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“I am not!” I said, right before my butt bumped into the counter. “And how do I know you aren’t?”
“Because I have just told you. And what difference would it make if I was? Why are you angry?”
“Maybe I don’t like someone messing around in my head!”
“Messing around?” His forehead knitted.
“For God’s sake!” He ran into English problems at the most convenient times. “It means—”
“I know what it means. What I do not understand is why it is a problem.”
“Why?” I just stared at him. “Why wouldn’t it be? Would you want me doing it to you?”
“I would not care,” he said, and actually looked like he meant it. “And in any case, it has happened before—”
“Rarely! And not at will!”
“—and you do not need to do it to me. You have my memories. All of them.”
I blinked, because I hadn’t realized he knew about that. A metaphysical accident had resulted in a colossal info dump shortly after I met him—four hundred years of Louis-Cesare’s memories straight into mine. I hadn’t wanted them, hadn’t asked for them, didn’t want them now. I just didn’t know how to get rid of them.
I also didn’t know why he was just standing there like it was no big deal. If anything, he looked impatient, as if I was the one being weird here. He also looked like he wanted an answer, which was a little hard because I wasn’t sure what the question was.
“That’s…different,” I finally said.
“How so?”
“That was an accident. And anyway, I never look at your memories.”
“I know that you do not.”
I took a second to yank Stinky back, who was still trying to scratch out the eyes of this strange creature who had offended me. “And how do you know that, if you’re not in my head?”
“You did not know about Christine,” he said, referring to the revenant who had landed him in his current mess. “You had my memories, all of them, at your fingertips. Yet you did not recognize her when you saw her.”
And for some crazy reason, he looked almost insulted by that.
“They’re your memories,” I said, like I somehow needed to point this out. “I don’t have the right—”
“You do,” he said, coming toward me.
“I do not.”
“I give it to you freely—”
“I don’t want it!” I said, and my back hit the door.
Louis-Cesare stopped. For a moment we just looked at each other. And then he frowned.
“I was surprised,” he finally said, “when I realized the truth. But I assumed it was due to your fear of intimacy—”
“I don’t have a fear of intimacy!”
“—or your lack of desire for intimacy with me. But when you demonstrated that that was not the case—”
Claire made a little sound, whether of outrage or sympathy I couldn’t tell.
“—naturally I wondered why you had not attempted to know me better. At the time, I put it down to living with humans and their secretive ways.”
