best way to remove the debris without hurting her. “In that case, I will take your misguided stunt-butt comment as the compliment you intended it to be, and counter with Thanks, but oh hell no.”
“A moment of silence for the world’s tragic loss. Although, wait, if you’re almost done with my arm,” she pointed out, “that means my knees are next. And that’s making me sweat because...” She pulled up her robe slightly to examine them and made a face. “I scrubbed them, I swear, but it doesn’t look like I did.”
“I’ll get them clean,” he reassured her.
“Yeah, no, I really just want you to look,” she said. “Give me a thumbs up or down. I can’t bandage my arm—” she tried to see it again by straining to look over her shoulder and once again failed “—well, if I were here alone, I’d muddle through, but it would be a challenge, and I wouldn’t be able to get it as clean as you can. But my knees...? That I can do. Melvin can attest to the high level of my personal nursing skills, if you need a reference.”
“It doesn’t make sense for you to—”
“Yes, it does.” She cut him off. “I’ll handle my knees while you tick off whatever’s left on your Get Ready for the Lights to Go Out doom-list.”
She was determined so Thomas surrendered. “Fair enough,” he said. “You ready for me to go again?”
She took in a deep breath and exhaled it hard on a rush of air, then nodded. Her shoulders started to go upward as she tensed, and he held onto her, shaking her just very slightly. “Try to stay loose,” he advised. “And tap your fingers on your leg so your focus isn’t on your arm.” That was a trick he’d learned from the nursing team in Landstuhl, to distract from the sharp pain of a needle stick. “Okay, here we go.”
“It’s so handy to have a hospital corpsman at hand,” Tasha said through clenched teeth as she tapped. “The perfect ass is just a very nice bonus.”
“And here I’d hoped we’d moved on with that discussion of your sweaty knees,” he said, leaning in and wishing the light was a few thousand watts brighter, or that he had an extra hand to hold up a flashlight. Please God, let him get it right away, and not have to hurt her again.
“Sweat-inducing scraped knees,” she said. “Very different.”
“Yes! Got the first one.”
“Go, team!” Tasha exhaled loudly as she relaxed her shoulders and circled her head to release the tension in her neck.
It would’ve been so easy to reach out and help her along with a little gentle massage. But as much as he wanted to, Thomas knew that finishing up and getting her bandaged while they still had electric light took priority, so he settled for another shoulder grip and light shake.
“You’re doing great. Ready to go again?” he asked.
“Last time?” she asked hopefully.
“Not quite.”
“Second to last?”
“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 if that was 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 you are very 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 word wrong. But before he could even inhale in order