Everything goes fuzzy, the pain spreading from my cheek, seeping into my veins until the agony is all I feel. Blood trickles from my nose and onto the seat.
“Fucking crazy,” the driver mutters under his breath. “Just crazy.”
I almost laugh but it hurts. I’m crazy?
God, but maybe I am.
Maybe none of this is really happening, just a figment of my imagination.
But as much as I wish that were true, I know it’s real, just as the pain is real.
I’m going to die here.
I don’t know how long I lie like this in the backseat, hair over my face, feeling like the leather is going to swallow me whole.
But eventually the car slows, then stops, like I knew it eventually would.
Every ride must come to an end.
Even mine.
“Wait here,” the man says as he turns off the car, as if I have a choice.
I almost laugh again, getting just enough power to push myself up and look. He leaves the car, locking the door, and then strides off toward the mist. I’m not sure where we are, the quarry maybe. I can barely make out the forest on either side of the car, but in front of us is a wide-open space covered with fast-moving fog.
The man keeps walking forward into the mist and stops, back to me.
Then out of the fog comes a shadow, a tall man in a long coat.
The two of them have a conversation, lit by the fog lights from the car.
The tall man keeps looking my way, and it’s then that I know for sure it’s the man I saw under the streetlight in Upper Haight.
My stalker.
But when he starts striding toward me, his coat flowing behind him, followed by my driver, that’s when I realize the truth.
And the truth feels like horror.
In the wavering headlights his face comes into focus.
The face that once took my breath away, that compelled me to follow him like a hound after a scent.
My stalker is the sexy-suit man.
They are one and the same.
How could I have been so stupid?
How could one person give me such separate feelings, fear and terror in one version of him, and desire and lust in the other?
It doesn’t really matter now though.
The lust and desire are gone.
All I feel is fear.
He walks toward the car, eyes on me the whole time as if he can clearly see me, his strides elegant and powerful, like a panther. The graceful walk before they pounce.