Loving A Moretti - THE OBSESSION

Chapter EIGHT

The problem with knowing someone was watching me was that eventually I started watching back.

Not in any useful way. I didn’t suddenly become good at identifying suspicious cars or memorizing license plates. Mostly, I became aware of reflections, store windows, train doors, dark phone screens, polished elevator walls. Every surface capable of showing me what was behind me became something I checked without meaning to.

Three days after seeing Larkin outside the grocery store, I caught myself using the mirrored side of a vending machine to inspect a man standing twenty feet behind me at the subway station. He wore headphones and ate something from a paper bag while waiting for the train. When he turned, I saw enough of his face to know I had never seen him before.

I felt ridiculous until my phone buzzed.

Dean had sent three messages to the group chat informing me that we were having dinner that night, I was coming, and apparently this was no longer a democracy. I told him it was bold of him to assume I respected his government. Jennie reacted to his messages with a thumbs-up and sent the address of a restaurant neither of us had agreed to.

That was how I ended up between them that evening in a place loud enough to make private conversation nearly impossible. Dean had chosen it because it was busy, Jennie approved because the cocktails looked good, and I agreed because I was tired of every trip outside my apartment requiring a safety assessment.

For almost an hour, it worked. Jennie complained about someone at work reheating fish in a shared microwave. Dean tried to convince us that buying a standing desk had changed his life, and I told him I had seen people join cults with less enthusiasm. By the time our food arrived, I was laughing hard enough that the couple at the next table looked over.

It felt normal.

I missed normal enough to resent noticing it.

Jennie stole something from my plate and waited until she was chewing before asking whether I had heard from him again.

“The stalker or Larkin?”

Her eyebrows went up. “Interesting that you immediately knew there were categories.”

“You’re the one who said him.”

Dean looked between us. “Have you seen bookstore guy again?”

“Grocery-store guy now, technically.”

Jennie lowered her fork. “You saw him again?”

“I told you about the bottle cap.”

Apparently Dean hadn’t heard that story, so Jennie delighted in explaining how I had told Larkin she thought he was hot and he immediately dropped the cap from his water bottle beneath a parked car. Dean listened with the grave expression of someone receiving important testimony before deciding, “That’s unfortunate.”

“It was incredible,” I said.

Jennie wanted to know what happened afterward, and I gave them the condensed version. We walked for a while, Larkin carried one of my grocery bags, and somewhere in between I told him I had a stalker.

That stopped both of them.

“You told him?” Dean asked.

“Yes, and before you start interrogating me, it wasn’t some planned confession. He said he’d watched me choose a bottle of wine, I reacted badly to the wording, and he noticed.”

Dean’s expression changed exactly as I expected. I held up a hand before he could speak. “He meant inside the grocery store. He walked past the aisle while I was choosing it. I know how it sounds.”

Jennie studied me over the rim of her glass. “How did he react when you told him?”

“He seemed concerned. Asked what happened and what the police were doing. He told me not to confront the guy if I saw him, then offered to carry one of my bags.”

“Did he walk you home?”

“No. I stopped him a couple blocks early.”

“And he didn’t ask which building was yours?”

I shook my head.

That seemed to earn Larkin a tiny amount of credit with both of them, although neither wanted to admit it. Jennie eventually said that if he was secretly my stalker, he was doing a convincing impression of a man trying not to scare me.

The joke landed badly enough that she apologized before I had to say anything.

I changed the subject.

Still, Larkin remained somewhere in the back of my mind through the rest of dinner. Not exactly as a suspect. Not exactly as anything else either. More like a question I kept returning to despite having nowhere near enough information to answer it.

***

I saw him again the following afternoon.

At that point, coincidence had become a word I was starting to distrust.

I had spent part of the afternoon near a university campus and was leaving a small bookstore when I spotted him across the street beside a coffee cart. He had one hand around a paper cup and was waiting while the vendor counted change.

He wasn’t looking at me.

That was the first thing I noticed.

The second was how different he seemed when he didn’t know I was there. His shoulders were relaxed, his movements unhurried. He put the change into his pocket without dropping any of it, accepted his coffee, and stepped away from the cart with the shocking competence of a functional adult.

I stayed near the bookstore entrance longer than necessary.

Then Larkin turned.

His eyes found me almost immediately, and the transformation was small enough that I might have missed it if I hadn’t started recognizing his particular brand of malfunction. His hand paused halfway toward his pocket. His posture changed. The composed stranger I had been watching from across the street suddenly looked as if someone had interrupted whatever instructions his brain had been following.

I smiled.

When the light changed, he crossed toward me.

“You keep finding bookstores,” he said.

“So do you.”

“That sounds accusatory.”

“It’s an observation.” I nodded at the cup in his hand. “Is that yours?”

He stared at me for half a second before understanding. “Yes.”

“Just checking.”

His mouth tightened. “I’m never recovering from that, am I?”

“Probably not.”

We started walking without deciding to. By the time I noticed, we were already halfway down the block, close enough to be together without either of us having suggested it.

“So what do you actually do when you’re not haunting bookstores?” I asked.

“Haunting?”

“You have the wardrobe.”

“I’m wearing gray.”

“Today.”

Larkin glanced down at his sweater as if checking whether I had somehow caught him lying about its color. When I pressed him for an actual answer, he eventually admitted that he worked in finance.

I looked him over once. “That is aggressively unsurprising.”

“Why?”

“You look like you say things like market volatility without irony.”

His expression went blank. “I’ve said that.”

I laughed hard enough that he looked genuinely offended.

He asked what I did in return. I gave him a vaguer answer than I normally would have, something I had started doing with almost everyone since the photographs began. Larkin seemed to notice the lack of detail, but he didn’t ask for more. He simply accepted what I gave him and moved on.

That should not have been remarkable.

It was.

At the next corner, we stopped with the crowd waiting for the light. I caught him looking at me again, not openly enough to call staring but often enough that I had noticed it several times since we started walking.

“You do that a lot.”

His face changed. “Do what?”

“Look at me when you think I’m not paying attention.”

For a second, he looked completely caught. I expected the usual malfunction—an excuse, an awkward denial, maybe another object sacrificed to the sidewalk. Instead, something steadier settled over him.

“You noticed.”

“That’s usually how looking works.”

“I’m trying not to.”

That made me pause. “Why?”

The light changed, and people started moving around us while Larkin remained on the curb. His jaw shifted slightly before he looked at me again. “Because you make it difficult not to.”

There was nothing clumsy about that.

No ruined sentence. No dropped coffee. He said it quietly, almost matter-of-factly, and somehow that was worse.

My stomach did something inconvenient.

I looked toward the crosswalk. “That was almost smooth.”

“Almost?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

We crossed with the last of the crowd, and I was still smiling when my phone buzzed inside my coat pocket.

The reaction was immediate. My hand stopped at my side, and whatever warmth had been sitting beneath my ribs disappeared before I even saw the screen.

Unknown number.

You’re getting comfortable.

Larkin noticed me stop. “Isabelle?”

I locked the screen. “It’s nothing.”

His eyes stayed on my face long enough to make it clear he didn’t believe me. “Was it him?”

I hesitated, then nodded.

The change in him was different this time. He didn’t ask another question immediately. His attention moved over the street instead, taking in the storefronts, parked cars, and people passing us. There was none of his usual awkwardness in it. He looked focused in a way I hadn’t seen before.

“Did he say where he is?”

“No.”

“What did he say?”

I showed him the message.

Larkin read it without touching my phone. His expression barely moved, but one hand curled slowly at his side before relaxing again.

“Don’t,” I said.

His eyes lifted. “Don’t what?”

“Whatever you’re thinking.”

“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”

“I know that face.”

Something almost amused flickered through his expression. “You’ve known me for twenty-something minutes.”

“Apparently you keep count.”

That got him. His gaze shifted away, and the tension loosened just enough for me to smile.

Then my phone buzzed again.

I opened the new message.

You shouldn’t trust strangers so easily.

The smile disappeared before I could stop it.

Larkin saw my face and stepped slightly closer, leaving enough space between us that he still wasn’t touching me. “What did he say?”

I showed him.

For several seconds, neither of us spoke. Traffic continued through the intersection, and the sidewalk remained crowded with people carrying bags, staring at phones, talking into earbuds. Nothing about the street had changed, but the message had turned every stranger on it into a possibility.

Whoever was watching hadn’t just seen us together.

He had been watching closely enough to notice Larkin’s face.

I searched the opposite sidewalk, then the windows above the stores, trying to find someone standing too still or looking away too quickly. There were too many people and no reason for the right one to look suspicious.

When I turned back, Larkin wasn’t looking at me anymore.

He was studying the crowd with an expression I had never seen on him before, all traces of the awkward man who lost bottle caps and forgot how coffee worked gone from his face.

I slipped my phone into my pocket.

For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t the only person the messages were meant to unsettle.