Now that he was sitting across from me and not endlessly serving customers, I had a chance to really study him. I had always found him attractive. I'm sure he knew that. And my sister had an unhealthy crush on him that her husband really should probably be concerned about. Aaron Parker was tall. Perhaps one of the tallest men I had ever seen. I suspected he was an athlete and I resisted the urge to ask him if he played basketball. Aaron had full lips. The kind most women drool over. He had sad puppy dog eyes, as brown and bright as polished cherry wood. But it was his mouth that I found the most curious. He didn't seem to know what to do with those beautiful lips of his. Sometimes he pulled them as if snarling. And sometimes they seemed to drape over his lower lip. Often they moved and shifted and I kept having the impression he was about to say something, but words rarely followed the movement. It was the oddest twitch I had ever seen.
Finally, his moving lips formed words. When he spoke, he did so softly. If not for my better-than-average hearing, I might have missed what he said: "I remember everything you tell me, Samantha."
"Except I never told you my name."
Now he looked away, suddenly embarrassed. He should be embarrassed. Her had stalked the shit out of me. "Yes, I've known your name for some time."
"It's not nice to stalk people," I said. "Especially someone who can kill you and deposit your body somewhere over shark-infested waters where it will never be seen again."
Aaron's eyes flashed briefly with amusement. "It was a chance I had to take."
Our drinks came. It was late Sunday night and the bar crowd was thinning. No doubt only the hardcore drinkers were left...and a creature or two of the night. As we sat in the bar, toasting to good health and long life (which put a smile on my face), I was suddenly certain Aaron and I were being watched. I glanced over his shoulder, searching for the source, but there was only an empty stairway leading up to God knew what. Still, the electrified field that only I seemed to see, a field that consisted of glowing streaks of light that helped me see into the darkest of nights, seemed to be buzzing with more than usual activity. Light streaks zipped about as if energized by something unseen.
Something's coming, I suddenly thought. What that I was, I didn't know.
I turned back to Fang. "So how did you find me?" I asked, although I had already intuited the answer. Obviously, I had given the man enough clues about my life - in particular, the cases I had worked on - for him to find me. Quite simply, he had put two and two together. Even if two and two had come over the course of years.
He confirmed my hunch, and explained. To his credit, he looked a bit sheepish. Anyway, it had been one of my bigger cases four months ago that had gotten some national attention, a case that involved a runaway girl and a murderous dad. Despite my best efforts to remain anonymous, my name had appeared once or twice in the newspaper. I had, of course, mentioned to Fang that I was working on an important missing person case. By this point, I had already inadvertently dropped enough clues over the years to direct him to the general region where I lived. And once he knew the general region, well, it had just been a matter of scanning the local headlines for any news about a runaway.
I said, "So everything I ever told you...."
"I made notes," he said. "I saved our messages. I poured over them later, searching for hidden clues about you. About how to find you. In the beginning, you gave me very little to work with. But you loosened up over the years."
I wasn't sure how I felt about that. There was a creep factor here that was hard to ignore. But I also understood human nature. Or, at least, tried my damned best to. Yes, of course he had been curious about me. Who wouldn't have been? I was a woman who was professing to be much more than a woman. And, admittedly, I had certainly been curious to find him, too, but I had never acted on it. I was a married woman at the time, working hard to keep things happy and seemingly normal.
Too hard.
A marriage shouldn't have to be so much work. Love shouldn't crush your soul. A relationship should add to your life, not take away from it. Something I'm only now beginning to understand.