I shook my head. God knew Ryan and Jonah had been after me for a decade to see one. Instead, I went off to Iraq, hoping to get my brains blown out. No such luck.
“Do you have a history of violence, Talon?”
I shook my head again. “Not really. I was in the Marines, stationed in Iraq for several years. I saw a lot of shit go down there, and I did things I would prefer not to think about, but it was all in the line of duty.”
“Did you kill a man there?”
More things I didn’t like to think about.
Before I could answer, Dr. Carmichael spoke again.
“Let’s not go there quite yet,” she said.
Thank God.
“Let’s go back to today. Who was this girl that the guy was kissing? Your sister’s friend. Tell me about her.”
How could I tell her? How could I make her understand the ache inside me? I could talk for hours about Jade. I could talk for thirty minutes on those steely blue eyes of hers alone. They gripped me, tore at me, drew me to her. Emotions were rising to my surface—emotions I thought I was incapable of having.
“She’s my sister’s best friend, and she moved out here to our ranch after she got left at the altar on her wedding day.”
“Oh my gosh,” Dr. Carmichael said. “That’s terrible.”
“She seems to be handling it okay. The guy kissing her was her ex. He showed up this morning.”
“Are they reconciling?”
“Doesn’t look that way. I mean, he totally humiliated her.”
“But they probably still have some feelings there.”
I tensed up in my chair, gripping the arm, my knuckles whitening.
“So you have feelings for this Jade.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, first, the fact that you beat up her ex. Second, because you’ve got the arm of that chair in the devil’s clinch.”
I let out a breath and consciously relaxed my hand. Yeah, she was good.
“Tell me what you were feeling while you were beating him.”
“It was like I wasn’t myself. Almost like my arms and legs were acting on their own. The rage was so real. It took me over so that I wasn’t even there—just the rage was.”
“Why did you stop beating him?”
“Jade asked me to.”
“So Jade got through to you, through the fog.”
She had. Through the fog… The words Dr. Carmichael used resonated with me. It had been like a fog. A thick hazy fog. A red sickness that simmered within me.
“So is the man okay?”
“Yeah. I was pretty hard on him, broke his nose. He’ll have held a few bruises, but he’ll live.”
Dr. Carmichael nodded. For the first time, I noticed that no notepad sat on her lap. No pen. I was one patient of many.