Angel didn't sleep well.
That wasn't news — he rarely slept well, because the twin mattress was thin, the bed frame creaked, and Simon had a habit of talking in his sleep about things that made absolutely no sense. Last week, at three in the morning, Simon had said, in the perfectly clear voice of someone wide awake: *"The cheese knows."* Angel spent twenty minutes staring at the ceiling trying to decide whether that was a dream or a threat.
But that night, the problem wasn't the mattress. Or Simon. Or the cheese.
The problem was a pair of green eyes that had moved into his head like a tenant who doesn't pay rent and refuses to leave.
Angel rolled onto his side. Closed his eyes. Saw green.
Rolled onto the other side. Saw green.
Lay flat on his back. The ceiling had a crack that, with a lot of imagination, looked like the letter L.
*No.*
He grabbed the pillow and pressed it over his face. Breathed deep. The pillow smelled like cheap fabric softener and bad decisions.
At six fifteen, the alarm went off. Angel had been awake for forty minutes.
The morning followed its usual script, with one exception: Angel was distracted. And a distracted Angel was rare enough that Hector — who normally didn't notice anything before eight in the morning — noticed.
"You're acting weird," Hector said.
They were in the kitchen. Hector was holding his coffee mug with both hands, like always, but this time his eyes were open. Almost fully open. An event.
"I'm not acting weird."
"Yeah you are. You poured your coffee into Simon's mug."
Angel looked down. The mug in his hand said *SCREENWRITER UNDER CONSTRUCTION — DO NOT DISTURB* in crooked letters Simon had painted on with fabric paint. Angel was drinking coffee from the wrong mug.
"Distraction," he said, and swapped the mugs.
"Distraction," Hector repeated, the way Hector repeated things — like he was filing the word away in a mental folder to use against you later.
Simon came out of the bathroom at that moment. Wet hair, towel around his waist, expression of someone who had just received a cosmic revelation.
"I figured out the second act," he announced.
"Of the screenplay?" Angel asked.
"Of life. Of the screenplay too, but mainly life."
"Simon, you're in a towel in the kitchen."
"Creativity doesn't wait for clothes, Angel."
Hector took a sip of coffee. Looked at Simon. Looked at Angel. Went back to the coffee.
"You two are going to kill me," he said, no emotion whatsoever in his voice, like he was reading a particularly boring weather forecast.
Angel smiled. And for a second — just one second — he forgot about the green eyes.
The morning class was pharmacology. The professor was a sixty-year-old man who spoke like every word cost money and he was watching his budget. Short sentences. Long pauses. A look that suggested he'd seen too much in his life and hadn't liked any of it.
Angel liked him. Not because he was pleasant — he wasn't — but because he was honest. No sugarcoating. No pretending medicine was glamorous. He said things like *"you're going to make mistakes, the question is whether you make them high or low"* and *"if you don't know the dose, don't prescribe it, because the difference between medicine and poison is a decimal point."*
Angel wrote everything down. He always wrote everything down. He had notebooks organized by subject, with color-coded tabs that Hector called "chromatic obsession" and that Simon called "the most beautiful thing I've ever seen a human being do with Post-its."
That day, though, the notes had gaps.
Not big gaps. Small ones. A word he started writing and didn't finish. A blank space where a dosage should have been. A sentence that said *"drug interaction between"* and then nothing, as if the thought had slipped out the window halfway through.
Angel looked at his notes at the end of class and felt an irritation with himself that was almost physical. He wasn't like this. He didn't get distracted. He didn't leave blank spaces. He didn't think about green eyes during pharmacology.
*Green eyes are not a known side effect of any substance*, he thought, and then thought that that was exactly the kind of thought that proved he was losing control.
The shift at Maple & Thyme started at five.
Angel arrived at four forty-five, like always. Fifteen minutes early. Put on his apron. Tied back his hair. Checked the tables. Checked the silverware. Checked the napkins. Checked whether the salt shaker at table seven was full.
Table seven.
He stood in front of table seven for three seconds longer than necessary. The table was empty. Clean. Four chairs, a small vase with an artificial flower the owner swapped out every month. Nothing special. It was a table.
*It's a table, Angel. A table with four legs and a flat surface. It's not a shrine. It's not a dimensional portal. It's a table.*
"Meditating?" Clara asked, passing behind him with a stack of menus.
"Checking the salt shaker."
"You've been checking the salt shaker for thirty seconds."
"It's a complex salt shaker."
Clara laughed. It was a short, practical laugh, from someone who'd seen a lot in life and found everything mildly amusing. Clara was twenty-eight, had two kids, an ex-husband she described as "a typo on life's intake form," and a supernatural ability to tell when someone was lying.
"It's about the three guys from yesterday, isn't it?" she said.
"What three guys?"
"*The* three. The cute ones. The big one, the one in the jacket, and the—" She made a vague gesture with her hand that somehow perfectly captured the essence of Logan. "The one with the green eyes."
Angel felt his face get hot. Again. For the second time in less than twenty-four hours because of the same person. This was unacceptable. This was clinically concerning. This was—
"No."
"Liar."
"Clara."
"Angel."
They looked at each other. Clara smiled. Angel didn't smile. Clara smiled wider.
"Fine," she said, raising her hands. "I won't push it. But if they come back tonight, table seven is yours again."
"They're not coming back."
"You say that like you've given it some thought."
Angel opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I'm going to check the napkins," he said, and walked away with the dignity of someone who was absolutely not fleeing a conversation.
The shift was quiet. Wednesday. Quieter than Tuesday. Few tables, few orders, the kind of night where time drags like a lazy cat in the sun.
Angel served, cleared, cleaned, restocked. Everything on autopilot. His body was working. His mind, not so much.
At eight twelve — he knew it was eight twelve because he'd looked at the clock, and he knew he'd looked at the clock because some traitorous part of his brain had memorized the exact time they'd walked in the night before — the door didn't open.
The bell didn't ring.
Nobody came in.
Angel felt something he refused to call disappointment. It wasn't disappointment. It was... relief. Clearly relief. He was relieved he didn't have to deal with those green eyes again. Relieved. Completely relieved.
At eight thirteen, he looked at the door again.
At eight fifteen, again.
At eight twenty, Clara walked past him and said, without stopping, without looking up, like someone commenting on the weather:
"They didn't come."
"I know."
"You're staring at the door."
"I'm watching the floor. It's part of the job."
"Watching the floor is part of the job, not staring at the door every two minutes with the face of a dog waiting for its owner."
Angel decided he wasn't going to respond. Decided he was going to keep his composure. Decided he was going to be a functional adult with correct priorities and a healthy sense of proportion.
"I don't have a dog face," he said.
Clara gave him a little pat on the shoulder as she passed.
"You really do, honey. But it's a cute dog."
The shift ended at eleven. Angel took off his apron, let his hair down, grabbed his backpack, and went out the back door.
Sideville at night was different from Sideville during the day. Not in any obvious way — the streets were the same, the streetlights were the same, the houses were the same. But there was a quality to the air that changed after the sun went down. A density. Like the darkness had weight. Like the shadows between the trees were a little darker than they should be, a little deeper, a little more... watchful.
Angel never thought about this consciously. But his body knew. He walked faster at night. Kept his hands in his pockets. Didn't look down the alleys. Didn't look at the woods, which started three blocks from the restaurant and stretched up the mountain like a dark stain on the city's map.
That night, he stopped.
Not by choice. By instinct. Something deep in his gut — that place where the body stores warnings the mind hasn't processed yet — made him stop in the middle of the sidewalk and look left.
The street was empty. Streetlights. Sidewalk. A trash can. The beginning of the fence that separated the last row of houses from the edge of the woods.
Nothing.
There was nothing there.
But for a second — a second that lasted longer than it should have — Angel had the feeling that something was watching him from inside the trees. Not a person. Not an animal. Something that existed in the space between the two, in the place where logic doesn't reach and instinct screams.
The wind moved through the leaves. A branch snapped.
Angel breathed deep. Adjusted the backpack on his shoulder. And kept walking.
Behind him, in the darkness between the trees, two eyes glowed for a fraction of a second — green, dense, like the floor of a forest that had never seen sunlight — and then disappeared.
Angel didn't see it.
But he felt it.
And he walked faster the rest of the way home.