Untouched The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,31
want to die, and a relationship with me was just that, a death sentence. At least, if it was to involve anything other than conversations. And if there was absolutely no physical component to a relationship, was it anything other than a friendship?
A guy like Zack had friends. I was fairly certain he could have his pick of any number of women, too. Why wouldn’t he look past me at some devil woman in a red dress? Even if she was twenty years older and taller and more shapely and knew how to apply cosmetics and bleh. Was it possible to hate someone you didn’t know and hadn’t exchanged more than a few words with? I even envisioned walking up behind her, taking off a glove and giving her a little touch to the arm. Not enough to kill her, just enough to zap some of the prettiness away.
Then I cursed myself for being petty and tried to watch the movie. It wasn’t easy; it had no plot and a lot of explosions. I felt my mind wandering for minutes at a time and when it came back, I found I hadn’t missed much.
Afterward Zack offered to walk around the mall for a little while longer but I declined. I suspect he saw through my terse answer, but he didn’t say anything as we walked to the car.
It was a quiet ride back to the Directorate. Even though I could have sworn it was only about twenty minutes, it felt like an hour. We pulled into the parking garage and he stopped the car. I started to turn to him to say good night, but he preempted me.
“Did I...say something or do something that pissed you off?” He was staring at me, earnest, for all his faults.
“No. I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought that woman in red—I thought she was my mom, from a distance. She looked like...” My words trailed off.
“Ah,” Zack said with a nod. “I wondered what would possess you to jump across the mall like that, in public and in full view of a hundred people. It all makes sense now.”
“Why didn’t you ask me before?” I stared straight ahead, looking hard at the concrete wall that was just in front of the hood of the parked car.
“In my experience, if a woman seems upset, it’s better to wait a little while before you probe to get to the bottom of it,” he said. A sage, he was. “You know,” he said with confidence, “in case it was something I did, I didn’t want to make it worse by seeming like I didn’t have a clue.”
I heard Wolfe’s laughter ringing in my ears and I saw red. “Of course it wasn’t you,” I said, calm. How did I manage that calm? No idea. “Well,” I said with an urgency I couldn’t define, but that welled up along with a hundred other emotions I didn’t want to give voice to, “good night.” I grabbed the handle to the car door and forced it open, rushing to get out before he could say anything else. My hand gripped it tighter than I intended, and I heard a squeaking noise as I stood up, and I looked down to find the door hanging free of the car, loose in my hand.
I stared at it with incredulity for a moment before a torrent of bitter anger burst loose somewhere within and I screamed a curse. I hurled the car door as I stomped away from the vehicle toward the nearest exit. I heard it crash, the window breaking when it hit the wall, and I heard it bounce into something else. The earsplitting sound of a car alarm going off echoed through the whole place as I pushed my way out of the garage’s exit door and blissfully found myself out of the garage and on the snowy grounds of the Directorate.
Chapter 11
You should let your anger out to play more often, Wolfe said a little while later, as I was about to get into bed. It’s quite becoming, little doll.
“You’re a hobo who’s living rent-free in my brain,” I said out loud as I turned down the covers. Someone had snuck in and made the bed and cleaned the room while I was out. At another time, I might have been impressed with the turndown service. As it was, it was added to the pile of things annoying me, the lack of privacy I felt in this place.