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Jimin spent the entire night tossing and turning in the squeaky uncomfortable bed in the motel room he had rented. He was so restless that once the sun peeped from over the horizon, he was already up and putting his clothes on.
Throughout the whole night, his mind kept drifting back to that ridiculously young looking girl back at the bar. The way she'd look at him, the things she'd say – almost as though she knew him from before.
But that would have been impossible, wouldn't it? He had never seen her in his life. How could she know this about him and the fact that he'd suffered a terrible loss? That his guilt and remorse wouldn't leave him alone, eating him up from inside?
How?
It was crazy and he felt absurd. It probably didn't mean anything. But the point was, he had already dismissed another suspiciously accurate comment on a similar occasion – he recollected how he'd chalked up the words of the beggar woman called Vera who had warned him about something dark lurking around him and his friends last year.
And – no surprise here – it words had ended up being absolutely true.
Deciding to learn from his past mistakes, Jimin fled his motel room very early in the morning. He had planned to leave town that very same day, but the plan changed. No matter what it took him, he'd find that girl again, even if he had to stake out in front of the same bar the two had met, or ravage the entire city.
The more Jimin thought about it, the more he was convinced that it was no accident that he had run into her. Was she by any chance following or stalking him? She seemed to know a lot about him and was accepting of his harsh attitude last night, which was weird enough as it was. If she was any other girl looking for nothing more than a casual hook-up at a bar, she'd have stood up and left the second he had given her his cold side stare.
But no, Iris had stayed and had kept on talking to him. This had to mean something, and Jimin was slowly but steadily starting to think that she had approached him for a reason. Whatever that reason was, he'd unravel it, no matter what.
The whole day, Jimin surveilled the seedy bar from afar. This was a relatively small town, so with the exception of a stuffy restaurant, this was the only establishment that worked until late at night. If Iris was from around here somewhere, she'd definitely swing by at some time in the evening.
It made Jimin uncomfortable and he was perfectly aware how stalker-ish that was. Had this been a different situation, he'd be outraged by his actions, but right now he was desperate. It was a shot in the dark and he was certain of how slim the chances of this actually meaning something were.
But if there was one thing Jimin had learned in the past one year, it was to follow his gut feeling.
It was around 7pm and the sun was already starting to set when she finally came. Her pale blonde hair glowed in the twilight gloom, drawing attention as she moved down the street. It stood out so much that Jimin wondered how he hadn't noticed her earlier last night.
