Page 47 of Deja New
TWENTY-THREE
Jason blinked, disorientated. The village, the smell of smoke and suffering and pain, was gone in a moment. He was back in his room
(back? you never left. just a dream, just the same dream)
and a few seconds ago he had been a member of the Alyutors, his reindeer cloak spattered with muck and blood,hisblood, and he was pressing his hand over his baby’s mouth as an act of lo—
Oh.Thatdream again, the one where his sister had been killed and then, years later, he’d killed one of his daughters.
Stop showing the same slides, he thought irritably at his subconscious, the thing that never shut up. I know all this. There’s no need to keep hammering it home.
He groped for his phone and squinted at it: 5:57 a.m. A new record for that month. Not hard to reason why, either. After he’d returned from the cheerfully chaotic Drake dinner, he’d actually felt...
...felt...
...good?
Not only good, and sated, but pleasantly tired; he’d crawled into bed just after midnight. And slept, undisturbed, for nearly six hours.
Huh.
And he was hard. Nocturnal penile tumescence had reared its mushroom-shaped head once again.Like the groundhog predicting when spring will come, he thought, amused. His erection was more a cause for puzzled bemusement than alarm. It was a universal biological phenomenon most healthy men experienced; it didn’t mean that infanticide aroused him. As for what did...
Did the Drakes rekindle my sex drive?
Of course not, that was idiotic.Angelawas rekindling his sex drive. Well, Angela and Paroxetine.
In fact, he’d been having a string of good days; his big black dog, it seemed, was going back to sleep.*It would lope back into his life soon enough, but as his mother had been fond of reminding him, even big dogs have collars.
He hopped out of bed and headed for the shower. He was halfway to the bathroom before he realized he was whistling “Chick Habit.”
