*I like doing segments of the same story for my prompts. Maybe they will equal something like a whole novel one day. More likely I’ll have to hack away at them, cutting and pasting until I get a useable short story. Today’s prompt (“I’m being followed”) is courtesy of BareKnuckleWriter. I just started following her. I think I’m gonna like ‘er!
The Cycle (V)
Many criminalists, and probably most anyone else who a longstanding career in most any aspect of criminal law enforcement, would probably agree that a woman should follow her instinct in regards to “bad feelings.” If you feel like you’re being watched, you likely are. If you think you’re being followed, it pays to be paranoid. As the great author Joseph Heller once said, Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.
Kurt Cobain agreed, and look how he ended up. He chuckled at his own tasteless joke with evident self-approbation.
The women he had followed had no idea they were being watched. When he finally approached them, disarming and all smiles, they had no idea they had likely seen him before. He took no great pains to avoid being seen. That was how you got noticed. Someone trying to hide behind a hoodie or a menu, or surreptitiously slip into a doorway appeared suspicious. His great talent was blending in. He knew he was too classically handsome, too good-looking, to go unnoticed entirely all the time, but he had perfected the art of looking nonchalant or preoccupied. Too busy to notice anyone, let alone be approached.
Even still, every once and a while, a woman would approach him. Not usually the one he was observing, thankfully, but some clueless, brazen bitch who had no idea that the inconvenience of her advances far outweighed any minute ego boost which he might derive. Yes, sometimes the shyer ones would just try to catch his eye, offer a tentative smile. But then there were the ones who practically sauntered over. Try to buy his coffee, make small talk, perhaps actually thinking they would leave with a phone number or a date. He was usually able to shut them down quickly and effectively, without hurting their pride too much– a wounded woman would remember him– but he always had to abort whatever mission he was on so as not to draw any further attention.
Even those instances where he’d been “spotted” did not concern him greatly. He’d had plenty of practice over the years, plenty of time to perfect the art of the hunt. There had been plenty of times when he’d followed people just to see if he could. There had been many times when he had no intention of doing anything but following. He didn’t consider it time wasted. Rather he thought of himself as an actor learning a part. Like those prissy Hollywood types they called “method actors.” Only he didn’t get so involved in his work that he wanted to go home and swallow a bottle of pills or drown in a bottle. He liked his work.
And after his work became less random, more focussed on what came next, he began to be more selective about the object of his attentions. When he finally moved on to phase two (what he was scarcely aware that he mentally referred to glibly as “the meet and greet,”) he was pleased to discover an unintended result of his “blending in.” Often the women he engaged had in fact noticed him, but were largely unaware that they had noticed him. Sometimes they said things like, “Do I know you? You look so familiar…” The fact of his having been an unobtrusive presence in the background of their local grocery or coffee bar had resulted in a sort of false sense of familiarity, of which his targets were not consciously unaware. In his efforts to learn master his craft with minimal mistake or misadventure, he had unintentionally perfected the art of being present just enough to be familiar, but not enough to be creepy. The end payoff was that the women were often easier to lull into a false sense of security. Their early warning systems, their “bad feelings,” had essentially been short-circuited.
alienredqueen 