She really needed to start leaving a toothbrush here.
And he needed to talk.
“A long day,” she said, to help him out.
“Yeah.”
She narrowed her eyes.
Amusement gleamed in his. But then he said, “I had this kid in with his dad this afternoon. Summer people.”
She nodded encouragingly.Go on.
“Turns out there’s not enough for the kid to do on the island, so he decided to make his own excitement. He set off a bunch of alarms around town.”
Lauren thought of the blaring sirens at the bakery and shuddered. “Well, that’s a cry for attention. What did you do?”
“Collected the fines and let him go. You can’t get too tough on tourists’ kids in a resort town. It’s not good for business. But maybe I wasn’t doing him any favors.”
“Would the outcome have been any different if he went to court?”
“Not really. But it might have been a wake-up call for him. Or his folks.”
He was such a good man, she thought. Careful. Conscientious.
“I don’t think there’s one right answer,” she said. “What do you want? What’s the behavior that’s going to get you what you want?”
He smiled faintly.
“What?”
“You sound like a therapist.”
“Is that bad?”
He shook his head. “It’s who you are.”
Which didn’t quite answer her question. “Did you ever see a therapist?” she asked curiously. At thirty-eight, a cop, divorced... It was a reasonable assumption.
“I’m looking at one now.”
“To talk to, I mean.”
His dark eyes turned opaque. “The department back home had a shrink on call for intervention, fitness for duty evaluations, stuff like that.”
She waited, but that was apparently as much as he was ready to share. “What about down here?”
“You looking for a job after graduation?”
Answering a question with a question, she thought. Deflecting. No,dodging.
But she didn’t want to spoil the mood by calling him on it. She wasn’thistherapist. Only his... girlfriend? Lover? Fuck buddy?
She sighed. The problem with living in the moment was it didn’t help you talk about the future.
“I don’t need my doctorate to work as a therapist,” she said. “Although it would certainly give me more choices. Once I finish my dissertation, I’ll probably look around for a postdoc fellowship—a research position. We say, psychiatrists write prescriptions, psychologists do testing, and counselors talk. But there are a lot of mediocre counselors out there. I don’t want to be mediocre.”
“You’re not mediocre.”
