Ellie, come in, Ellie? A voice crackled to life from my desk, and I realized I’d completely tuned out an entire Zoom meeting. I’d been distracted, and forgot what I was presenting to my team. I had screen share on, and it was open to a blank word document. The clock read 1:11. Had the meeting just barely started, or run over? I couldn’t remember. I shook my head, gave a quick excuse, and dismissed my team before slamming shut my laptop. Something had started bugging me, and it took me a moment to realize it– it smelled like roses.
A few months ago, I decided I was ready to date again. I’d gotten divorced about a year before COVID hit, and by the time I was ready to open myself up to the horror of dating in your 30s, suddenly we were all on lockdown, and I had zero hope of meeting someone in the conventional manner.
I’ve never been big on online dating, but working from home, the only person I was seeing in the flesh was my therapist, once a week. I was desperate for some sort of human interaction that wasn’t work related. Enter Shawn.
He wasn’t the kind of guy I normally would swipe right on. His profile was pretty generic, spoke little of his interests, and had just the bare details filled out. He had some sort of obscure literary quote from an old classic, but the fact that he didn’t want kids stood out to me. Swiping through his pictures, I came across one taken at a bar in NOLA, with his shirt pulled up, a goofy grin, and an offering of plastic, multi-colored beads. I swiped right, and then found myself distracted by work. My phone lay forgotten on my desk for the next hour.
Then, a notification. A second. A third. I realized Shawn had swiped right as well, and was messaging me. He asked me about my tattoos and my cat, and easily lured me out of my work for the rest of the Friday afternoon. Before I knew it, we’d been texting until midnight. Then, he called. Before I knew it, I was agreeing at 2 AM to let a stranger come over to my apartment. He’d insisted it wasn’t to be like that, but that after a day of happy conversation, he just wanted to be near me. To kiss me. And again, I was starved for affection. Looking back, even knowing what I know now, I can’t say I blame myself.
True to his word, his affections remained at kissing. We stayed up talking until sunrise, and fell asleep together in the pale morning light streaming through the dusty blinds on my window.
When I woke up at noon, I was pleasantly surprised that he was still there. So much so, that I made him pancakes. He didn’t stay long after, he was going to check in with his mom. When he left, I caught a scent of roses on the wind. I fell asleep that night smiling.
Weeks turned into months, and our relationship was…mostly normal. At least for the first few weeks. You know how they say that everyone wears a mask for the first little while of a new relationship, and then lets out little bits of their “normal” at a time? Well…Shawn’s normal was…different.
He shunned social media. Increasingly normal for our generation, now that we’ve seen some of the lasting effects it’s had. But he wouldn’t even let anyone take his pictures. I became surprised that he’d managed to find any pictures of himself for the dating site. Even when I tried to sneak snap a photo to my friends, I somehow always managed to miss him, leaving me with only pictures of our background.
On top of that, he told me none of his friends knew about me. He said none of them would believe he was making it with a real girl. I laughed it off, but he said that truly, none of his friends would believe I was real. I know that guys can be harsh with each other, but I tried to brush it off. We’d only been dating a few months, I definitely wasn’t expecting to integrate friend groups yet. But it was little things like that, things that were just on the cusp of being easily explainable, that gave me this lingering feeling of unease.
Fridays became our day. He’d come over after work, we’d have dinner, it was pretty normal. Last Friday, though, things felt different. When he came over, he seemed a little preoccupied. I tried to pretend more convincingly that I was into the weird YouTube videos he always wanted me to watch with him- weird, AI generated people whose skin stretched too far over their disproportioned faces, singing nonsensical songs. He was obsessed with videos like these. I thought, if I showed some enthusiasm, it might perk him up a bit. Finally, he told me he’d run into an ex–or at least, he’d seen her while he was out. He said they didn’t talk at all, but it had obviously unnerved him.
He told me that it had been about a year since their breakup, and seeing her freaked him out because he realized how similar she and I were. He pulled up a picture, and he was right- we could have been sisters. She even had a heart tattoo in the same place I had mine- midway up the left forearm.
That night, I pulled out all the stops in bed, determined to make him forget about her, but my heart wasn’t in it. Her face pulled to the front of my thoughts, too. I’d never considered myself jealous, but we were so alike, I had to wonder if that was the only reason he was seeing me. Regardless, my plan worked, and he slept harder than he’d ever slept at my place. He left early the next morning, and this time, the scent of roses lingered in my sheets, my closet. Pushing away thoughts of his ex-girlfriend, I pulled up Twitter to doomscroll.
I realized I had a message request. It had come in last night, some time while I was making Shawn forget his own name. It was a dark picture. I could tell something was there, but it was barely visible. The username was a random string of letters and numbers I tweeted it out to my followers, asking one of them to work some photoshop magic and reveal themselves if it was a prank. One of them privately DM’d me back, asking if this was some sort of joke. Confused, I asked what they meant. They sent the attachment back, lightened. It was a picture of me, two nights prior, sleeping. I knew the date because I was wearing my new sleep mask. Scrawled on notebook paper, below my sleeping face, two words in blocky handwriting.
Save her.