His face remained endlessly flat, his body inconspicuous in its stillness.
While we watched, he picked up his glass of milk.
Inserting a finger into the contents, he withdrew it carefully, sniffing the end of his own digit. Frowning, he wiped it clean with a paper napkin.
Jon stifled a laugh.
I fought not to do the same, raising an eyebrow at Cass and cocking my head with mock inquisitiveness.
“Yeah, okay.” Cass shrugged. “But I like his hands.”
“You said that about Jack, Cass,” I reminded her.
“Yeah, well I was right, wasn’t I?”
I didn’t touch that one. I squinted at the black-haired man. “He’s like a walking corpse,” I said a second later. “...Minus the goth. He probably lives in his parent’s basement. I get Asperger’s syndrome, listens to bad cowboy music.”
Cass gestured with her slim fingers, tugging at a silver chain around her neck. “He looks like there’s more to him than that, Al.”
“Again. You said that about Jack, Cass.”
“And I was right, wasn’t I?”
I grimaced, glancing back across the room.
The black-haired stranger rose to his feet.
I watched him reach into a back pocket and extract a money clip. Like he had the day before, and the day before that, I knew he’d leave actual paper money, and well in excess of what he owed. He wore a single piece of jewelry, I noticed, a silver ring on his smallest finger.
“He’s leaving,” Cass said.
Jon yanked on my arm. “Stop staring, Al.” He sharpened his voice when I didn’t look down. “Al...seriously. What are you doing?”
I watched Mr. Mono move softly out of the diner’s front door. It was already dark outside, but the neon sign lit up his face as he passed by the plate windows. He didn’t hurry, and just when I thought he wouldn’t, he turned.
The lamp-like stare met mine.
When it did, the world became soft.
I grew aware of the sharp lines of the diner blurring. Night filled in the gaps...a sky teeming with violet and black clouds, a backdrop streaming further back than my mind could reach.
Stars exploded behind my eyes, a single shocking plume of brilliance.
And it is beautiful. So incredibly...
The clouds enveloped my mind, leaving nothing but silence.
Cass watched the black-haired man turn from the window.
He was tall, she realized again, maybe more than six and a half feet, and despite the haphazard and almost dated way he dressed—like something from an old fifties movie mixed unevenly with the newer lines of the Aardvarks shirt and a modern watch—Cass could see an athletic body beneath the hanging clothes and inconspicuous gait.
He was really hot, actually.
She wondered why Allie was pretending he wasn’t.
Not stereotypically handsome, not by a long shot, but the guy had a quiet intensity that exuded sensuality. It also struck Cass as a relatively thin mask for whatever lay beneath. Cass watched him glide past the outside window, reminded of Jon’s martial arts buddies and of Jon himself, in the way he moved. This man might be a fighter, too.
So yeah, he was even Allie’s type.
She’d always gone for the dark ones, anyway.
Cass watched until the black-haired man disappeared behind the adjoining wall of the next store front. She caught his brief stare at Allie, and it struck Cass that his eyes seemed to have almost no real color to them at all.
“Weird,” she said, once he was gone.
“You say that like you’re surprised,” Jon said, annoyed.
Cass glanced at Allie, curious as to her silence, wondering how she had reacted to the man’s departure.
Allie had always collected weirdos. While Cass personally thought her friend was gorgeous, she knew that wasn’t the reason, either.
Allie was fairly average by most accounts. While she had stunning...at times riveting eyes, really her face and figure were relatively normal, especially for California. Allie didn’t fall into the “pretty girl” rubric in dress, confidence or manner, either, tending to downplay her assets instead of going out of her way to emphasize them.#p#分页标题#e#
Even with all that, Allie had a less-obvious quality that always seemed to have guys chasing after her anyway. More than Cass did. More than a lot of people who were technically better-looking than her did.
Whatever that quality was, it unfortunately was well-appreciated by the full moon crowd even more than normal people. In Jon’s words, Allie was a freak magnet and always had been. Mia Taylor, Allie’s mother, once confided to Cass that Allie had been nearly abducted something like four times as a child. Once, she actually got taken, if only for a short period of time. She managed to get away...luckily...and mostly thanks to the intervention of a stranger who saw her with the freak and figured out something was wrong.