Deja Who (Insighter #1)(58)
Yep.
“You help clients you view only as medical charts see themselves make the same lethal mistakes over the centuries, and then you help them fix it. Sure, it’s a noble calling and all, but sometimes, no question, it gets old. Jaded comes with the territory. As does phobophobia, sometimes. But it doesn’t have to define you!”
“Archer,” she said, her voice low and sorrowful, “it does define me. It isn’t just a job. I’m also possibly a thanataphobe.” He must have looked helpfully blank, because she elaborated. “Fear of death.”
He threw his hands in the air. “Well, yeah! This goes back to what I was talking about! If I’d been murdered a dozen times, I’d be afraid of death, too.”
“But I shouldn’t be.” Her tone—he actually wished she would go back to shouting. She just sounded so young and lost—like a girl who’d lost a mom she loved, as opposed to losing It. “I know I’ll come back again. Except—” She cut her gaze and looked away from him. “What if I don’t? One of these lives might be my last and I’ll never know why. I’ll never get another chance to fix things. Or worse—what if I come back like—like—”
He took a breath. Let it out slowly. “Like me?”
She said nothing.
“That,” he said, “could be a blessing. You guys are so busy feeling sorry for people like me, it hasn’t occurred to any of you that a person who has the experience of one measly lifetime can be emotionally and psychologically stronger than someone busily screwing up life number xix. Don’t you get it? We can be like that because we have to be. We can’t hit rewind a hundred times until we figure out our—I dunno”—he groped for something that sounded scientific—“our autophobia is because we’ve died a dozen times in a dozen car crashes.” When she said nothing, he went on. “Fear of cars? Right?”
“Fear of being alone,” she said slowly and why wouldn’t she look at him? He thought he knew.
“That’s one thing you never have to be afraid of.” He reached out, wanting to cup her cheek in his hand, wanting to feel her smooth warm flesh, wanting her to tip her face into his hand and rub like a shark-eyed cat. He wanted to feel the muscles in her cheek flex as she smiled up at him. “Not ever, Leah.”
None of those things happened; she took a calculated step backward and he only cupped air. “That is inappropriate, as we are no longer seeing each other.”
Each word was like a needle in his chest, long and sharp and hot going in. He dropped his hands, took a calming breath. Tried to take a calming breath. “Leah, I love you, but my God: your knowledge of past lives hasn’t made you smarter or braver or stronger. It’s paralyzed you. Please, please let me help you.”
Oh, shit. What did I say?
Her eyes widened.
Oh, shit! She heard me say the words!
If they got much wider, if any more color fell out of her face, she’d do a face-plant on the sidewalk.
Ohshitohshitohshit.
He braced himself to catch her but wasn’t sure he could move fast enough—
“I don’t love you and what’s more, I never could. I tolerated you because, much like a Vulcan, every now and then I need to mate. You’re not worth the time nor the trouble. Get out of my life. The next time I see you, I’ll call the police. After I plant a balisong in your voice box.”
—and it was just as well he couldn’t have gotten there in time, because he might have let her smack into the sidewalk, purely for spite.
She turned and walked away.
He let her.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Had to be done. It absolutely had to be done.
Oh, God, forgive me, the look. The look in his eyes.
“I had to do it,” Leah tearfully told the cabbie. She was a matronly woman in her forties, blond and brown-eyed and fair-skinned and running to plump, she and a million others like her in the Midwest. She wasn’t at all alarmed by the crying once she made sure Leah wasn’t physically hurt, or needed a hospital or the police.
“Don’t take me back to the police,” she begged, “I just got out of there. I had to get him clear of me. Of my life. My mess. Everything. I had to get him away. But oh, you should have seen. How he looked, oh, God. God.”
She burst into fresh tears, accepting the box of tissues and instantly going through half of them. “Please put the price for these on the meter,” she ordered between sobs.
A snort from the driver. “Not charging you for tissues, honey.”
“Thank you, that’s very nice. If you had a daughter you wouldn’t make her do cattle calls for tampon commercials unless she really wanted to, right?”
“A what for a what?”
“An audition where they call in dozens of actresses and see them all in the same one-or two-or three-day period.”
“Cattle call?” the cabbie (Brenda Morgan, per the ID helpfully posted on the plastic divider between them) said, lips thinning in distaste. “Is that what they call those? Awful. Well, hon, here it is. I have four daughters, two in med school, one in law school, and one is teaching history to seventh graders. None of them ever wanted to do a cattle call and never have.”
“You’re a good mom. Your daughters are so fortunate,” Leah said, more grateful than she could express. Although why she was grateful to a strange cab driver for not charging her for half a box of tissues she did not know. Was she so starved for positive maternal attention that she would latch onto any older woman who was nice to her?