"So she had just imagined it all?" Reese asked as she stuffed her fork inside her mouth accompanied with a piece of hot apple-pie that she had ordered for dessert.

"What else is there?" Nick said, taking a sip of his cup of coffee as he shifted his sight over to face the see-through glass wall beside him where a bunch of people stood outside, laughing amongst each other as each of them randomly took their own puffs of their cigarettes.

"What do you mean by that?" Reese curled her eyebrows, continuing on eating her pie.

"By what?"

"By you asking ‘what else is there?’ what did you mean by that?" Reese explained showing off her perplexity by Nick’s attempt of presenting to her a rhetorical question.

"I…you lost me, Reese!" he chuckled lightly while shifting in his own chair. The ambiance of the restaurant was very relaxed and simple; a type of place where most people will find their own selves accompanied by comfort, but at that moment, Nick was not a part of this crowd. He felt shifty and prickly, and he didn’t know why. The place he was in used to be one of his favorite places to go to whenever he and Reese went out on their monthly dinner get-together, but that night, it was different for him. Everything seemed different; everything seemed to give off a sign of discomfort. He found himself timorous of the situation. What if the weird sensation he felt was a premonition of something awful that is about to take place? He didn’t know what to take of his feelings: whether it is just a silly paranoia or something that he should actually take notice of.

"Okay well let’s put it this way," Reese implied trying to find a different route of explaining what she wanted to ask so that Nick would understand her better, "What else could it be used as a reason on why she had that kind of…for lack of better words here Nick, of apprehension?"

"Well...when she...I mean, I asked her and..." Nick found himself stumbling in his own words. He closed his eyes for a bit, trying to clear his head as fast as he could. He finally took a deep breath as he opened his eyes, placing his gaze straight into Reese's eyes. "She said she could have sworn Jay was there with her trying to choke her to death," he informed her while taking another sip of his coffee. "I thought she was just having an anxiety attack of some sort but…it just…that wasn’t an anxiety attack! Anxiety attacks aren’t like that; her entire body was shivering from being so scared! It was different and I know it!"

Reese nodded her head in agreement to Nick’s reasoning about it being an anxiety attack, "Yeah that’s true. Jay is the deranged boyfriend, right?"

"EX-boyfriend!" he claimed quickly in correcting his friend’s mistake. "’Ex’ is a vital two-letter thing in the…the word…thing!" he muffled taking another sip of his coffee.

Reese began to laugh in a low-key intonation. "Don’t need to get defensive there, Nicky!"

"I’m not…I’m just…you know!"

"No, I don’t know actually! What’s going on with you and Ro-Ena, buddy-boy?" she winked at him as she continued to devour her dessert.

"Nothing, we’re just good friends," he shrugged his shoulders not making eye contact with Reese whatsoever.

"Liar!" she laughed a bit louder. "You know you can never lie to me, Nick! Why bother doing it?"

"I am not lying!" Nick retorted defensively.

"My ass! You like freakin’ spend 20 hours of the day with this girl only because you can’t spend the full 24-hour time with her! You worry about her every passing minute! If I had gotten a dime every time you checked your cell phone to see if she called, I’d be amongst the ranks of the richest people in the world by now!" Reese laughed. "You like her, I can tell and it’s perfectly normal to like her and be this worried about her"

"I hear a ‘but’ coming," Nick rolled his eyes

"Just be careful!"

"Of what?"

"In general! This guy Jay could just strike you guys unknowingly and you might be unprepared and though you annoy the bejesus out of me more often than not, it would suck if you end up at the hospital morgue!"

"You’re being paranoid!"

"Am I?"

"Stop that!"

"Stop what?" Reese chortled

"You’re doing that little…thing that you always do, acting like you know everything!" Nick whined. "I hate it when you do that, I feel like you’re looking at me like I’m some kind of kid!"

"You do act like a kid sometimes!"

"I do not!" he whined again

"See! You just did it!" Reese laughed again. "Now back to that elevator thing; you can’t escape this conversation! Now stop and think about this for a second if you will: what if she’s right?"

"What do you mean?" Nick’s facial expression changed from a goofy grin into a more serious look.

"I mean, what if someone really was there with her in the elevator but…you know?"

"Here we go with the ‘let’s confuse and lose Nick’ game!"

"Stay with me here, Nickolas! You watch Unsolved Mysteries and those mystery-genre movies, fill in the blanks!"

"Okay now you’re just being paranoid!" he snickered upon hearing his friend’s comments, and then just as quickly, he curled his eyebrows as a memory from the night before when he put Ro-Ena into bed after the occurrence, sparked in him. "Though…okay this is…it’s just that, when she was sleeping last night, when I went to sort of tuck her in, I noticed that her neck had some…some kind of marks"

"What kind of marks?"

"Like someone was…was strangling her…I don’t know. My mind could have just been playing tricks with me!"

"She told you that Jay was there in the elevator with her trying to kill her, right? That he was trying to kill her by strangling her!" she said while pointing at Nick as her eyes sparkled in bewilderment, but not in a good way.

"Yeah…" Nick said low enough that was barely audible. "You think she didn’t imagine it?"

"Who’s to say that she DID imagine it, Nick?" Reese shrugged her shoulder. "All I’m saying is that people can’t freak out the way that you described how she freaked out over nothing or even over an anxiety attack: you said it yourself, her reaction was evident that it wasn't an anxiety attack! Even if say she was claustrophobic, I highly doubt she’ll have that much fear. And explain the marks you said you saw around her neck. What did they look like anyway?"

Nick looked down, his jaw slightly dropped as his thoughts began to wonder of the possibilities. "Like…someone had…strangled her…oh my god!" he exclaimed upon his realization. "You’re right…what if…but how could he just disappear out of thin air?"

"They were inside an elevator, Nick, not a wooden box with just one way out!" she backed up her reasoning. "Maybe he went through the elevator roof into the shaft?"

Nick stared at Reese with a perplexed expression on his face. He quickly pulled out his wallet and took out his credit card, handing it to Reese. "Here,"

"What’s this? Are you ditching me?"

"Reese, I’m sorry for doing this to you, I know this is our time together but…I have to go…uh…pay for the stuff using that…I’m sorry, I really am!" he quickly grabbed his jacket and leaned over to give Reese a small friendly peck on her cheek. "You know I love ya?" he winked at her trying keep his friend as in good a mood as possible so that she would not hold grudges against him. "I’ll see you later!" and with that, he ran out of the restaurant and into his car and began to drive back to his hotel, where he had left Ro-Ena to rest.