"He wishes," Kirk declared with a snort. "Finnegan got my sloppy seconds."

And almost as soon as he said that, he regretted it. Odd, how he actually cared now -- or realized that he cared. Gaila was part of the reason for that, which made him feel awful about the crack he made at her earlier in regards to how he'd used to her to get the codes to the Maru test. She'd been his friend and that hadn't been right of him to do. And she was a face that stood out and helped make the numbers that were the girls in his past into faces as well. Faces with names and lives and feelings that he'd hurt. Why had it taken a girl he knew and had been intimate with dying during a horrible crisis for him to see the error of his ways?

"What am I supposed to do, then? I doubt caving to the urge to deck this vampire isn't the answer."