Deja Who (Insighter #1)(71)

“Official first date. And come out and say it, for heaven’s sake. You think being life-blind will be a problem for me.”

“Won’t it?”

She yowled in frustration, then had to smile when he jumped. She leaned forward, her arm across the back of the swing, and thumped him on the chest with her other hand, well away from his stab wounds. “I don’t have a problem with your life-blind status. I decided it makes you far more attractive to me than the alternative, and I told that to all the girls in my cell.”

“Uh. What? Is this gonna be a Chained Heat thing? Please let it be a Chained Heat thing.”

“I refuse to be distracted by yet another silly movie reference. Look at me. Listen to me. Of course you fear going forward from here; anyone who isn’t severely mentally damaged would be. And that is my fault, for saying those dreadful awful things. I swear to you, I swear it, the only one of the two of us who has a problem with being life-blind is you. And also, you’re not.”

“Sure, now. Today.” She could see Archer, her proud, vibrant, endlessly amusing and charming Archer, was having trouble keeping his head up, having trouble looking her in the eyes. My fault. This is my fault and I’d better fix it or I’ll wish Tom had killed me. “But eventually you’ll get tired of living with someone who’s missing a bunch of their parts.”

“You’re not missing anything!” she almost howled. “Except knowing when to quit being an idiot!” She took a steadying breath. “Sorry. And did you not hear what I said? You aren’t life-blind.”

“I love your love talk. Um. What?”

“You’re not life-blind. You’re rasa. You’ve done all this before. Just like the rest of us, you’ve had baggage to clear in order to move on. The difference is, you eventually got it right.”

He shook his head. “Leah, you don’t have to make up some fairy tale about rasa to make me feel—”

“It’s not a fairy tale. It’s just, we’re all so jaded, so far from ourselves, we told ourselves it was. It’s not. You did it. Other people did it. Other people can do it. I was top in my field when I was jaded and passively waiting to be murdered. Think how many people I can help, not that I’m not either of those things. Because of you, Archer.”

“And you.”

“Yes. And me. And I don’t know how I couldn’t see it before. I don’t know how other people in your life couldn’t see it. Idiots. And me, too. I’m an idiot. I’m a fool—”

“This is getting me so hot.”

“Stop that. I’m not such a fool I cannot learn from mistakes. I will be glad to put that in writing and have it notarized if you so require. Besides, you aren’t even considering the alternative.”

“Alternative?”

“Maybe it isn’t just you. Maybe what we’ve callously dismissed as life-blind aren’t blind. Maybe they’re new.”

“Leah, we’ve been over this—I’m older than you are, and—”

“I don’t think you are,” she said softly, reaching out a small, pale hand and clutching his wrist. “I have this theory. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. You’re rasa, I’m sure of it now, but I don’t think the life-blind are blind at all. I think Insighters can’t see them because there is nothing to see. It’s not a failing in them; it’s a failing in us.”

Now he was paying attention. Now he could meet her gaze.

“There have to be some new souls, don’t you think?”

“You’re saying we can’t all be reruns.”

She groaned yet again. “If it helps you to put it in the context of television, fine, we can’t all be reruns. And . . . I think that’s what I needed to break the cycles of my murders. All my other sad short lives—you weren’t in them. But you were here for this one. I think that’s why I’m still here.”

He was staring at her like she was a dangerous woman who routinely kept knives near her breasts as well as a careful clinical distance from almost everyone on the planet. And he was staring at her like he found it almost unbearably sexy.

“You might be wrong.”

“I am not.”

When he continued, he had the look of a man with his mind made up. “And if you are, I don’t care. That’s . . . yeah. It’s fine if your theory goes the way of . . . of other theories that weren’t true. I’m kind of drawing a blank on examples, but you get where I’m going. A lot of the blood has left my brain,” he admitted. “I can’t even hold your hand without wanting to do things to you that will make you want to put your nails in my back.”

She leaned forward, put her hands on his shoulders, sucked his lower lip into her mouth, nibbled gently, then slowly released it.

“Show me.”





FORTY-FIVE


They made it, somehow, to his tower, and Archer thanked whatever deity watching over them that his landlady was still out of town. They stumbled through the nearly empty living room, past the gourmet kitchen (which boasted a coffeemaker and a microwave to supplement the stove, and that was all), up the suspended staircase, down the hall past the bathroom and two other bedrooms, and up the tower staircase to his little corner of the house. A third of the room was all reading nook, one big enough to sleep in, and another time he hoped to coax Leah into making love in it. People likely wouldn’t see them, especially with the lights out, but it would be hot to do it next to a bunch of huge windows and graphic novels and pretend they could be seen. But that was for another time; Leah had had a tough week and he had no interest in pushing anything for their first time. He would wait as long as she—