Deja Who (Insighter #1)(29)

“The tower?”

He leaned back and pointed. The third story jutted into a conical tower, big enough around that it was likely a small bedroom. Or a large bathroom. Or a large closet. Why would they make the closet into a tower? Why am I thinking about towers? Does Archer go to sleep every night in a tower, like a prince in a fairy tale? What in God’s name is happening to my life this week?

By now he’d unlocked the door and swung it wide. “Come in for a minute?”

She had to smile at his hopeful expression. What a sweet . . . idiot. “I don’t know,” she said demurely as she followed him inside. “Did you hide the pointy cutlery?”

“I’ll risk it.” He shut the door for her and she found herself in a three-story living room, complete with blinding white walls and a floating staircase. The room seemed even larger because the only furnishing was a black sectional couch big enough to sleep a family of six, and a plasma-screen TV larger than her kitchen table. “Besides, you prob’ly wouldn’t stab me ag— What?”

Leah was openmouthed. “You live here? But you’re just a kid!”

He frowned and shook his head, messy bangs tumbling almost into his eyes. “I rent the tower, like I said, but I don’t know for how long—my landlady’s moving and the house is going up for sale. And I’m twenty-eight.”

I must stop gaping like a moron. “You are not.”

He sighed. “Don’t you remember what I yelled in the ER?”

“There was a lot of yelling,” she replied, swallowing fresh guilt.

“‘I’ve been stabbed seven times so far and I’m not even thirty, if this is what my twenties were like, I dread my thirties, blah-blah.’ Do I have to fish out my driver’s license?”

Seven times? In one life? She actually thought about it while he groaned and started digging for his wallet. “No, no, I believe you,” she finally said, trying and failing to keep the uncertainty out of her voice.

“I’m flattered, I think.”

“I thought you were younger than me.” Much younger.

“I’m flattered, I think.”

“You seem so—” Immature. Goofy. Lackadaisical. “—younger than me.”

Archer laughed. “You’re an old soul, Leah. Literally. Y’know, I hear that phrase all the time but I never really got it. Sounded like one of those things dumb people say when even they don’t know what they’re talking about. But everything you’ve been through—even the stuff you don’t exactly remember, it’s had an effect on the you of now.” He spread his hands like she was arresting him. “Of course I seem younger. I’m not trying to walk around with the weight of all my past mistakes smashing me down. As far as my brain’s concerned, there’s just one of me. God, how many of you are there?” He had moved closer and was looking down at her with a wondering smile. “Can you even see them all? Do you know?”

She shook her head. Five, ten, a dozen, thirty, a hundred, a thousand. Most doomed to die young, doomed to end badly, or begin badly, or get bad in the middle and stupefyingly dull at the end until death was a relief, and why wasn’t she more worried about that? No, what she worried about were the ethical considerations of jumping the bones of someone she’d stabbed repeatedly (was twice “repeatedly”?). And beyond the bone-jumping, ethical or otherwise, was she actually entertaining the thought of pursuing a relationship with the fresh-faced boy who was two years older than she was?

He can’t see anything about himself, so you can’t, either. You can’t quantify him. He’s an unknown factor and he is throwing you off because he is not someone who keeps happening and happening and happening to you.

The thought stirred something inside her.

Not her heart. Lower.

“I don’t know how many of me there were,” she replied. Her voice sounded, to her ears, too slow. Slurred, almost. Yes, lower than her heart, much much lower. Ummmm . . . “Come here.”

“Are you okay? You look kind of . . . nnnffff.”

I am not considering pursuing a relationship. I merely want to bang him. Repeatedly.





NINETEEN


Weird day weird day weird day weird goddamned day!

That was about all Archer had time for while Leah was backing him into the empty living room, snogging him

(mental note: stop watching so much BBC)

like she was—ha, ha!—gonna get murdered tomorrow. Or something. One of Elaine’s lines from Seinfeld

(God, is that why I’m crushing so hard on Leah? she reminds me of a dour Elaine? God, what if she dances as horribly as Elaine does, the whole “full body dry heave set to music” thing? that would be so hot)

flashed through his brain: “We made out like our plane was going down!” Yep. That’s just how Leah was kissing him. Like she wanted to eat him while also pushing him away as she vigorously boned him and then never called him again on her way to get murdered.

Not cool. He would put a stop to this right now.

Right now.

Any minute now. He would. It would allll be stopped.

Thoroughly stopped. Stopped dead. Completely, utterly stopped.

“Ouch!”

“I’m so sorry. Here, I’ll kiss the stab wounds I inflicted and make them all better.”