her face light up with amusement, the faint lines at the sides of her laughing eyes. Even without any makeup on, she looked her age, with her grown woman’s body beneath her clothes and the blanket that she’d wrapped around her shoulders.
And this was where, always in the past, he’d start feeling uncomfortable, like he needed to smack himself for thinking about Tasha as a woman. And no, not just as a grown-up, adult woman—he absolutely could see that she was that—but instead as a woman that he, personally, found to be physically attractive.
And yeah, he was still unsettled, but maybe that was because he now couldn’t stop thinking about how she’d made it damn clear that she’d always found him to be physically attractive, too. And she didn’t wax poetic about his graceful lips and laughing eyes. She’d made it very clear that she still wanted to climb naked into his bed and jump his bones.
And after, lie in his arms, forever at ease.
It hit him, like a blow to the gut, that with Tasha in his arms, he’d be at ease forever, too. With Tasha in his arms, he’d at long last be able to breathe.
And suddenly now the question What about Ted? was no longer the conversational shield that he’d thought it to be. Suddenly, now, he wanted to know.
What about Ted?
Back soon.
Tasha worked at the dining table in the pod’s main living space, occasionally eating a small handful of her peanuts from today’s jar.
That was what Thomas had recommended in terms of rationing their limited food. For the next three days, they’d each get a full jar of both peanuts and olives. After three days, if they hadn’t been rescued, they’d cut back to what he called half rations, which was, quite literally, half of that.
Back soon.
He’d signed his terse note with a T, and had also put the time of his departure—0515—so she’d have a reference point for that soon.
She’d gotten up at 5:30, thinking he wouldn’t have left yet.
Hah.
She’d showered and washed her hair and put her clothes back on, but then decided that her sweater smelled ripe, so she’d washed that too. It was going to take forever to dry, so she got another blanket from the bedroom, in case she needed to add a layer as she went back to work on the fleece “pants” she was making for Thomas.
She winced every time he left the pod dressed only in those thin plaid PJ pants, even though he shrugged it off. I’m fine.
Back when they’d first arrived, she’d helped him engineer some waterproof toes for his cut-open, too-small boots, using a trash bag and a couple of rubber bands she’d found in the kitchen’s junk drawer. It wasn’t great, and Thomas had pointed out that the thick plastic was a recipe for trench foot—or it would be if he didn’t have the opportunity to take his boots off, shower, and then go barefoot while back inside for most of the day.
But after she’d helped him cut a hole in one of the fleece blankets to create a poncho against the cold, she realized that she could make him warmer pants, too. Or she could at least try. There were certainly enough fleece blankets to spare if she ruined one in her attempt.
There’d been a small collection of sewing kits in that kitchen junk drawer—many bearing the names of five-star hotels, where they’d no doubt been available in the bathroom along with the expensive tiny shampoos and variety of lotions. Each of the kits had a small amount of thread in a rainbow of colors. They were designed for mending or sewing buttons back onto shirts and blouses. So, not a lot of thread, but there were six kits. She was also being careful not to waste any thread—to use as much of it as humanly possible on the two inseams and the single side-seam that she was sewing by hand. One of the sides of the “pants” didn’t have a seam—she’d simply folded the blanket over.
So no, they would not be pretty—that much was clear—which was why she used scare quotes around the word “pants,” even when thinking about them.
Although her aunt Mia had been incredibly crafty, with a sewing machine that she’d inherited from an elderly relative, Tasha hadn’t done much sewing—and certainly never without a machine. But she’d taken a look at the seams of her shirt and was attempting to duplicate the tiny, reinforced stitches. Her handiwork was ugly,