when the only word you can say is a fist
It isn't rage or the will to harm so much as just no other ideas for keeping the bastard from offering something Gately knows that he's powerless at this moment to refuse.
Context
The mute man's most urgent message — no — can be delivered only as violence, and only in a dream: unable to speak his refusal, Gately's hand shoots through the railing and closes on the tempting doctor's groin, not out of anger but because it is literally the sole utterance available to him. Stripped of speech, the one thing he most needs to communicate collapses into a grip, the body forced to say what the voice can't. [sweep · shared-ground addiction-recovery]