Chapter Text
Albuquerque, New Mexico. Monday, January 30th, 2006. 14:25 (MST).
Carol Sturka is a woman of many talents. She can fry an egg on a good day. She can make a mean cup of coffee, if it’s to her own tastes, and no one else is in her general vicinity. She can drink a mild alcoholic under the table with little to no effort on her part, and has done as much on several occasions. She can write. Sure, what she writes may or may not be mindless crap, depending on the reader, and, sure, she isn’t yet published, or in possession of anything close to a finished manuscript, but she can write, nonetheless. She is a good employee: works hard, clocks in on time, leaves on time, and steals from the supply closet of whatever temp job she is working only when necessary.
Despite a plethora of glowing character references from anyone that has known her for less than five minutes, Carol Sturka is resolutely not personable. That trait, that fact, is highlighted within five seconds of her stepping foot into Albuquerque International Sunport.
She has been in a shitty mood all morning, all week, maybe. She wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, or whatever bullshit people say to excuse being an asshole, which is then made a billion times worse when her taxi shows up thirty minutes late. The driver is a balding creep, because of course he is. He is unequivocally the kind of man that Carol could only describe as a “stain on humanity’s already tarnished name,” and she says as much to his face before throwing a twenty dollar bill at him and storms into the airport.
If the thought isn’t beyond ludicrous, she could almost see cartoonish clouds of steam pouring out of her ears as her vision flashes crimson.
Sue her! She woke up on the wrong side of the bed.
The airport is crowded, probably far beyond intended capacity, and the check-in queue is already thirty miles long. Carol huffs out the breath she’s been holding since crossing the threshold of the airport, folding her arms over her chest, and tapping her foot in time with the ticking clock on the wall. She watches as the hands spin, entranced as they turn a full three-sixty, then another, until she loses count and gives up. The queue hasn’t moved yet.
“Fucking Christ,” she mutters under her breath, kicking the wheel of her suitcase. It teeters forward slightly, the handle knocking into the legs of some blonde in front of her. She turns, eyes narrowed at Carol, and Carol simply raises an eyebrow.
The woman relents with a sigh, and Carol’s lips turn upwards in victory.
“Yeah, thought so.”
Apparently, she didn’t say that as quietly as she wanted to, if the five foot and several-inches-taller-than-Carol that stares her down, once again, is anything to go off.
“Do you have an issue, lady?” she asks, pushing her hair up and out of her face with a pair of black sunglasses that, in humble Carol’s estimate, cost more than her monthly pay cheque.
“No. No issue,” Carol replies with a humourless snort of a laugh.
The queue moves, finally, and splits off into three separate lines. Carol joins the shortest of the three, the one on the left, and silently thanks some God she doesn’t believe in as the woman at the desk beckons her forward. She hands over her documents, grabs her boarding pass without issue, and leaves the bulkier of her two bags with the woman.
Security is a breeze. Aside from the handsy TSA guy that searches her (because, God forbid, a woman forgets to downsize her moisturiser to a smaller bottle), she gets through without incident (after she agrees to throw it away). A dollar store moisturiser is decidedly not worth a fight right now, not when she has a plane to be miserable on.
The first flight is, expectedly, a nightmare. Carol is shoved into a middle seat against her will, stuck between an old guy with untreated sleep apnea, and a woman who, as soon as the plane leaves the ground, removes her shoes and socks, and tucks her feet up onto the seat, right beside Carol’s armrest.
Disgusted doesn’t quite describe the expression that plasters itself across her face for the entire duration, and she resorts to sitting on her hands to keep from lashing out.
The three hours pass by slowly, with Carol silently fuming between the two most insufferable people she has ever encountered. Well, maybe not the most insufferable, because, fuck, everyone she has ever met in her thirty-three and a half years of life has been terrible, but these two… They definitely make the cut for the top ten. Top hundred. Thousand, maybe.
Carol Sturka is flanked on either side by two of the top one-thousand most insufferable people she has ever met. Great. Perfect.
She tries her best to ignore them, and succeeds, for the most part, until they land in Atlanta.
Atlanta, Georgia. Monday, January 30th, 2006. 22:25 (EST).
Her second flight is less eventful. She has a window seat, and an empty chair separating herself and a middle-aged man, who, much to Carol’s approval, keeps to himself for the entirety of the journey. She falls asleep a little after midnight, head resting against the purple travel pillow she picked up in Atlanta during her layover, which, in turn, rests against the shuttered window.
A flight attendant accidently stirs her awake two hours later, and Carol finds herself unable to be truly annoyed as she is handed a mini bottle of vodka, and a glass of sauvignon blanc. The wine is… fine, she supposes. All wine is just fine, unless it’s complete, utter shit. The vodka, however, is more than a welcome flavour. It is, admittedly, much better than the cheap gas station stuff Carol’s temp salary usually permits. It’s less paint thinner-esque, and more of an enjoyable burn in her throat as she swallows it down without the provided mixer.
It reminds her of the vodka she used to steal from her mother’s liquor cabinet, in some fucked up kind of way. She remembers it fondly, or as fondly as her childhood allows something to be remembered. She remembers the late nights, when she would creep down the stairs in her pyjamas, holding her breath and trying her best to avoid the three floorboards that would creak louder than the others. She remembers prying the cabinet door open in the dark. She would pull it slowly, inch by inch, bit by bit, refusing to let the hinges groan, then she would grab the bottle closest to the edge. She remembers drinking as much as she could stomach, which, at fourteen, was not very much, before replacing the missing liquid with three fingers of warm water she stored in a cup before bed, and placing it back into the confines of the neat, dustless circle in which it took up residence on the shelf.
It’s funny to her, in hindsight, that every memory she allows herself to bask in is tainted by alcohol in some way or another. She snorts out a laugh at the thought, and rests her head against the travel pillow once more.
She remains that way, more or less, until the flight lands, and she is rushed through baggage claim, and ferried out into the brisk, English air.
London, England. Tuesday, January 31st, 2006. 15:14 (GMT).
It takes her almost two hours to find where she is supposed to be staying. The dilapidated building hides from her within a maze of bustling streets, crumbling before her eyes. The painted exterior is chipped all over, caked in enough dirt that it almost blends into the brown townhouses that flank it from either side, and the sign is missing the first three sections, reading only as TEL, now.
Somehow, the Carol Sturka of last month neglected to read a single review before booking her accommodation, and the current Carol Sturka, the sober, annoyed and seething version of Carol Sturka, ends up stuck in an absolute dump of a hotel for the next two weeks. Calling it a hotel is pushing it, actually.
The entrance is pungent. A sharp odor of stale sweat mixes with the swirling trails of cigarette smoke that linger in the air, thick and cloudy. Her eyes burn, and the scent settles deep in her body immediately. It’s unpleasant, to say the least.
Seeing no other option, with her very limited funds, and knowing next to nothing about London, she checks in at the desk. The woman that greets her is older, probably in her sixties, with prominent crows feet that are accentuated further by several layers of oxidising foundation. Her gaze is stern as she glances at Carol over a pair of wide-brimmed glasses, and it almost reminds Carol of her time at school, almost reminds her of the daily scoldings she would receive from her teachers for not being ladylike.
She swallows hard, and knows that, to Paula, it must look comical, the way her throat bobs with the action.
They exchange whatever the least polite version of pleasantries are called, and Paula hands Carol a lone key, with rust collecting on the bow that, over time, has rapidly started to spread down towards the bitting. She heads up to her room in silence.
To say the room is bare would be a wild understatement. There’s a bed, a single bed, at that, pushed against the far wall, adorned only by a heap of off-white sheets dumped on the one, singular pillow. They didn’t even bother to fold them. A floor lamp collects dust, propped against the opposite wall, no lampshade. The exposed bulb flickers when she turns it on, lighting up once, then twice, before fading into darkness once more.
Nothing about it feels like hers.
Whatever. Good.
Carol is self aware enough to know she will spend most of her trip in some pub, binge drinking whatever alcohol is the cheapest, and pointedly ignoring any drunk British men that attempt to talk to her, so fuck it. What difference does a shitty room make?
She hauls her suitcase onto the bare mattress, pulling the zipper open. A mess of clothing bulges out as soon as she wrangles with the zip and gets it open, and she grabs the first tank top to fall out from the tangled pile of garments. It’s light blue, made up of a soft cotton that fits snug around her chest and amplifies her assets without showcasing them too much. She pulls it on, then strips her plane clothes off from beneath it in an attempt to hide herself from her own eyes.
Looking down, she can’t help but think, damn, you clean up nicely, Sturka. The voice in her head isn’t her own, hasn’t been her own for decades, but a warmth blooms in her chest at the thought nonetheless. She does clean up nicely, when she isn’t trying to conform to some impossible standard set and enforced by someone else.
It almost makes her feel like herself. Almost.
Back in Albuquerque, she never gets the chance to wear it outside of her apartment, too scared of knowing glances and lingering stares in public, too scared of being seen, truly seen, by someone who would know.
Her mother haunts the edges of her vision, a shadow just out of sight, but always there. She watches, always watches. Her presence is always there, always in Carol’s mind like some kind of divine punishment sent from above. She doesn’t even believe in God, doesn’t believe in anything, actually, not anymore, but the constricting tightness around her body never seems to go away, even after all of these years.
She has spent almost as much time away from her mother as she spent living under her roof. Her childhood consisted of unspoken prayers and silent tears as she remained trapped between four walls of rosary beads and crucifixes, and the crushing weight of disappointment and conditional love. Her adulthood, so far, is starkly similar. Instead of prayers, she whispers her fears into an empty apartment, fears that have grown from the wounds of those old prayers, etching darkness across her already tainted soul. Sometimes, she cries in front of the mirror, and her reflection distorts into a young girl, no older than thirteen, with knee length hair of the brightest, untouched blonde, and dim, blue eyes, filled with a self-loathing she is yet to shake off.
She tried, still tries, in fact, to be the perfect daughter, to fit herself into the mould her mother hand-crafted just for her, but she never quite fits. Maybe, at some point, the molten liquid she was made from overheated and slipped through the seams, melting the mould and jaggeding her edges just slightly until she no longer fits within the confines.
She tries still, fifteen years after last seeing her creator, to fit inside the suffocating shape of expectation. It never works, try as she might to squeeze every part of herself inside, and she ends up in tears again.
In Albuquerque, she clings to that mould like a lifeline, she lets it drag her down beneath waves of icy blue, for weeks at a time, sometimes, until she is heaving for air, and finally works up the courage to let go for just a moment. She depends on it, holds her breath and rearranges her outsides into some semblance of what her mother wanted her to be, but her insides churn, and she finds herself walking on eggshells around her own desires to satisfy the ghost of love that lingers still.
In London, however, a little of that weight is lifted from her shoulders. She feels it immediately, and it washes over her like a cool, winter breeze.
No one knows her here. No one has any connection to her. They don’t know her mother, nor do they know a single detail of Carol’s tumultuous history. She isn't comfortable, exactly, but the overwhelming need to hide is eased slightly. She feels it deep in her bones, some mangled half-comfort, and lets herself be enveloped by its blanketing warmth.
She swaps her sweatpants for a pair of dark jeans, struggles with the button for longer than she would ever admit, then shoves her feet back into her worn combat boots. Her hair looks acceptable as is, so she leaves it loose around her shoulders. It falls in flat, sad waves, but, truly, she couldn’t care less.
She shoves her phone and wallet into her tote, one she got from her last temp job as a parting gift, as they put it, and it makes her look like a respectable professional. V.L. Legal is printed in black, block letters across the beige fabric, and it sits nicely against her hip as she loops it over her shoulder.
It’s almost eight by the time she finally heads down, jacket wrapped tightly around her, and a black, cashmere sweater looped over her bag.
“Door locks at midnight, Claire,” Paula yells from behind her desk as she exits through the reception area, head held high. She doesn’t bother to correct her, doesn’t feel any desire to do so, in fact. Maybe being Claire for a moment is better than being Carol for an eternity. “Don’t be late, we won’t let you back in until six tomorrow.”
“Gotcha,” Carol replies with a nod, throwing her handbag, rather inelegantly, over her shoulder. “See you tomorrow, Patty.”
“It’s Paula.”
“I know,” she says with a smile, one hand waving back to the woman as she braces the other on the brass door handle and pushes. It creaks on its hinges, protesting against the wind that wants it to stay shut, then releases, and almost sends Carol stumbling backwards. Thankfully, she had the foresight to hold onto the doorframe, so her dignity remains solidly intact. For now, at least.
The door slams behind her, and she takes a deep breath. The air is crisp and cold, bitter in a way that New Mexico never really gets, and it feels good. Wind sweeps down the narrow street, barricading her against the wall as she walks towards the noisy street corner she passed earlier. She assumes it is a pub, hopes it is, for the sake of her shivering body, and is disappointed to find it empty now.
She shrugs, and pulls her jacket closed in the front, tucking her scarf into the front as she struggles with the zipper. If stereotypes are anything to go off of (which she knows is a bad way to think, a sheltered, uncultured way of seeing the world, but whatever), there should be a pub within two minutes of her, no matter which part of the UK she is in.
She crosses the street, eyes squinting against the onslaught of wind that comes at her head-on. She looks the wrong way – muscle memory from a land that is normal, and makes sense to anyone with half a brain – and almost gets hit by a passing cab. The driver yells something at her, and she flips him off with a smile.
Ultimately, she settles on the first pub she finds. It’s a run-down building, Tudor and historic, she assumes, or a pretty good replica of what likely once was a Tudor building, with warm light streaming through stained glass windows. The door is open wide, a dark stained wood with matching, geometric glass along the top panel.
A sign hangs down above the entrance, and she has to squint against the light to make out the words. The White Swan. Cute.
Inside, a faint chatter mingles with some obscure (to her, probably not to anyone with any knowledge of music) British song that plays through a crackling speaker. A man is singing along over a pint of lager in the corner, as his friends, presumably, laugh around him.
The lyrics speak of Limassol, a place Carol has never had any desire to visit, but, upon hearing the passion in their voices, both the singer and the drunken man providing shoddy harmonies, she is swayed to at least enter the pub.
The carpeted floor is a deep red, muddied by years of mud-trodden boots and stained by long forgotten alcohol. The walls are papered in muted flowers, fading burgundy roses spiral up along the far wall, and the other three are plastered in beige floral designs. It’s homey, in a way, and Carol finds herself drawn in before she can second guess herself.
She finds a spot at the end of the long bar, perched up on a tall chair, with her hands clasped neatly atop the dark wood.
She knocks back a half dozen pints, cider and lager, and whatever the bartender hands her, before she starts to really feel it. Her head is spinning in that pleasant way she usually craves, and her body is loose and free and everything she usually isn’t. Her limbs are tingling just enough that, if she takes another sip, the feeling fades away for a minute or two before returning.
She sits at the bar, thinking. Alcohol does that to her, more often than not, makes her think. She thinks about everything; she thinks about nothing. All of her thoughts have merged and streamlined, consolidated into one: God, she hopes she can get laid soon.
Everything is kind of fuzzy at the edges, and she smiles to herself as she orders another pint.
A woman sidles up beside her, six foot something of pure leg, if Carol’s drunken brain is anything to trust. Her hair is dark, and falls in what Carol assumes would have been neat, loose waves six hours ago. Now, though, she looks a little dishevelled, as if the day was almost too much, but she managed to claw her way through it, relatively intact, nonetheless.
Hot.
“My friend has been eyeing you all night, you know? Do you want me to extort him into sending you free drinks?” the mysterious woman asks, her voice husky and tinged with enough alcohol to rival Carol herself. If she focuses, she can almost hear an accent beneath the stench of booze, mingling with some clear American influence.
“No,” Carol replies, smile tight and guarded as she takes a sip of her lager. “I’m good, thanks. Trying to avoid any attention from that…” She gestures vaguely towards the crowd of men in the corner, before turning to finally look at the woman to her left.
The sight before Carol renders her momentarily speechless.
“...type,” she finishes after what has to be a good minute or two.
“Are you a lawyer?” the woman asks, brown eyes searching Carol’s face. There’s a hint of something in those irises, something that Carol, in her current state, can’t quite recognise. Intrigue, maybe. Probably not. Morbid fascination. Pity. Those were far more likely, far more familiar to the blonde.
“What?” She blinks dumbly, eyes still fixed on the slope of her nose, the curve of her mouth. “No. No, I’m not a lawyer.”
“Hm,” the stranger hums in response, signalling for another round. “What’s with the bag, then?”
“The bag?”
“Your bag,” she nods her head towards the back of Carol’s chair, where the V.L. Legal tote hangs empty. “Steal it from a law firm?”
Carol blinks again, her mouth opening in anticipation of a response that never comes out, then closes again. A scarlet flush stains her cheeks as she ducks her head and takes a swig from her glass.
“Zabije sie.” The words are whispered with a humourless laugh, and Carol swears she has never heard anything as attractive in her entire life. She has no idea what it means, doesn’t even know which language it is spoken in, but, God, she’s aroused.
“What?”
“You are so shit at conversation,” she says, bumping her bare shoulder against Carol’s. The touch is electric, pulsing through Carol’s veins right up until the moment she pulls away, and offers a hand instead. “I’m Zosia.”
“Sturka,” Carol mumbles, taking Zosia’s hand in her own and shaking it. “Carol, I mean. Carol Sturka.”
“Oh, full name, huh?”
“Something like that. Yours?”
Zosia just shrugs, tongue flicking out to lick up a droplet of condensation from the side of her glass. Carol audibly swallows in response, because of course she does. How could she not, when the single most alluring woman she has ever met is looking at her like that?
After what, to Carol, seems like decades, Zosia finally says, “maybe you’ll find out.”
“Cheers to that.”
Their glasses clink, and Carol finds herself unable to look away from the long fingers that wrap around Zosia’s drink. Long is an understatement, if she is completely honest. They’re extensive, if anything, and Carol can’t stop imagining how they would feel inside of her.
Those thoughts are, thankfully, expelled as fast as they came on as Zosia exclaims, “Oh!” and sets her glass back on the beer-dampened bar. “I love this song. Have you heard it before?”
“Nope,” she replies with a shake of her head, her hair falling across her exposed collarbones and tickling the sensitive skin there. “Can’t say I’m familiar.”
“What!? You don’t know Sugababes?”
Carol just shrugs in response, almost apologetically.
“Up,” Zosia commands, an arm hooked around Carol’s waist. She pulls her off the seat, unceremoniously, and Carol has to bite back a scathing remark, lest she upset the very attractive stranger at her side.
“What?”
“Get up, we’re dancing.”
“Zosia,” Carol murmurs, shaking her head.
“No, don’t fight me on this, Carol Sturka. Come on, we’re going to dance to Push the Button, and then you can protect your dignity and pretend it never happened.”
She doesn’t know whether it’s the alcohol thrumming through her system right now, or the teasing pout that graces the stranger’s face for a fraction of a second that hammers that first crack against Carol’s well maintained walls, but her body betrays her then, and she obliges, taking Zosia’s hand in her own. Her palm is cooler than she expected, skin soft beneath her fingertips as Zosia drags her out into the open area beside the bar. It isn’t a dance floor by any means, but that, clearly, does not deter the brunette from treating it as such.
Long arms shoot up, pulling Carol’s much shorter arm with her as she dances to the beat. Carol is forced onto her tip-toes, pressed against Zosia’s side and forced to sway in time with her hips.
She opts to watch Zosia’s face, rather than making any more of a fool out of herself with her less than flattering dance abilities, and her eyes latch onto that gorgeous mouth. She mouths every lyric, sometimes inaudible, but, more often than not, Carol can hear whispery harmonies beneath the crackling audio of the unfamiliar song.
Her eyes flick towards the group of drunken men in the corner, heart rate spiking at the notion of being seen like this by strangers, but they pay her no mind, and she allows herself to relax enough to loop her free arm around Zosia’s waist.
“You’re so short,” Zosia says as the song slowly fades into the next, pulling Carol impossibly close. “I didn’t realise it when we were sitting, but you’re tiny.”
“Maybe you’re just fucking tall,” Carol replies, an eyebrow raised in faux indignance. “What are you, a model or something?”
“I am, actually.”
Her hips are pressed flush against Carol’s now, Zosia’s knees bent slightly to account for the height difference as she leans in.
“Come home with me.”
It isn’t a question, and Carol finds herself unable to find an excuse not to oblige, and, against her better judgement, nods her head.
London, England. Wednesday, February 1st, 2006. 05:37 (GMT).
She blinks her eyes open, letting herself adjust to the dim light. Her head is pounding, and every audible rustle of stiff, warm sheets beneath her feels like a bullet to the skull.
Her bones feel like mush as she sits up, as if blended up into a fine, powdery white, and shoved haphazardly back inside of her skin, melding to her blood and guts and flesh until they resemble something close to the original, but not quite.
Her arm gives out under her body weight, and she has to catch herself on the headboard.
Huh.
The metal is unfamiliar under her hand, cold and smooth, and noticeably not tainted by a fine coating of dust and ash. She cranes her neck to get a closer look, a dull ache shooting through her limbs as she does so, and is met with an eye-full of dark, wavy hair. An expanse of toned back lays beneath the brown mane. It seemingly goes on forever, scattered with dark moles, and the slightest dimples where the skin disappears under light, white fabric. A faint scratch is the only thing to break up the three mile length of flesh, pinkened in the middle and raised just above the rest of the skin around it. It is clearly fresh.
Carol, for a fraction of a second, wonders if she was the one to leave it there.
Upon seeing no one else in the bed, or the whole room, for that matter, she concludes that, yes, she did leave it.
She peels herself out from beneath the covers, legs stiff and sore from whatever the fuck it was that she did last night. She tries to recall the woman’s name as she starts up the shower, but finds herself drawing a blank.
When she emerges from the tiny bathroom, clean and dry, she finds herself at the mercy of the brunette’s lingering gaze once more.
“Morning,” she says, head ducked almost shyly as she reaches for her clothes from the night before. She debates shoving her panties into her tote for a moment, until a pair is thrown at her from the bed. “Uh…”
“They’re clean, I promise,” she winks, and Carol rolls her eyes.
“No shit. Not sure I wanna wear a stranger’s panties, though.”
“Your loss. I’ll even let you keep them. Call it a souvenir from your first night in London.”
Carol rolls her eyes for a second time, but relents, nonetheless, and pulls them on. They fit okay, and, God, it is so much less humiliating than putting her jeans on sans underwear.
“Do you want breakfast?” the woman asks, sheet draped over her upper body as she lounges on the bed. Her eyes are fixed on Carol’s almost exposed form, and all Carol sees staring back at her is desire. Maybe she is still drunk. That would explain a lot.
“I’m good, gotta get back to my hotel,” she murmurs, pulling her sweater on over her bare chest. “Thank you, for the uh–” she shakes her head as she finishes redressing, and grabs her phone from the nightstand. “For the welcome, I guess.”
London, England. Wednesday, February 1st, 2006. 11:03 (GMT).
The guy on the door hands her a flyer as she enters, and, following a curt smile and nod, she scrunches it into a ball in her fist. Her discomfort must be oozing out of her pores, if the metre gap around her is any kind of indication.
Good, she thinks as she makes her way through the crowd of people.
She settles down into a chair in the back row, the plastic firm and unforgiving underneath her. Her bag slides between her legs as she unwinds the scarf that has spent the better part of the morning as decoration, rather than serving any real function.
The room is warm. A heater stands right behind her chair, and the small space is bustling with a hundred or so bodies, most of which, she thinks, are far too close to each other. She silently thanks the universe for gracing her with an empty chair between herself and the fifty-something year old man to her right, and an aisle to her left.
A woman begins to speak from the makeshift stage at the front of the room, and Carol tries her absolute hardest to focus on the words. It isn’t that she is boring, per se, but, comparative to the alluring woman stuck in Carol’s thoughts, her words are dull and meaningless, little more than a jumble of British-accented nothingness swirling through Carol’s mind around images of long legs and beautifully mismatched eyes.
When she closes her eyes, she can see them still. One brown, one an endless abyss of warmth, both hypnotic. She blinks her own eyes open, and tries once more to focus.
Her phone buzzes in her lap, the notification jolting her gaze away from the crumbling concrete beneath her feet.
Z x
Hey, it’s Zosia from the pub x You left your top here last night. Meet later? I’ll give it back x
Carol stares at her screen, a blankness to her expression until, finally, it clicks. Zosia, six feet of legs from the pub.
Carol Sturka
Just keep it, as a thanks for the hospitality… What’s with the x?
Zx
Hospitality ;) x
She stares at the small screen for… God, she doesn’t even know how long she stares, brows creased slightly until a knee knocks into her, and, fuck, someone is about to poach the empty seat. Day ruined.
“Hi, Carol,” a voice whispers above her, and she closes her eyes tightly. “Express delivery service.”
“Jesus, fuck,” Carol murmurs, finally looking up. Zosia stands in front of her, towers over her, really, holding out that blue tank top. She is looking down at her, those eyes boring right into her soul. "Are you stalking me?"
"Maybe."