In the past three months, he'd only caught up with her three times, and never for long enough.
The first time was in Venice. He'd been on the first plane there at the blip indicating irregular activity from his ParkerWatch Alert™, and shown up just in time to watch her swan-dive off the Campanile di San Marco with two Picassos and a Dalí. She'd been laughing as she fell, sylphlike, into the wind.
The second time was by accident. He'd taken a detour through Paris because the Doctor Who Christmas Special was filming on location. After scoring Freema Agyeman's autograph (and professing his undying love for her, but that's a whole other story), he'd been casing the Louvre out of habit when he bumped into a blonde tourist.
"Excuse me," a familiar voice had said.
"Parker?" he'd managed to choke out before the alarms went off in the Antiquities Wing and guards started running toward him, and suddenly she'd grabbed his hand and dragged him along on her getaway. His protest—"But I didn't even do anything!"—was ignored.
Before he'd regained his bearings, she'd found a storage room and begun stripping to the nude, per usual. He politely averted his eyes, also per usual. By the time he thought to look back, wondering what was taking her so long, she was gone.
He looked left, and right, and even up (because if he'd learned one thing from Parker, it was to always look up), but it was as if she'd never been there.
The third time, now … the third time was different.
He'd been checking his mail and found an unmarked envelope with "You still looking?" scrawled across it in Parker's handwriting. Inside was a blank sheet of paper and a post-it note:
Times Square. New Year's Eve. It's a date.
And that's how Alec Hardison ended up packed with a million tourists into what must be the most crowded 4,000 square feet in the nation, wondering what exactly Parker had planned.
As the countdown began, he felt his phone vibrate. He flipped it open to check who was calling – an unlisted number. "Hello?" he drawled as he tried to hear the other end despite the roar of people chanting.
"Watch very carefully," Parker's voice crackled through the noise in the background ("Four! Three! Two!").
"One."
Afterwards, nobody was quite sure exactly what had happened. Accounts varied, with the only consistent thread being this – on the very last second of 2009, someone stole the Ball.
Yes, that Ball.
That night, Hardison had some of the best sex of his life. He woke up the next morning to an empty bed and a post-it note on the bedside table.
See you in Rio de Janeiro.