Zac could not sleep at all. He tried. He went to bed at the same time, played some stupid white noise app on his phone, avoided caffeine for hours before bed, but nothing worked. Nothing.
He could pinpoint exactly when it started. It was the night he saw her again.
It didn’t matter that Spencer wouldn’t answer his texts and had refused his request to talk about their situation. If anything, that only made it worse. He needed to see her just one more time, even if it was the last time. At least then he would know for sure that it was over.
He was wearing her down, though. She promised to “think about it” and Zac figured that was probably the best he could hope for. It wasn’t enough, though. He had to take matters into his own hands, if he ever wanted to sleep through the night again.
When Mac came into their office after class one day and started complaining about some new professor – “that redheaded bitch,” he called her – he got Zac’s attention immediately. Zac began to hatch a plan. He felt like a stalker, but he didn’t care. He was determined to find Spencer and, if necessary, fall to the ground and beg her to talk to him.
It only took him two days to find out that she did indeed work at the University of Tulsa, and from there, only a little bit more research to find her schedule. With a campus map printed out and spread across the dashboard of his truck, he left the office and drove across town to the college campus where he hoped he would be able to find her.
He felt stupid and more than a little creepy just standing around a parking lot on the campus, but his determination to see Spencer kept him there. He knew she had class in one of the buildings nearby, and if he had read the map correctly, it was the large red brick one he was facing. Any minute now, she would walk out…
And probably tell him he was an idiot.
It was a risk he had to take, though. The second he saw her, a flurry of red hair bounding down the steps of the building, he knew that just seeing her one more time was worth whatever she might say or do to him.
He didn’t think she had seen him yet, so he didn’t feel bad at all about blatantly staring. She tossed her hair to the side as she wiggled free of her cardigan, and just seeing that much more of her body made Zac a little weak in the knees. Even from the distance, he could see how she had a death grip on her coffee thermos. Still as addicted as ever, he thought. At least some things hadn’t changed.
Zac didn’t think he had changed all that much in the past two years, but at the same time, he knew he wasn’t the same man Spencer had once known. He wanted the chance to show her that, the chance to show her how much she had helped him to grow.
When her head turned and her eyes locked on his, he knew he was going to get that chance very soon.