alone the very existence of Ted, even as the more highly developed part of him understood that Ted’s presence in Tash’s life was absolutely his own damn fault. He was the one who’d been absolute in his conviction that they could never be romantically involved. How could he fault her for believing him?
“Okay,” he said. “You’re good to bandage your knees yourself. Lots of antibiotic ointment on them, though. Let’s finish up your arm.”
Before he could move back around her, she said, “Wait. I want to tell you some... details about my relationship with Ted.”
Thomas met her eyes again at that, and his Oh hell no must’ve been written all over his face, because she laughed a little and made her own face back at him.
“Not those kind of details,” she said. “I’m not talking about... okay, although, I kind of am, because there aren’t any details like that, and, well, you need to know that. Here, I can talk while you finish my arm. Keep going. I don’t want to slow us down.”
He went to the sink so he could wash his hands again, and she raised her voice to be heard over the running water.
“But I do want you to know that... Well, I believe, completely, that we—you and I—wouldn’t be here right now if we hadn’t spent all that time apart. That’s what I meant when I said that I like this timeline. I’m really glad I got this chance to get to know you—to really know you, to see you without the fairytale gauze over the lens, you know?” Tasha turned to watch him as he dried his hands and went back to his position behind her, where he picked up the tweezers. “And I think, in any other timeline, that I wouldn’t have dared to say all those things I said last night—things that somehow, miraculously, made you decide you finally needed to kiss me.”
Thomas gently turned her so that he had access to her injury again. “On three, two, one.”
Her shoulder tightened beneath his hand, but this last time was a charm, because he got the offending material on his very first try. Thank God. “All done.”
She looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes wide. “That was fast.”
“The hard part’s done, anyway. I still need to drown it in antibiotic ointment, then bandage it.”
“Thank you,” she said, and then waited, as if she wanted him to say something.
So he did. Even as he reached for the ointment and gauze that he’d already picked out for her bandage. “When I kissed you,” he told her, “I wasn’t thinking about Ted.”
“I wasn’t either,” she said. “Because—”
He cut her off before she got off up to speed with her explanation, because why really didn’t matter. “But we should’ve been. Especially you. And part of me is freaked out. My judge-y inner grandpa, I believe you call it. The part of me that’s a traditionalist. The part that learned right and wrong—without a lot of wiggle room—from my grandmother. So I’m not sure how to process the fact that you weren’t thinking about him. That you were so okay with kissing someone else when just a few days back you were on the verge of getting engaged to him.”
Tasha shook her head, no. “But you’re not someone else and I wasn’t... I mean, I was, but I wasn’t...” She took a deep breath and started again as he opened the paper wrappers on the gauze. “It wasn’t going to be a real engagement. Ted and I had a... well, I know this sounds insane but... it was a business arrangement.”
Okay, he wasn’t sure what he was expecting her to say, but it certainly wasn’t that.
She kept going. “His mother was pushing all these women at him—women who would make acceptable—” she gave the word air quotes “—wives for the crown prince. And God, it just really exhausted him. He hated it. He wanted her to stop, so... I was working as his personal assistant—we’re friends, but I needed a part-time job so he paid me to organize his life.”
Thomas remembered hearing about Tash’s assistant job from Mia, and disapproving—yo, Judge Gramps—because, in his opinion, she’d clearly settled badly, in terms of her post-college career. Now he just let her continue as he opened the gauze pads he’d chosen.
“But then this gossip blog posted a picture of us together—we were laughing at something—and they were all Who’s the redheaded vixen wrapping Prince Tedric around her little finger? or something equally ridiculous and demeaning, and he got the brilliant idea to just run with it. And after that worked so well, he decided what he really needed was to get engaged. You know, to shut his mother down even more completely. So we set this up. But it’s a hundred percent pretend. It’s like, I’m playing at being a princess again. We live together, yeah, but we have our own bedrooms—Ted snores.” She shook her head, as if annoyed with herself as he attached the bandage to her arm with tape. “But that’s not... What I mean is, we don’t sleep together.” She got even more precise. “We don’t have sex. We’ve never had sex. We’re friends.”