Black Ice - The Twisted Thread - Part 1

[kittydesade]

She looked across the room and he was staring at her. Pale blue eyes that stood out against his half-sunburned pale face and scraggly black hair. The kind of eyes that usually stared at you from a television screen right before the good cowboy blew the bad outlaw's brains out. These were just as striking, and the stare was anything but impersonal.

Randi dropped her eyes back to her book. She was here to study, not to stare at men in libraries. Of all the stupid places to pick someone up, or get picked up, a library wasn't on the top of that list but it wasn't anywhere near the bottom, either. You didn't pick someone up for a date in a library, you got book recommendations or invitations to a bridge club or something. Cheap music CDs you could steal to your hard drive. Not boyfriends.

He didn't look like boyfriend material anyway and why was she looking again? Oh god, he was looking her way. Head back down, quick.

He still had amazing eyes.

He really didn't look like he was boyfriend material, or like he belonged in a library. Black leather draped over his back, chains hung from his hip, his fingers were adorned with all manner of garish looking bling and a pair of aviator shades hung from a pocket over his chest. His boots stomped through the room despite the profundity of carpet. And his chains rattled. And he was coming over nearby.

Nearby and past her. Whatever he was looking for he'd found it, and he didn't even stop by the desk to check out any books. Then again, he'd been in the reference section. You didn't check out reference books.

She took a breath and let it out again, muttering words under her breath that didn't belong in a public library with kids present. Now she was completely distracted from what she'd come here to find, to do. Studying was all right, but now changing first aid procedures were the farthest thing on her mind. Right now every turn of the bastard's head and the way his jacket hung on his shoulders was sticking in her mind, and the way his eyes had fixed on her face for just that one moment, and she couldn't even explain why. It wasn't like they'd been aware of each other for more than four or five minutes.

Irritated, she closed the books and put back the medical text, grabbed her battered and dog-eared study guides and shoved them back into her satchel. Maybe she should just go home and try to study, despite the upstairs neighbors. At least she knew what they were like.




"Oh no. Don't look around."

Randi straightened but managed to avoid doing exactly what she'd been told not to do. "You realize that saying that to anyone is a guarantee that they'll do that exact thing?" Her friend snorted. "What is it?"

"Don't look. Over your left shoulder. There's a man staring at you with this really weird..."

She didn't have to look around; the truck's rear-view mirror was right in front of her and if she leaned at the right angle, strange as it must seem to the outside observer, she could see him. "Oh, christ."

He sat on the bench on the opposite side of the street. Maybe he'd been chewing on a burger earlier, but all that was left were the wrappers and the greasy remnants of a paper bag next to him. One ankle crossed over the other knee and he looked like he was lounging at a bus stop, except they'd closed that route down last year. The pole and schedule were gone, but they'd left the bench behind. The better to stalk you with, my dear.

She shook her head and returned to her tuna sandwich, chewing the thing as though it had personally offended her. Zenya glanced over, frowning. "You okay?"

"Yeah," she shook her head. "I just... I saw him in the library maybe a day ago..."

"You saw him? Like, you remember him from fifteen minutes in the library or you ran into him and had a chat?" Zenya was a little too curious. Randi favored her with a glare.

"No, I mean, I looked across the room and... I don't know, he was just there. I remember he had these really blue eyes. Pale blue." And, looking once again in the rear-view mirror, he still had pale blue eyes. Right before he hid them behind aviator glasses. "And he stared at me then, too."

It wasn't as funny, now. Zenya turned around in her seat to stare through the back window at him.

"What are you doing?" Randi hissed.

"Letting him know he's being watched," she shrugged. "Letting him know you know he's there. If he's stalking you, he should at least ..."

She whacked her friend on the arm. "At least what, know he's got my attention? I don't want him to know I'm paying attention. I don't want to get to know him, I don't want him around. He's creepy."

Her friend pursed her lips and clucked her tongue, straightening up enough to get a good look. He hadn't moved. She should be able to get a real good eyeful. "He's kind of hot."

Randi stared.

"In a slimy, bad boy kind of a way." Zenya's eyebrows arched a question, and she took a big bite of her meatball sub. Tomato sauce rolled down from the corners of her mouth.

"That's disgusting." Whether she was talking about the sandwich or the man was left ambiguous, though she figured it applied equally well to both. Thankfully, Zenya didn't try to up the ante by talking with her mouth full. They finished their sandwiches in peace, while she waited for him to come across the street and do something. He didn't. She didn't understand.

"He doesn't look like he wants anything..." Randi slurped the last of her very watered down soda from the bottom of the cup. He'd moved about as far as to stretch out further on the bench, but he neither seemed like he intended on moving anywhere nor like he intended to stop watching her. "Maybe he's a PI."

"Why would a PI be watching you?" And then, a second later. "Did you do something? Did you get into trouble without me?"

Whack. "When the hell would I get into trouble without you? All I do is eat, sleep, work, and study. I don't even go out to the clubs anymore."

Whack back. "You know, I noticed that. Cute Bartender keeps asking about you."

"Cute Bartender can just sit and wait till I pass my state quals." All the shoulder-whacking turned into a slap-fight, which would have ended in laughter had they not gotten a call-out just then. "Shit. To be continued, don't think you're getting off this easy."

"Yeah, right. Want to run down your stalker on the way out of here?"

She shook her head as she hit the lights. "Don't even joke about that. Maybe he'll get bored and be gone by the time we're back. Dispatch, what do you have for us?"




He was gone from the bench by the time they got back. He didn't appear for the rest of the day. She made it home without incident, wondering if she was being paranoid now, if it was just some sort of strange quirk of fate, or maybe just a guy being shy. If he'd noticed her in the library and took an interest but didn't feel confident enough to ask her out, maybe he'd been watching her looking for an opening.

Although the idea of someone who looked and dressed like that not being confident seemed counter-intuitive.

Maybe not. Didn't matter. She was going to bed.

Pajamas on, teeth brushed, scrubbing the sleep from her eyes. She contemplated a shower, something about the whole effort of the day left her feeling a thick film of something over her skin. Dismay, chagrin, regret. One of those words that meant something was off just a tiny bit but not enough to really fuss over. Which meant no shower, no changing clothes yet again, just falling into bed and hoping that sleep cleared the muck from her mind. It usually did.

If sleep happened at all. Right now nothing was happening except that she was lying on her back and staring at the ceiling. Blue in various shades where the moonlight and shadows stippled over paint, the occasional flash of tint as a car drove by. Very occasional. It was pretty late. Her body was exhausted, her emotions had exhausted themselves into dullness, but she still couldn't sleep. Her mind churned over the man who had been watching her and what that meant.

He wasn't handsome, she decided. Although memory distorted his actual features, his nose was too big and too beak-like, his hair was too greasy, his face too joweled and his eyes were like a serial killer's. No, the eyes were fact. The rest of him was exaggerated or minimized but the eyes were fact, she remembered that. Staring at her across the room, and again from behind his sunglasses. He had an intensity to him, a way of looking at her as though he could pin her to the wall like a butterfly on a piece of cardboard. "Not the mental picture I was going for," she muttered to her subconscious. "But it'll do."

Because that was the kind of mental image that went with stalkers, wasn't it. Death's head moths silencing women's lips. She didn't want to be silenced. She didn't particularly want to speak out, but she damn well didn't want to be shut up. She just wanted to go her way. She hadn't meant to trip over some man and spend the next couple of days obsessing about him. He swaggered, and he had a damn short sword strapped to his thigh.

"This is stupid," she snapped, throwing the covers off and stalking to the fridge. If this day was going to end like this she demanded ice cream before bed, and fuck diets. Excuse, meal plans. All problems involving males required ice cream.

"Okay, so..." Randi scowled. "I'm talking to myself. Great." Internal monologues belonged inside the brain, especially when she didn't even have a cat or dog to talk to and pretend it could talk back. She could call Zenya or Mark, but it was a little too late for that. And cute as it sounded, she was not going to talk to either Ben or Jerry.

So, there was a guy. So what? She wouldn't see him tomorrow, she wasn't likely to see him the day after that. It, he, was a non-issue. Him and the bike he rode in on. She was perfectly capable of thinking about things that didn't involve him. Like this perfectly good pint of fudgey ice cream she was tapping a spoon on instead of eating. Grocery shopping. What she could have in her freezer that wasn't fudge. When she would find the time to do said grocery shopping, what with needing to study and needing to work. Studying. Getting back to the library. Wondering if he would be there again when she did.

Oh, look, she was back to the guy again. Son of a bitch.

If she still had some of those sleeping pills that, all right, had been expired for two years, she might be able to get a good night's sleep. Even the ice cream wasn't helping now. She stuffed it back in the freezer amidst the frozen meals, no point in letting it go to waste, and dragged her sorry carcass back to bed. One thing she didn't need, apart from thoughts of the greasy-haired biker badass, were headaches from lack of sleep. But unlike the boot-prints of the stranger stomping around her brainpan, her headaches could affect someone else's day, even someone else's life. Responsibility tucked her back into bed. This time, to her surprise, she slept.




Randi spent the next few days looking over her shoulder. She didn't manage to trip over anything, and didn't see him behind her, either. After three days of checking rear-view mirrors and the reflections in shop windows for a tall, broad-shouldered man with scraggly black hair and sunglasses too dark to see the look in his eyes, she finally stopped. He wasn't there. Maybe he wasn't ever going to be there, maybe it had all just been an aberration.

Aberrations didn't make the area between her shoulder-blades itch. They didn't fill her waking life with thoughts and daydreams and increasingly elaborate fantasies. They didn't act like this. Something had triggered her thinking this way, if nothing else. It could either be internal or external. She wasn't a psychic, wasn't a witch or anything, but she knew enough about that part of the world to know that it could be someone putting a hex on her. Why anyone would want to do that and why it would involve a leather-clad bad boy was beyond her ability to imagine, though.

Scottie picked her up to go grocery shopping. From the library, too, and she swiveled her head left and right as they walked out, making sure there were no bikes in the parking lot and no bikers in the courtyard.

"You okay?" Scottie gave her a funny look; Randi straightened. She hadn't realized it looked that obvious.

Casual shrug. Dismissing the problem as nothing serious. "I'm all right. It's nothing, it's just... there was a guy a couple of days ago, I thought he was following me for a little while there."

Her friend frowned. "Following you? Shouldn't you go to the police with that?"

"He didn't do anything threatening, just stared at me a couple of times. And I haven't seen him for the past couple of days, maybe he just decided he had better things to do. I don't know, I just... I keep expecting to see him around the corner."

He snorted. "You keep looking around over your shoulder like that you'll break your neck. So he just stared at you a couple of times and then left? Either he got better at hiding or he lost interest. I can keep an eye out, if you want?"

She shook her head as they grabbed a cart, headed into the store. With one last look around that he noticed, she knew he did by the look he gave her, so he'd probably keep an eye out anyway. But she didn't feel like remembering enough of the man's features to describe them to Scottie, and without a decent description tall dark-haired thug-looking biker dude fit a lot of people around the city. And a lot of them shopped at discount grocery stores like they were doing today.

"Maybe he did lose interest," she muttered. That would be the ideal thing, at least. Wandered off to bother someone else.

Scottie looked over his shoulder at her as they started down the grocery aisle, back of the store, working their way forward. "Maybe he figured stalking you wasn't the way to go."

"You think?" Randi gave him one of her "you idiot" looks. "Way to go for what?"

"To get your attention. Win your affections, whatever you want to call it." He was getting a kick out of her incredulous, disgusted faces. "Oh, come on, guy sees you in the library, guy follows you around for a day or so, what else do you think it means?"

"That..." She tried, but she couldn't come up with much of anything. "He's crazy?"

Scottie rolled his eyes at her, all but throwing the bag of potato chips at her chest. "Probably that he thinks you're hot. Only he's too shy to ask you out so he just lurks and stares until he gets over it."

She stared at him. Tossed the chips in the shopping cart and stared some more, until he was almost around the corner and she had to trot after him to keep up. "Wait a second.. shy? Seriously, you're saying..."

"Hey, shyness happens to everyone. Even greasy-haired bikers with too much leather and great big knives and, what, a Harley?"

Randi shrugged, hopping up on the back of the cart and pedaling it after him. "I don't know, I didn't look, and I don't know bikes. I guess. It was big and it looked loud." She tilted her head to one side. "Think he was compensating for something?"

A choking noise came wafting over from around the corner. She smirked. After a second Scottie chucked a couple loaves of bread at her, which she caught and dumped into the cart. "I wouldn't know. But if you want to find out, I bet he'd be willing to show you."

Her screech drew attention from everyone else in the aisle. "That is ... gross, Scottie Markinson. That is... ew." God, and now she was thinking about it. She dug her palms into her eyes, trying to clear the image out of her brain. "Oh, god, why did you have to go and say that."

"Uh-huh, you're thinking about him, aren't you? You're thinking about it right now. All those ... all his sweaty hands, groping at you, while his big..."

"All his hands? He has more than two hands?"

"I don't know, you tell me."

At least it was distracting. Okay, now she had this image of an eight-armed-and-handed, half-naked biker guy chasing her around a parking lot (and why a parking lot she had no idea) lodged in her brain, but at least it wasn't realistic and could be shoved away with nightmares about John Malkovich and that weird one with the shower and the engagement ring made out of sculpted sugar. And it was kind of funny. "This is a stupid conversation. We're not having this conversation."

"Okay, do you want to have the one about the biker guy you don't know and haven't introduced yourself to who's in love with you?"

If her sneakers could have screeched to a halt on the grocery store linoleum, she would have. "Whoa. Hang on, there." No one had mentioned the L word. She ... no, no one was mentioning the L word here. "Hang on a second." But the words stuck in her throat and came out strangled and dry and she couldn't think of anything to follow that up. She needed a drink. Water, not alcohol.

"In love, infatuated, got a crush on, what's the difference?"

Randi could breathe again. "There's a whole lot of difference. But it doesn't matter, since he isn't here anymore, and he's probably off doing whatever it is that people who ride Harleys and wander around in aviator Ray-Bans do. Beating up old ladies for their pension money, I don't know." She truly didn't know, but she didn't want to, either.

"Okay," Scottie shrugged, hands up in a gesture of surrender. Which he then turned into that raise-the-roof motion. "Just saying, you might want to rethink your whole work all day study all night thing, if you've got hot bikers on your ass."

She threw a bunch of bananas at him when he started whooping.




Rain battered the canvas she held, somewhat usefully, over her head. Water poured down her back hard enough for her to feel the weight of it. She still had four blocks to go before she could duck under the entryway overhang of her apartment building and have a hope in hell of staying dry.

Her head was bowed, her arms starting to ache, and she was focusing so much on dodging the various obstacles on the sidewalk that she completely missed the tall, stocky form in front of her.

"Oh, christ, sorry...." The impact knocked her hands open, the canvas flying out of them. "Aw, shit..."

She looked up and he looked back at her, pale blue eyes and eyebrows upturned in an expression that looked surprisingly innocent and pitiful from a biker guy. He looked confused. Surprised.

Why he should be surprised when he ran into her outside of her apartment building, she didn't know, but now she was standing in the rain and drenched and she didn't like it. She shoved past him and started to stomp home. Dripping wet now, it didn't make much sense to find anything else; she'd just have to peel off and change into dry clothes when she got upstairs.

"Hey, hang on, wait a second..." Before she could blink, a huge, thick coat was thrown over her head and shoulders and she could see again. His coat. It was big enough, and the few glimpses she'd caught of him through the rain he'd been wearing something big and black that made him look like a shadow monster. "I have a taser, you know."

"And are you going to shoot me with it while we're both dripping wet, surrounded by water?"

Several things surprised her about that. Starting with the fact that the motorcycle thug knew even basic physics and going on to the note of amusement in his voice. She looked up and sideways, trying to catch a glimpse of his face through the edge of the coat and the rain, which might even be slacking off by now. Maybe not. It was hard to tell. It was impossible to tell the expression on his face, so after a second glance she gave up trying.

"What are you doing here?" Straight-up question that maybe had a straight-up answer. Probably not.

He shrugged; at least, he made some kind of a movement with his arms and shoulders, one of which was still tucked around her with the coat as they walked. Slowly. "Looking for you."

Randi didn't know him enough to know what the hell that was in his voice. Softness. Tenderness? He meant something by it, and she could only half-hear him above the rain. Was it the softness right before the creepy stalker hurt you for not living up to his fantasies or the softness of a shy man trying to figure out how best to approach the object of his affections? And how the hell did she tell the difference?

"I have a taser," she muttered again. "And you're a creepy stalker."

"I'm not... really?" He didn't sound as though he believed it. She stuck her head out of the coat and glared at him. No, he looked more bemused than angry or that blank kind of calm serial killers had. Supposedly. Randi didn't know from serial killers but she did know from stalker boyfriends from the women she picked up and took to the ER while their men followed, crying how sorry they were and baby why you make me hurt you so bad? Why you hurt me so bad? The women didn't do that so soon, she'd noticed. The women who hurt their partners were still angry as their partners went off in the wagons, with themselves, with the people they'd hurt. And more often quiet, although not always.

Randi nodded, slow and deliberate. "You've been following me since we saw each other in the library. Which was a week ago. And now you're turning up outside my apartment. Yeah, I'd say that qualifies as creepy stalker territory."

"Oh."

She looked up again, this time incredulous. "You really didn't actually think of that?"

Another shrug. "I don't know, I guess I just... I guess I wasn't thinking."

Now that she was listening to him she heard that note of not knowing what was going on, not being too happy about it. Maybe he was as confused as she was, not able to get him out of her mind. He was just more aggressive and proactive about it. "Okay. I guess that's fair."

Only now they were in front of her building. The rain had almost stopped entirely, and after another second she shrugged out of his coat and pushed it gently back against him. He shook it out and slung it back over his shoulders. still soaked, but she appreciated the gesture.

"So, what do we do now?" He looked at her. She looked back at him.

Then she looked up at the sky. "I don't know, man, I don't... what do you want to do? I don't even know your name."

"It's Ray. Sullivan."

She even smiled a little. Normal. Banal. "I'm Randi. Randi Teller."

"Randi?" His eyebrows shot up again, but this time he smiled. He had a pretty nice smile.

"It's short for Miranda, and don't go getting any ideas. It's just a nickname." They both laughed, and he stuffed his hands in his pockets, almost shrugging his shoulders out of the jacket that hung there.

"So..." He spread his hands inside his pockets, she saw the fabric stretch. "Now what?"

"Now..."

Now it all seemed surreal. Like it hadn't really happened or maybe like it wasn't happening. They were just talking like two ordinary people, as though the way they met hadn't been incredibly weird. She'd have to be an idiot to invite him up, and she didn't want to.

But maybe there was a happy medium to that. Or maybe there was another way, a slower way. She opened her mouth to speak and he started, and then they laughed.

"Sorry," he half-drawled half-murmured. He had a strange cadence to his voice. It wasn't unlikeable, just going to take a little while to get used to. "Go ahead."

"Well. Now... You give me your number. And I run upstairs and find something to write it down on before I forget, and I give you my number. And then we start talking like normal people instead of big crow-like stalkers."

"Big..." Ray shook his head, chuckling, and gave her his digits. "You sure you can remember that all the way up there?"

They both looked up at her second-level apartment. She ducked under the overhang, flashing him a one-finger salute as she worked the key in the lock and dashed up the stairs, mouthing the numbers to herself as she went. Her sneakers squelched on the hardwood. She'd have to remember to get something to mop that up and she couldn't think about that now because she had to find something to write with. Something that she wouldn't drip on. Marker was in the kitchen drawer, white-board was magneted to the fridge. She wrote it down in big letters so she wouldn't accidentally erase it, then dried her hands and grabbed her cell phone out of her pocket. If she was lucky, it wasn't too soaked to work.

"Hello?" his confused voice came out of the speaker, crackling but there. She went to the window and waved down. "Oh, hey. Hello, there."

Randi smiled. Waved again. "Okay, now get going before I start thinking you really are a creepy stalker." Before she got ideas that didn't involve getting into dry clothes and curling up on the couch. Suddenly a lot of those fantasies were seeming more plausible. "We'll do this like normal people, okay? You can call me tonight when you figure out our first date."

Their first date? God, she really must be insane. She grabbed a dish towel and mopped up her footprints straight into the bathroom, stripping off her wet clothes and dumping them into the tub. Naked, she danced into the bedroom for something warm to throw on, and tried not to think as she crawled over the bed to where her bathrobe had gotten shoved down between the slats and the wall, what else felt good crawling around naked. Especially with big, agile hands like that.