When I sat next to her, I was done for.
“My name’s Penelope, what’s yours?” she said.
I looked at her. She was the deal. She has curves and a beautiful face. “Jacob,” I answered.
“Jacob,” she repeated my name and touched my arm with her hand. A sense of tingling feelings flew through my body. “Wanna come to my place after we’re done?”
I stammered, “S-sure.”
We then turned our attention to the big screen. During that time, I couldn’t wait and wanted to get out now; she was rubbing my arm and I thought she was really into me.
After the viewing ended, we got out of the theater and I was feeling so excited that I didn’t notice we bumped into a homeless guy. Penelope stopped and stared at him as he walked away.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
She kept staring. “Nothing.”
Afterward, she drove us to this big apartment building in a rich part of the city. Cameras and high-tech locks were everywhere, and we walked inside her apartment on the high floors. She told me to wait as she went inside her bedroom and I scanned around the place: China vases, busts of Greek men, Oriental carpets, and a lot of stuff rich people would own. I didn’t expect a private massage therapist’s lifestyle would be grand.
She finally came out after thirty minutes and let me inside her bedroom where she set up the candles, the music, and the massage table. I quickly undressed myself and hopped onto the table faceward, naked. I felt her hands and elbows pinching my back.
“Man, you are really a massage therapist,” I remarked as she kept massaging my back.
“Lucky we met on Instagram?’ she asked.
I gave a response of moaning.
“But there is something I like about you, Jacob.”
I said, “Oh?”
She came up close to my ears and whispered, which I immediately sat up from the table.
“How did you know that?” I asked.
She darted her eyes back and forth while grinning. “Hmm, when I touched you back in the theater?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s say I possess a gift no one should have but me.”
I got off the table to walk away, but she stopped me.
“No, you won’t, Jacob Baloney.”
I stammered.
“‘How did I also know that? Listen.” She told me.
I just stared at her.
“I know everything about you, like the time you stole your parents’ car when you were fifteen to impress this girl, Baloney.” She laughed. “I also know what your favorite line is for your passcodes and I got access to your bank accounts. By the way, if you think you could change them, I already have while you were waiting outside.``
I continued staring at her and all the feeling of desire in me transformed into fear.
“From now on,” she pressed her finger into my chest, “you will do everything I tell you to. If you don’t, kiss your life goodbye, including that girlfriend of yours.”
Since then, I became a servant to her. My list of tasks included washing her car, cleaning the apartment, making her food (even if I was bad at it), and taking down notes for her with meetings of people who have connections with her. They all knew her gift and would pay her greatly if she gave them dirt and other secret things of their targets. Whenever they asked about me she would say to them, “Don’t mind him, he’s just another poor idiot I picked off the street.”
All of her tasks prevented me from going to my work, seeing people, and living in my apartment. The witch forced me to quit my job as a web consultant, but the worst happened when she made me break up with my girlfriend. Holding my grudge together, I carried it out and I was left crying in the corner of my new but dirty room, hidden down below the apartment.
Then, one day, as I picked up the groceries from the market and put them into my car, the homeless man, the same one who bumped into me, walked up behind and introduced himself as a former victim of her.
“I’ll tell you all of it if you take me somewhere,” he said.
I drove my car with him and he explained it all to me. “For years, I was a dog to her and she would make me carry out terrible things that I wish to block my mind from. While I was doing it, she drained every last bit of money in my accounts and also impersonated me to my family and friends on social media. By the time she was done with me, I had no place to go and live. I went looking for her, but she got away. She has lived under many names and places, but I found a pattern of where she would pick her victims from. Back then, I could’ve told you, but I actually needed patience for my plan.”
We arrived at this house and I asked him, “What do you mean your plan?”
“Sorry, but some things require sacrifice,” he said and knocked me out with the butt of his revolver.
When I came to, it was already dark and all my clothes were gone. I was in the house’s living room and the TV was on where it played the news channel.
The story went like this: the cameras caught a man dressed like me who got inside the secured building after the woman let him in. Once he was inside her apartment, and away from the cameras, he shot her dead. He then trashed her around her place, including breaking her computers and phones. After he was done, he exited out of the building. The police came five minutes later and saw the whole mess. They found his note and it read, “To those who read this, I finally fulfilled my space of silence.”
Since he wore my clothes and drove my car, everybody pinned me as the killer. Not only did he destroy my second life, but he also made me live in a new one: a wanted fugitive. There were some food, money, drinks, and clothes in the house, but I still felt angry and wanted to confront the guy.
After a month of her death, I returned back to the front of the apartment building. Something called me back to this place, and I inhaled heavily through my nostrils and blew them out of my mouth. Then a guy came up next to me and spat out a spit on the steps. “Fucking bitch deserved it,” he muttered and walked away.