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I met a cute girl on Tinder but some of her requests are making me uncomfortable
I’m never quite sure if I was just stupid when I missed the signs or if I’m just a normal person. Sara was very sweet and on the surface she ticked all the boxes, even if she was a bit awkward. But so what? People are awkward. I try to look past the little things. I mean we can all be a bit weird can’t we? Especially when we get nervous. But Sara 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 toed the line of what was and wasn’t appropriate. I like a woman with a dark sense of humour, and she had that in spades. But she pulled away if I ever tried to reciprocate, and I realised early on that sex 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 ask for photos almost every night. Girls don’t normally ask for full-length nudes. It was weird, and taking a good picture wasn’t as easy as I thought it’d 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, on my back. She liked that one a lot. One time she made me do a striptease with a white sheet, slowly pulling it down in one picture after 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 kinda 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 sex 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. I never really figured I had an exhibitionist streak, or that that was something 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 little thing going that might one day become something real.
We never did spend 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 tiles 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 sex-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 grope me and touch me with so much raw passion. 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 non-verbal 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 her stare that shrunk me down until I was the size of an ant.
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 sorta 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 hands roamed all over my back. I was cold 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 to keep me replying to her texts. 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, her neck, maybe even her 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, cuddled together in the freezing cold. She made me give her my jacket as well, even when I offered to get 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 begged me. “Lie down on 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 instructions.
“Sip some,” she said. “And keep it in your mouth. 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 corner 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 pissed me off. It was surprising in all the wrong ways, and given what I’d maybe *hoped* was coming, it just meant all that disappointment turned into outright frustration. All I’d wanted was a normal kiss. Some sign of basic, normal affection. Did she even realise how shit I felt after freezing my ass off on the balcony so she could feel like I was some gentleman giving her my jacket?
I pushed her off me gently but firmly.
“Let’s not do that again,” I said, choking the words out. “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 excuse. I wiped myself down while she went to the toilet, and when she emerged, I greeted her with her handbag and keys. I didn’t even walk her to the door. Instead, as she looked at me with a sort of sad pout 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 realised 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 apologise and explain her behaviour 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 seemed so random. I’m more than familiar with the usual BDSM stuff people like. If I could have pinned her actions down to some specific kink or fetish, 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 or what the hell we’d 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 but something about her tone seemed a little contrite. That 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 her 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 in the hospital itself, but rather took me off to a small building on the same grounds. 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 that was pretty overwhelming, but at first glance it seemed like a simple GP office. There was a little reception area with one or two chairs. A small counter top with some computers and a bunch of back offices. This was after hours 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. I took that as a good sign, but I still felt pretty uncertain. Where were we? And why the hell did she pick this place for a date?
I tried to sit down but it felt too strange, like waiting for the dentist. So I stood and shuffled around a bit instead, listening to the muffled thumps 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 a 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 realised it was the source of that damn chemical smell. Once I realised 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 was a set of stairs going down into a basement.
More thumps from upstairs told me that 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, but what I saw… at first it left me dumbstruck 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 recognise. One wall covered in a regular grid of metal cupboard doors.
And three steel slabs in the centre of the room.
One of them was occupied. A vaguely human shape covered by a white shroud, the lone foot of a man sticking out the bottom. Something about the strange colouring 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.
The walk to the body felt like a ten-mile hike. Every step was too loud. Every breath, a nervous shivering exhalation that felt like it 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 realised why ghosts are stereotypically portrayed as walking sheets. 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 colour. Same face shape. Same ethnicity, age, so on. For a moment I considered the idea that maybe Sara was just a very weird woman. People get desensitised to this kind of stuff all the time, and to her the building we were in 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 where she pushed against my chest and sent wine dribbling out my mouth. So utterly bizarre but… maybe?
I placed my hand against the man’s cold flesh, heel 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, platelets and plasma separated with time into a thick soup. When 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 the vomit and bile, images of my time with Sara flashed through my mind.
The photos of me nude lying on a white tile floor. The use of the blanket to cover my chest. Her fixation on my cold hands. A night spent freezing on the balcony. Filling my mouth with wine and forcing it back out with a shove to the chest. I looked at the body and quickly understood how and why she’d 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 man 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, underground and in a room with only one exit! I had to be careful. She was up there, somewhere. Maybe clueless about what I’d realised. 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 realise where I was. Sooner or later this plan of hers had to have an endgame. I looked up at the stairs. If she came down from the top floor she’d see the lights from this room and it would 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 awkward 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 her plan 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 distance. 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 mind, including swapping myself out for the corpse. I nearly laughed at the stupidity of it, but my attention had been pulled to the morgue drawers and with a sinking feeling in my gut I slowly realised 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 really was fast becoming a 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 trying my best not to think of a pair of cold hands snatching my ankles, and then quietly pulled the door shut.
I’d barely heard the click when there came the sound of footsteps down the stairs. They stopped half-way and I clearly heard her hiss “*Shit!*” under her breath before turning back around and returning upstairs. She must’ve figured I’d seen the bodies and run off somewhere else. Wherever that might take her, it had at least bought me time. I opened the door using an internal latch while pushing aside morbid questions of why that feature was even necessary, and stepped out as quietly as I could onto the tile steps. After that I slowly 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 ajar once again (bit of a habit of hers I assumed) and peeked through into the darkness beyond.
In the time I’d been in the basement the sun had fully set and now there was only the lights of passing cars to illuminate reception. Bright amber lights with hard edges swept across the room, one after the other, with strange irregularity. They made for an unpredictable insight into the room’s contents. A chair. A computer. A counter top. I had to squint and wait patiently for a few of them to go by before I realised 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 are 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 it was still locked, and so with nowhere else to go, I went up 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 that office and enter another.
“Come onnnnn!” 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, and was all ready 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 let out a gasp.
It was covered in plastic wrap. Top to bottom. Floors, walls, and ceilings. A small white table had been set up in one corner and on it lay three open pill bottles, a hacksaw, and several scalpels.
Seeing all that stuff, getting such an upfront insight into what she had planned, it all made my fucking skin crawl. That and a 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 aside the plastic sheeting and opened it to find the drop below wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the thought of spending another second in that fucking room.
I began to climb out, got one leg through, carefully balancing so that if I fell I’d minimise injury, when I heard a sound by the door. The crinkling of plastic. The gentle glide of a 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 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 the 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 mewed,
“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 thump. Nowhere near as bad as the shin-splintering worst-case scenario I’d kept imagining. Then, with a deep breath, relishing the smell 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 all was 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 morbid 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 fucked up behaviour. At 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’d 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 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 Tinder profile having decided that internet dating will 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’ve thought. The whole thing was like I’d been a bit naughty. There she was, an aspiring murderer 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 minor setback. It just didn’t make sense, and like everything with Sara I struggled to move on from this peculiar behaviour until I got an answer.
Well… today 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 have underestimated her patience, and I am starting to appreciate just why she found that night in the morgue to be little more than a setback. On the tag itself, my name is scrawled on one line, and on the date of death below, she has simply written,
*In just a few days.*
source
I’m never quite sure if I was just stupid when I missed the signs or if I’m just a normal person. Sara was very sweet and on the surface she ticked all the boxes, even if she was a bit awkward. But so what? People are awkward. I try to look past the little things. I mean we can all be a bit weird can’t we? Especially when we get nervous. But Sara 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 toed the line of what was and wasn’t appropriate. I like a woman with a dark sense of humour, and she had that in spades. But she pulled away if I ever tried to reciprocate, and I realised early on that sex 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 ask for photos almost every night. Girls don’t normally ask for full-length nudes. It was weird, and taking a good picture wasn’t as easy as I thought it’d 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, on my back. She liked that one a lot. One time she made me do a striptease with a white sheet, slowly pulling it down in one picture after 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 kinda 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 sex 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. I never really figured I had an exhibitionist streak, or that that was something 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 little thing going that might one day become something real.
We never did spend 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 tiles 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 sex-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 grope me and touch me with so much raw passion. 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 non-verbal 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 her stare that shrunk me down until I was the size of an ant.
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 sorta 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 hands roamed all over my back. I was cold 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 to keep me replying to her texts. 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, her neck, maybe even her 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, cuddled together in the freezing cold. She made me give her my jacket as well, even when I offered to get 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 begged me. “Lie down on 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 instructions.
“Sip some,” she said. “And keep it in your mouth. 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 corner 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 pissed me off. It was surprising in all the wrong ways, and given what I’d maybe *hoped* was coming, it just meant all that disappointment turned into outright frustration. All I’d wanted was a normal kiss. Some sign of basic, normal affection. Did she even realise how shit I felt after freezing my ass off on the balcony so she could feel like I was some gentleman giving her my jacket?
I pushed her off me gently but firmly.
“Let’s not do that again,” I said, choking the words out. “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 excuse. I wiped myself down while she went to the toilet, and when she emerged, I greeted her with her handbag and keys. I didn’t even walk her to the door. Instead, as she looked at me with a sort of sad pout 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 realised 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 apologise and explain her behaviour 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 seemed so random. I’m more than familiar with the usual BDSM stuff people like. If I could have pinned her actions down to some specific kink or fetish, 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 or what the hell we’d 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 but something about her tone seemed a little contrite. That 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 her 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 in the hospital itself, but rather took me off to a small building on the same grounds. 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 that was pretty overwhelming, but at first glance it seemed like a simple GP office. There was a little reception area with one or two chairs. A small counter top with some computers and a bunch of back offices. This was after hours 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. I took that as a good sign, but I still felt pretty uncertain. Where were we? And why the hell did she pick this place for a date?
I tried to sit down but it felt too strange, like waiting for the dentist. So I stood and shuffled around a bit instead, listening to the muffled thumps 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 a 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 realised it was the source of that damn chemical smell. Once I realised 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 was a set of stairs going down into a basement.
More thumps from upstairs told me that 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, but what I saw… at first it left me dumbstruck 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 recognise. One wall covered in a regular grid of metal cupboard doors.
And three steel slabs in the centre of the room.
One of them was occupied. A vaguely human shape covered by a white shroud, the lone foot of a man sticking out the bottom. Something about the strange colouring 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.
The walk to the body felt like a ten-mile hike. Every step was too loud. Every breath, a nervous shivering exhalation that felt like it 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 realised why ghosts are stereotypically portrayed as walking sheets. 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 colour. Same face shape. Same ethnicity, age, so on. For a moment I considered the idea that maybe Sara was just a very weird woman. People get desensitised to this kind of stuff all the time, and to her the building we were in 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 where she pushed against my chest and sent wine dribbling out my mouth. So utterly bizarre but… maybe?
I placed my hand against the man’s cold flesh, heel 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, platelets and plasma separated with time into a thick soup. When 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 the vomit and bile, images of my time with Sara flashed through my mind.
The photos of me nude lying on a white tile floor. The use of the blanket to cover my chest. Her fixation on my cold hands. A night spent freezing on the balcony. Filling my mouth with wine and forcing it back out with a shove to the chest. I looked at the body and quickly understood how and why she’d 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 man 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, underground and in a room with only one exit! I had to be careful. She was up there, somewhere. Maybe clueless about what I’d realised. 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 realise where I was. Sooner or later this plan of hers had to have an endgame. I looked up at the stairs. If she came down from the top floor she’d see the lights from this room and it would 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 awkward 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 her plan 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 distance. 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 mind, including swapping myself out for the corpse. I nearly laughed at the stupidity of it, but my attention had been pulled to the morgue drawers and with a sinking feeling in my gut I slowly realised 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 really was fast becoming a 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 trying my best not to think of a pair of cold hands snatching my ankles, and then quietly pulled the door shut.
I’d barely heard the click when there came the sound of footsteps down the stairs. They stopped half-way and I clearly heard her hiss “*Shit!*” under her breath before turning back around and returning upstairs. She must’ve figured I’d seen the bodies and run off somewhere else. Wherever that might take her, it had at least bought me time. I opened the door using an internal latch while pushing aside morbid questions of why that feature was even necessary, and stepped out as quietly as I could onto the tile steps. After that I slowly 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 ajar once again (bit of a habit of hers I assumed) and peeked through into the darkness beyond.
In the time I’d been in the basement the sun had fully set and now there was only the lights of passing cars to illuminate reception. Bright amber lights with hard edges swept across the room, one after the other, with strange irregularity. They made for an unpredictable insight into the room’s contents. A chair. A computer. A counter top. I had to squint and wait patiently for a few of them to go by before I realised 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 are 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 it was still locked, and so with nowhere else to go, I went up 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 that office and enter another.
“Come onnnnn!” 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, and was all ready 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 let out a gasp.
It was covered in plastic wrap. Top to bottom. Floors, walls, and ceilings. A small white table had been set up in one corner and on it lay three open pill bottles, a hacksaw, and several scalpels.
Seeing all that stuff, getting such an upfront insight into what she had planned, it all made my fucking skin crawl. That and a 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 aside the plastic sheeting and opened it to find the drop below wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the thought of spending another second in that fucking room.
I began to climb out, got one leg through, carefully balancing so that if I fell I’d minimise injury, when I heard a sound by the door. The crinkling of plastic. The gentle glide of a 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 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 the 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 mewed,
“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 thump. Nowhere near as bad as the shin-splintering worst-case scenario I’d kept imagining. Then, with a deep breath, relishing the smell 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 all was 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 morbid 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 fucked up behaviour. At 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’d 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 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 Tinder profile having decided that internet dating will 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’ve thought. The whole thing was like I’d been a bit naughty. There she was, an aspiring murderer 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 minor setback. It just didn’t make sense, and like everything with Sara I struggled to move on from this peculiar behaviour until I got an answer.
Well… today 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 have underestimated her patience, and I am starting to appreciate just why she found that night in the morgue to be little more than a setback. On the tag itself, my name is scrawled on one line, and on the date of death below, she has simply written,
*In just a few days.*
source
| 3,000 mlx | |
| 71 | |
| 3 |