He rolled his eyes and turned toward the door. “I’m gonna grab a bite to eat after I’m done with my workout. Wanna join me?”
“Thanks, but I can’t. I have… plans.”
He turned to face me. “With the mind reader?”
I nodded.
He stood there and stared at me for another second before grinning. “Proud of you, brother.”
“Proud of you too… big daddy.”
After workouts, I showered quickly and hustled to Dr. Roberts’s office, getting there with only one minute to spare. I flipped the light switch and took my phone out, shooting a quick text to Michelle.
Hey. Just checking on you to see if you need anything.
The minute I hit send, the door opened and Dr. Roberts stood smiling at me in the doorway. “You’ve been on time twice in a row now. I’m impressed.” She waved me in cheerfully.
“Don’t get used to it. I can almost feel myself getting ready to oversleep,” I teased as I walked past her, silencing my phone and shoving it into my back pocket.
“Ha ha.” She sat in the chair across from me. “So, how was your weekend?”
“It was good.”
“Did you do anything exciting?”
“Not really.”
She turned her head to the side and looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “I feel like there might be something more to that ‘not really.’ Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“There’s really nothing to tell.” I shrugged. “I talked to someone I haven’t talked to in a long time, went to the grocery store, got laid, worked out—”
“Wait, wait, wait.” She closed her eyes and shook her head, trying to process everything I’d just thrown out there. “You talked to an old friend—”
“Well,” I interrupted, “more like a friend of a friend. It was Mike’s wife.”
“Mike. The Mike?”
I nodded.
“Wow. How did that come about?”
“I thought about what you said, all night long, actually. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. About what kind of man I was and what kind of man I wanted to be.” I paused.
“And…”
I cleared my throat. “And I don’t want to be the kind of guy that makes promises and doesn’t keep them. I know that guy. He sucks.”
“Good! I’m proud of you for being proactive about this. How did it go?”
“Um… okay. It was hard at first, being in that house. Being with her. All of it. But it ended well. It ended really well.”
Life was weird. If someone had told me a month ago that I’d be sitting in a therapist’s office, spilling my guts, and actually enjoying it, I would have told that person they were off their fucking rocker. But I couldn’t deny it. If any good was going to come out of this thing with Mike, then it was going to be a brand new Viper. A better Viper.
She was leaning forward in her chair with her elbows resting on her knee, listening closely. “Tell me more. What did you say? What did she say?”
“First, I apologized for what happened to Mike, then I told her about what I promised him in the hospital room. I told her I felt awful that I hadn’t contacted her at all and then I asked if she needed anything.”
The corners of her mouth turned downward and her eyebrows dipped low as she shook her head slowly. “You know, for someone who tries so hard to be a badass and keep people at arm’s length, you really are a great guy.”
“I’m not great,” I denied, annoyed that she was praising someone like me. “Did you miss the part where I told you I had a one-night stand? I went to my favorite bar, for the second time in a week, in an attempt to talk the waitress into coming home with me. She turned me down—again—so I set my sights on another innocent woman. A woman who didn’t know who I was or what I do for a living. She simply thought I was cute. I brought her home, fucked her brains out, gave her cab money, and sent her on her way. She left her number in hopes that I would call her again. Instead, I tossed it into my kitchen drawer on top of the other five hundred or so scraps of paper with phone numbers on them.” I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, real great guy. I’ll be back. I gotta piss.” I got up and stomped out of Dr. Roberts’s office, down the hall to a bathroom near the elevator.
I didn’t have to piss.
I needed out of that room.
One minute I was okay with talking and working some things out, and the next I wanted to leave and never go back in there. I didn’t deserve praise, certainly not from someone like her. I was a heartless bastard. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to check how much longer I had to sit in that room and noticed I had a text… from Michelle.