3. Miles #2
I push off the pillar and move closer. Not toward her, but parallel, the way you’d drift across any open space on your way somewhere else.
I’m close enough now to see the small crease between her brows when she checks a shot she doesn’t like.
Close enough to hear the shutter. Close enough that if she looked left right now…
She looks left. Everything in me goes completely still. I don’t flinch. I don’t step back. I just stand still, so that I don’t draw her eye because there’s nothing to catch. I’m looking at my phone. I’m a student on a path, mildly bored, going somewhere unremarkable.
Her gaze passes over me.
She moves on, and my heart stops racing as much.
She lifts the camera again.
I wait three full seconds. Count them in my head, then I walk on, at the same pace I’ve been walking all day. I look over at her once again and smile. She has no idea, but she’s going to be mine, and no one is going to stop me, not even her.
Back at the table, Mason looks at me and then over my shoulder, back toward where I’d come from, then back to me with a smile.
“Are you looking for fun?” He looks over my shoulder again; the smile still spread over his stupid face. “Which type of fun are you looking for?”
“How many types of fun are there?” I ask, sitting back down on the bench.
“Oh, there are so many, but I have a feeling your fun is a little more creepy than mine.” Mason jokes and starts laughing as he takes a big mouthful of his food.
***
The thing about information is that it's never really complete.
I learned that early on. Sitting in front of a screen at thirteen, I would watch data streams resolve into something useful, something actionable, and something that told you exactly where a person was and what they were doing without them knowing you'd looked.
Cain drilled that shit into me quickly, and if I fucked up, there was a punishment.
Cain always said that you learn quicker knowing you will get a punishment if you mess it up. Fuck, was he right.
My father called it a gift. Mason calls it terrifying. I call it accurate.
I close the laptop at eight forty-three.
The campus empties differently at night. People are going somewhere specific: a bar, a club, a girl's house. Everyone has a place to go. I walk with my hands in my jacket pockets, my pace even, there’s nothing about me that says I'm going anywhere I shouldn’t be going.
I know where she is at all times. Tuesdays and Thursdays she's in the gym by seven forty-five.
I know the team usually migrates to Grounds after Friday evening sessions.
Three of her teammates follow the café's Instagram and it has a happy hour special that runs until nine.
I know this because the café's Instagram is public, and two of those accounts are easy to trace back to campus IDs I already have open tabs on.
Grounds sits at the edge of campus, still close enough to academic buildings, but out the way so not every student will be here filling the seats.
I stand on the pavement outside, phone in hand, but not looking at it. The window gives me a clean angle.
Her team has taken the long table at the back. Sadie is at the end closest to the wall. She's got a mug in her hand, her elbows are on the table, and she’s laughing at something one of them said.
I learned the team’s names in case I had to talk to them.
She's still in her practice clothes, a zip-up over what I assume is a leotard. Her hair is still damp at the ends where it didn't quite dry after her shower. She tucks it back from her face, and it falls forward again immediately. She doesn't fix it a second time.
She’s beautiful, and I bet she doesn’t even know it.
I watch her for twenty-two minutes. In twenty-two minutes, she finishes the mug, wraps both hands around it anyway as if it still has warmth to give.
She checks her phone twice, both times briefly, with no visible reaction, and she puts it face-down after the second time.
She laughs four more times: once so hard she has to put the mug down.
She's easy with her team mates, you can tell by the way her body is relaxed, the way she laughs, and the way she just goes about her time.
At nine-fourteen she says something to the tall one, Juno, I know from the team roster, and reaches for her jacket off the back of the chair. She makes a brief round of the table. She gives them all a hug as she puts on her jacket and then she steps out into the street.
I let her get thirty meters before I move.
Thirty is enough distance for me to be a part of the background. A campus at nine-fifteen has enough foot traffic that one more person going one in the same direction is nothing.
She walks with confidence, having learned the route already. She doesn't check her phone for directions, and she doesn't hesitate at corners. She’s listening to her music, in her own world, and I take the moment to admire her body from behind.
She's small, compact in the way that gymnasts are, not slight, not fragile, but precisely built.
The zip-up she's pulling closed does nothing to hide the fact that her body is a thing she has worked for, earned, and maintained with discipline that most people talk about.
The practice leggings sit low on her hips.
When she tugs the jacket zip up, her spine straightens and her shoulders settle back, and I feel something shift behind my sternum that has nothing to do with data.
I want her.
That's the accurate thing to say, so I say it, to myself, I want her.
She tips her head back once to look at the sky for just a second and then starts walking.
I match her pace, not gaining on her, and not falling behind either.
There are residential buildings on the left.
The path narrows between two older academic blocks.
The lighting goes from adequate to yellow and uneven.
She doesn't slow down. I’m trying to work out where she’s going, but I’m not sure.
Then she suddenly stops halfway down the narrow path between the blocks. One hand goes to her jacket pocket. She pulls out her phone, it must be a message as her thumbs are moving over the screen, then pockets the phone and keeps walking. I count to five before I follow her again.
The building is called Alderton, she’s on the East Hall. It has four floors, badge access, and the east-facing rooms catch the morning light. I know which window is hers because I looked at the building the moment I knew she lived there.
She badges in without looking back.
I stop at the edge of the car park opposite. I’m not hidden, I’m standing in the open, with my hands in my pockets.
The fourth floor east corridor light comes on.
Forty seconds later, a light comes on at the window. The curtains aren’t drawn, so I can see everything in the room.
She moves across the window, and my breath doesn’t change.
She’s taken the zip-up off. She’s got a loose top on now, and her hair is down, fully down, not the damp ponytail from Grounds, and she’s doing something I can’t fully make out from this distance. She’s moving between two points in the room. The desk, maybe, and the wardrobe.
She stops at what must be the desk. Her back is to the window, and I can see the line of her shoulders, the way her hair falls between them, and the small movements of her arms that suggest she’s opening something: a box, or a bag, something that needs unpacking.
Then she turns, and for three full seconds she’s facing the window directly.
I don’t move.
She can’t see me. The car park is unlit, and I’m standing in the darkest part of it and the contrast between her warm room and the black outside means she’s looking at her own reflection more than anything beyond it.
Still, for those three seconds, something in me goes very quiet. She looks back down at whatever she’s unpacking.
I check my watch.
Nine forty-four.
I give myself until nine fifty. That’s what I decide, not because it’s a meaningful number, not because anything will have changed by then, but because structure is the difference between a man standing in a car park at night and something worse.
She crosses the window again. Sits down somewhere I can’t see, the bed, probably, from the angle. Just her shoulders are visible above the sill now: the top of her head, the loose fall of her hair. She’s looking at something in her lap.
Nine forty-seven. Three more minutes. I stand in the darkness of a car park on a Friday night, watching a lit window on the fourth floor of a building I know the floor plans of, watching the top of a girl’s head while she reads something on her phone in a room she thinks is private and I feel completely calm.
Nine fifty.
I put my hands in my pockets and walk away at exactly the pace I arrived at. There’s nothing about me that says I was standing still for six minutes in the dark. The campus has thinned out further. Two people pass me going in the other direction, deep in conversation, and not registering me at all.
I don’t look back at the window to get one more look because I’ll do all of this again. I know I will.