chapter 1
368 Words
CHAPTER ONE — FINDING MY PREY
I didn’t come to the café for coffee that morning.
I came because it was a place where people blended into noise, where my thoughts could hide behind the chatter of strangers. I didn’t expect anything unusual. I didn’t expect anyone unusual.
But then you walked in.
You didn’t rush inside like someone trying to escape the morning.
You didn’t demand attention.
You drifted calm, soft, unaware of how the light shifted to follow you.
Your hair brushed your shoulders when you tucked it behind your ear, and that single motion punched the air out of me.
Not romantically.
Not sweetly.
Something colder.
Sharper.
Like a thread had looped itself around my ribs and pulled tight.
You ordered something simple your voice quiet but steady. I found myself leaning in, pretending to check my phone just to hear the tone again.
You sat by the window, the sunlight pooling over you like it had been waiting. You opened a small notebook. The way your wrist moved as you wrote… gentle, deliberate… I memorized every motion without meaning to.
I told myself:
Stop watching her. She’s just another face in a room full of faces.
But none of them mattered except you.
When your eyes lifted and passed over me not stopping, not recognizing, just passing I felt something settle inside me:
A certainty.
A pull.
A decision I didn’t consciously make
I was obsessed at first sight.
You were going to matter.
And you didn’t even know I existed.
When you finally stood and left, you walked out with no hesitation, no backward glance. But I stared at the empty seat you left behind, feeling the quiet collapse around me again.
I shouldn’t have followed you outside.
But my feet moved before logic caught up.
That was the beginning.
Not love.
Not fate.
Something darker.
And irreversible.
Obsession.
- Writer
