“Now I insist you tell me.” I could hear the irritation in his voice. “Or is it that you’re too good to share your thoughts with someone you see as damaged. I’m still your patient in the back of your mind.”
“What? No,” I snapped, dropping my hands. “I mean, yes, I want to help you. But I don’t think I’m too good.” If anything, I felt the opposite. If I wasn’t able to cope with my feelings at this juncture, I certainly wasn’t going to fare any better if we were intimate. And now that I’d thought about it, I was probably incapable of pleasing him anyway. To me, sex had been little more than a physical activity I performed with my boyfriend because it was required to keep him happy. Of course, it hadn’t. He’d ended up fucking my best friend to supplement his needs.
“Then?” Mack asked.
I blew out a breath. “It’s not easy to explain.”
“You seem to have a gift for working through difficult conversations. I suggest you rely on that fancy PhD of yours.”
“I, uhhh…Well, before I met you, I had a condition.”
He sat up and twisted his body to face me, placing his back against the armchair. “Go on.”
“I wasn’t able to really feel anything. Not like I do now.”
He folded thick arms across his broad chest. “Feel how?”
I shrugged. “Emotions. I didn’t have any. It was like that part of me was broken. I mean, I understood when situations were good or bad, and I knew the appropriate reaction—to smile because someone did something nice for me, to laugh when someone told a joke, to stay serious when someone said something sad, but I never really felt anything. I was just…numb.” I looked over at Mack, and he had the most peculiar expression on his face, like he was trying to figure something out.
“And now?” he asked.
“The moment our eyes met, that door was kicked wide open. You fixed me.”
He pursed his lips and scratched his rough chin, producing a bristly sound I found oddly sensual.
“I don’t know. Maybe…” his voice trailed off, and he shook his head. “I really don’t have a fucking clue.”
“When you met me any of those other times, was I like that?”
“No. You were normal. I mean to say—you-normal, not normal-normal. You are, after all, extraordinarily unique and beautiful regardless of the body you inhabit. You’re also a Seer,” he added.
His comment made my toes tingle. I’d never felt adored before now. “Well, I really don’t feel like anything other than ill equipped to handle this entire situation.”
“Trust me, you are powerful. And you’re equipped to handle anything. Even me.” He flashed the sweetest smile I could ever hope to see on a man—wicked or not.
As I basked in the glow of that, the wheels started turning. Mia had said something about my having undiscovered gifts. The only thing I’d ever seen was that I had a very strong knack for diagnosing illnesses, not just in the psychology field either. I remember when I was five, my grandfather kept complaining of being tired. I told him his heart wasn’t giving him enough blood. I don’t know why I’d said that, other than it had somehow seemed obvious to me. My poor grandfather had a heart attack three days later. Luckily he survived and lived another ten years.
Mack went on, “Seers are connected to that part of world that cannot be seen with the naked eye—the energy all around us, the light that makes up the soul, etcetera. You can draw from it and use it in ways that defy the laws of nature in this world. It’s not unheard of for a Seer to time travel.”
“Damn. I feel cheated. The only thing I’ve gotten out of this is having dreams about your brother hunting me down like an animal. At least, I think it’s him.”
Mack groaned. “Fucking King. If only you knew how many times we went at it because of you.”
“Really?” I don’t know why it surprised me, but it did.
“Really. Somehow, he’d sense when you were back and getting near to finding me. And then he’d hunt you down and kill you.”
“But why did he think I would come after you like that? I mean, look at me now.”
“He never said. Perhaps he feared I would beg you and you would be guilted into releasing me—like now.”
I did feel an unstoppable need to save him, but I had zero desire to kill him. I think they’re operating under a huge misconception. If anything, earlier back at the hospital, I’d wanted to kill anyone and everyone but Mack. I felt protective of him.
He continued, “I always knew King did it out of his own distorted sense of love for me, and, of course, I felt as guilty as hell that he’d given up his chance to truly live again for me. But there were quite a few centuries where I stayed as far away as I could from him.”
“Where did you go?”
“Anywhere that I thought my skills might be useful. I fought in almost every war you could imagine—the Civil War, both World Wars, Korea—I followed the blood. I flew planes and helicopters, manned gunning stations, served in the infantry, drove tanks—I’ve done it all.”
It was an oddly patriotic way to make lemonade out of his situation.
“It wasn’t until the Gulf War that I finally gave it up,” he said.