Page 34 of Monk
“Thanks for the coffee,” she says.
“Least I could do.”
She rolls her eyes. “The very least you could do. Like the absolute, rock bottom, bare minimum.”
“I get your point.”
“Still, I appreciate the drink.”
“Of course,” I murmur.
“Where’s your little leather vest?” she asks.
“It’s called a kutte.”
“Sorry, where’s your kutte?”
“At home. I thought I’d do my best to look a bit more… civilized… this evening.”
She nods, a faint smirk playing across her lips. “So, a biker, huh? Not exactly what I expected to find.”
“What did you expect?”
Kasey shrugs. “Had no idea. It wasn’t that, though.”
The anger is wafting off her like heat radiating from a bonfire. It’s so thick, I’m practically choking on it. She raises those sparkling green eyes to me, and I find they still hold the same appeal, packing the same emotional punch today as they did all those years ago. Back then, all she had to do was turn that emerald colored gaze on me, and I would have done practically anything for her.
“So, I figure since you’ve been waiting so long, I should probably let you go first. Say whatever you need to say,” I tell her.
Her expression sours. “How magnanimous of you.”
“I do what I can.”
She glares at me, apparently not appreciative of my attempts to keep it light and inject a little levity into a tense situation. But then, maybe I need not be trying. She’s had a decade of hurt feelings to build upon, and sarcastic remarks probably aren’t going to do much to defuse those.
“Why’d you do it? Why’d you disappear like that?”
Drawing in a deep breath, I hold it a beat, then let it out slowly. This is a position I never expected to find myself in—having to explain myself to her. I honestly never thought I’d see her again. But she’s right. She deserves some answers. Kasey is somebody I cared about a lot. Somebody I loved with everything in me. And I can see she’s still hurting about the way everything went down at the end, so if there’s a way I can alleviate that pain, I’ll try.
I may be an asshole, but I’m not that big of an asshole.
So, I tell her about what happened that day I left home, sparing nothing. She asked for answers, so I give them to her in excruciating and graphic detail. As I relay the story, I watch her face. She’s aghast—to say the least. A myriad of emotions scrolls across her face as she listens to my story of enlisting and volunteering for an infantry unit—one in which I was guaranteed to see action.
What I’m not expecting to see, is the sympathy etched into her features. She looks at me with a mixture of horror and compassion on her face. That throws me a bit. But I quickly recover and finish my tale of woe.
“Anyway, I thought you’d appreciate it if I kept my homicidal urges away from you.”
She stares at me, wide eyed and slack jawed for a moment. But then, she clears her throat and sits back in her seat, taking a drink of her coffee to cover her shock. She sets the mug back down and looks at me.
“So, you decided to control your homicidal urges by… killing people?” she asks.
“Bad guys. I killed bad guys. Terrorists, enemy combatants and the like.”
“But still… you killed people,” she repeats, her voice low and thick with sadness.
“It was my job. It was war, Kasey. I’m not a sociopath.”
“Are you sure about that?”
