Loving A Moretti - THE OBSESSION

Chapter SEVEN

I saw Larkin twice over the next week.

The first time, he was standing outside a convenience store with a plastic bag in one hand, looking down at his phone. I was across the intersection when I noticed him. He never looked up before the light changed, and by the time I reached the other side, he had already disappeared around the corner.

I didn’t follow him.

I did think about it for approximately thirty seconds, which was embarrassing enough.

The second time was harder to dismiss.

I had gone back to my apartment for good three days earlier. Dean still had half my clothes and Jennie had made me promise to keep my curtains closed at night, but sleeping in my own bed felt like taking back something I hadn’t realized I’d surrendered. The messages had stopped again. Mr. Alvarez hadn’t seen the man in the black coat on the lobby camera, and the police had nothing useful to tell me beyond continuing to document anything new.

So I went back to work on being normal.

Normal apparently included standing in line at a small grocery store on a Thursday evening with pasta, dish soap, strawberries, and a bottle of wine I had chosen entirely because the label had a cat on it.

The line barely moved. A woman near the register was disputing the price of avocados while the cashier repeatedly pointed at a sign neither of them seemed willing to read. I was deciding whether abandoning the basket would count as personal growth when I noticed someone near the refrigerated drinks.

Larkin.

He was comparing two bottles of water.

For a long time.

I watched him put one back, pick up another, read the label, return to the first one, then stare at both as if hydration had become a moral dilemma.

I smiled before I could stop myself.

His head lifted.

Our eyes met.

There was that tiny disruption again. He didn’t drop anything this time, but one of the bottles slipped slightly in his hand before he caught it against his chest.

I raised my eyebrows.

He looked down at the bottle.

Then back at me. His mouth tightened.

The avocado argument continued ahead of me. By the time I reached the register, Larkin had chosen a bottle and moved toward another aisle. I paid, packed my groceries into two paper bags, and stepped outside.

He was near the corner. This time, I knew he saw me.

I adjusted one bag against my hip and walked over. “Three sightings.”

Larkin glanced behind himself before realizing I meant him. “Is that significant?”

“Jennie thinks it is.”

“Who’s Jennie?”

“My friend. She has theories.”

That earned the faintest change around his mouth. “About me?”

“Unfortunately.”

He unscrewed the cap from his water. “Should I be concerned?”

“She thinks you’re hot.”

The cap slipped from his fingers before he could get it back onto the bottle. It hit the sidewalk, bounced against the curb, and rolled neatly beneath a parked car.

Larkin leaned slightly to follow its escape, then went still with the open bottle in his hand. I looked under the car, looked at him, and watched his eyes close for a second as if he were reconsidering every decision that had brought him to this sidewalk.

A laugh burst out of me hard enough to shift one of the grocery bags against my arm. I caught it against my hip. “Oh my God.”

“That was unrelated,” he said, opening his eyes.

“Of course.”

“The cap was loose.”

“You removed it.”

He bent slightly to look under the car, reconsidered whatever plan he had formed, and straightened again. “I didn’t like that cap.”

“Clearly.”

A reluctant smile appeared at the corner of his mouth. It changed his face more than I expected. He looked younger when he smiled, less severe, and for a second I understood why I kept noticing him before I remembered all the reasons noticing strangers had become complicated.

Larkin’s eyes dropped to the bags in my arms. “Those look heavy.”

“They’re groceries.”

“I can see that.”

“Good. The bookstores haven’t permanently damaged you.”

His smile disappeared, but only because he was trying not to let me see it.

I shifted the heavier bag. “Do you live around here?”

The question came out before I decided whether I wanted to ask it.

Larkin went still.

Not dramatically. Just enough that I noticed because I had become very good at noticing him.

“Not far,” he said.

“How not far?”

His gaze settled on mine. “Are you asking where I live?”

“I asked you a normal question.”

“You didn’t answer when I asked you one.”

I blinked.

Then I laughed once. “Fair.”

He remembered.

Of course he remembered. It had only been a few days, and I had lied directly to his face when he asked whether I lived nearby. Still, something about the immediate recall bothered the part of my brain that had spent the last week cataloguing another person’s attention.

Larkin seemed to notice the shift.

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” he said. “I was teasing.”

“I know.”

He took a drink from the now-capless bottle and glanced at my groceries again. “Do you need help?”

“With what?”

“Carrying those.”

I looked down at the bags, then at him.

“No.”

“Okay.”

That was it.

No insistence. No reaching for them anyway. No joke about me being stubborn. He simply accepted the answer and shoved his free hand into his pocket.

It shouldn’t have mattered.

It did.

“Where are you going?” I asked, then heard how that sounded and grimaced. “Actually, that came out wrong. I meant, are you walking this way? Not where exactly are you going, what building, what floor, give me your Social Security number.”

Larkin’s eyebrows lifted slightly. He glanced toward the intersection and nodded in that direction. “That way.”

“Great. You can walk near me. Not with me,” I added when he looked back at me. “You haven’t earned that.”

Something almost amused passed over his face. “Understood.”

We started toward the intersection, and it took me half a block to realize he had taken me completely literally. He stayed a step to my left, close enough that we were obviously going in the same direction but far enough away that another person could have walked comfortably between us.

I looked over at him. “Are you seriously doing that because I said near me?”

“You said not with you.”

“I was joking.”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“Walk normally, Larkin.”

He moved beside me without argument, and I had to hide a smile. For someone who had managed to make an impression on me without saying a word the first time we met, he was surprisingly quiet when given the opportunity to speak. I expected the usual questions people used when trying to turn themselves from strangers into acquaintances—where I worked, where I was from, whether I came around here often. Larkin asked none of them.

Instead, he pointed at the wine bottle sticking out of my grocery bag. “You chose that because of the cat.”

I glanced down at the black cat wearing a tiny gold crown on the label. “No.”

“You did. I watched you pick it up.”

My steps slowed.

Larkin made it another pace before noticing and stopping with me. The sentence had come out casually, but it didn’t land that way. Not anymore.

I watched you.

His expression changed almost as soon as he seemed to realize it. “In the store,” he clarified, shifting the water bottle between his hands. “I walked past while you were standing in front of the wine shelf. I meant I saw you choose it.”

The explanation made perfect sense. That didn’t stop the sudden jump in my pulse, and apparently I wasn’t as good at hiding it as I thought.

Larkin studied my face. The awkward amusement from a moment ago had disappeared. “Did I say something wrong?”

I could have lied and kept walking. Instead, I adjusted the grocery bag against my hip. “Someone’s been following me.”

The words were out before I decided whether telling him was a good idea. Larkin went completely still, so abruptly that a cyclist passing behind us forced me closer to the building. He barely seemed to notice.

“What do you mean, following you?”

“I mean I have a stalker.” There was no point softening it anymore. I was tired of calling him someone as if avoiding the word made any of this less real. “It started about a week ago. Photos, calls, messages. He got into my building once.”

Larkin’s fingers tightened around the plastic bottle until it dented slightly beneath them. His jaw had gone tight too, and for a moment he looked more like the man I had first noticed across the bookstore—the severe one from before I caught him holding a book upside down.

“What did the police say?”

“That they’re looking into it.”

His brow pulled together. “That’s it?”

“What else are they supposed to say?”

Instead of answering, his attention shifted past me. He scanned the sidewalk behind us, then the opposite side of the street, taking in faces and storefronts with enough concentration that I turned to look too. Nobody stood out. A woman pushed a stroller past the corner, two men were talking beside a parked van, and someone farther down was fighting with a folding umbrella.

When I faced him again, Larkin was still watching the street. “You should be careful going home alone.”

A small laugh escaped me. “You sound like my friends. And before you ask, no, I’m not telling you where I’m going.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.” His eyes came back to mine. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

That shut me up more effectively than an argument would have.

The light changed at the next intersection, but we stayed on the curb while everyone else moved around us. I wasn’t sure what I had expected after telling him. More questions, probably. Curiosity. Maybe the same interrogation Jennie and Dean had given me. Instead, Larkin glanced at the bags digging into my arms.

“I know you said no before,” he said, “but I can carry one if it’s getting heavy. You can tell me where to stop.”

The wording caught me. He didn’t say until you get home. He didn’t ask where home was. He was offering exactly as much as I allowed him to.

I looked at him for another second before handing over the bag with the dish soap and pasta. His eyebrows rose as he took it, his surprise obvious enough to be mildly insulting.

“Don’t make me regret it.”

“I won’t.”

He adjusted the bag carefully in his hand, and we crossed the street together.

⸻

I stopped him two blocks from my apartment, beside a row of buildings that gave me enough options to lie convincingly. “This is me.”

It wasn’t. My building was another block and a half away, around the corner, but Larkin didn’t scan the entrances or ask which one was mine. He simply handed the grocery bag back.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

I settled it against my hip and expected him to leave, but he lingered. His mouth opened once before closing again, and his gaze shifted toward the street like he was privately rejecting whatever he had almost said.

“What?”

“If you see him, don’t confront him.”

“I know. I call the police.”

“That isn’t what I said.”

I looked at him. “I wasn’t planning to confront anyone.”

His expression made his opinion of that claim very clear.

“That face is rude.”

“You look like someone who would confront him.”

“You’ve known me for about fifteen minutes total.”

“Twenty.”

I stared at him.

Larkin seemed to hear himself a second too late. He blinked, and the confidence behind the answer vanished so quickly that I nearly laughed.

“Twenty?”

“Approximately.” He shifted the water bottle from one hand to the other, suddenly unable to find a comfortable place for it.

I narrowed my eyes. “You’ve been counting?”

“No.”

“You corrected me pretty fast for someone who wasn’t counting.”

His gaze flicked away. “You talk a lot.”

My mouth fell open. “Excuse me?”

“That came out wrong.”

“Did it?”

“Yes.” He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the bottle label, refusing to look directly at me now. “Very.”

I laughed and adjusted the grocery bag in my arms. “Good night, Larkin.”

“Good night, Isabelle.”

I turned before he could dig himself any deeper and made it almost to the corner before curiosity got the better of me. When I glanced back, Larkin was still standing where I’d left him, watching me go. The second he realized I had caught him, he looked away and started walking in the opposite direction with such suspicious purpose that I shook my head and kept going.

My phone stayed quiet the entire walk home. For once, I didn’t check whether anyone was behind me.

I was too busy wondering why a man who apparently couldn’t remember what belonged to him could remember exactly how many minutes he had spent with me.