A/N: I'm sorry for my absence, but I'm back with a short but sweet lighthearted piece based on a reviewer's suggestion. thanks for reading!

"cress and throne keep meeting everywhere and eventually cress asks Thorne 'dude are you following me?'" -reviewer submission :)

She had noticed the same dusty brown mop of hair popping up all around her recently. She had first noticed him acting anything but suspicious in the coffee shop Sunday morning. He had very nearly knocked her latte out of her hand but had apologized with a quirked smile and a low voiced, "My bad."

Then he had been skillfully wedged between fish carts at the Dock Market on Monday, seemingly choosing between two eerily large cuts of tuna while she perused the shrimp, and had made his third appearance on Tuesday evening at the Whole Foods across the street from her complex. Wednesday he was at the diner where she and Scarlet always picked up lunch together and Thursday she glimpsed him across the laundromat.

All of these happenstance meetings seemed to Cress to be not-so-happenstance, and come Friday Cress had plucked up enough courage to confront the guy, if her hunch was correct and she would meet him later that day.

She was in fact right, and therefore barely surprised at all to see him trailing behind her as she left the gym that afternoon. She gently tried to lose him, on the off chance that this was just a creepy coincidence, by turning down random side roads and looping around blocks, but the brown head of hair stayed bobbing through the crowd behind her.

Exasperated, she turned down the alley outside her favorite Chinese restaurant. As soon as he turned into it, not realizing that he was no longer on a through street, she cornered him.

"Hey! Dude!" He looked up abruptly at her voice and his face conveyed a mix of shock and embarrassment, with a hint of a smirk peeking through. "Yeah you. Mr. Good-Looking-Stalker. What do you think you're doing?"

He took a step back as he awkwardly responded, "Um, clearly taking a wrong turn-"

"No, no, no. Don't think I haven't seen you the past few days. You've been following me all week. Who are you? Do you work for SunCorp because I don't plan on giving any LunarCo data away no matter how chiseled the jaw of their spy is." She paused briefly as he shook his head and let out a soft chuckle. "Oh my god, are you stalking me? I should not be alone in some shady alley with my stalker, Jesus Cress, what were you thinking?" She muttered the last part as if talking to herself.

The man's chuckling got louder and then stopped with one glare from her. He ran a hand through his tousled hair and sighed. "I'm afraid it's much less exciting then those fantasies. In reality, I saw you at The Brew and couldn't get you out of my mind. So, using my clearly well-intentioned but poor judgement, I decided to familiarize myself with you and maybe having another, er, chance meeting."

His explanation threw her off, and she stood silent for a moment before saying simply, "Oh."

"Yeah."

A smile creeped onto her face as she looked back up at him, suddenly emboldened. "Well, do you think perhaps another 'chance meeting could arranged tomorrow? Say, 9:30 at The Brew?"

A shocked and elated smile appeared on his face and he eagerly responded, "Yeah! Yeah, I could do that."