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He smiles knowingly. “Twenty-five,” he says without even stopping to think.
I look at him with pleasant surprise. He sounds confident, as if he already knew.
“You’ve looked me up, haven’t you?”
He winks at me in response and I smile from the warmth of knowing that he’s thought about me enough to look me up.
I guess that also means he must have manager access to the system so he could actually see my age. Damn.
Picking up my cup to finish the last of my coffee, I sigh, my gaze drifting inadvertently out the window, when suddenly, a movement in the corner of my eye makes my heart stop. A man is walking casually on the opposite side of the road. He looks familiar, but I don’t know from where. He glances at us and I quickly look back down at the table. When I look back up a moment later, the man is gone.
“You alright?” Marcus asks.
“Yea…” My voice trails off, wondering if I should say something.
He follows my line of sight across the road, but there’s no one there.
“You sure?” he asks, leaning forward and taking my hand. I let out a big breath. His touch instantly relaxes me in a way that somehow only he can.
“I just thought I saw someone outside, but it’s nothing. I don’t know who it was.”
Marcus’s face suddenly turns into a frown as he stands up, craning his neck to look down the street.
“What? Your ex?” he says, a bit too loud.
The girl behind the counter glances at us as I grab his hand and pull him back down.
“No, it wasn’t! It was just someone I thought looked familiar! I’m probably just being paranoid.”
He looks back at me, his eyebrows furrowed with concern, then glances out the window again.
“Are you sure?”
I look again at the car. There’s still no one in it, and yet…
“No,” I say in barely a whisper.
“No, you’re not sure?”
His eyes dart between looking at me and out the window and back at me again, trying to spot something.
I lean in to whisper and he mirrors my movement, drawn forward as though there’s an invisible string between us that’s tightening, pulling us closer.
“Do you see that black car?”
“No. Which car?” He turns to look out the window and I point in the direction of where the car is parked.
“There. The black Range Rover with tinted windows.”
“That car’s huge. There’s no way it’s the one from the other night. I would have remembered that.”
“No, I don’t think it’s from then. But the tinted windows… I mean… how many cars really have tinted windows?”
Marcus’s face relaxes as he pulls back slightly. “Lots of cars can have tinted windows. My car’s back windows are tinted. I wouldn’t worry about that.”
He’s right. I’m probably overreacting.
But still, I can’t shake the uneasy feeling that the person I saw looked familiar. I just didn’t get a good enough look at his face to place him.