Admit It

12; if eyes are the windows to the soul, what does it mean when he looks away?

Camila noticed the dark brown eyes following her in the rearview mirror long before they entered the city streets. It was an odd sensation, although familiar to her now, that she could feel his presence whenever he was near, even if that 'near' meant a car behind her, through two windshields and a wall of darkness that made it hard to see when he was staring at her. Only when they reached a traffic light somewhat near the both of their homes did she turn around and give him the other half of that stare he'd been waiting for, to which he responded to with a laugh and a wink. 

Camila already knew by this point that he was following her home, so when he pulled up in the parking spot beside her, all she did was smile and gently roll her eyes at him. She leaned over to pull her phone from the AUX cord, and when she sat back upright, Shawn was opening her car door, smiling that mischievous smile at her. 

"Surprise," he said, taking her hand in his as she stepped out. She showed him the screen of her phone, the photograph on the playlist he'd sent her, the name of it that he'd written. 

"It has the words 'Saturday mornings' in it, you realize," he teased. "It's a morning playlist." 

'You can't possibly have enough playlists for every morning, noon, evening, 1 a.m., and 3 a.m,' Camila teased back. 

"You're right," he said, to her surprise. "My system is more complex than time of day." 

She urged him on by poking him in the side with her elbow, standing till at the bottom of the staircase before he grabbed her hand and pulled her up the stairs with him. It took a moment for her to realize that unless he had only come up the stairs with her to walk her to the door, which felt unlikely after the hours spent driving through the starlit rain, she was going into her house. Presumably her room. The echoes of his footsteps against the floorboards. The ghost of his shadow wandering the walls. 

"They're emotions. Feeling, you know? But there are more suitable ones for right now than the one that's called, 'the breath of cold air that makes you grateful for saturday mornings'." 

'Show me,' she texted him, and he opened his messages app. 

'Why do you want to see them?' he replied. 

They reached the second floor of the building, the air blowing the sparse clouds in patterns like water. On the drive through the late evening, it seemed as if the deep grey rain clouds were only able to keep the small town of Springside Hills in their grasps, or were only brave enough to claim the skies of the vacated suburbs as their own. As soon as they saw the first city streetlight, it was as if the thick cloud simply disappeared in the wind. 

Camila rolled her eyes. 'Talk. Out loud.' 

The dots next to his name began to move in their funny little formation, not too different from the wisps of clouds in the sky, Camila noticed with a smile. 

'And why is that, may I ask?' he said, refusing to give in.

Color rushing to her cheeks, she quickly replied, 'Never mind.' 

"You just like to hear my voice, don't you?" 

It's the most beautiful sound I've heard, she thought, just a bit more blush creeping into her cheeks as she finally admitted it to herself. She warned herself against thinking that, as Shawn seemed to always be able to know what she was thinking so well. She mused that maybe he was magic. 

Before he had the chance to decide whether or not he'd like to look through her, she changed the topic. 'I think I said something about how I didn't think you were a serial killer the other day. I'm not quite sure about you now.'