The chase is on

Nothing reasonable could've made me follow the skinny man in the wool suit. When a stranger gawks at you, you don't flag him down and ask, "Hey, is there something on my face?" My blood was up. It could be that whatever I'd been rolling on the night before was still running through my veins, but I think I was just hungry for something solid. There was a cold line running down my back that felt like a cut. If I took off this tarnished silver dress and looked over my shoulder in the mirror, I was sure I wouldn't see anything, and that wasn't relieving. The man who couldn't keep his eyes to himself was real. When I yelled at him he answered. That was what I needed.

For a middle aged man in black brogues, he was fast. By the time I gathered up my things and got outside–fuck it's so cold–I'd lost sight of him. I spun in circles, knowing how crazy I must look. One more has been crawling out of the gutter with half a head on their shoulders. "I just had a bad night!" I wanted to scream at anyone watching. No one was watching. And, shivering, I knew I hadn't had a bad night. There was a mark on my ass that would bruise. Why did I have to be such a fan of rough treatment?

My eyes searched the sidewalks and street corners. With the trees giving up their leaves, everything was coming together in a muddy gray blob. Possibly, just possibly, he wasn't real at all, I thought, pricking myself with the idea as an act of self torture. You're going really crazy now. Won't that be nice?

At that moment the idea of a padded cell sounded pretty nice. Cheaper than the rent I was paying for a loft downtown, and I wouldn't be touch starved with people wrestling me into a straitjacket every day after feeding time. If I didn't catch sight of him just then, maybe I would've accepted my fate then and there.

He was walking away from the station with his briefcase under his arm. Not quickly. He didn't look back to see if I was chasing him. Seeing him scared me, too, because he didn't seem like he was worried at all. In the station he'd seemed terrified of the idea of me, but then

We were in an alleyway. Fuck, why does it still hurt so bad? He was taller than he looked at the station. It didn't make him any more imposing. As I looked up at him, he was stretching away from me, or seemed to, like a road crawling up a hill. I was seeing things.

"I mean what I said," I say, I said.

His eyes flickered. "So did I." His voice sounded familiar. Of course, it seemed like we'd been talking for a few minutes already. I might not have remembered what we were talking about, but maybe my ears did.

We stared at each other for a long second. I couldn't say what I was waiting for. That made it even more surprising when I was the one to speak next. "Whatever needs to happen to make this go away," I said.

The bald man shifted his weight. He looked paler, now.