Deja Who by MaryJanice Davidson

don’t know why I can’t see you, but
you
must know that at least.” She took his elbow and gently shook it. “Concentrate. Tell me.”
    â€œI keep saying. The client wants you.
Really
wants you.”
    She stepped back. She hadn’t been afraid of him when she thought he was someone else, someone who would have killed her, but now,
now
she stepped back. And that smile was long gone. What. The. Fuck? “Oh, no,” she breathed.
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œNot . . .”
    â€œYeah. Your mom. She really wants to see you. She says the time has come for you to forgive each other and work on your comeback.”
    She stabbed him in the other shoulder.

SEVEN
    â€œY ou 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.
    He
was 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.
    â€œHey! Nazir! I’m screaming at you in the middle of an ER. Please pretend to care.”
    She smiled at him. “No more Leah, eh?”
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œYou are,” she decided, “overly dramatic. And possibly deranged.”
    â€œBecause I’ve been fucking stabbed, you heartless psychotic!”
    â€œI’m not psychotic,” she said, stung.
Most likely.
    â€œWarning her,
warning
her, and she stabs me!”
    â€œIt’s true.”
    â€œTwice!”
    â€œI’m sorry about the first one,” she added.
    â€œSee? 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?”
    â€œI thought you were the killer who keeps killing me.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œUsually it does.”
    â€œOw, argghh!”
    â€œUnless I did it wrong again.”
    â€œ
Again
?
Here’s some advice, doctor—if that
is
your 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 hear
ever
.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œWhy the hell would you tell me that?”
    â€œSleep