Their plan had been for her to crash on the living room couch, with hopes that she’d awaken when Thomas returned from his oh-dark-hundred sneak-and-peek. They’d experimented before he’d left, and discovered that if the lights in the pod were out, they went on for five blinding seconds when the hatch door was opened. Still, that was no guarantee that Tasha would wake up.
But the bolt clicked right after he delivered their Lizzo-knock on the door.
“Yay, you’re alive!” she said brightly—clearly not groggy from sleep. Her smile was infectious—it was impossible to not grin back at her in agreement. Yay, he was alive, indeed. She’d taken off her towel-hat—he noticed that immediately—and her hair gleamed as it curled around her face.
“Nothing yet,” he told her as he helped her pull the door more fully open. The lights were blazing in the shelter’s main room.
“I figured,” she said as he locked the door behind him and set down the rifle, “or you’d’ve been back much sooner.”
“Yeah, sorry it’s so late.” He yanked off the fleece poncho that they’d made from a dark blue blanket with a pair of scissors Tash had found in a kitchen drawer. Now that he was out of the freezing cold, he was desperate to pull his raincoat hood off his head, unfasten the damn thing’s front zipper, and peel the sleeves from his arms. The unbreathable fabric was giving him insta-sweat.
Tasha had anticipated that. As soon as he wrestled the jacket off, she handed him a towel, and held out a bottle of water.
“Thanks.” He could drink while he dried himself, so he did just that, noting, too, that she’d draped his pink sweatshirt over the back of a nearby chair, ready for him to pull on if and when he needed it. He purposely hadn’t worn it under the raincoat again because it would’ve become a hot, sweaty mess, and then he would’ve been walking around shirtless for all of the hours that it soaked and then endlessly dried. And although his being half-naked didn’t seem to bother Tasha, it made him uncomfortable. “It’s late. You should’ve gone to sleep. I would’ve been okay in the stairwell.”
It was warm enough that far underground, so he’d left out a blanket and a pillow and had thought he’d convinced her that he was ready to camp there for the rest of the night, in the event that she didn’t see the lights or hear him knock when he returned.
“Yeah, well, I got caught up in a good book,” Tasha said as she picked up his discarded raincoat and poncho and carried them to their hooks in the utility room to dry.
Yes, there was a romance novel, spine-up on the coffee table. And she was clearly close to done. But he could read the real story in the relief that lingered in her eyes as she came back into the living room.
Relief and happiness and burning curiosity.
He should’ve known better than to think she’d sleep while he was gone. And the weird thing was, he was happy to be back here, too.
“The message I’d left earlier at the extraction point was untouched,” he told her, clarifying his Nothing yet, as he looped the towel around his neck and sat down on the sofa, keeping to the edge of his seat because he was going to continue to sweat for a while. And although there was deodorant in Ted’s guest-packs of toiletries, it wasn’t quite Navy SEAL strength. After he cooled down, he’d shower and use it, although it was weird to smell like someone else, probably Ted, which was vaguely unsettling.
Tasha had curled up in her usual place on the other section of the sofa’s L and was watching him, clearly waiting for him to continue. He realized then that along with losing the towel-hat, she was down to just one blanket and one bathrobe over her shirt and jeans. Her red hair cascaded down the white blanket that she wore like a cape as she watched him—Tasha’s eyes in this beautiful woman’s face. A woman who was no longer a stranger.
Thomas cleared his throat, feeling self-conscious about his lack of a shirt, so he spread his towel out across his shoulders. “So I left a second. Message. But no one’s been in the area at all. I still have... high hopes for tomorrow morning.”
“Seriously, Pollyanna?” she said, her eyes dancing with laughter. “Are they also apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes?”