I know it was you.
The plants were sweet, but you were the only one in the store when I went in who would have seen me asking the owner all sorts of questions about them, only to walk out with a tiny aloe vera plant. And just so you know, I’m terrible with plants,so you might have just cursed these to their demise. Either way, it was sweet to wake up to the plants sitting at my front door.
I mean this respectfully; I don’t know if you remember, but you are, after all, a ginger-haired, six-two giant with way too many muscles and seriously sexy facial hair. You don’t blend into the background of our town like some kind of npc in a video game.
I know you’re the one who has been running behind me for my morning jogs every day since our night of dancing ten days ago. But you have to know that wearing tank tops to show off your muscles cannot be healthy! Especially in late January.
You could get seriously sick! Anything from catching a cold to pneumonia. Not that the sight isn’t a good one. God, those arms make me ache to climb you like some kind of capuchin monkey and then have you show me what I know a lot of tourists passing through found out about you. If you’re a boxer or briefs guy and if you’re as generous and good in bed as I’ve heard women gloat you are.
So… stop stalking me.
Quit following me from store to store, watching me through the window. It’s time to shoo. It’s alittle creepy. (That’s a lie. You’ve never creeped me or scared me. If anything, the idea of you sneaking into my place, into my room while I’m asleep? I think I need to get my head checked because I know that’s exactly what I’m going to be thinking about tonight when I pull out my battery-operated boyfriend from the top drawer of my nightstand.
Begrudgingly yours,
Elizabeth ‘You-still-can’t-call-me-Liz’ Verdusco
I shutthe journal I was supposed to be writing in to myself, so I learned how to enjoy sitting still, and shoved it into my bag wishing it weren’t the first entry in the thing I’d addressed to my handsome yet not-so-stealthy stalker.
4
elizabeth
Living a little…Well, it kind of sucked.
Maybe I wasn’t good at it? Because when you were trying to live a little, there was no way you could find yourself bored, right?
A local nurse friend of mine called and asked me to get a drink at the brewery in town. I’d been there more than a handful of times. It was a fun place to be. But it was also where Austin Hart worked. Well, he co-owned the place that had helped boost the economy of our small mountain town in the last year since it opened its doors. Jackie, my influencer sister, had not only told me all about the amazing things the brewery did but had shown me. From a haunted maze to a Santa’s workshop for a toy drive, the brewery had been the background of quite a few different fundraisers.
Now I was getting ready to go there.
All while I thought about the guy whose number I’d still not deleted from my phone. Nor had I texted or called him. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t want anything to do with the man who kept following me, running behind me on my daily runs.Liar, a little voice inside my head whispered.
I was woman enough to admit I’d scrolled down my contacts and had hovered over his number multiple times on a daily basis. And I might or might not have even typed out a couple of texts only to immediately delete them.
There was something about the guy who had been following me around town.
I wasn’t stupid. It wasn’t like he could blend in just anywhere when he was out and about. The first two times I’d noticed him while I was at the gym or on a run, I’d totally chalked it up to coincidence. Small-town living stuff. And if I was being honest, my ego had been a little bruised at the fact he never came up and spoke to me. Or acknowledged our night together.
“What night, Liz!?” I groaned at my reflection. “We danced. That was it,” I had to remind myself. He hadn’t even tried to kiss me. Because if he had… I would have let him do that and so much more.
But when I started to notice him almost daily? Every morning, no matter where I was in town for the last two weeks, I stopped believing it was a coincidence. Not when I walked around town and he was usually across the street or even in the same stores I went into.
But he never walked up to me again like he had at the little biker bar on the outskirts of town.My very own little stalker,I mused as I stared at my reflection in the mirror and rolled my eyes.Stalker.I smirked.
Austin Hart was too tall and too handsome to blend in.
I had no idea what he thought he was doing when he followed me around. At six two and at least two hundred and twenty pounds of lean muscle, with reddish brown hair and a closely-trimmed beard and freckles that gave him grown man air with light blue eyes that made me want to drown in them, he was born to stand out. Freakishly handsome with a smile that made any woman of any age or backgrounds knees wobble. I couldn’thelp but notice the man who happened to be everywhere I turned.
Or at least it felt like he was.
Even late at night, I felt… him around me. His attention. His gaze. Which was ridiculous.
Not that I had been stalking him back or anything. Pshh… God, that was exactly what I had been doing. I had to be bored and lonely if I had shamelessly deep-dived into social media accounts to find out more about him.
Two days ago, Jackie noticed I’d been checking him out on Instagram, when she stopped by my place for brunch. Instead of teasing or shaming or questioning the hell out of why I was looking up one of Moonlit’s most eligible bachelors, he had shown me even more places to look him up on, including our town’s page. Everything I learned about him intrigued me.
Made me wonder more and more about him. And it annoyed me.
