Deja Who (25 page)

H
e 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.”

She stopped. Put her hands on her hips. Shook her head like she was amused but disappointed at the same time, and what the fuck was
that
about? “I honestly don't know how I should react to this.”

He blinked and scratched. “Just gimme.” Best to keep the transaction short and simple. No one was gonna fall in love here. Her face wasn't changing but that didn't mean he couldn't take what she had.

“Normally I'd impugn your manhood and dare you to shiv me—that's the term, yes? shiv?—and then we'd grapple and I wouldn't especially care if you killed me.”

“I'm not gonna kill you!” Shocked in spite of himself. He did
not
need that kind of heat, ever. Mugged at knifepoint was as far as he was willing to go, and it took years to work up to that. “Just give me your fucking purse, okay?”

She ignored him and kept talking like he hadn't interrupted. “But I have something of a new lease on life this week. God, I hear myself saying it and ugh. New lease. Ugh.”

“Gimme!”

“It's not like I would miss the forty bucks,” his victim was speculating. “But it's the principle of the thing, do you understand? Nobody ever calls you on your shit. So life after life you just take-take-take and then die alone.”

“What?”

“I know! Awful. But you can break the cycle, you know.” She
sighed. “Aaaaand I just heard myself again. It seems I am unable to stop spouting clichés. I really hope that particular Archer effect wears off.”

“You just—”

“You think I hear it? Of course I hear it. I recognize it and the worst part is, I am unwilling to stop the romance clichés. And perhaps unable.”

Okay, fuck this shit, and fuck this crazypants bitch. He swiped the knife at her and she sidestepped. “No-no-no. Not like that.” She mimed his action. “I had all the time in the world to move, you silly man. Like
this
.” He jerked back and avoided her hand, but not the invisible knife she was swinging at him. If it had been a real knife, his guts would be hanging around his ankles.
Why isn't she crying or screaming? Why am I standing here letting her teach me Mugging at Knifepoint?

“You're fuckin' weird.”

“Yes, I am! Good of you to notice and comment. And in these few seconds you have stupidly given me, I have decided. So we can get on with it now.” She gestured at him, bending at the waist in what his amazed eyes reported to his brain was a short, polite bow. “Whenever you're ready.”

“Last chance.”

“It's not, though.” She smiled, big and wide like a kid eyeballing a hot-fudge sundae. She was kind of almost pretty when she did that, which made him want to stick her more. “It's not my last chance at all. Which I find singularly wonderful.”

Enough was fuckin' enough. He swiped again, copying the motion she showed him. But it went wrong, like this whole encounter had gone wrong from the second he blocked her path.

She somehow stepped inside his swing and then his wrist
hurt and then his balls exploded into two white-hot suns of agony and the sidewalk jumped up and hit him on the back of the head and when he woke up in police custody he counted himself lucky to be alive.

Fuckin' weirdos! The city wasn't safe anymore.

“W
hat . . . is this?”

“C'mon, baby! Let's ride.”

Leah blinked and took in Archer and, odder, the gigantic silver car he was leaning against. “What is this? You promised me a date the likes of which I had never seen. I was skeptical.”

“You were,” he agreed, smirking.

“You said you'd show me more things I missed by not going to high school. But . . . ?” She gestured. “I have seen you. I have seen cars.”

He slapped the side of the car, then winced. “Wow, they really don't make 'em like they used to. It's a rental, and I got it for a great rate for the day, part-time job number fifteen.” He went to her, dropped a quick kiss to her smile, then escorted her to the vehicle. “It's a Crown Vic.”

As if that would have any meaning for me.
“All right.” Bemused, she slid into the passenger seat as he held the door for her. “So
we are in a Crown Vic.” It was nice, if you liked gas-guzzling monsters. She herself was indifferent, but with much of the country in an uproar about going green, she suspected people would start throwing gasoline on guzzlers the way fur activists used to throw red paint on women wearing mink. “Where you shall show me what I missed.”

“Yep. Buckle up, baby.”

“I insist you stop calling me that,” she said without heat, and got another kiss for her trouble.

He drove with easy confidence, one hand on the steering wheel and (often) one resting lightly on her leg. She pondered part-time job number fifteen and his many other jobs (her current favorite, part-time job number four: lemonade stand franchise owner) and thought his exhaustive need to try
everything
might help prove her theory that life-blind weren't blind, just new.

They drove out of the city and eventually parked at the end of a scenic lookout, where they could see hills peppered with fields for what seemed like miles, even as the sun set and swept the land with shadows.

Then he pulled her to him and she could feel herself opening for him, wanting him, not just her mouth but her entire body seemed to want him, and his tongue stroked into her mouth, slid along her tongue, nibbled her lower lip, and her hands were under his shirt, clutching the long muscles in his back, and things got rather more delightful every minute, every
second
, and then they were tumbling into the backseat and he was showing her what she missed in high school.

“W
e've done it!”

“Eh?” Leah was struggling back into her bra. “Have you seen my balisong—ah! There it is.” She had explained to Archer that although Tom was moldering in his grave, and good riddance, she felt naked unless she had at least one knife concealed on her person. Far from being put off, he'd nearly tackled her on the spot and they spent a delightful hour experimenting with cowgirl and reverse-cowgirl. “Yes, we have definitely done it; it seems obvious.”

Archer was back in the driver's seat, shirtless. “We are the first couple in the history of backseat banging to have terrific sex in the back of a car! You have no idea how unprecedented this is.”

“The word ‘first' tipped me off.” She couldn't help the grin, an expression she suspected would eventually become more or less permanent with Archer in her life. “It's good that it's
unprecedented, though. That makes me glad. Until you pointed that out, I was sad about missing high school sex.”

“Yeah, that? About that. Typical high school sex: picture what we just did, but suck ninety-five percent of the pleasure out of it and factor in muscle cramps and a paralyzing fear that you may have knocked up the girl in question, and also that your folks will find out what you've been up to, calculate all that, and it's actually much, much worse.”

She sniffed. “Then why indulge?”

“Um . . . sex? Even bad sex is still pretty great. Because: sex.”

She tossed his shirt at his head. “Spoken by every man ever, and no woman ever,” she muttered, but it was impossible to maintain her pique. “So I should not actually miss this, because backseat sex tends to be unsatisfying?”

“Not the way we do it,” he replied with deep, masculine satisfaction. She rolled her eyes, but nothing would bring him down. “You know that feeling you get when you're positive you haven't done this before? Déjà new? That's what Leah and Archer backseat sex is. Déjà new.”

For some reason, that made her laugh so hard she dropped her knife. And then there was nothing for it but to slip into the back again and go for Round Two.

NELLIE NAZIR

1985–2017

The World Remembers Her

Always

A
rcher took a long look. “Wow. It's beautiful.” And it was. The headstone was purple marble and when the sun hit it, it kicked up a glitter effect that made the stone seemed to glow. Even on a cloudy day, the effect was striking. The letters and numbers were deeply, crisply chiseled and unlikely to rub off for at least a couple of centuries. There were trees nearby, and the grave was nearest the pond full of koi, which Nellie had always thought were the epitome of class, though she went to her grave having no clue how to tend to them.

“It's a lie, of course,” Leah said, smiling at him. She had dressed in a sober black business suit, black stockings, and black
high heels, attire she loathed and would never wear in the course of an ordinary day. Which this was not.

Archer knew she was trying to show respect to It—um, to Nellie—the only way she could, and made a mental note not to tell her how sexy she looked in mourning. God, the high heels alone . . . ! “It's really beautiful.” This in an attempt to keep his Leah-obsessed mind out of the gutter for five entire minutes.

“It's a lie,” she said again. “I've paid for a lie, and that's not the only one. My mother did not die at thirty.”

He smothered a laugh against his fist. “Ah . . . no. Probably not.”

Leah shrugged. “But she deserves the lies. In a way, they're perfect for her, entirely suited to her personality. If my mother was here, she could believe those lies; she would make herself believe them. So it's okay. Besides.” Leah took a deep breath and smiled at him, though her eyes were bright with tears she refused to let fall. “
I'll
remember
her.”

Photo courtesy of the author

MaryJanice Davidson
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of several books, most recently
Undead and Unforgiven
,
Undead and Unwary
,
Undead and Unsure
, and
Undead and Unstable
. With her husband, Anthony Alongi, she also writes a series featuring a teen weredragon named Jennifer Scales. MaryJanice lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two children and is currently working on her next book. Visit her website at maryjanicedavidson.net or find her on Facebook at facebook.com/maryjanicedavidson.

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