Page 16 of Deja Who
SEVEN
“You can just back right off, Nazir!”
The strange man who had accosted her on the street was in quite a snit. He kept batting the air like a spitting kitten when she came near, which annoyed the intern trying to stitch him up. And though they were in the least romantic place on earth, save for perhaps a sewage treatment plant or a phosphate mine, she was having trouble not staring at his peculiar, gorgeous eyes. One faded denim blue, one a light green like seawater. Even with his shock-induced tiny pupils, they were extraordinary.
Hewas extraordinary, which explained why she was rapidly overcoming her knee-jerk reaction to someone in her mother’s employ. He wasn’t... handsome, exactly. If you took his qualities and examined them separately, he was downright funny-looking, like Julia Roberts or Gotye.
His nose was too long. His mouth was too wide. His eyeswere striking but odd. His hair was, as Madeleine L’Engle described such things, “hair-colored hair,” a sort of light brown with dim lighter brown highlights, and he needed a haircut; the ends curled under just below the nape of his neck. His thick bangs were always falling in his eyes—it was a wonder he had been able to spy on her at all.
So, yes: taken apart, odd-looking. Together, it worked. Together, he was somewhat... dazzling.
How annoying.
“Hey! Nazir! I’m screaming at you in the middle of an ER. Please pretend to care.”
She smiled at him. “No more Leah, eh?”
“I’ll never call you Leah again, Leah! That Leah, the Leah that was, the Leah I might have had wonderful children with, is dead to me forever.”
“You are,” she decided, “overly dramatic. And possibly deranged.”
“Because I’ve been fucking stabbed, you heartless psychotic!”
“I’m not psychotic,” she said, stung.Most likely.
“Warning her,warningher, and she stabs me!”
“It’s true.”
“Twice!”
“I’m sorry about the first one,” she added.
“See? She admits it! Ow-ow-ow!” He jerked on the gurney, and seized the doctor’s sleeve. “That stuff you said would numb me? Is not numbing me.” Then he snapped his head around to glare at her again. “Wait, just the first one? You’re only apologizing for the first stab?”
“I thought you were the killer who keeps killing me.”
“I don’t even know how to be in a conversation with her,” he complained to the harried intern. “Ow! You said the Novocain would kick in right away.”
“Usually it does.”
“Ow, argghh!”
“Unless I did it wrong again.”
“Again?Here’s some advice, doctor—if thatisyour real name,” he snarled, then ruined the fierce effect by puffing his bangs out of his eyes. “That is not something a patient wants to hearever.”
“I didn’t want to be a doctor,” the intern confessed. He was a harassed-looking blond twentysomething who needed a haircut and about thirty hours of sleep. Leah had seen skulls with shallower eye sockets. “My dad insisted.”
“Why the hell would you tell me that?”
“Sleep deprivation.” Leah cleared her throat. “Your father insists because in two lives your father—and mother, actually, in your last one it was your mother—wants to be a doctor, cannot get it done, and makes you go to med school to fulfill their thwarted dreams,” Leah told him.
She looked away from their wide eyes. God, when would she learn not to blurt out Insights to strangers? (At least, strangers who weren’t new patients.) The intern had been trying to work and was clearly out of his depth and then... then she saw him. All of him. Saw his parents, saw their lives. Saw how it could end for him if he didn’t break the cycle. A maddening aspect of her “gift”: there were plenty of times she interacted with someone for hours (her receptionist) or saw them many times (the woman who cut her hair every six weeks) and never got so much as a glimpse into their lives, past or otherwise.
She cleared her throat again
(stupid nervous tic; anxiety phlegm!)
