Page 88 of Deja Who
“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’rerasa, 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 besomenew 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. Alotof the blood has left my brain,” he admitted. “Ican’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.”
