The Night Shift Stalker

The passenger seat of my car has been empty for three months now, and I still catch myself looking at it like it owes me an apology, which is a stupid thing to admit but here we are. It's two in the morning at the Salt Fork pharmacy, the graveyard shift, and the fluorescent hum overhead is the only conversation I've had since eight. My name is Naomi, I'm thirty-four years old, I count other people's pills for a living, and I have been single since August, when a man I loved stood in my kitchen and told me a contract in Kandahar was worth more than two years of us.

I don't think about that. I think about insurance rejections and the box of shipping labels by the register.

The wide front windows of the pharmacy face the lot, and in the glass I can see the dark shape of my Honda sitting there alone, and sometimes, if the lighting hits right, I can almost see a reflection that isn't mine. A broad-shouldered ghost with a buzz cut, hands in his jacket pockets, the way Collin used to stand while I locked up. I know it's just my brain doing its nightly cruelty, projecting a man who left onto a window that never asked for it, but knowing a thing has never once stopped me from feeling it. I wipe down the counter for the fourth time. The clock says 2:14. Salt Fork, population somewhere north of nothing, two miles from the base gate, does not exactly keep a girl distracted.

That's when I see him.

Not in the window this time. In my peripheral vision, out at the edge of the lot, where the gravel ends and the scrub brush starts, there's a lamppost with a dying bulb, and there is a man leaning against it. I only catch the shape of him, one shoulder cocked against the metal, arms crossed, completely still, the way certain men learn to stand when they've spent years being paid to watch things. My ribs go tight around my lungs, that specific old squeeze, and I don't even have to turn my head to know. Three months, an ocean, half a planet, and my body still recognizes that silhouette before my brain can file the paperwork.

"Nope," I say out loud, to nobody, to the register, to the antacids. "Nope, no, absolutely not!"

Because here's the part I haven't told anyone, not my sister, not the group chat, not the woman who does my nails: Collin called me from the airport six days ago. He's back stateside, he said, with six weeks before anything else, and he'd like to talk, and I told him in a voice I kept impressively level that I had nothing to say to a man who chose a deployment over a shared couch. I hung up. I did not block the number, which should tell you exactly how level my voice actually was. And now he's standing at the edge of my parking lot at two in the morning like some kind of distance-challenged lighthouse, and I am going to fill this soldier's prescription and go home and not think about it.

The bell over the door jingles and in comes a young man, twenty-three at least, base uniform rumpled, face shiny with fever, sweating and shivering at the same time the way only a sick soldier can manage.

"Evening," he croaks, sliding a paper across the counter. "Doc called it in, said you'd have it ready."

"Amoxicillin?" I check the bag against the screen. "Yeah, it's been sitting here since ten. You look terrible, hon."

"Feels like somebody packed my skull in wet sand," he says, and laughs, which turns into a cough. "Ma'am, you got any of those little packets of soup? Like the crackers but soup?"

"Second aisle, next to the batteries. Drink the whole course, even after you feel better, and I mean it, I will know." I ring him up, count his change, tell him to go to bed, and he shuffles out with a wave, and for four whole minutes my brain was occupied with useful things. Then the bell goes quiet and the silence comes back and my eyes go straight to the window like a dog to a dropped sandwich.

He's still there. The lamppost man. And I know it's Collin now because he shifted his weight, and there is exactly one man on this earth who stands like his knees were installed by the lowest bidder and still owns the whole lot while doing it.

I should call the sheriff. I should call my sister. I should do literally anything other than what I actually do, which is nothing, which is go back to my register, restock the cold medicine, and feel his eyes on me through two panes of glass like a hand resting flat between my shoulder blades. Not grabbing. Just resting. Patient.

By four the store has been empty for an hour, and I do my walk-through, lights off aisle by aisle, register closed out, keys in my fist the way they teach you, and I stand at the door for a second before I lock it, looking at that figure out in the dark. He hasn't moved in two hours. That takes either discipline or obsession, and with Collin it was always hard to tell the difference, which was part of the problem and, God help me, part of the appeal.

I lock the door, and instead of heading straight for the car, I step out onto the curb under the neon sign, the one with the dead letter so it just says PHARMAC and has since before I was born, and I let the light wash over me. I let him see me. Arms at my sides, work shirt and jeans and a coat, hair coming loose from its tie, standing in the cold like an idiot, and I feel the weight of his stare settle on me from forty yards away, and it's warm and it's furious and I hate that it's warm.

"You've got two minutes," I call across the gravel, because apparently I have no self-preservation instincts at all, "and then I'm calling Deputy Ruiz, who owes me for the sinus infection I fixed him up with last winter."

He peels off the lamppost and walks over, and it takes him maybe ten seconds and every one of them is too long. Up close he's the same, thirty-seven and leaner than when he left, a new scar through one eyebrow, eyes like he never once slept on that entire continent.

"Naomi."

"Don't say my name like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you didn't leave it in my kitchen in August."

He looks at the ground, then at me, and his jaw works. "The contract ended early. I've been stateside six days. I've driven out here four of those six nights and I haven't once come past the light, and I know how that sounds, and I'm not asking you to forgive it."

"Good, because I'm not handing that out tonight. Possibly not this fiscal year."

"Fair." He shoves his hands in his pockets, and the gravel crunches under his boots, and somewhere out by the highway a truck goes by with its high beams on. "You look good."

"I look like someone who's been awake for twenty hours counting other people's Vicodin."

"That's what I said. Good."

And there it is, the thing about him, the dry, sure, awful warmth of him, and I hate it, and my stomach does the thing anyway. "Why the parking lot, Collin? Why not a phone call like a person?"

"Because if I called, you'd hang up, and I figured watching you be okay was better than nothing." He says it flat, no performance, and it lands with the impact of a dropped weight. "It was a bad call. The leaving. I knew it at the gate and I've known it every day since, and I'm not here to talk you out of your anger, I just... couldn't be in this town and not see you. Even from out there."

I stare at him. The neon buzzes. My breath fogs and drifts sideways.

"You watched me through the window for two hours."

"Two hours and eleven minutes. You restocked the cold medicine twice."

"You counted."

"I count everything," he says. "It's the whole reason we broke up, probably. I couldn't stop calculating the cost of things that didn't have a price."

My phone buzzes in my coat pocket. I don't want to look, but I look, because that's who I am at four in the morning. Unknown number.