I'm never quite sure if I was just stupid when I missed the signs,
or if I'm just a normal person. Sarah was very sweet on the surface.
She ticked all the boxes, even if she was a bit awkward,
But so what people are awkward. I tried to look past the little things.
I mean, we can all be a bit weird, can't we,
especially when we get nervous. But Sarah was odd in a way that,
in hindsight, maybe I should have taken more seriously on their own. All
the little signs seemed quite innocuous at the start. She was very hands on
during dates, pinching and grabbing and winking. She'd make these hilarious innuendos and
constantly towed the line of what was and wasn't appropriate. I like a woman
with a dark sense of humor, and she had that in spades. But
she pulled away if I tried to reciprocate. And I realized early on that
intimacy wouldn't be on the cards for a long time, and I was fine
with that. I wasn't in a hurry. And yet she continued to send
mixed signals. She'd asked for photos almost every night. Girls don't normally ask
for full length. It was weird, and taking a good picture wasn't as
easy as I thought it would be. I always thought I looked weird in
that kind of full body vertical picture, but she was always happy with what
I sent. She had a lot of requests. One was to see me
lying on the floor, eyes closed, arms to either side of my back.
She liked that one. One time she made me do a strip tease
with a white sheet, slowly pulling it down in one pig draft of the
other. This went on for the first month, i'd say. I sent
her pictures, she sent me some. We talked a lot about what we
each wanted. It was kind of fun and kinky, like we were taking
turns being each other's long distance model. And as a guy, I don't
usually get to enjoy the feeling of being a promiscuous object. I normally feel
like my sexiness is tied to some kind of performance. It was novel and
exciting to be valued as just a physical being. We never really figured I
had an exhibition at streak, or that that was something that women wanted much
of, but she did, and I didn't dislike it. During all this
we continued to meet up once or twice a week for food. It seemed
like we had a little thing going that might one day become something real.
We never did in the night together. First time I thought it was going
to happen was after I sent a photo of me lying on my kitchen floor,
the white towels freezing my ass the whole time. An hour after I
sent the photo, she appeared on my doorstep without warning, hair soaking,
wet and smelling of booze. As soon as she saw me, she grabbed
me, guided me to the sofa, then climbed on top and started kissing
me hard. She was handsy, but it never went past over the clothes
stuff, Just hot, heavy, and well, not all that good.
Do you ever wonder if some people are bad at intimacy stuff because no one
tells them the truth. It was like she was trying to suck the air
out of my lungs. I've had better kisses off my dog. She got
a lot of points for enthusiasm, Don't get me wrong, I've never had
anyone grote me show me with such raw passion before. But whenever I tried
to match her energy, I got the sense she didn't really care for it.
She never reacted or moaned or gave off nonverbal cues to be like do
that more. It was all about her touching me, never vice versa.
After maybe twenty minutes of this over the clothes fumbling, she asked me to
lie down on the floor. I had no idea where this was going,
so I did. Can you hold your breath, she asked as she looked
down at me. All of a sudden, I felt very small, and
there were lots of thoughts going through my head. I'm pretty sure there was
nothing I wouldn't have done for her in that moment, although not necessarily because
I wanted to. There was just an intensity to us stare and shrunk me
down until I was the size of an end. So I held my breath.
I held it so long my lungs burned and my head swam until I
couldn't do it any longer. When I opened my eyes, she was looking
down at me with so much hunger in her eyes. I actually got a
little scared. Admittedly, I sort of liked it. She paused for a
moment, drinking me in, and then said she had better get going,
she had work in the morning. We kissed, at the door, and
her hand roamed all over my back. I was called by that point,
and her hands felt so warm, I swore something was about to happen,
but she simply left me standing there. It was confusing and frustrating, so
much so I almost didn't call her back. But she had a kind of
commanding energy about her, a deep awareness of what she did and didn't want.
That it was just enough for me to keep replying to her text After
that night. I always laid on my kitchen floor when she asked for a
photo, but it never really had the same effect of getting her to my
doorstep. Still, she became a regular fixture in my life, and pretty
soon I hoped we might get close to something a bit more serious. I
looked for signs that she thought the same thing, but the going was damn
slow. By the time winter rolled around, we'd been on and off for
six months, and just about the only thing that actually changed was the way
she kept holding my hand. She'd take my cold hands between her own and
hold them against her cheek and neck, maybe even a chest at times.
It was quite nice. It took a while, but I managed to swing
her around into another home visit. You can guess what I was hoping for,
but she actually made us spend most of our time out on the balcony
watching the stars, cuddling together in the freezing cold. She made me give
her my jacket as well, even when I offered to get a one from
inside, it had to be the one I was wearing, and she wouldn't
let me replace it. By the time we went back in, I felt
like I was close to getting pneumonia, and the shock of the warm air
left me feeling dizzy. Lie down, she pegged me. Lie in the
floor. I have an idea. I was shaking by this point, the
tips of my fingers ice blue. When she came back over, she had
a glass of red wine. She stood over me, warming the glass in
her hands before giving me clear instruction. Zip some, she said, and
keep it in your mind. Close your eyes, don't open them, and
don't swallow the wine. I don't even like wine, and I was pretty
irritated by the whole thing, But there was a tension in the air,
something about her electric anticipation that infected me. I didn't know what was happening,
and in the past, when I felt that way, it sometimes led
to me having new and exciting experiences out of nowhere. She kissed me,
pushing her tongue into the lukewarm wine until it dribbled messily out of the corners
of my lips. At the same time, and in one swift motion,
she pressed the heel of her hand into my diaphragm and pushed so hard that
the wine gushed out of my mouth and into hers. I started coughing.
She did too. My immediate reaction was that kind of irritation you can't hide.
It actually ticked me off. It was surprising in all the wrong ways,
and given what I may be hoped to was coming, it just meant
all the disappointment turned into outright frustration. All I'd wanted was a normal kiss,
some sign of basic normal affection. Did she even realize how terrible I
felt? Have to freeze my ass off on the balcony so she could feel
like some gentlemen was given her my jacket. I pushed her off me gently
but firm. Let's not do that again, I said, choking at the
words. What were you trying to do? Nothing? She cried, It
was nothing, just something different. She seemed sincerely regretful and sorry, But
I was half naked, horny, irritated, and freezing cold. I didn't
ask her to leave, but she clearly sensed the change in atmosphere and made
some I wipe myself down while she went to the toilet, and when she
emerged, I greeted her with a handbag and keys. I didn't even walk
her to the door. Instead, as she looked at me with a sort
of sad power from the door, I simply ignored her and began to mop
the kitchen floor. Looks like a damn murder scene, I grumbled. She
may have said something before she left, but I didn't look up until I
heard the door close. After that, we didn't speak for a while.
Now this is a very typical thing for me to do, but over the
next few days I did a little retrospective on our dates and realized I'd been
the one putting in all the work. It was always me escalating, asking
for dates, phone calls, trying to move things between us forward. I
figured if there was any chance of a real relationship, then she'd have to
just come back and apologize and explain her behavior and be the one to reach
out for once. Of course, at the exact same time, I couldn't
get her out of my head. Maybe she'd just been clumsy. I thought,
maybe she was nervous. I couldn't get my head around the wine thing.
It seems so random. I'm more familiar with the usual BDSM stuff people
like. If I could have pinned her actions down to some specific kink,
I could have more confidently figured if we were compatible or not. But without
more information, I was just well and truly confused. I wanted to like
her, but if there was no chance of us working out, if we
were just incompatible, then I wanted closure. As it was, I didn't
have a clue what we were, but what the hell we've been doing either
way? When she finally text asking if I'd like to pick her up after
work, I agreed. I wanted closure, and maybe I imagined it with
something about her tone seemed a little contrite. Her feeling was reinforced when I
met her in the parking lot of the hospital where she worked, and I
found her sitting on the hood of her car in a breath taking red dress.
As soon as I was out of the car, she took my hand
and told me she'd set up a little date for us, something special,
and that she'd finally make it all up to me. The way she kissed
me, the way she guided my hand along a waist, there was something
so utterly different about it, so committed that I immediately knew she wanted to
go the whole way. I could just tell she'd finally made a decision,
a threshold had been crossed, and I wanted to go see where this would
lead. She didn't work at the hospital itself, but rather took me off
to a building on the same ground. It was a quiet, little red
brick thing, just two floors from the outside, and I wondered what it
was exactly that she did. Inside. There was a chemical smell I was
pretty overwhelming, but at first glance it seemed like a simple g P office.
There was a little reception area with one or two chairs, a small
countertop with some computers, and a bunch of back offices. This was after
ours, so no one else was there, only a few dim lights in
the reception area, everywhere else was dark. She quickly disappeared upstairs, telling
me she was going to slip into something more comfortable, and I settled down
for a short wait. At least she locked the door behind us, so
no one else could come in. I took that as a good sign,
but I still felt pretty uncertain. Where were we and why the hell did
you pick this place for our date. I tried to sit down, but
it felt too strange, like waiting for the dentist, so I stood and
shoveled around a bit instead, listening to the muffled dumps of whatever the hell
she was doing upstairs. Outside, it was starting to get dark, Fewer
and fewer cars were going past, and it was raining heavily, all of
which made that little room feel even like a lonely little corner of the world,
well hidden and out of the way, even though the hospital was clearly
visible, with heavy traffic not far behind it. There wasn't much else to
do except snoop, and I quickly noticed the door had been left slightly ajar,
like someone had forgotten to shut it. It was the only door I
could reach without climbing over something, so my curiosity got the better of me.
I approached it and got maybe two feet away before I realized it was
the source of that damn chemical smell. Once I realized that, I had
to take a look inside, just so I could know for sure what the
hell it was. I tried pushing it open an inch or two and peeking
inside, but it was pitch black in there, so I pushed it open
a little further, and using my phone light, I saw that there were
a set of stairs going down into a basement. More thumps from upstairs told
me she wasn't going to come down any time soon. I had time to
check, so I went down a step and tried seeing if that helped,
but there was nothing. So I went down another and then another, until
suddenly a set of automatic lights came on, with a loud thunk and the
rising whine of fluorescence coming to life. I'm not sure what I expected for
what I saw. At first it left me dumb struck, but then I
don't know. It was a sterile room with white speckled tiles, a few
countertops running along the walls covered in silver instruments I didn't recognize, one wall
covered in a regular grid of metal covered doors, and three steel slabs in
the center of the room. One of them was occupied a vaguely human shape
covered by a white shroud, a lone foot of a man sticking out of
the bottom. Something about the strange coloring and texture of the skin immediately let
me know he wasn't having a nap. That and the toe tag was a
pretty obvious clue. It was a morgue. She worked in the morgue,
and it was here, of all places, she'd decided to set our final
date. My initial reaction was to want to go upstairs and confront her,
get angry, let it out, and just leave after making her unlock the
door. But something stopped me. I can't say for sure what. As
quickly as it came, the anger left me, and I was left with
a kind of horrified curiosity, an idea I couldn't even put to words in
the privacy of my own head. Instead of turning around and leaving, I
waited a few seconds to make sure she wasn't coming down right behind me,
and I began to descend the rest of the way to the body felt like
a ten mile hike. Every step was too loud, every breath a nervous
shivering exhulation. The elicant might burst into a gasp at any moment. I
was terrified. I couldn't help but imagine that faceless shape turning to look at
me, or sitting upright in one smooth motion, I quickly realized why ghost
I stereotypically portrayed his walking sheet. Someone must have had the same thought.
I had the imagined scene of a shroud covered body moving swiftly towards you in
the dark. Hell of a time for my brain to play those kinds of
games with me, But that curiosity drove me on. I couldn't walk away,
not now. Before I knew it, I was stood by the body,
and with a shaking hand, I pulled back the sheet. He looked
like me, vaguely. I think we would have probably been a close match
before the bloating. Same hair, collar, same face shape, same ethnicity,
age, so on. For a moment, I considered the idea that
maybe Sarah was just a very weird woman. People get desensitized to this kind
of stuff all the time, and to her, the building Brewin might just
be a nice empty place to bring a date. But that body on that
slab, I don't know how to describe it, but it set something off
in me, a kind of slow rising dread. I'm not sure why I
did what I did next, but I couldn't stop thinking of that strange night
when she pushed against my chest and sent wine dribbling out my mouth so utterly
bizarre. But I placed my hand against the man's cold flesh, healed to
the diaphragm and applied pressure. He animated like a puppet, a brief gasp
of air, followed by curdled blood flowing out of his mouth. Black and
yellow and red paletts, platelets, and plasmas separated with time into a thick
soup, and the smell hit me. I couldn't help but be sick,
and as I hunched over the nearby drain and emptied my body of all my
vomit and bile, images of my time with Sarah flashed through my mind.
The photos of me nude lying on the white tile floor, the use of
the blanket to cover my chest had vexation on my cold hands, and nights
spent freezing in my balcony, filling my mouth with wine and forcing it back
out with a shoved to the chest. I looked at the body and quickly
understood how and why she discovered what happens when you apply pressure to the chest.
The image was crystal clear in my mind. The mental image of her
slender frame straddling the bloated men before me was as unpleasant and inescapable as nails
on a chalkboard. Unable to shake it. I hunched over once more and
was sick again, this time until my eyes watered and there was nothing left
but saliva and bile. I felt violated. I wanted to leave. I
no longer felt angry or confused. Instead, every moment of the last six
months fell into place, and a pattern emerged that terrified me. She wasn't
meandering or clueless. Everything she'd done had been moving towards this one night with
me here, locked in this place, with no one to call for help.
I'd blundered into what might just be the most dangerous situation of my life.
And now I was too deep into the trap to just blindly panic.
Under ground and inner room with only one exit, I had to be careful.
She was up there somewhere, maybe clueless about what I'd realized, maybe
not. She seemed small enough, but a cursory glance at some of the
glinting blades on the nearby work surface told me she didn't have to be a
bodybuilder to hurt me. Any One of those razor sharp instruments could work its
way into the meat of my neck with very little effort. Sooner or later
she'd realize where I was. Sooner or later. This plan of hers had
to have an endgame. I looked up the stairs. If she came down
from the top floor, she'd see the lights from this room be obvious to
anyone where I'd gone. I was torn. Do I go up and pretend
I saw nothing? I thought about having to go up there and lie my
way through some aw good encounter. Oh I'm feeling a little unwell. I
have to skip polite, smile, nod. Could I stomach even that brief
exchange? And that's if she bought it? And it required that the next
step of a planet involved me conscious or alive. I thought of her attacking
me out of nowhere with a scalpel, silently dragging it across my throat,
letting that surgical blade bite into cartilage. She was small, but so what.
I had no idea what she was planning or where she was lurking.
Walking into an ambush and toughing it out didn't seem like the best of plans.
What I wanted was distant. I just needed a door or a window.
I just had to avoid her. My first instinct had been to get
out of the basement, and I wanted to go with it, but the
strange sounds coming from upstairs made me think she might have finally come to find
Reception empty. Terrified, I looked around, desperate for some way out or
maybe even a good hiding spot. Just about every bad idea you can think
of went through my head, including swapping myself out for the corpse. I
nearly laughed at the stupidity of it, for my attention had been pulled to
the mob drawers, and with a sinking feeling in my gut, I slowly
realized there was nowhere else in that room large enough to hide a person.
Michael. The voice was muffled and distant, but I could tell she was
finally looking for me. This was really fast becoming and now or never moment.
With a deep breath, I pulled at the first drawer I saw,
and felt bittersweet relief that it was empty. I wasn't sure I could go
through with this, but at least it hadn't been already occupied. With a
rising gorge, I climbed inside feet first, slid myself back into the darkness,
try my best not to think of a pair of cold hands snatching my
ankles, and then quickly pulled the door shut. I'd barely heard a click
when there came the sound of footsteps down the stairs. They stopped halfway,
and I clearly heard a hiss damn under a breath before turning back around and
returning upstairs. She must have figured I'd seen the bodies and run off somewhere
else. Wherever that might take her. It had at least brought me time.
I opened the door, using the internal latch, while pushing aside more
bequest of why that feature was even necessary, and stepped out as quietly as
I could onto the tile steps. After that, I scaled the stairs as
silently as I could manage, and made my way to the door at the
top of the basement. She had thankfully left it a char once again,
bit of a habit of hers, I assumed, and peeked through into the
darkness beyond. In the time I had been in the basement, the sun
had fully set, and now there were only the lights of passing cars to
illuminate reception. Bright and the light with hard edges swept across the room one
after the other with strange irregularity. They made for an unpredictable insight into the
room's components, a chair, a computer, a countertop. I had to
squint and wait patiently for a few of them to go by before I realized
one of the back office's doors were open, and there was the sound of
frustrated footsteps coming from within. She was distracted, and this was my best
chance of getting out. I tiptoed out of the basement and listened carefully.
She occasionally hissed an angry refrain to herself, opening what sounded like cabinet doors.
Why you doing this, Michael, she whined, and I was surprised
that she sounded not malevolent, but sad and pitiful, like an upset teenager.
She was genuinely confused by my reaction. For a brief moment, I
dared to wonder if my imagination had gotten the better of me. Right there
on the counter was a bottle of wine and two glasses. Maybe she really
was just intending for a normal date, and I'd made connections that were never
really there. But in my mind I saw that corpse bloated and bloody once
again, and ultimately decided I was better safe than sorry. A quick check
of the front door showed who was still locked, and so with nowhere else
to go, I went off another floor, careful to stop every step or
two and listen for signs she had changed course. Thankfully I was at the
top step by the time I heard her leave the office and enter another Come
on, she cried, why are you being like this? I wasn't sure
what my game plan was. I figured my best chance was a window who
was already trying to start tearing the top floor apart when I was stopped dead
in my tracks by what I saw. There were a few rooms on the
top floor, but only one of them had an open door and the lights
turned on. What I saw inside hit me so hard I stopped dead in
my tracks and led out a gasp. It was covered in plastic crap top
to bottom, floors, walls, and ceiling. The small white table had
been set up in one corner, and on it lay three open pill bottles,
a hack saw, and several scalpels. Seeing all that stuff, getting
such an unfraught sight into what she had planned, it all made my damn
skin crawl. That and the bottle of lotion made me want to be sick.
Suppressing the urge to gag, I decided none of that really mattered,
because, and this wasn't a great surprise, she had picked a room with
a large and easy to open window. I pushed the side of the plastic
sheeting and opened it to find the drop below was in anywhere near as bad
as the thought of spending another second in that damn room. I began to
climb out, got one leg through, carefully balancing so that if I fell,
I'd minimize injury. When I heard a sound by the door, the
crinkling of plastic, the gentle glide over door. I turned and saw her
standing in the dark hallway beyond. It was hard to see, but she
wasn't grinning like a maniac or waiting with a knife. More than anything,
she just looked disappointed, maybe even frustrated. In hindsight, it made sense
she'd spent a long time setting this up, not just the room with a
plastic sheeting, but the entire relationship had been built carefully around that night.
I expected her to crack break, come at me, screaming and slashing with
some hidden blade, but she only shook her head and quietly it's not my
fault. I considered a reply, but found none to be fitting. I
jumped and landed safely below with a bit of a knee shaking thumb. Nowhere
near as bad as the shin splintering worst case scenario, I kept imagining.
Then, with a deep breath, relishing the small of fresh air, I
ran as quickly as I could towards the hospital and the lot where my car
waited. You know, you might not be too surprised to learn this,
but there wasn't actually much I could prove when it was all over. By
the time the police visited the morgue, it was apparently back to normal.
Her side of the story was that I'd insisted on visiting the morgue out of
curiosity and got upset when she didn't want to stick around. It was kind
of hard to prove anything else. I had no injuries, no evidence of
intent, or anything else other than a suspicion of some pretty mess behavior.
In the end, the best the police were willing to do was hook me
up with a lawyer who dealt with restraining orders, and he told me I
need some evidence of actual harassment. Well that and the main gist of his
advice was actually for me to stay away from her, because, if anything,
it'd be a hell of a lot easier for her to convince people I
was the problem and not the other way around. I didn't have much choice
in the end except to move on, and all told, I was just
happy to have made it out alive, even if the thought of her out
there made me deeply anxious. I had to assume she'd go looking for another
target since I'd wised up, although I hoped that maybe the close encounter with
me would stop her from trying again. As for me, I deleted my
tender profile, having decided that internet dating would never be a thing for me
again. But the nightmares persist, and I often think of her standing there
in the doorway. She didn't look half as upset as I might have thought.
The whole thing was like I'd been a bit naughty. There. She
was an aspiring murder, moments away from executing a plan that had been months
in the making, and she'd stood there like it was all nothing but a
miner set back. It just didn't make sense, and like everything with Sarah,
I struggled to move on from this peculiar behavior until I got an answer.
Well to day, I finally got it when I woke up and felt
something strange by my feet. I pulled back the sheets and saw something that
made my heart sink, and a cold sweat form on the back of my
neck. I was wearing a toe tag. I think I might have underestimated
her patience, and I am starting to appreciate just why she found that night
in the morgue to be a little more than a set back. On the
tag itself, my name is scrawled on one line, and on the date
of death below she had simply written in just a few days