“Oh, Leah. That’s . . . so TV.”
“I can’t help it, I spent my formative years mouthing clichés and fake-crying. Or fake-laughing.” She shoved his shoulder, gently. “Less criticism, more hugging.”
“Oh, absolutely. For the next several decades. Yes?” He leaned in and kissed her carefully on the mouth.
“Yes.” She could not seem to stop looking at the body. She remembered Tom’s clumsy kindness as a child. She remembered him pleading with Nellie when Leah brought them to court. She remembered him crying as he tried to kill her. Whatever she was feeling, it wasn’t shock.
“He tried to break his pattern, too. He didn’t want to kill me right away. He wanted to be around me for a while; years and years. He told me. And I—” Leah pulled away from Archer, bent at the waist, and barfed in the stairwell. Coughing, she stood, wiped her mouth, and glared. “Not in shock.”
“Fine, you’re not in shock. But the CSI guys aren’t gonna like that. Your neighbors won’t, either.” He took her back into his arms and resumed rubbing slow, soothing circles on her back.
“Please tell me you don’t find that attractive, too,” she groaned.
“Congratulations. You’ve found my one turnoff. I temped as a janitor at the high school last year, part-time job number twelve, and you wouldn’t believe how often teenagers throw up.”
“Change of subject.” Then, “Part-time job number twelve?”
“It’s a long story. Which, thank God, I now have all the time in the world to tell you.”
Thank God, yes. That’s exactly right. Thank you, God.
Leah leaned forward while remaining in the comforting circle of Archer’s arms. “Good-bye, Jack. Good-bye, Buck. Good-bye, Fritz. Good-bye, Béla. Good-bye, Elias. Good-bye, George. Good-bye, Peter. Good-bye, Gilles. Good-bye, Delphine. Good-bye, Tom. Good-bye.”
FORTY-FOUR
“And they lived happily ever after. Except I don’t think so.”
They were on Archer’s porch, swaying back and forth on the porch swing. Leah had been unaware such things existed in the twenty-first century. It was nightfall of a long day.
“You promised to forgive me for being horrible to you in order to save you,” she scolded. “You can’t tell me you knew I didn’t mean it and then decide perhaps I did mean it.”
He had been bringing her hand to his mouth to nibble on her knuckles, but snorted against them instead. “That’s not what I’m talking about, okay? I was talking to Cat about what you said—”
Leah groaned. The mayor had had choice words for them both. Some of the words had been “idiots” and “dumbasses” and “thank God, you’re all right” and “cripes, the shit I put up with” and “you swear you’re both okay” and then a lot more in the “idiots” vein followed by “they don’t have any carrots here!”.
Cat had, in fact, called the police, careful to have them take her statement at the hotel as Catherine Carey. The three agreed that the cops taking her statement in the park might cause unnecessary complications. (“Wait, ma’am, what did you say your old job was?”)
The police had plenty of questions for Archer and Leah, mostly because the two of them were involved, once again, in a violent death. The second that week, in fact. So . . . yeah.
Fortunately, the police seemed satisfied with the answers. It helped that they had Nellie Nazir’s killer, complete with the de rigueur creepy killer motive. And Tom’s shrine to Leah had been found almost immediately, which made sense because it was basically his entire house.
When asked how she’d known him most of her life but never saw his house, Leah’s reply was particularly Leah-ish: “I made it clear to the late Tom Winn of Winner’s TalentTM (ugh) that I would rather be hooked up to an IV of my own vomit than ever set foot in his home. And my mother would never deign to visit; she made him come to her. Always. So, yes: I knew that man my entire life and never saw his home.”
Archer’s cab driver was found and questioned, and confirmed Archer was the hysterical young man who kept begging him to call the cops “before he kills her again oh my God when will this horrible wonderful month be over?” Leah’s cab driver also came forward, but more to explain to the police (who already knew) what a help she had been to those in need and if she killed anyone she had a damned good reason and why don’t the cops leave Leah alone and go after actual criminals. Huh? Huh?
“Anyway, Cat knew what you’d done—that you’d pulled a Harry and the Hendersons—”
Leah groaned again.
“—but you have to admit, you made a couple of good points. We might be too different. I’m not sure I’m the right guy for you.”
“Don’t break up with me for my own good, Archer,” she warned. “It’s annoying and condescending.”
“Can’t break up with you,” he said, not looking at her. He was still nibbling on her knuckles, so she stayed where she was, content to have any part of him touch any part of her. “We haven’t been going out.”
“Well, we are now. We are now officially going out. This is our official first date.”
“On the porch? We didn’t have dinner. We didn’t even have ice cream. And we both smell like a police station.”
“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—
“Oh. Here. Over here.” She hauled him to the nook, rearranging several of the thick pillows and putting his Avengers graphic novels on the floor. Then she was wriggling on her back, her fingers in his, as she pulled him down on top of her, with six-foot-high windows right beside them.
He was worried he’d crush her but her lips broke his fall.
(Wait, that’s not right. Who cares, we’re kissing. Who cares, I’m on top of Leah oh my God this is the greatest day of my life back off, long weekend at Disney World, we have a new winner!)
Her mouth was sweet and warm, and often curled into that smile he was finding easier and easier to coax out of her. Her fingers slipped beneath his shirt and she stroked his chest, her touch skimming over his wounds, his belly, his nipples. He shivered in her embrace and she helped him pull the shirt off. She examined his wounds, which were carefully taped and healing well. “Are you sure it will be okay if—”
“S’fine.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.” Her smile turned sad. “More, I mean.”
He couldn’t stand it. “Leah. It’s so completely totally fine I can’t even.” And it was, but he would have lied. He could have been bleeding out and would have said it was fine. And it would have been fine. “Please touch me more or I’ll curl up and die, no pressure.”
She laughed and pulled off her own shirt, then sat up to wriggle out of her tan shorts. Archer may have helped—his hands were shaking too much for him to be sure—and then she helped with his jeans and, with a devilish grin and a whispered “Do you mind?”—his black boxer briefs.
“You didn’t wait for an answer,” he said, thinking he should mind that he was naked and she still in her bra and panties
(pale green satin, his dazzled, fevered brain reported, like early spring, her underwear is like early spring I didn’t even know sharks could pull off pale green)
and deciding he didn’t mind. At all.
Oh my God this woman is perfection and I don’t even know what color her nipples are.
“It was a rhetorical question,” she admitted, reaching behind her and unhooking her bra. The straps fell down her shoulders and he leaned forward and gently pulled them down her arms. She raised her hips and he slid her panties off as well.
“Pink!”
“Excuse me?”
“Your nipples. Now I know what color they are.”
“I’m so glad to please you,” she said primly, then ruined it with another of those grins. He felt dazzled and, more than that, lucky. He was getting to see a side of Leah that he doubted anyone else knew existed. Nobody knows how playful and adorable she can be. Nobody but me, how did I get so lucky?
And that was all he could stand to consciously think about; she was pale and perfect and studded with pink and her mound was dark silky hair and he pounced on her, and the nice thing about being stabbed by the future mother of his children was, if she had a problem with anything he was doing, she would have no problem stabbing him. Or letting him know some other way.
“God, you’re—”
“Yes,” she murmured, her hand on the back of his neck. “Oh. There. Right there.”
He was kissing her with zero finesse, more intent on pressing his mouth everywhere on her tender flesh than seducing, he was clutching her and groaning into her mouth and she wasn’t minding, she was getting pretty enthusiastically vocal herself.
He left her mouth only to kiss her nipples, his tongue curling around the hardened buds, and she shivered beneath him. He closed his eyes and reminded himself it was not cool to leave off the foreplay to get on with the pounding already but, ah God, it was hard—well, it was hard, of course, but—
“Stop thinking,” she whispered, her hands in his hair. She arched her back, pressing her breasts into his mouth. “It’s very distracting.”
“Sorry,” he managed, his hands slipping down her waist to clutch her hips and then sink lower, fingers skimming across the damp dark hair between her legs. “Oh, God. You’re so beautiful.”
He anticipated denial, and was happily startled when she murmured, “I know you see me that way. Thank you.”
“You like a tender boyfriend, right? Because I’m probably going to burst into tears in another few seconds. It doesn’t mean I’m not all man, baby. It probably doesn’t mean that. All right, there’s a chance I’m not all man.”
She giggled and her rosy flesh, flushed with arousal, trembled against him. “I’ve cried more than you have this month. Have you even cried this month?”
He let it go, since it was old business and settled, but she must have seen something in his face, because she was sitting up and gently pushing until he was sliding off her to sit back on his heels.
“Oh my God. You cried after I drove you away. You came up here to your tower and wept when you thought I—I did not want you—”
“Leah.”
“I should have thought of something else, I’m so sorry, I—”
“Leah! C’mon. It’s fine. I promise I’ll cry plenty of other times when you don’t d
o a damn thing to set me off. AT&T commercials make me cry, okay? iPhone commercials. When you want me to mow and it’s really hot out, I’m gonna cry like a little girl whose pet bunny got hit with a lawn mower.”
“Promise?”
He held his hand up in the Boy Scouts salute. “I swear.”
Then she was drawing him back to her, taking his hands, guiding him, touching him, stroking him, and she was whispering the same thing over and over and he groaned and shuddered and when she helped him inside her he made out the words she was saying—“I’m so sorry, I love you”—over and over, and when she arched beneath him and shivered all over, his own orgasm swamped his brain and he was slurring, “I love you, I love you, Leah” all the way down into exhausted, sated sleep.
FORTY-SIX
He itched, a constant burning itch, and hated himself and hated the people around him. They had everything and he had next to nothing; they thought he was scum, and he hated that sometimes he thought they might be right.
He knew how to get rid of the itch and the maddening thoughts and feelings that came with the itch and she was coming toward him, some bitch in nice clothes with mousy brown hair and shiny black eyes, kind of a dumb bitch, too, walking like her shit didn’t stink, walking down his alley like her shit didn’t stink.
Easiest thing in the world to step up to her. He liked this part, though the first time he did it he threw up afterward. He liked when their eyes changed and they realized their safe comfortable boring lives weren’t safe or, as long as they were in his alley, comfortable. He liked how at first they pretended they didn’t notice he was in their way, and he liked how they looked when they couldn’t pretend anymore.
He stepped out, blocked her. The alley was wide, but she couldn’t slip past him without getting stuck. He waited for her steps to falter, her expression to go from determinedly not seeing him on purpose to not being able to look away from him.
“Give it up.”