had talked with him about that, too. And that—back when she was thirteen—was the very first time he’d told her that she reminded him of the little brother he’d never met, which always felt odd to her. But okay. She was not an expert in psychology or human behavior, and if he said that seeing her made him think of the sibling he’d never known, then she believed him.
But it seemed to come out of nowhere, after all those years of friendship.
It wasn’t until she found Patricia, her therapist, that she’d thought in any depth about the timeline of what she’d always considered Thomas’s Weird Phase—the way he suddenly started calling her his sister, and then his suddenly being connected at the hip to Rachel whenever he attended any SEAL family event. And she realized that it lined up rather neatly with her headfirst dive into puberty.
“You know,” she told him now, “when I was thirteen, I started wearing a bra. I started needing one. My body was changing. Really quickly.” Almost overnight, she’d gone from her solidly square block of a little girl’s shape to a curvy, more womanly one. “It happened while you were overseas. I think you came back, and took one look at me, and started chanting, Sister, sister, sister, to keep me at a distance.”
He gave her his absolute-nope face. “You were thirteen. I didn’t need any convincing to keep my distance.”
“No,” Tash corrected him. “Sorry, I didn’t mean... Not for you. I mean, not entirely. See, it was definitely good that you did that.” Grandma King knew it, too, even though Tasha hadn’t understood at the time. “Because I had all these crazy hormones happening, and that plus being more than a little screwed up from the dysfunction of living in Sharon’s world, combined with the fact that I never, not even for one second, stopped actively adoring you...? If you’d shown any admiration that was even slightly salacious about how grownup I looked in my skinny jeans...? I for sure would not have waited to turn eighteen to climb into your bed.”
“Are you kidding? You were so innocent.”
“It’s the freckles,” she said. “Freckles always fool everyone.”
He clearly had no patience for her attempt to make light, and he shifted in his seat. “I’m not sure what any of this has to do with anything—”
“You said you wanted to have a conversation about what happened. I’m trying to make a point.”
To his credit, he swallowed whatever retort was on the tip of his tongue, and even though he eyed the door to the stairwell—the only real escape route out of this pod—he still didn’t leap up and run away. He simply said, “Okay.”
So she told him, “Thomas, I lived with Sharon. Think about what that was like before she was trying to get clean, when something—or someone—that she wanted bumped into her inability to pay a babysitter, even though we usually lived in a studio apartment. I was given a piece of candy or a soda pop, and ordered to go to sleep on a pile of pillows in the bathtub, and to not, under any circumstances, come out of the bathroom. Do you honestly think I did what she said?”
Thomas shook his head, no. He was well aware of the struggle her uncle had had with her, when she’d first come to live in the apartment complex with Alan. Tasha had spent the first five years of her life with Sharon, whose always-changing rules never had consequences. Because of that, Tasha had frequently wandered out of Alan’s apartment and into the busy oceanside neighborhood before she’d learned that with Alan, no really did mean no, and that he took his responsibility for her safety and well-being seriously.
“I probably knew more sexual positions than you did when we first met,” Tash said, and Thomas flinched so hard, she realized she had to add, “From observation only. Relax. But I do look back on all the times that Sharon passed out with some strange man still in the room and realize just how lucky we both were that I learned pretty early on to lock that bathroom door.”
The muscle was jumping in his jaw, but Tasha wasn’t done.
“Thing is, I was a hopeless romantic. Some day my prince will come... Sharon always got so excited whenever she had a new guy in her sights. She’d do the laundry and fix her hair and laugh a lot, instead of sleeping most of the day. She would