Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,161

at myself, and that anger wanted to spill onto the men in the car. It wasn’t logical, but then anger seldom is. Luckily for all of us, I had been working on my anger issues in therapy. Otherwise God knew what I would have said or done: something to hurt my relationship with Nicky permanently or accidentally pull the pin on Olaf. If I ever did the last part, I wanted to do it on purpose.

Olaf glanced back at Nicky and asked, “How did you know what upset her?”

“I felt her thoughts.” Nicky said it as if his doing so was totally normal.

Olaf kept looking at Nicky and not at the road. He wasn’t drifting out of his lane or anything. There were no cars in sight, but . . .

“Driving,” I said, “you’re driving. Looking at the road would be good, Olaf.”

He stared at Nicky for a heartbeat more and then looked back at the road. “Did the car divert from its course?”

“No.”

Nicky said, “Anita’s nervous in cars.”

Olaf nodded. “I remember.”

The mechanical voice on my phone, which tried to sound vaguely like a British lady, gave us the next turn, which was coming up soon. Olaf slowed down to look for the next road, but all I could see were trees and more trees. It was beautiful, but I suddenly felt claustrophobic, as if another road or house would have been comforting.

“Can you hear Anita’s thoughts?” Olaf asked.

“Sometimes, but her feelings, those’re constant,” Nicky said.

“Do you experience the feelings with her?”

“No, but I’m still impacted by them.”

“Impacted how?”

“Anita is uncomfortable with us discussing her like this, so I need to ask if she’s okay with me elaborating.”

“Elaborating? I don’t remember you knowing words that large once,” Olaf said.

“I read more now.”

I sat there debating how I felt about the conversation, other than it making me uncomfortable. I finally said, “Answer Olaf’s question, and I’ll see how I feel about it.”

“I’m her Bride. Apparently that means my main job is to keep her happy and safe. The happiness is the hard part.”

“Because you do not understand what makes her happy?”

“No, I understand exactly what makes her happy, or I do now. If I make her unhappy, it literally hurts me emotionally and almost physically until I fix it. Like right now she’s uncomfortable hearing me say that, but she told me to answer you, so it can get tricky.”

“It sounds . . . terrible,” Olaf said. He slowed to let a car turn out onto the road from the turn we were supposed to make.

“I’ve never been happier in my life,” Nicky said.

“But it’s Anita’s happiness, not yours.”

“Is it? I can’t really tell sometimes, but I know I feel happy. I feel loved. I feel safe. I feel like you’re supposed to feel in a family when you’re a child, or how they make it look on TV movies and family events at school. I always felt like an outsider or like other families lied better in public than mine did. Until I hooked up with Anita, I didn’t believe in family or love.”

“We are both sociopaths. You can’t feel those things,” Olaf said.

“That’s what I thought, too, but something about the connection with Anita opened me up to feel things.”

“Nicky tells me I’m his Jiminy Cricket, like in Pinocchio,” I said.

“I know Pinocchio,” Olaf said.

“Sorry. You don’t always get the cultural references I use.”

“True. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.

The road widened, and we were suddenly in a small neighborhood that looked like a million others anywhere in the country, except for the ever-present trees that hedged round it like someone had dropped it into the middle of a national forest.

I was thinking about how pretty the area was when Olaf asked, “May I touch your leg?”

He’d asked permission like I’d told him to do, but I didn’t want him to touch me. So if I let him touch me, was I really giving permission or being coerced?

“Your body is reacting as if it is stressed. I have done nothing.”

“You asked permission, and that’s great. It’s appreciated, but I’m sort of in work headspace, and I wasn’t expecting you to ask anything date-y, so it threw me.”

“Why is it a problem? No one from work will see us, so it will not hurt our professional standing. Nicky will not care.”

“I might care,” Nicky said.

“Why would you care if I put my hand on her thigh?”

“Because she cares, and she doesn’t want you to do it.”

I added, “I don’t usually let