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