To say I couldn’t imagine a life without Audrey sounds melodramatic, I know. I had lived 37 years without Audrey. But once I knew she existed, that was it for me.
I was an attractive woman with very little baggage — no children, never married — and a lot of money, but I considered myself too jaded and too busy for a relationship. I’d had plenty of one-night stands and short-term flings, but I was certain I’d die alone with a cat or a bird who knew all my secrets, but could never share them.
Then came Audrey. I couldn’t shake her. From the moment she sat herself down next to me at the bar, I was hers. Early 30s, dirty blonde and always messy hair, terribly into ceramics and plants. She worked at a patisserie and so she got up early, like I did, and I liked to imagine her hands coated in flour as I ran through my meticulous morning routine. She didn’t mind my persnickety nature or numerous idiosyncrasies, and I was so enamored with her that I let her just… make me happy.
She quickly moved into my place, ditching her studio apartment and driving through the hills to work, her rotation of angry ‘90s music fading down the long drive. She’d cook when she returned home, even after a long day of making food for others, and she never tired of feeding me her latest creations. I lavished her with attention whenever we were both home, and in turn, I basked in her affection.
She was loquacious and an open book, which helped in the beginning, as I was forced to be tight-lipped about my work. But eventually, I would share with her a very specific device — the technology that has led us here, to my confession.
I work in experimental biotech. And one thing I’d been working on for quite some time, outside the purview of my colleagues — or board members, investors, and the FDA — was a pair of small implants designed to be worn by two people who wanted to be very, very close. I will not bore you with the details of how it worked, but the end result was that when both were activated, each party could feel everything the other felt, at least physically.
In my head, it was to be an empathy tool that would help patients better communicate with medical providers. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories of patients, particularly women and people of color, whose doctors won’t believe they’re in pain or that anything is really wrong with them. Well, what if your idiot male doctor could feel your ovarian cyst? What if they could feel the pain you’re in instead of assuming you just want opiates? I was sure some doctors would refuse, but is the medical profession not meant to be empathic?
Listen to her, I’m sure you’re saying. Listen to this ‘scientist’ with her lofty, world-changing goals pretending like the medical profession is anything but capitalism at this point.
Okay, I’d laugh too.
But I’m also only human and so, of course, I used the device for sex.
Audrey acted like signing the NDA was foreplay without even knowing what we were to discuss and had zero reservations about linking herself to me. I warned her that it was a closeness neither of us had ever been able to know, but she was convinced it would be nothing but pleasurable and then told me, irrelevantly, about how many drugs she’d done in her 20s. I’d heard all these stories before, but I nodded patiently as I prepared her skin for incision and insertion. I’d already done mine.
I’m not sure I can describe the sensation of feeling myself touch her as though I were touching myself. I’m not sure that’s possible. It was exquisite, however, and lasted till morning.
When I finally deactivated our devices, I felt a loss I didn’t know that I could feel. I grabbed her hand with my hand. It was enough. It was grounding. But I knew then that the device was going to ruin us.
I’m sure you’ve heard this before. A high is only a high for a little while. Then you need a bigger high. For Audrey and I, it was enough to lose ourselves in each other (and ourselves?) for several months. I would only allow us to use the device once a week for fear it’d get old or become an addiction. But eventually, she and I began to discuss the other things we might do.
Audrey loved to tell me of the late-night group sex sessions of her 20s; she knew I liked to imagine her within them and had no jealousy. I’d often told her that I wished I could know what it was like to do something like that, but I simply could not be recognized. Even the most exclusive clubs could be — and likely were — full of the exact kind of people I would see in meetings later. But Audrey realized that the device could give me that sensation without my presence, using her body.
It took a little convincing, but finally, I agreed.
I settled into our bed alone with a glass of wine as Audrey texted me she’d arrived at the venue and was surrendering her phone, as she assured me was typical of these types of events. Without texts between us, I could only imagine what she was up to. I closed my eyes. I felt the whisper of her dress across her thighs when she walked. Her heels ached slightly. She’d be wishing she wore different shoes. Something cold in her hand. Champagne. The bubbles on her lips. Slight grazes on her arms as she engaged in flirtatious small talk. Before too long, I felt her kiss someone. A man. Then a woman. Then more.
If someone had walked in on me that night, I’m sure I would have looked insane, writhing with unseen pleasures. But when Audrey returned home to my flushed form, she didn’t have to say anything. She merely peeled off her dress and approached.
It went on like that, for a while, until we decided we needed something more. The soft touches of myriad lovers turned into leather and wood and metal. Audrey returned home with welts and bruises across her entire body, and though they never appeared on my skin, I knew exactly how she got each one.
I worried sometimes that there would be no limit to our quest for shared sensations, but I’d never find out. One night, Audrey went to meet a new partner. I trusted her to vet them herself — she had more friends into that sort of thing than I ever had.
Nothing seemed particularly out of the ordinary that night, at least not for Audrey and me. Some light kissing before I felt the softness of a mattress beneath her, then metal against her wrists. Standard fare. I’m sure they’d discussed a safe word.
I knew something was wrong when I felt the handcuffs biting into her wrists, as though Audrey were trying to free herself, yet there was nothing else that I could feel to provoke such a response. What had she seen?
And then I felt it. Hands at her throat. Another set at her ankles. There were two people there. She hadn’t mentioned that. A surprise?
I was no stranger to hands at her throat, but these were too tight. I was not physically being strangled but it felt as though I were. My body heaved for breath. I tried to get up, to grab my phone and call the police and make up a lie about how my girlfriend had sent me an alarming text from the address — yes, let me find it, the address — please could they go there?
But I couldn’t speak. I could hardly move. I could only feel until I couldn’t.
If the sensation of voluntarily disconnecting from your lover after a night of passion felt like a loss, imagine feeling the love of your life die. It was a vaster, emptier cold. I gasped for air in that pit, tears pricking the corners of my eyes, too shocked to sob. Perhaps she’d just lost consciousness, I thought. But I knew better. Audrey was gone.
It did not stop me from waiting for the device to reactivate. I kept mine on, just in case. But without her brain waves, there was ultimately nothing to connect us.
I reported Audrey missing. I told the police most of the truth — that we were in an open relationship and I allowed her to explore her kinks without me. I gave them all the information I had, including the address Audrey had given me as a precaution, but that address did not exist. Where they’d really taken her was anyone’s guess.
I knew justice for Audrey was in the hands of an overworked homicide detective who assumed a woman into some kinky shit had gotten what was coming for her. I could practically taste the victim blaming when I answered their questions and I suspected then that Audrey would not be their top priority. She was a high-risk victim, the kind of woman who had placed herself in harm’s way, like your sweet daughter or sister never would, right?
That’s why I never told them about the device, or that I knew how Audrey had connected with her murderers.
The device could be tracked, and so I followed it to the woods where they’d left Audrey to be picked apart by wildlife, to rot. Through bitter tears and fits of vomiting, I removed Audrey’s device. I will leave her coordinates in this letter, if an unfortunate hiker’s dog hasn’t found her by now.
Audrey and I had shared literally everything, so I had her passwords. I spent a lot of time on her profiles, reading all her messages, figuring out which of her many potential suitors had been the last.
From there, it was not particularly hard to bait him into another rendezvous. I even asked if he had a friend he could bring and, why, yes, he did.
I wore Audrey’s clothes. I wore Audrey’s perfume, though it hurt to smell it. When I arrived, a very ordinary-looking man in his 30s flagged me down and told me he’d accidentally typed the wrong address and that his house was just down the street. So close, I thought. So brazen.
Inside, he introduced me to his friend, a bit older, leaning against the kitchen island. I wasted no time with small talk, instead producing two bottles from my bag and asking, “Wine or whiskey?”
Audrey had spent a lot of time telling me that people into extreme sex do not drink beforehand as a safety precaution but I knew these two didn’t follow those rules. They chose whiskey and so I poured them each a glass.
“I’ll open the wine, if you don’t mind,” I said.
I took my time digging around in the drawers for a wine key. It didn’t matter as I’d drugged both bottles. By the time I even found the corkscrew, they were fading away.
In developing an empathy tool for the health care system, the same issues within the criminal justice system did not escape me, though I had not considered them prior to Audrey’s murder.
When the men awoke, each with a fresh incision, they were chained to the queen bed in the downstairs bedroom. Much like I presume Audrey had been. Despite their suburban location, I knew no one responded to Audrey’s screams, so I chose not to gag them.
“Let’s be quick,” I said. “I know you killed this woman. Denying it will change absolutely nothing and will, in fact, make it worse for you.”
I held up a photo of Audrey, the same one she’d used for her profile. They exchanged a glance.
“Are you… a cop or something?” one asked.
“No,” I said. “The cops have no idea about you. I was her partner. Perhaps I would have been her wife someday. I had access to all of her accounts. You were easy to find that way.”
“What do you want?” the other asked.
They were both squirming in their restraints, testing them.
“I just want you to tell me why you killed her,” I said.
It took prodding, but they became more forthcoming. They both blamed the other, saying it had gone too far. Was it their first time? They claimed it had been the first time their little game had ended in death. But it wasn’t the first time they’d gone too far in other ways, pushing past someone’s agreed-upon boundaries, building up to an inevitable, fatal conclusion.
When I was satisfied, I stood. I had long changed out of Audrey’s dress and into scrubs. Now I pulled on my cap, mask, and gloves. The men looked alarmed, but I’m sure whatever horrifying fantasies flickered through their minds, they couldn’t come close to what was about to happen.
“The woman you killed, Audrey, was my partner, like I said. She and I shared something very special. I imagine the bond you two have — hurting women, killing women together — is similar in many ways. It’s secret. It’s private. It’s exquisite. It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced before or will again, and yet it’s somehow never enough. You know that in the end, it will also be too much and it will destroy you. It’s rare to have a bond like that.”
I pulled a small box from my pocket.
“Audrey and I were connected in other ways, too. By a device that, when activated, allowed us to feel everything the other person felt, at least physically. I felt you strangle her. I felt her die. And now, those devices that she and I shared are inside you.”
I pressed a button. Then, I slapped one of the men across the face. The other felt it.
“What the fuck?”
I slapped the other.
“Dude…”
I dug back into my bag and began laying several tools on the nightstand.
“Unfortunately, just like Audrey and me, only one of you will be able to feel the other die,” I said. “Which one of you will that be? Which one of you will die second?”
Neither were keen to die first. Ultimately, I decided to let the younger man, who had admitted to being the one to strangle Audrey, die second. I wanted him to feel what I had felt but also, so much more.
At this point, I gagged them and turned on some music, just in case. Audrey’s angry ‘90s. I was slow. A series of small incisions, leading to larger flayings. An eyeball, carefully removed, but not the other. A few teeth, but certainly not all of them. A buffet of tortures, endured by one and felt fully by the other. They screamed and cried and begged around their gags, but I barely heard them. This, too, was exquisite. I wish Audrey could have felt it.
When the blood loss threatened my grand finale, I finally set down all my tools and wrapped a rope around the older man’s neck.
“Wait until you feel this,” I whispered to the younger man.
I left the young man alone with that emptiness for several hours, chained to the bed as the corpse beside him leaked and bloated. Finally, I returned to the bedroom, placed a plastic bag over his head, and watched him die, too.
As I said, I really can’t imagine a life without Audrey. Once I’m done with this letter, I’ll be notifying the police of what I’ve done and when they get here, they’ll find three corpses.
As for the devices, I have destroyed them. My company may end up finding and using my research to mass produce them. I’m sure some of you deviants will snap them right up, sign away your money and your personal data just to feel an iota of what I’ve felt.
And it’ll be worth it.