The encounter followed him longer than he expected.
Not as a memory exactly, but as an echo—subtle, persistent, woven into everything else. He found himself replaying it without meaning to, not the words so much as the feeling of it. The way the moment had tilted toward possibility and then corrected itself, returning to normal as if nothing unusual had happened.
That was what unsettled him most.
For her, it had been ordinary.
For him, it had changed the weight of everything.
He noticed how his thoughts behaved differently now. Before, she had existed at a distance, shaped by observation and imagination. Now she had a voice, a cadence, a presence that resisted reshaping. The version of her in his mind no longer obeyed him as easily.
He told himself this was good. Healthier. More real.
Still, the loss of control bothered him.
He began to measure his reactions carefully, watching himself the way he watched her. When he thought of her, his pulse quickened—not dramatically, but enough to register. When he remembered the way she had looked at him, neutral and unburdened, something tight formed just beneath his calm.
He wondered if she remembered the conversation at all.
The question irritated him more than it should have. Not because he needed to matter—no, that wasn't it—but because moments, he believed, carried weight whether people acknowledged them or not. Shared space left impressions. Words lingered.
At least, they had for him.
He considered speaking to her again. The thought arrived cautiously, wrapped in logic. One conversation didn't establish anything. Two would still be coincidence. Patterns only became noticeable after repetition.
He told himself he wasn't chasing anything.
He was continuing something that had already begun.
That reasoning settled into him, smooth and convincing. He began to notice openings—moments when another exchange would seem natural, unforced. He didn't act on them yet. Anticipation, he decided, was still safer than action.
But anticipation carried its own risks.
The more he imagined the next conversation, the more important it became. He rehearsed responses again, but now with new information—her tone, her expressions, the way she listened. Each detail sharpened his expectations, made the future feel closer and more necessary.
By the end of the day, he understood something he hadn't before.
Meeting her hadn't calmed his fixation.
It had focused it.
And focus, unlike distance or silence, didn't fade with time. It demanded direction.