“That was the first time I went wheels up while she was in town,” Thomas explained. “I think it was different, seeing it up-close. It wasn’t just me on the phone saying Hey, I gotta go. I’ll email if I can, like I was making a business trip to Sacramento. I remember her telling me, afterwards, how awful it seemed because y’all seemed so casual—all the families and girlfriends.”
“Well, that’s not true. It was normal-ish, sure,” Tash said. “It was expected, absolutely, but it was never casual. But making a fuss about it—making it about how we felt when our SEALs needed their heads in the game...? That was not okay. Geez, I knew that back when I was six. Don’t cry when Uncle Alan has to leave, because the last thing he needs is to be worrying about you. Just hug him hard and say I love you, and trust him to fight like hell to come back home.”
And Tasha also knew, even as a child, that she and Mia had it easier than the other SEALs’ families. Because even though her uncle traveled to some extremely dangerous places, an injury to his knee had permanently sidelined him, keeping him relatively safe back at the base or HQ, in a support role. That didn’t mean, however, that he couldn’t be killed by a roadside bomb or a terrorist attack.
Thomas was nodding, but then he shook his head. “Yeah, well, Rachel wasn’t from a military family.”
“So?” Tash said. “You lean on the families who’ve been there, done that, and you learn how to cope. Veronica Catalanotto wasn’t from a military family—until she married Uncle Joe.” It was essentially true for most of the SEALs’ girlfriends and wives—and boyfriends, hello Dave, don’t forget about Dave.
“Yeah, I know that, but...” Thomas said, but he shook his head no again, glancing at her as if he had more to say.
So she waited, picking up her peanut jar and rattling the last of her ration. Three. She was down to three. Her stomach growled.
“Not everyone can learn—not everyone wants to learn,” he finally told her. “And... it ended up being too much for her.”
“Oh, my God,” Tash realized, thinking back to that year. Yes, Thomas and Rachel had broken up not too long after that bowling party. And suddenly it all made sense. “Rachel broke up with you...?”
“Well, no, I mean, yes, but, we broke up. It was mutual. I had a choice...” His voice trailed off.
Tasha leaned in and put voice to his next unspoken word. “But...?” She trailed it out and made her voice go up.
“She wanted me to go to medical school, become a doctor.”
“What’s wrong with that? You absolutely should. You’d be a great doctor. Melvin agrees.”
“She wanted me to leave the Teams to do it,” he said.
“Oh, no,” Tash said. “Oh, Rachel, yikes.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he said. “I said, I’m sorry but I’m not ready to leave the Navy, she said, Okay, it was fun, but I’m going home, and she packed her things.”
“Whoa, really? Just like that?”
“Yeah. It was kinda surreal, because it happened so fast. I mean, one minute I thought everything was great—better than great—and the next, I’m driving her to the airport, and she’s telling me, Call me if you’re ever ready. It was... bad. I was blindsided and... really hurt. She knew I was a SEAL from the jump, and it seemed so harsh. I love you, except for that important job that you have that you love so passionately. I don’t love that, so now you have to change or I’m gone.”
“Wow,” Tash said. “I thought... I mean, everyone thought...”
“That I dumped her?” he said. “Oh, good.”
“By everyone, I really just mean Alan and Mia.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“They wanted you to marry her. They were crushed when it didn’t work out.”
He laughed as he finished the last of his beer. “Uncle Navy was crushed.”
“Well, Mia was crushed, and Alan was supportive.”
“Ah,” he said. “That sounds about right.”
“As for me,” Tasha said, and he looked up from pouring himself another small handful of his peanuts—his eyes flashing his alarm. She smiled at him sweetly, because yeah, she was going there. “I was still convinced you were going to marry me. It seemed about the right time for Rachel and her smarty-pants to exit stage left. In my head, she wasn’t good enough for you—although she did have the tall thing down. It never occurred to me that she might’ve broken your heart, and I’m sorry I wasn’t more empathetic.”
He was clearly uncomfortable with where she’d taken the conversation, because he jumped on one of her details. “The tall thing?” he asked. “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned tall.”
“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 t
hat 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.
“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—”
King's Ransom: (Tall, Dark and Dangerous Book 13) Page 15