Page 56 of My Last Dance

“It just…it irks me,” I announced, flopping on my back while munching on a twizzler after dinner.

“What irks you?” Ria asked without taking her eyes off her bio textbook.

“That he won’t tell me what his stupid job is.” I stared up at our ceiling fan going round and round. “It’s gotta be something bad ifhe’s not telling me.”

Ria was so silent that I lifted up on my elbows to make sure she was still breathing.

Her face lit up with an amused grin. “I love this.”

“Love what?”

“You’ve got it bad.” She threw her textbook aside and tore off her reading glasses. “Finally,you’re the one losing it over a guy, not me.”

“I amnotlosing it,” I argued.

“Yeah, you kinda are, girlie. And that’s perfectly okay, but you know what this calls for, don’t you?”

“No?” I asked more than said.

“A stakeout.” She wagged her eyebrows. “We have to follow him to his job. I bet he’s a waiter, we’ll follow him to the restaurant and sit in his section. I wanna meet the man that finally made my bestie fall. C’mon, let’s go.”

I was shaking my head in an instant. “We can’t just follow him.”

She grabbed my wrist to pull me up off the bed. “Uhhh,yes,we can, and we will.”

_______

A half hour later, Ria, Paige, and I were all sitting in Ria’s warm truck, avoiding the drizzly fall night while watching the entrance to the Smithson guys’ dorm.

“I think those are overkill,” I said, motioning to the binoculars Ria was holding to her face.

“Hey, can we get some mozzarella sticks when we get to the restaurant?” Paige asked from the backseat.

“Ooh yeah, hopefully your man gives us dinner on the house, you think he would?” Ria asked.

“Guys, he might not even be a waiter.”

“Yeah, you never know, he could be—” she cut herself off with a gasp. “There he is!”

Wearing black joggers and a hoodie, Richard Charles Kappers the Third strode across the campus lawn, stopping to chat a couple times with different people. He’d only been here about a month and he already seemingly made more friends than I had in a whole year. It wasn’t fair. Where he attracted people with his warmth, it felt like Ihad some kind of freezing power that kept people away from me. I was a nice person, damnit, why couldn’t I—

“Maybe he’s a personal trainer? Like at a gym?” Ria frowned. “He’s not really dressed for anything else.”

Richard pulled up his hood and took off in a jog down the sidewalk toward downtown.

Now I was really curious. “Follow him, just stay back.”

We inched along, pulling into random driveways and turning down a couple different sideroads just to pop back to the main road a couple times while we followed him.

By the time we made it to the small downtown, he looked both ways to make sure no one was watching him, then he dipped into a dark building.

I squinted around for a name on the building but couldn’t find one.

After parking a few blocks down, we ran through the rain and entered the building through the same door he used.

“Umm, so this is weird?” Paige asked, tucking her dark hair behind her ears.

“Yeah,” I mumbled, worrying my bottom lip. Inside was just a dark hallway and a small, older elevator. I was now positive that Richard was up to no good.

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