Page 254 of His Hungry Wolf

“Me too,” he said with a bucket of charm.

“No, come on. I’m supposed to be here to help you. My professor said that you had an incident?”

Nero looked down and dropped the charm.

“Yeah, I had a run-in with a car.”

“What do you mean?”

Nero hesitated and looked at me.

“Sometimes I need a release. When I do, I don’t always make the best decisions.”

“So, when you say you had a run-in with a car…?”

“I might have taken out some frustration on it.”

“Oh!”

“I dented a couple of the doors, smashed a window…”

“Why?”

Nero stared at me for a moment and then looked away.

“There are just times when I don’t feel like myself and things can get away from me.”

“Have you always been like this?”

“More so recently. But yeah.”

For all of his charm, there was no mistaking what I saw. He wasn’t a monster. He was a guy in a lot of pain. My heart broke for him.

“Things can get away from me too, sometimes.”

“Yeah?” He said looking back at me with a sudden light in his eyes. “How do you mean?”

“I mean like when I said what I said to you.”

“Oh,” he said disappointed. “Oh,” he repeated this time looking down and getting lost in the memory. There was no mistaking the pain it triggered.

“I know you will never guess this, but I have a thing against football players.”

Nero smiled. “I might have picked up on that. Why?”

As comfortable as I was starting to feel around him, I wasn’t yet ready to go there.

“How about we not talk about me?”

“Then what should we talk about?”

“What’s going well for you right now?”

“So far, today’s going pretty well,” he said finding his charm.

“Come on.”

“It is. And, I guess you can say football’s going well.”