Mind Games

Chapter Eight: Someone New

It had been two days since Kanas had been in Lucca's presence. Two days since he'd suggested his deal and left it in her capable hands to decide.

It was two days of silence.

Though to say that it would have been complete radio silence may have been overstating it a little. They had seen each other in passing at the university. Polite words had been spoken. Knowing looks had been exchanged. But for the life of him, and all of his training, he hadn't gotten a read on her.

Which had lead him down a way of thinking that he was unaccustomed. The way of self-doubt. Left to wonder if he had gone soft during his months since leaving the prison. He'd kicked down the wayward direction of his thoughts almost immediately, deciding that going soft was never a problem. Lucca was simply someone who didn't break easily.

Perhaps Kanas had been too generous in providing Lucca with a free pass to the mandated therapy sessions. Or therapy with him, in general. Perhaps he should have taken the harder route, the more forceful route and pressured her to continue therapy at the school, because her silence was infuriating.

The result of his anger, was that Kanas was finding himself jittery. He was short-tempered with his patients and the likes of the staff that surrounded him at the school. His body was strung-tight, coiled and ready to strike, as though it was anticipating something to happen. Nothing ever did, and when those moments passed, the feeling of his anticipation seemed to have doubled.

His sessions with Irene seldom helped.

He wanted his answer, and he wasn't above going to her place a second time. Or interrupting whichever class she held now.

In the moments when Kanas began thinking rationally once more, he entertained the idea that it wasn't her silence or lack of an answer that annoyed him to the point of anger, or even violence. It was the lack of control he seemed to feel. Lack of control that she provoked.

It was the lack of control he felt for a situation he craved. And he craved Lucca's intelligence, her viewpoint on the world. He craved the depth of conversation and knowledge, the rollercoaster of information and emotions she had locked away inside of her.

Kanas was a man of control. Someone with both hands on the wheel at all times. He had relinquished that control with Lucca. He'd given her the guise of control when he had let her believe that making the decision to come to therapy was completely under her own volition. That it was her idea, and not a seed that he had planted. He had been believing that he had at least one hand on the wheel for that situation.

He'd been wrong.

Somewhere along the way, somehow, Lucca had managed to take the control. She had both hands on the wheel, while Kanas was standing with his hands in his pockets as she raced by him on the highway. She was nothing more than taillights on the horizon. A dream within reach, but something he couldn't touch.

Teasing him. Taunting him.

Angering him.

He flexed his hand, recalled a rather blissful memory of his time with Irene and let that sooth him. Let that scenario play out in his head... even if he imagined Lucca in her place.

"I heard that you were at the DeMarco's for sauce night," his first patient of the day, Jake Ross, tells him, sounding bemused as he brought Kanas out of the quickly darkening cave of his thoughts. "Not even I have managed to score an invitation to that."

Kanas momentarily felt guilty. He had been so wrapped up in his dilemma with Lucca that he had barely been registering anything the boy before him had been saying. He'd noticed that Jake had a tendency to ramble anyway, and had grown accustomed to tuning out while he talked about his home life.