"Understandably," she said, turning her head slightly to plant a kiss on my shoulder.
"I crashed the computer and I burned the pages. I told them exactly how fucked up I thought they were."
"What did they do?"
"They sat there and wrote down fucking notes. And seeing that, seeing that no matter what I did or said, it would never elicit any kind of genuine reaction out of them, that there would be no changing them, I left."
"You couldn't have had much..."
"I didn't have shit. Not even a change of clothes. I grabbed their car keys and hit the road. Didn't stop driving until I hit here."
"And?"
"And I kicked around town for a few years. I drank, I fucked, I got into a shitload of fucking fights. I was young and mad at the world and couldn't turn off my foot-in-mouth tendencies. It never even occurred to me to not tell a girl that her boyfriend was clearly cheating on her. Or tell some random guy that his repressed homosexual drive was making him a bully."
"You never did learn, huh?" she teased.
"Nah. I just found people who didn't mind it so much. And people who found it useful. Reign likes me tagging along and telling him why the Russians are refusing to do business all a sudden or what is motivating the Mexicans to demand the guns for half the price."
"Or tell him why the new probates should or shouldn't be in the MC."
"Exactly."
"Have you ever tried to talk to someone about it?"
"I'm talking to you."
"I meant a professional."
"You know as much as any shrink. Analyze me, Doc."
She considered me a for a long moment, those fucking amazing eyes of hers a little sad. "Fear of failure and need of approval."
"What?" I asked.
"Your motivators. You have a fear of failure and a need of approval. Like it or not, that's why you do what you do. If you didn't do this, if you didn't read people and poke and prod at them, what would you have to feel pride about? What do you bring to the table?"
"You mean aside from my devilish good looks and world-class pussy-eating abilities?" I asked, trying to lighten the mood, uncomfortable that she was maybe uncovering something I didn't want to know about myself.
She laughed at that, looking away for a second. "Yes, aside from that."
She was right.
I didn't have much to bring to the table outside of my small subset of skills. I was a decent shot. I was cool under pressure, as I should have been having grown up in a pressure cooker. But I wasn't a practical sniper like Repo. I didn't have Reign's experience. I didn't have brute force like Wolf or training like Duke.
"See, I think you dig and you poke at sore spots because you can, in a way, bring the rat home to your owner and get a pat on the head. And you are afraid that, if you stop bringing home the rats, even if your owner is getting kind of sick of cleaning up the bodies, that you will in some way have failed." She paused there for a second. "The thing is, you belong here now, Renny. You don't have to work at this so hard."
"Easier said than done, lamb chop. It comes and goes as it comes and goes."
"Have you ever maybe just... tried though?"
"Tried what? Tried not being myself?"
"I'm not saying to not be yourself. I'm not even saying to stop analyzing people because, in some ways, it can be a good skill. But try to stop from going so dark and cold. You're not a victim of your impulses, Renny. You're supposed to be the master of them."
She wasn't wrong.
I usually just went with it, got obsessed with it, when there was something I wanted to figure out or a reaction I wanted to try to bring about. I had convinced myself it was for the greater good of the MC to dig up everyone's skeletons, to dust them off, to dangle them in front of their faces and see how they spooked.
And, in some situations, like vetting the prospects, it was useful. I would even go ahead and defend the first incident with Duke. Was it shitty? Sure. But did I get to see that his loyalty was squarely set where it belonged? Yes.
But it didn't need to be a continuing cycle. If you kept jabbing your finger into a healing bruise, it would never go away.
I was, in some situations, causing more harm than good.
That being said, it was so ingrained, it was such a part of my life from such a young age, I wasn't entirely sure it would be something I could always control. If the impulse was small, just a curiosity that could go rogue and become an obsession, yeah, I probably could hold off and think clearly about it. But if it was one of the situations when I went zero to one-hundred in a blink... I didn't think I possessed enough restraint to handle that.