The Naturals by Jennifer Lynn Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

barbell, and rocked back on her heels, angling it into place.
    Dean wiped his hands on his jeans, grabbed a nearby towel, and sat up. “Thanks,” he told Sloane.
    “Torque,” she said, instead of
you’re welcome
. “The role of the lever was played by my arms.”
    Dean stood up, his lips angling slightly upward, but the moment he saw me, the fledgling smile froze on his face.
    “Dean Redding,” Michael said, enjoying Dean’s sudden obvious discomfort a little too much, “meet Cassie Hobbes.”
    “Nice to meet you,” Dean said, pulling dark eyes from mine and directing those words at the floor.
    Lia, who’d been remarkably quiet up to this point, raised an eyebrow at Dean. “Well,” she said, “that’s not strictly—”
    “Lia.” Dean’s voice wasn’t loud or hard, but the second he said her name, Lia stopped.
    “That’s not strictly what?” I asked, even though I knew that the next word out of her mouth would have been
true
.
    “Never mind,” Lia said in a singsong tone.
    I looked back at Dean:
Light hair. Dark eyes. Open posture. Clenched fists
.
    I cataloged the way he was standing, the lines of his face, the dingy white T-shirt and ratty blue jeans. His hair needed to be cut, and he stood with his back to the wall, his facecast in shadows, like that was where he belonged.
    Why wasn’t it nice to meet me?
    “Dean,” Michael said, with the air of someone imparting a fascinating bit of useless trivia, “is a Natural profiler. Just like you.”
    Those last three words seemed more aimed at Dean than me, and as they hit their target, Dean lifted his eyes to meet Michael’s. There was no emotion on Dean’s face, but there was
something
in his eyes, and I found myself expecting Michael to look away first.
    “Dean,” Michael continued, staring at Dean and talking to me, “knows more about the way that killers think than just about anyone.”
    Dean threw down the towel in his hand. Muscles taut, he brushed by Michael and Sloane, by Lia, by me. A few seconds later, he was gone.
    “Dean has a temper,” Michael told me, leaning back against the workout bench.
    Lia snorted. “Michael, if Dean had a temper, you’d be dead.”
    “Dean’s not going to kill anyone,” Sloane said, her voice almost comically serious.
    Michael dug a quarter out of his pocket and flipped it in the air. “Wanna bet?”
    — — —
    That night, I didn’t dream. I also didn’t sleep much, courtesy of the fact that Sloane, who had a dainty little build, also apparently had the nasal passages of an overweight trucker. Instead, as I tried to block out the sound of her snoring, I closed my eyes and pictured each of the Naturals who lived in this house.
Michael. Dean. Lia. Sloane
. None of them was what I’d expected. None of them fit a familiar mold. As I drifted into that half-awake, half-asleep state that was as close as I was going to get to a real night’s rest, I played a game I’d invented when I was little. I mentally peeled off my own skin and put on someone else’s.
    Lia’s.
    I started with the physical things. She was taller than I was, and lithe. Her hair was longer, and instead of sleeping with it tucked under her head, she would spread it out on the pillow. Her fingernails were painted, and when she had energy to burn, she rubbed the thumbnail on her left hand with the thumb on her right. In my mind, I turned my head—Lia’s head—to the side, peering into her closet.
    If Michael had leveraged a car out of Briggs, Lia would have gone for clothes. I could almost
see
the closet, full to overflowing. As the room came more into focus, I could feel my subconscious taking over, feel myself losing the real world in favor of this imaginary one I’d built in my head.
    I let go of my bed and my closet, my physical sensations.I let myself
be
Lia, and a rush of information came at me from all sides. Like a writer getting lost in a book, I let the simulation run its course. Where Sloane and I were neat, the Lia in