Who: Ben & Dani What: Stalking When: July 10 (a few days after helping Becca) Where: Vale Diner
It'd been bothering him since he left Rebecca's place once the three of them finished assembling the cot and Ben decided he'd let the girls have the rest of the day to acquaint themselves with each other. An unintentional brush of the shoulder or grazing of forearms or whatever it had been sent him reeling to places he thought he'd never revisit. The flashes of light and colour and the feeling of vertigo were nothing new, but the smell of the scene was familiar. The distorted, distant voices - even with all the other background noises, the static, the blurry images swirling like a rainbow pinwheel in the wind, he recognised those voices in the vision.
Brushing his moment of unsteadiness off as a 'I'd been drinking a lot last night' probably wasn't that hard for either of the girls to believe, even if Ben had seemed jovial and managed to keep a steady hand all throughout his time there. He hadn't been focused at work at all and at night he, predictably, went back to drinking. Drinking and staring deadpan at a laptop screen, trying to dig up information on 'the girl from the zoo'. He tried the usual channels and social media, but it wasn't enough.
It drove him mad enough to want to consider breaking into her place when she wasn't around to have a nosy around, but first he had to figure out her routine. So he was back at the diner, sitting at the booth right at the end, melded in the corner between the seat and the window. Less of a moth drawn to a dull flame, more like a comet in lazy orbit around the mysterious planet, tethered to the mystery of her. Anyone who didn't know him probably thought he was two steps away from a serial killer-level obsession with the victim who'd caught his eye in the middle of the trailer park.
He wasn't exactly completely inconspicuous, sitting there with his fourth cup of coffee, but he was trying to be discreet.