“I can’t promise, but I hope so.”
“I love that you don’t lie to me,” she said, tapping on her leg again. “All right, I’m ready.”
Thomas braced himself and leaned in. “On three, two, one.”
“Ooh! Ouch ouch ouch!”
“Shit,” he said. Talk about sweaty knees—he now had sweaty everything. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Keep going. It was a life-altering experience for me—the Pre-Shower Ass-ening,” she informed him. Apparently, she still wasn’t done with her... what had she called it?Ass-chat.
“The Pre-Shower...? I’m sorry,no.” She’d given it a name, which meant it would forever live in infamy—and be endlessly discussed—like the night of the massively bleeding head wound or Pink Settee-Palooza. Although that last one—the day that the pink settee had been delivered by the furniture store—was Uncle Navy’s creation, so maybe her propensity to name events was genetic.
Tash, meanwhile, was blithely ignoring him. “Pre for you, post-shower for me,” she explained through her clenched teeth, as ifthatwas his issue. “And I mean, yes, I know you told me that you kissed me intentionally, and I love that you said that, I do. But part of me was still going,But did he really, or is he just taking responsibility?Because youarevery intensely into taking full responsibility for anything that goes wrong.”
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 wordwrong. 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-chatandPre-Shower Ass-eningstyle. 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 thatthatwas 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 asex-pod.
Ted’ssex-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 saidLet’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.Hewas 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...detailsabout my relationship with Ted.”
Thomas met her eyes again at that, and hisOh hell nomust’ve been written all over his face, because she laughed a little and made her own face back at him.
“Notthosekind of details,” she said. “I’m not talking about... okay, although, I kind of am, because therearen’tany details likethat, 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—toreallyknow 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.”
