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“I don’t know.” I clicked my tongue as I tried to think about how they’d been. “Up and down. The normal.”
To be honest, fuck if I knew what constituted normal emotions. I’d always been all over the place. That was my normal.
“How up and down?” I hated the way he fucking stared at me over the rim of his glasses.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you track your moods?” David asked.
“No. I don’t have the fucking time for that,” I snapped. “I don’t need to.”
“I can’t help you if you don’t want to help yourself, Killian.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I said, gesturing around the room. “I think that means I want to help myself.”
“I’m going to guess that you started taking medication because it was the one way you’d get out of the psychiatric facility,” he said. Shit. “And I’m going to guess that you barely talked about what was going on in both group therapy and individual while there. Just enough to make them think you were improving without having to dig too deep. After you got out, you realized the medication helped the same way alcohol did. Except you’re much less self-destructive when on medication, so you stuck with it. Your doctor didn’t push therapy, so you never had to figure out how to handle your moods. You put a bandaid on it. And all that anger and irritability with your hypomania is easy to funnel into bounty hunting and fight nights. Am I right?”
My jaw ticked as he waited. I wasn’t about to say a damn thing.
“You’re surviving, Killian,” David continued. “You’re not helping yourself like you think you are. You’re getting by without actually trying.”
I said nothing. I had nothing to fucking say. My skin burned as I clenched and unclenched my fists. Every part of me vibrated with a need to hit something.
“I’ll give you your medication but only for thirty days. And only because I know you’ll crash and burn if I take you off it. I want you to track your mood for the next month—a scale of one to ten—morning and night. You don’t have a therapist, you have a lot going on, and you’re irritated right now.” He gestured to my furiously bouncing leg. Of course, I was. The dick was under my skin and saying shit he didn’t need to be saying. “I want to see how they’re doing. There’s an indication that you rapid cycle, which would explain a lot, but it also requires a different management approach.”
“Fine,” I ground out.
“And I highly encourage you to find a therapist. I’m going to give you a list of some of the best ones I know.”
“My other doctor didn’t do this shit.”
“I’m not your other doctor. I don’t believe in letting my patients survive and drown,” David replied in a sharp tone. “You need to heal and learn to take care of yourself, Killian.”
I scowled. What the fuck was I supposed to say to that?
Chapter 44
Genevieve
The energy in the air was intense. I stood with Raven on the pack house lawn, watching her stretch as Nolan quietly rambled on about strategy this and strategy that. I wasn’t sure what strategy there was to discuss. They were running in the woods.
Whatever he was saying, I didn’t hear a single word of it. My focus was stuck on Killian across the way. Why couldn’t the man just wear a t-shirt and sweatpants like everyone else? No, he had to be in a pair of faded jeans and nothing else. Not even shoes. He just stood there, laughing with Declan and Cade, in all his half-naked glory while I was hung up on his muscles. The bulge in his biceps, those sinful veins in his forearms, the dips in his abs, and that perfect V-cut around his hips barely disappeared into his jeans. Why’d he have to wear them so low? And his smile? His laugh? Even the way his tattoos traced and defined the shape of his body was attractive.
Why’d he have to be so handsome? It’d be easier to be mad and put up boundaries if my clit wasn’t throbbing just from the sight of him. And I wasn’t the only one to notice him. Lusty little shits. I scowled. Not a thought I should be having. It shouldn’t have bothered me that they found him attractive—not that he seemed to care.
“Like what you see?” Raven’s voice in my ear startled me and snapped me back to attention. My cheeks burned with embarrassment as I put my back to Killian. I regarded her with the most serious face I could muster, but it was clear she wasn’t having it.
“I wasn’t staring.”
“Tell that to the drool on your chin,” she teased.
“I do not!” And my hand still flew up to my mouth because God forbid she was right. Raven burst out laughing. “Don’t do that to me!”
“Oh, come on! You can stare. Hell, most of us are staring.”
“Us?”
“Well, I can’t keep staring at my fiancé while he’s in those damn sweatpants,” she retorted. “It’s basically porn, and then I get horny, and I can’t be running horny through the woods. At least not right now. Maybe later when he can catch me… definitely when he can chase me down and catch me…”
