“Nothing—”
“Topaz, please don’t lie to me. I can tell. Just answer me.”
“All right,” she snapped, sitting as well, “it was nothing. You were just holding me a little tight. I called you, but you were sleeping so hard and—”
“God ...”
“Alex? What?” Topaz breathed, reaching out to touch his forearm. “Alex, talk to me now, you’re scaring me.”
Alex draped his arms across his knees and bowed his head. “Last thing I want to do is to scare you, but it seems like that’s all I’ve been doin’.”
“I wanted you to talk to me. I still do,” Topaz said, pressing a kiss to one of his massive biceps.
“How can you say that?” he probed, turning to fix her with his startling gaze. “After everything I told you, how can you say that?”
Topaz looked away briefly, then met his gaze again. “I honestly don’t know. All you’ve told me ... I should be terrified, but something won’t let me be.”
Alex covered his head with his hands. “Maybe you should hear more,” he muttered.
“Alex?”
“There’s more I need to tell you.”
“Another ghost?”
“Oh, yeah.” he confirmed, his gaze narrowing when he looked up at the ceiling. “And this one scares me more than the others ever did.”
Topaz sat on her knees and leaned closer. “Why don’t you tell me about it?” she quietly prodded.
Alex stood then, completely oblivious of his nude state. Topaz forced herself to look away from the fantastic view, fearing she would be unable to focus on what he had to tell her. “Alex?” she coaxed, when he’d stood in silence for nearly two minutes.
He grimaced and began to massage his neck with both hands. “When I told you about what I’d been ... the things I’d done ... I was sure you’d be out the door so fast.”
Topaz reached out to stroke his calf. “I’m still here, though.”
“Hmph, and that I still find hard to believe,” he mused, managing a light smile. “I never want to lose you,” he said, the brief easiness fading from his demeanor.
“Obviously I’ve shown you there’s nothing you can’t say to me.”
Alex looked back at her. “I know that, but it’s ... your reaction to what I have to say now that scares me.”
Topaz rose to her knees. She reached for his hand, pressing a kiss to his palm, then his thigh.
Alex smiled, then resumed his place next to her in the hay. “Unless you’re a complete monster—a machine, perhaps deranged—there’s no way you can take the life of another person and not feel something, a little piece of yourself dying with them. No matter who they are—whatever they’d done—you know it’s a human life you’ve just ended. It sticks with you, Topaz,” he said, averting his face. “Until a few years ago, I was that machine—that monster. The fact that I never served time for any of it put more than a bad taste in my mouth once I started to face the sickness of it all.”
“What happened then?” Topaz whispered.
Alex shook his head. “It started with a serious case of guilt. Remorse came later. I even started a side business—offering security, if you can believe it—to friends, acquaintances who were being threatened—physically threatened.” He frowned. “I guess I thought it would help me cope, like in some way I was makin’ up for all the evil.... I soon realized I was only making it harder on myself.”
“How?”
“I started to have these daydreams—really they were flashbacks of actual violent episodes I’d carried out,” he recalled, rubbing a hand across his arm as though he were chilled. “Then the dreams came—then much worse,” he whispered, looking directly into her wide eyes as he spoke. “I began to—to act out those episodes in my sleep.”
Topaz shook her head once. “Act out?” she probed.
Alex focused his eyes on the floor. “If I ... envisioned myself squeezing someone’s neck, I’d wake up and find myself sitting up in the middle of the bed with my hands out.”
Topaz gasped, her gaze riveted on Alex’s hands. They were poised in the air as a visual accompaniment to his words.
He grinned humorlessly. “It gets worse,” he warned.
“Go on.” She spoke in an uncertain, breathless voice.
“My psychiatrist’s name is Beck Gillam,” Alex shared, leaning back against one of the massive beams supporting the roof. “We’d gone to school together and when I decided to become his patient, I looked at it as though he were just a friend I was confiding in.”
Topaz drew her knees up to her chest and rested her chin there. “What did he say about what you were going through?”
“The problem I suffer from affects my ability to control my anger. When I feel the emotion, the easiest method of overcoming it is to vent the frustration,” he explained, shifting his gaze to hers. “That night with those guys in the park was as much about them threatening you as it was about what had happened earlier in the restaurant.”
“The restaurant?” she questioned, her stare turning blank as she watched him. Then the memory returned and she raised her hands. “But ... that was such a petty thing,” she said, recalling the scene with her old college friend and his hot-tempered girlfriend.
“Don’t take much,” Alex said.
Topaz looked away, clenching a fist when she noticed how badly her hand shook. “Can’t anything be done? I mean, is the therapy helping at all?”
Alex pushed away from the beam. “There’re times when it seems to, my doctor even prescribed medication.”
“But?”
