Written for Round 1 in the NYC Midnight Micro-fiction challenge 2019: write a 250 word story in 24 hours.
Genre : Thriller/Suspense - Action: Following Someone - Word: disappointment.
When I bumped into her at Starbucks, spilling my coffee over the blouse she’d bought two days earlier at Zara, I already knew everything about her. Where she lived and worked. Her favorite coffee flavor and what books she read.
She had caught my eye at Broadway-Lafayette, weeks earlier – and that, that was serendipity. Had my phone not buzzed, I wouldn’t have halted. I wouldn’t have looked up, at the very moment she came down the stairs and pulled a clip out of her hair, red curls pouring down and framing her face.
I followed her into the station, hoping she’d take the 6 train Uptown, but she led me to the D instead. A Park Slope girl. A bit of a disappointment, but I’d already decided I wanted her.
I’d wandered in the shadows of her existence for a while. Watched her in window reflections and from across streets. Staying ten steps behind her, and leaving two people between us in lines. Until I knew her so well I had become the part of her she’d think had been missing from her life.
She wanted me to be that. They all do. They’re so predictable.
This is on her. She manifested me, willed me into being. She made it so easy to cloud her light, suffocate her dreams.
I pull both ends of the scarf. She struggles, grasps – for air and the lies she told herself.
The game’s been played. The moment she let me in, she’d already lost.