Page 17 of Smolder (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 29)

“Do you know me so well?”

“I share a lot of Jean-Claude’s memories, so yeah, I do.”

Then he got a look on his face that I hadn’t seen much, it was more from a memory of Jean-Claude than my own. He looked lost. “What am I to do if I cannot be cruel or flirtatious?”

I realized with a start that he was serious. “Asher, there is more to you than just that.”

“Is there? As the medication and therapy strip away all the broken thinking I am left unsure of who I am. I know that sounds ridiculous after almost seven hundred years, but I don’t know how to behave if I’m not sick with jealousy. It’s as if all of me was the obsessive negative thoughts.”

“You are more than just your illness, Asher.”

“Am I?”

“Is that why you don’t discipline Kane, because he’s the last part of your illness?” Peter asked.

Asher looked at him, careful to only let him see the perfect half of his face. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe worrying about Kane gives you something to obsess over now that your own obsessive thoughts are gone?”

“I... I had not thought about it like that.”

Edward said, “Giving up an obsession is hard. Giving up one that is made from your own obsessive-compulsive thoughts would be even harder. You are stronger than you let us see or you wouldn’t have been brave enough to do it.”

“Do you truly believe that?” Asher asked, again glancing at him through a fall of hair and perfect face.

Edward nodded. “I do.”

Asher ran his hands down his shirt, which was a gesture similar to one that Jean-Claude had; it was a sign of nerves. “Thank you.”

“When you first give up your obsession your life loses focus. You have to decide if you’re still you, or someone else, becoming someone else,” Edward said.

It was all I could do not to ask him what obsession he had given up, because this was more insight into his past than I’d ever had, at least about his emotional landscape. He was my best friend and we’d known each other for ten years, but Edward knew how to keep a secret.

Asher said, “I feel empty like a seashell washed up on the shore, beautiful but hollow with whatever creature lived inside me gone.”

“It will take time to fill yourself back up,” Edward said.

“Yeah,” Peter said, “it’s sort of like being fourteen again when you don’t know who you are or what you’ll be when you grow up.”

“I have been grown up for centuries.”

“In age maybe, but you got stuck because you were sick; now you can decide what you’ll be when you grow up for real.”

He stared at Peter, forgetting to keep his hair in place so he gave both eyes and an edge of scars. “How can you be so wise at such a young age?”

“I’ve had a lot of therapy and I have a great dad, and smart friends,” he said, looking from Edward to me.

“If you stop trying to be the old Asher, we’ll help you figure out who the new Asher is,” Edward said.

“You make it sound simple,” Asher said.

Edward shook his head but stopped midmotion because his head rubbed the stand-up collar. He frowned at the clothes, I think, but said, “It’s not simple. Re-creating yourself after you’ve given up one way of being is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do, but if you pay attention to yourself you can build a life you want, instead of the life that you fell into.”

I had so many questions I wanted to ask, but he’d never answer them in front of this many people, and he probably wouldn’t answer them at all, but more than that I realized he’d opened himself up to Asher. Was it for my sake, for Peter’s, or had Edward seen something in the vampire that made him want to reach out to him? Maybe I’d ask later when we were alone and Edward would give me the look he’d been giving me for ten years, the one that said he knew things I didn’t, and he wasn’t going to share.

“You would help me after I have behaved so badly?”

“Do better from this point on, and before you say it’s as simple as that, I know that changing how you interact with the world is anything but simple.”

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