Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(104)

Had I? I talked to her, sure—every day. And sometimes we talked about how we felt, but it was surface stuff, even if it was true. “No,” I said. The pressure inside me lightened up, weirdly enough. I no longer wanted to punch something to get rid of it. “I mean, she knows I don’t like the guy. . . .”

“Have you told her, explicitly, how you see her relationship with Myrnin, and how it makes you feel?”

That was an easy one. “No.” Hell no.

He was still smiling, all grandfatherly and very slightly amused. “Because strong men don’t do such things, yes?”

No shit, Sherlock.

“What if I told you that being honest with her, deeply honest, would make her love you even more?”

That was utter crap. If Claire knew me, really knew me, knew all the toxic muck that was sludged up inside me, she’d get the hell away from me, no question about it. I shook my head, not even meaning to do it.

Goldman sighed. “Very well, then,” he said. “Baby steps. At least you’ve admitted it to me. We have at least another two months left together. I consider this a very fine start.” He glanced down at his watch. “And I believe that it’s time for my next appointment. Very good work, Mr. Collins.”

I shot out of the couch like it had an ejection seat, and had my hand on the doorknob when he said, “One more thing, if you don’t mind: I’d like to assign you some homework.”

“Yeah, ’cause that never gets old,” I said, but I was already resigned to doing a searching moral inventory, or whatever psychobabble crap he was about to pull out of his dusty immortal bag of tricks.

He surprised me. “I’d like you to try, for the next twenty-four hours, to solve any problem that arises without allowing your anger free rein. If you’re presented with an opportunity to fight, I’d like you to back down. If someone tries to verbally engage you, defuse the situation. If you’re insulted, walk away. Just for twenty-four hours. Then you can engage in fisticuffs to your heart’s content.”

I turned and stared at him. “I have actually gone a whole day without punching somebody, you know. Sometimes even two days.”

“Yes, but you channel your anger in other ways, smaller ones you may not even realize. Perhaps by thinking hard about it, you may realize how much you allow it to drive your actions and shape the world around you.” He nodded then. “That’s all. Just try it, for one full day. I’ll be interested to hear how it feels.”

I shrugged and opened the door. “Sure, Doc. No problem.”

? ? ?

I didn’t even make it out of the building before my first challenge came up. It was a big one.

Physically, Monica Morrell was a pretty girl—not as beautiful as she thought she was, but on a scale of ten she was at least a seven, and that was when she wasn’t really trying. Today, she was definitely working for an eight point five, and was probably getting it. She had on a short pink dress and looked . . . glossy, I guess. Girls would probably be able to tell you all the technical details of that, but the bottom line was, she turned heads.

And my first impulse, my very first, was to punch her right in the pink lip gloss.

That was so familiar to me that it honestly kind of surprised me when I considered it, in light of Goldman’s homework assignment. She hadn’t even seen me yet, hadn’t smirked or made a snarky, cold comment; she hadn’t reminded me of my dead family, or dissed my girlfriend, or done any of a thousand things she was bound to pull out to trip my triggers. It was just a reflex, me wanting to hurt her, and I was pretty sure that most people didn’t have that kind of wiring.

I took a deep breath, and as she looked up and saw me getting off the elevator, I held the door for her. I didn’t smile—it probably would have looked like I wanted to bite her—but I nodded politely and said, “Morning,” just like she was a real person and not a skanky murderous bitch who didn’t deserve to breathe.

She faltered, just a little strange flinch as if she couldn’t quite figure out what my game was. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I never would have seen the odd expression that flashed across her face, and even then, it took me a few more seconds to realize what it meant.

She was afraid.

The flash of fear vanished, and she tossed her shiny hair back and walked past me into the elevator. “Collins,” she said. “So, did you rig it to explode?” She said it like she was unimpressed, and stabbed a perfectly manicured finger out at one of the floor buttons. “Or are you just going to throw paint on me before the doors shut?”

I considered saying a lot of things—maybe about how she deserved to die in fire—and then I let go of the door, stepped back, and said, “Have a nice day, Monica.”

She was still staring at me with the best, most utterly confused expression when I turned and walked away, hands in my pockets.

Frustrating? Yeah, a little. But oddly fun. At least I can keep her guessing, I thought. And it felt like a little victory, just because I hadn’t done the first thing that popped into my head.

Walking toward home, I nodded to people I knew, which was pretty much everybody. I didn’t hit anybody. I didn’t even say anything snide. It was kind of a miracle.

I decided to test my luck a little, and stopped in at Common Grounds.

If I’d been relatively unpopular around Morganville before, I’d taken things to a whole new level. Down a level. I walked into the coffee shop like I had a thousand times before, and this time, conversation pretty much stopped dead. The college students ignored me, as they always did; I was a townie, unimportant to their own little insulated world. It was the Morganville natives who were reacting like Typhoid Mary had just sailed in the door. Some got real interested in their lattes and mochas; others whispered, heads together, darting looks at me.