I’m sitting in the garden under a nice, shady canopy from a perennial with my laptop in front of me when I get interrupted.“Well, fancy seeing you here alone. Where’s your better half?” Lemon’s voice calls me as he approaches me, bouncing off his feet like usual. I raise my eyes from the laptop screen in order to acknowledge his presence, as he grins sunnily at me. Sometimes, I wonder where the heck the dude keeps all this energy from. It’s nearly 08:00 PM in the night, and he looks like he just rolled out of bed after a good night’s sleep, ready to go raring to enjoy his day.“Coraline had to go visit her parents after work. She said she will be here shortly. I send Laurent off with her for protection.”“Oh, right, you still got a stalker on your tail. I haven’t heard of him recently, so I thought that problem was sorted.”“No, not really. He's just missing at the moment, that’s all. The police told us to be as careful as possible, which is what we’re doing now.”“I see,” he takes a
“So, there’s a new villain in town,” Louise concludes after listening to my rendition of how the dinner with Coraline’s parents went. The moment I stepped into the cafeteria of King’s College campus for lunch, my friends had been on my case, asking for the details of the dinner because I texted them in panic in the group chat, we created once. After that, they had become very interested, and I thought that by today that interest just might be forgotten.But there was no such luck.“I would not go as far as to call it a villain,” Annabelle amends, quirking her head contemplatively, “maybe a new menace.”“What’s the difference?”“I don’t know, but it feels too much calling a land developing company a villain, like, come on! It’s like calling frozen yogurt fantastic. Like, you get to call ice cream fantastic, but frozen yogurt? Come on, it just does not fit!”“I have a lot of questions about your thought process there, also, what the heck had frozen yogurt ever done to you…”Mal rolls hi
“Jace Greyson!” Coraline’s voice comes, breaking the silence of my home. I snap my head up, realizing that it’s actually dark in my room. I had been completely occupied and focused on the information gathering I’d been doing that I didn't even notice night falling.I stand up from my chair, hastily turning my monitor off so Coraline won’t see my latest research project. I want to have more information on this before talking to her about it, and I still didn’t have the relevant details yet. Not enough to form a plan or give an explanation.Coraline bursts into my room just when I’m straightening from my monitor, and I’m taken aback to see the thunderous expression on her face.That coupled with her yelling out my full name before cannot be a good thing. After our courtship started, Coraline would normally greet me with a kiss as soon as we see each other again.“Hey, Coraline,” I smile at her, trying to diffuse the tension that seemed to be quickly forming although none of us had start
Coraline leaves after dinner to meet up with her parents rather than spend the night at my place, saying that she feels like it would be safer if she stayed with them for a few days. I feel so very bad when I see how tired she looks with this new problem piling on top of all the old ones. It’s bad enough we got a stalker on our tails, but land sharks too. Granted, it was technically not my problem, but as long as Coraline associated with me, I would be concerned about it one way or the other.Hell, even if Coraline decides tomorrow that she wants nothing to do with me, breaks our relationship, and resigns from her job, I’m still going to be invested. She was that important.Lemon, who had made himself scarce throughout the dinner, opted to let us have some ‘couple-y time’ rather than stay and be the third wheel. His words, not mine. He’d gone out by the looks of it, a soft-looking, dark-colored leather jacket draped over his shoulders and wearing a scruffy pair of dusty shoes. Althoug
“I’m just asking this to clarify some things, you do remember how you got a murderous psycho on your tail, right?” Lemon asks as we trudge down the road that leads to Coraline’s neighborhood, huddled in enough clothes to ward off the chill. “It’s such a moonless night tonight, and this area is pretty empty. Prime serial killer hunting ground if you ask me.”“You invited yourself over to this trip, remember?” I ask him, a bit amused, “I didn’t demand that you tag along.”“No, but you were implying that you would prefer to have my company than be alone, miserable, and cold in the night.” A flash of white through the darkness indicates that he had grinned at me.“I’m not implying anything, but if I were, to be honest, I am grateful to have a buddy while coming out here,” I admit, making the buddy in question bark out a quiet ‘hah!’ Quiet, because we’re not exactly supposed to be roaming this area.“I knew you loved me,” a smug reply comes, “that’s nice to know and all, but I couldn’t hel
“Are they freaking following us?!” Lemon screams, whipping his head to look over his shoulder as we raced down the road, trying to get away from the hooligans who are now in pursuit. If it was just them and just us, we don’t have to worry about running away, but they have the power of a car behind them, and that will not work in our favor.I am trying to keep a clear head and weave through the narrower roads away from the main road in hopes of getting away, all while cursing myself for coming up with this hir-brained scheme.“We need to take a hard left,” I inform Lemon, trying to catch my breath from the late-night workout, “the car is parked about two streets away, if we get there we can out-drive them!”“How do you know that? I can't tell anything because of the dark and these stupid, look-alike roads! Oh, but suburbs are a nightmare!”“Stop being so dramatic! And turn left now!”We turn left, nearly running into a trash cab due to the momentum and start to pound our feet to the as
Fortunately, Coraline does not realize that I’ve been in the neighborhood spying before, and because I intend to keep it that way, I make no mention of it. Even when Coraline grumbles about the vandals having bombed them with paintballs, I refrain from telling her that I already know about it. Coraline only wants to vent to me, she doesn’t even inquire if I had found any new information regarding her situation.So, I listen to her as a good boyfriend would, and ask her, “so are you going to report this to the police?”Coraline frowns, “We already did. I made mom and dad go to the police precinct for our division. But when they called me back, they said that the cops, while they did file the complaint, brushed it off as just kids being kids. Told them they should get security cameras.”That explains the remarks made by the vandals last night. The cops were in their pockets. It still surprised me how easy it was to bribe the angels of justice to do anyone’s dirty deeds or turn a blind e
Monday comes and I get a call to meet Eriksson for the business regarding the Falenridge case.“Your boys and girls are finally getting some momentum,” he notifies me as he scrolls through the news articles and social media posts about my friendly eco-conservationists on his laptop, “I’m impressed. Your social media person is doing a really good job, managing to get them going literally out of nothing.We sit in his office with a cup of sweet-smelling coffee in front of each one of us. It’s nearly noon, but I haven’t been able to get much sleep lately, so I feel really tired. Everything that was happening weighed on my mind, and I feel like I’m slowly becoming an insomniac. It had been three days since the incident with the vandals and I’d found myself going to spy around the Grangers’ brownstone last night, careful not to be seen by the brand-new security cameras they’d installed, and made sure not to have Lemon follow me. Not that he would, because after that first espionage trip, h