I never found out why Allison drugged me other than to just mess with me or get back at me for the incriminating things she found on my computer, or phone or in my closet.
I kept waiting to get a notification on Tinder that I was Liked by Allison. I kept paying for the stupid Premium account so I could find out, but it never happened, and months went by.
I kept waiting for something strange to happen in our house. It never did. The power went out once because someone hit a power pole on my street. That was it.
Life went back to normal.
One of the girls (Phoebe) I had casually talked with on Tinder just before Allison’s profile annihilated my world stepped into my life. We started hanging out regularly, though always in public or at her place.
I held off having her at my place as long as I could. I thought about telling her the situation and then scraping that idea. It was far too crazy.
Months had gone by without a peep from Allison and I was finally comfortable having Phoebe over. I invited her over for dinner. I had talked up my five-ingredient/15-minute carbonara and she really wanted it and this red wine I had been talking about.
Phoebe and I hadn’t slept together yet and I was getting major vibes that this was going to be the night. So I decided to make everything perfect and that got me deep cleaning my place.
I was cleaning out a coat closet when I found Allison’s old MacBook. It was stored above the jackets on a ledge underneath board games which hadn’t been dusted off since when she was sick.
Just looking at those games flashed cozy nights on the couch underneath a blanket and sipping drinks through my head. I felt a little warmer than I did before.
The MacBook provided a momentary distraction. I sat down on the couch and started going through Allison’s files. I knew she saved her favorite photos and videos there.
I didn’t have much time with Phoebe coming over soon so I just skimmed through the thousands of photos and videos and fought back tears.
It was all going sadly and sentimentally smoothly until I saw a large chunk of bare skin in a swath of photos. Allisons’ bare skin.
I stopped on the photos. I had never seen them before. At least I don’t think I had.
Allison was either nearly naked or close to naked in them and posed seductively but not pornographically. Think old school Playboy photo shoots.
They were all in a fancy hotel room I didn’t recognize. I saw some cityscape through a window, but couldn’t make out which city it might be.
What the fuck was this? Who took these photos?
I dove into the photos and examined every one like a skilled detective, looking for any clue I could.
I got the biggest clue and relief I ever could have gotten when I got to the last one and it showed Allison naked, sitting on the bed holding a sign written in cursive that read: I love you, Derry.
Oh. Okay. Crisis averted. Back to cleaning the house.
This wasn’t to say my suspicion wasn’t still raised at least a touch. Would throwing that last one photo with the sign in been a “cover your ass” move in case I found the photos which were intended for someone else.
It’s at this point I should divulge that Allison and I didn’t always have the most perfect relationship and neither of us were pillars of mental stability.
Allison grew up in a hard luck family. Her mom had her at 19 and her dad split very early and she barely knew him. He only came around for occasional life events and lived somewhere in Florida, possibly on a boat. I didn’t care enough to get much more and he didn’t care to volunteer.
Her mom was fine. She wasn’t the cliche young single mom who had a bunch of abusive boyfriends or anything. She held it down just fine and always had a job and avoided significant others.
The problem was Allison’s extended family. They were all bad news and always lurking around. Particularly her sister, Sophia, who was a dark cloud that seemed to always blow in at the worst time with sketchy friends and ruin things.
Allison also had her fair share of mental issues. Nothing completely crippling or diagnosed but she always had a mix of numb depression and sporadic manic anger. She didn’t let it hold her back though. She got through college, always had decent jobs, and met, and married the upstanding individual that is myself.
I had my own fair share of issues myself. On the surface, I had a very clean cut, middle class, suburban upbringing. One look under that veneer showed a dull darkness of seemingly contagious anger and depression. More on that later though.
Our issues tended to help us in some ways. We could lean on each other and understand each other in the hard times.
Then sometimes we couldn’t.
The blowout fights were epic.
The worst came just three months before our wedding. I can’t even remember what sparked it but we ended up screaming at each other all night and she called off the wedding even though all of the save the dates were already pinned on all of our loved ones’ refrigerators.
The deepest regret in my life which keeps me up at night is the cruelest thing I said to her in that fight. I told her she didn’t actually mean that much to me, she had just been convenient at a time in my life when I had nothing going on. She was a movie I watched on an airplane and would then forget about.
I didn’t mean that at all. I was just so hurt after the things she said to me and calling off the wedding that I thought of the cruelest possible thing I could say at that moment and it came out of me.
The wedding was off for a few days. We just never told anyone about it. We patched things up and were golden by the time we walked down the aisle.
This was all running through my head when I was on top of Phoebe in my bed. It was definitely affecting me. I was barely there. I was kind of just going through the motions until it was finished.
Phoebe didn’t seem to pick up on my troubles. We laid in bed for a while chatting before she asked to shower.
I then embarked on one of my muscle memory rituals. Usually after sex with Allison, she went to the shower and I went to the bathroom in the front of the house to pee so I wasn’t peeing right in front of her.
I did this with Phoebe, walking naked through our home and into the guest bathroom.
Thinking back now. I thought I did notice something peculiar in the kitchen, a moisture, the smell of gas, but that could just be my brain putting together pieces that weren’t there trying to figure out what happened shortly after.
Had I paid closer attention to the kitchen I wouldn’t have noticed the pot filler on the stove had filled up a pot that was resting on a burner and the gas burned had been put on high.
But I didn’t. I walked right by and back to the master bathroom.
Phoebe asked me if I wanted to shower with her.
I did.
I slipped into the shower.
It was warm, comforting, and beautiful.
It must have been about 45 seconds before the boiling water came over the side of the shower.
The boiling water mostly hit Phoebe’s back as she had her head down, the shower nozzle hitting the nape of her neck.
I watched her reach back as the scalding water scorched her and I watched the soft skin on her back liquify and slip away as she clawed at her back in a pained frenzy.
The water caught my shoulder and I got the same treatment - a searing pain and the smell of burning flesh right under my nose.
I yanked Phoebe out of the shower and wrapped her in a towel.
She screamed and heaved in my arms as my eyes combed the bathroom for our assailant.
I didn’t see anyone but I saw something written in the fog of the bathroom mirror:
I WATCHED EVERYTHING.