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I make a face. “Thanks, Dr. Ruth.”

“My pleasure.”

For the record, I’m aware of the difference between sex and love, just as I’m aware that I don’t need love to have sex.

I’ve slept with plenty of women. I’ve tolerated a few. I've liked even less. Love?

Yeah, no.

People like me don’t do the whole love thing. We don’t meet a girl, charm her, get to know her, meet her friends and family and plan a future together. Because we’re also planning the next time we’ll be leaving the house at one in the morning to plastic wrap a pedophile to a gurney and bleed them to death.

That said, none of this is what makes me hesitate with Bella. The problem is what she brings out in me.

I spend an absurd amount of time maintaining control. I have routines. Systems. Order. Everything has a place, because underneath those routines is something I know better than to let run the fucking show.

Bella pokes at that thing.

Constantly.

Last night in that dark corner of The Seven Bells, it fucking poked back, hard.

And I think she liked it.

There was a moment later where I wondered if I’d shown her too much. Revealed how deep the pit inside me actually goes.

Then again, this is the same girl who left a severed human head on my pillow and dropped a bag of dicks in front of a dinner date. I could probably start speaking in tongues while summoning a demon in my bedroom, and Bella would ask if she could keep it as a pet.

So no, I don’t think showing her my darkness is what worries me. What I keep landing on instead is the blood.

I have a complicated relationship with it.

It isn’t blood itself that fucks with me. I mean, that would make my preferred extracurricular activity very inconvenient.

No, it’s blood I can’t contain or control. Splatters of it. Pools of it. Too much of it in places it shouldn’t be.

There’s a reason for that, one I don’t particularly enjoy exploring, so I don't.

But it’s why, when I kill, everything is clean, precise, and surgical. Plastic wrap. Tubing. A controlled flow from one place to another. The blood goes exactly where I tell it to.

Bella’s blood last night was different.

There was nothing chaotic or threatening about it. It was warm and wet and hers, and instead of that old alarm firing somewhere deep inside me, an entirely different animal woke up.

More savage.

Hungrier.

And I’m not sure what the fuck to do with that, especially because Bella didn’t flinch from it.

That’s maybe what really keeps clawing at me. How readily she leaned into everything that happened between us. Every time I showed her another piece of the ugly thing that lives under all my rules and routines, she didn’t pull away. She didn't flinch. And when things got…messy?

She came closer.

Fuck.

This is a problem.

Last night, after I’d used a handful of cocktail napkins to clean up, we’d walked out of The Seven Bells together and into the fall chill.