The pills won’t hit him for an hour. We’ll have plenty of time to consummate our love.
Sure enough, we’re done with our burgers in fifteen minutes and Steven is giving me a tour of his house. It’s obviously going to end with his bedroom. I ooh and aah over the judo memorabilia and ask if I can come watch him spar sometime. “It must be so sexy,” I purr, “watching you fight another man like that.”
“Then you can definitely come watch sometime.”
He leads me to the bedroom and begins edging me toward the bed as he kisses me. His hands go for the flimsy buttons of my dress, and I remember that I had to find a new button for that last one he popped. “Let me see you, baby,” he whispers. He sits on the end of the mattress and unfastens two more buttons.
I ease my dress off my shoulders, still holding it up, as if I’m shy.
“That’s it. Take it off.”
I let it drop to the floor.
“Oh yeah. Look at you.” He’s still fully dressed, and if I were really as shy as I pretend to be, I’d feel vulnerable right now, presenting my body to him for approval. “God, these panties.” He slides his hands around my back and straight down my underwear to cup my ass. “So hot,” he whispers.
“You like them?”
“Hell yeah I do. Did you pick them out for me?”
I nod.
“A dirty little secret for your man?”
“That’s right.”
“Take off your bra.”
I reach back and unclasp the strap, then cup the fabric to me and wait for him to push my hands aside. He does. He doesn’t compliment my breasts; he just paws at them for a while. I know they’re not exactly what he likes, but they’re here, so good enough.
Surprise, surprise, there’s not much foreplay. We climb under the covers and we have sex. I try for hesitant warmth, eager to please him even though I feel ashamed about it all.
He’s not the worst I’ve had, but he’s in the bottom quarter. Halfway decent lay, terrible lover. He doesn’t even make a reluctant offer to go down on me.
Afterward I snuggle close and stroke the sparse hairs of his chest as if I can’t get enough of touching him. One minute later he’s snoring.
Unsure if it’s the drugs or just a male postcoital nap, I say his name a few times. He grunts something as if he’s trying to answer but can’t rouse himself. I nudge him. He snorts and then settles back into a deep sleep.
The pills were only antihistamines, but allergy drugs are a surprisingly effective sedative when you mix them with alcohol. There are warnings about it on the package, but the mixture is one of my favorite antidotes to my own bouts of restlessness. I only take two, though, and I chase mine with cocktails instead of dropping them in beer. He’ll hopefully sleep like an exhausted child for a good eight hours and wake pretty refreshed. Unless he has a heart condition.
I get up and walk naked through his house to retrieve his phone from the living room. I’ll enjoy this video later, watching myself move free and languid like a feline through his rooms. I take the phone back to bed and use his limp hand to access the fingerprint lock. It’s cozy here, and I settle beneath the sheets to explore his life as he sleeps deeply beside me.
Text messages first.
I read through several weeks’ worth of conversations with his dad, but they’re all wholesome as hell. Nothing good there, aside from access to his dad’s number, which I transfer to my own phone.
There’s no need to view my own conversations with him, so I move on to “Ted.” It looks like Ted is his little brother. I don’t remember hearing his name, but the texts are mostly about Dad, with Steven haranguing his brother for not bringing his kids to the church often enough. Ted wants to, but it’s nearly an hour drive for them, and Bethenny is still struggling with the postpartum even though the little one is ten months old now.
Steven helpfully advises that spending time praying with Dad could go a long way toward helping her buck up. So understanding.
Then there’s Vanessa, his failed booty call. He’s deleted whatever messages he sent when they were seeing each other, and Monday’s are just a version of “You up?”
Other than that, most of the texts are just verifications and reminders. He doesn’t leave a trail.
I check his email, but it’s only work stuff. I forward a couple of important documents to my anonymous email account, then delete the evidence from the sent folder. Maybe I can set him up for something after all.
After that, I forward his entire contact list to myself. Then I see the Tinder app icon on the second page of his phone. Score!
The profile photo doesn’t show his face. He’s a deacon, after all. Instead, it’s a standard shirtless-in-the-mirror selfie with only the bottom half of his smirk showing. There are a couple more pics of his chest, taken when he was a little more tan and cut than he is now. Fair enough.
I click on Profile and find a few women he’s been matched with, but most of them he’s organized into lists. The top list is titled Nice Tits. There’s also Dateable, Slutty, and Hit That.
Hit That has four women in it. They’re all white with hair ranging from blond to light brown. He calls all of them “baby” in conversation, just like he calls me. Now I don’t feel special.
The last contact with each of them was around April. He hooked up with all of these women almost immediately after Meg’s death, as if he were trying to screw a demon away. Good. I hope he was roasting alive with guilt and regret.
I screenshot the interactions and send them to myself. The other lists are full of typical come-ons from Steven and a few topless shots from women. I capture those conversations too. Why not?
Steven starts to snore beside me.
Shooting him a grimace of annoyance, I close Tinder and open his photos. There aren’t very many. Steven doesn’t have an artist’s eye for the world. There are more shirtless selfies of him, a few pics from the stands at a Minnesota Twins game last summer, snaps of him and his dad at some Christian conference together, a picture of a crack in the foundation of his house. There’s also a picture of his erect penis, of course, the shot angled to make it look bigger than it is. All in all, no surprises.
Then I get to a selfie of him and Meg, similar to the one she sent me, but taken from a slightly different angle. There’s also a pic of her wearing cutoff shorts and a tiny little tank top, holding out her hand and laughing. Next is a photo of her in a small boat, a light beer in one hand and a fishing pole in the other.
Hitting the back arrow, I find a separate folder of photos underneath the general file. When I click on these, rage turns my vision red. Red Meg. Red nudity. Red breasts and thighs. Red pictures of her from behind, being penetrated by Steven.
These are the pictures he threatened her with, likely after begging and cajoling and promising her the world in exchange for them. He wanted these photos and then he called her a dirty slut for providing them. They were proof that she wasn’t good enough to even be alive.
I feel a wild urge to grab a knife and end this now. He’s naked and helpless and out cold, and I could carve him into a puzzle of gore. By the time he wakes up enough to fight back, he’ll be bleeding out, missing his throat or his balls, some crucial part now permanently fixed in a bloody, open-mouthed gape.
I stand and throw back the sheets to glare at his limp nudity. I hear my own panting.
This is love. This is my love, and it may be a dark, mean, greedy thing, but it is real. I feel it. I love Meg and I would kill for her. I should kill for her. All of this dancing around, all of this toying with him—it needs to end.