Intrusion Read Online Free PDF Page B

But I can also see a flicker of humor in his eyes and on his lips—like he knows how he’s being. He gets that he’s supposed to say more. Maybe he even wants to say more.
    â€œAm I going to have to press for everything?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œCome on.”
    â€œCome on what?”
    Now he’s really letting that amusement out. He might be a private person, but I can see he takes pleasure in doing this to me. Or is the pleasure in the fact that I want to know? I see a little jolt of surprise every time I push him for something, as though he can hardly believe I’m interested. No one else has ever been interested before, quite clearly.
    Five seconds of questioning would have cleared up the whole animal-mutilator thing.
    â€œThis hardly seems fair. You see right to the heart of me in one glance, and all I get is three monosyllables and those unfathomable eyes.”
    â€œYou think my eyes are unfathomable?”
    â€œI should probably refrain from saying what I think they are.”
    In truth, I didn’t even want to say unfathomable . It just kind of slipped out, along with my dignity and my quickly growing feelings for him. Feelings that only get worse when he adds: “There’s nothing you can say that would bother me. I already know what I look like—that my eyes are too big for my face and look sort of. . .flat.”
    â€œDid someone once tell you that?”
    â€œPeople rarely want to meet my gaze.”
    â€œI think that’s because your gaze is intense. Not because it seems flat. Plus the color is so completely beyond my ability to describe. I want to say like the evening sky at the height of summer, but that makes me sound so ridiculous.”
    I wish it did make me sound ridiculous. I expect it to, yet somehow that isn’t the result. Instead, he does that odd little straightening thing again—only this time it has a hint of something else. And then I see his rising blush, and I know what it is. I can feel it myself, surging just beneath my skin. My arms are a sudden mass of raised hairs, and all of this heat just floods my face.
    He likes me saying that.
    He likes it a lot .
    So why do I change the subject?
    â€œYou still haven’t told me what your degrees are for,” I say, and then I know why I did. I get it before he gives his grisly answer.
    â€œCriminology and forensic psychology,” he says, and just like that the moment is gone, killed stone dead by the sudden specter of horrible things. Now we’re back in safer territory—if assessing the psyches of violent murderers can be called safe.
    â€œShould I be worried that you totally nailed me?”
    â€œThe person who hurt you should probably be worried,” he says, and suddenly that intense intelligence is like a laser sight on the top of a high-caliber weapon. I see it trained on the shadow just over my shoulder, burning hot and brilliant, and I won’t lie.
    That kind of makes me go weak at the knees for him, too.
    â€œDo you know stuff about him, just from talking to me?”
    â€œYes. Is that a suggestion for me to elaborate?”
    I consider, briefly. On the one hand, I would like nothing more than to forget. Most of my goals are about forgetting. I shape my life around never thinking about it, right down to the tiniest mundane detail.
    And yet, and yet, and yet.
    By God, I want to see Noah gun him down.
    â€œYeah, that was me wanting you to elaborate.”
    â€œI would say that he was a white male, twenty-five to forty, probably had a menial and possibly reviled occupation, very little family and no friends. Any friendships he attempted to form would have quickly deteriorated, as he realized his projected desires for people he sought out as potential companions did not match the reality. He most likely had a history of mental illness—paranoid schizophrenia or episodes that bordered on this. He had delusions at the very least, largely centered