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Ooooh, the vulnerability in his eyes ripped at her heart.
“Wait,” she said as he strode away. “Do you want me to insult you?”
“No! I want you to call it as you see it. Stop with this nice-girl shit. If I tell you something evil I’ve done, tell me I’m fucking evil!”
He walked toward the machine, talking low to himself.
Oh, she recognized this. Guilt did awful things to people sometimes, and this was a man being eaten alive by it.
She stood and slowly followed him. “Gunner?”
He paced back toward her and then away, still talking to himself.
“Gunner?” she asked again.
“What?” he growled.
“I…”
“You what?”
“I go to therapy.”
He straightened up and looked as surprised as she was by her admission.
“I haven’t even told Corey I’ve been going. I go at three on Tuesdays and Thursdays to this little building on Main Street, and then I sit in the parking lot and I try to cry, but I never can. Then I drive down to this little bar three blocks away. I go in and have a shot of whiskey, and I think over everything I’m learning about myself, and one of those things is that I’m bombproof.”
His chest was heaving with his breath. “Bombproof,” he repeated.
“I don’t react to big things anymore because I’ve been through some stuff that desensitized me to…well, to everything. If you want me to throw insults at you, you have to give me some kind of signal. Otherwise, you won’t find any judgement from me. Who am I to judge? My life is a fucking disaster, and I am a participant. I’m not just a victim, Gunner. I make bad decisions.”
Hands on his hips, he just stared at her in silence. At last he said, “I also make bad decisions.”
She pursed her lips against a smile and twirled the too-long sleeves of the hoodie around her wrists, and then twirled them the other way. “Want to make bad decisions together?”
“Like what?”
She pointed to the big machine. “We could make out in that tractor.”
“It’s not a tractor, and also you shouldn’t want to make out with someone who just admitted they burned their Crew’s houses.”
“Well…did you tell them you are sorry?”
He chewed on the corner of his lip, and then shook his head. “I haven’t talked to them.”
“My therapist would probably tell you that for closure, you should say your apologies.”
“I don’t like what you’re doing.”
“What am I doing?” she asked.
“You’re making things clear,” he growled, waving his hand near his temple. “I don’t like change.”
“Can’t just keep going like you’re going.”
“Yes, I absolutely can.”
“Fine. Do it.”
