“We’re fine, Cassie. It’s just that sometimes, when you’re in the business of being devastatingly handsome and admirably patient, you need an outlet. Or two. Or seven.”
He was taking his frustrations with me out on this car.
“Nothing happened between Dean and me,” I said.
“I know that,” he replied.
“Nothing is going to happen between Dean and me,” I said.
“I know that, too.” Michael leaned back against the car. “Better than you do. You look at Redding and see all the ways the two of you are the same. I look at him, and I see someone who’s so angry and so terrified of that anger that there’s not room for anything else. Or anyone else.”
I realized, suddenly: “That’s your problem with Dean.”
“That he’s incapable of romancing a female?” Michael smirked. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s his best quality.”
“No,” I said, turning the thought over in my mind. “That he’s angry and holding it in.” In Dean’s shoes, I would be angry, too. I understood why he wouldn’t let himself express it, why he’d fight tooth and nail against throwing a punch. He couldn’t risk flipping that switch and not being able to turn it off.
But I’d never thought about the effect that being around a person like Dean would have on someone like Michael.
Michael gave me a look. “You’re profiling me.”
I shrugged. “You read my emotions all the time.”
He paused for a moment. “What do you see?”
That was as close to permission to poke around inside his head as I was going to get. “You grew up in a house where everything seemed perfect—you had every advantage that money could buy. But it wasn’t perfect.” Michael had told me that much, but I pushed forward, tiptoeing into more dangerous waters. “You learned to read emotions because your father was hard to read, and you needed to be able to tell when he was angry.”
No response.
“Even if there was a smile on his face, even if he was laughing, if he was angry, you needed to see it.” I swallowed the ball of emotion rising in my throat. “You needed to avoid it.”
To avoid getting hit.
“Dean said pretty much the same thing to me once.” Michael crossed his arms, his eyes on mine. “Only he wasn’t nearly as nice about it.”
When I’d met Michael, he’d had an ingrained distrust of profilers—and a strong personal dislike of Dean. It had never occurred to me that Dean might have done something to Michael to justify those feelings.
“What did he say to you?” I asked, my throat going suddenly dry.
“Does it matter?” Michael glanced over at the house. “He’s got dibs on the screwed-up childhood, right? He’s the one with the get-out-of-jail-free card.” Michael smiled, but there was an edge to it. “No pun intended.”
“Tell me,” I said.
Michael took a casual stroll around the car, examining it from all angles. When he spoke, it wasn’t to answer my question. “Anger,” he said offhandedly. “This might come as a surprise, Cassie, but I don’t always react well to it.” An edge crept into his voice. “In fact, I tend to have a very particular reaction.”
I thought about Michael making veiled comments about The Bad Seed in Dean’s hearing. Michael letting Lia use him to get a rise out of Dean.
“You’re the guy who waves the red flag in front of the bull.”
“If you can’t keep them from hitting you,” Michael said, “you make them hit you. At least that way, you’re ready. At least that way, it’s not a surprise.”
It was easy to see now, what it must have been like when Michael was drafted to join the program. He wasn’t happy about coming here, but at least he’d escaped living with a ticking time bomb. And then he’d arrived to find Dean, who had every reason in the world to be angry and was fighting that rage every step of the way.
“One night, Lia and I stayed out until sunrise.” Michael never hid the fact that he had a history with Lia. I was so focused on the picture he was painting for me that I barely noticed. “Believe me when I say that had nothing to do with Dean. But when we got back that morning, he was waiting for us, practically vibrating, holding it in check, but just barely.”
I could see it: Michael being Michael, and Lia being Lia, both of them self-destructive with a taste for chaos and a desire to cause the FBI a little trouble. And I could see Dean, worrying about Lia out all night with an unknown entity that neither one of them had a reason to trust.
“So you said something to push Dean that much closer to the edge.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what Michael had said.
“I took a metaphorical swing,” Michael told me. “Redding hit back.”
“But not with his fists,” I clarified. Dean’s gift was like mine. We knew exactly what to say to hurt someone the most. We knew what people’s weak spots were. And Michael’s was his father. The idea that Dean might have used that to get at Michael made my stomach twist sharply.
“I punched him,” Michael added in the kind of casual tone most people reserved for chatting about the weather. He took a step toward me, giving me that patented Michael smile. “I get it, you know.”
“Get what?”
“You. Redding. I get it. I get that he’s going through something, and I get that you need to be there. That’s who you are, Cassie. You care about people. You need to help. Believe me when I say that I am trying to step back and let you do whatever it is you need to do. But it’s not easy.” Michael tore his eyes from mine and picked the power sander back up. “I haven’t had a lot of practice at being a decent person. It’s not something at which I particularly excel.”
Before I could reply, Michael turned the sander on, drowning out the sounds of the night. I stood there for a couple of minutes watching him. Agent Sterling’s car eventually pulled into the driveway. It was getting dark enough that I couldn’t make out much of her posture or the look on her face, but as she cut across the lawn, Michael tilted his head to the side. He turned the sander back off.
“What?” I said.
“She’s not happy,” he told me. “Brisk pace, no bounce to her step, hands glued to her sides. I’m guessing the exploration of the professor’s writing cabin did not go particularly well.”