The Woman Who Dated Death

Do you really believe me? I mean, most people think I'm crazy or on drugs or something. 

All right then. Well it was about five years ago. I had just broken up with my ex and was living in the kind of shitty apartment you live in when you're in that sort of situation. He lived a few floors below. Not in the basement or anything dramatic. I was on the tenth, he was on the sixth. We passed each other in the stairwell, made the typical evasive small-talk of the recently separated. 

He asked me out a few times before I said yes. We went to a dingy little restaurant...

What did he look like? Normal, not memorable. Thick glasses. Neat suits but a bit too neat, a bit nerdy, you know?

Well, about halfway through dinner it must have become clear I was totally disinterested. That was when he sighed, took off his glasses and asked me to look into his eyes. Really look. 

Those glasses... they weren't to help him see. They were to hide his eyes. 

What did I see?  It's hard to explain... but it was like he had no eyes at all, I was looking down into an endless pit, and tortured souls were reaching their arms out to me! 

Scared? I suppose, a little. But it turned me on. We paid the check in a hurry. We could barely keep our hands off each other in the taxi. When we got back to his apartment we fucked for hours. 

We got to talking later. He told me about his last girlfriend. She was hit by a car and there was nothing he could do about it. He had to collect her soul. She lives inside me forever, now  he said, and I shuddered, thinking of those hands, reaching out of the darkness. 

We had a thing for a while. Eventually I got my life together and got a new place, moved out. I haven't seen him in years, but I know I'll see him again one day. Right at the end. 

(c)opyright Laura Morrigan 2015

Based on a short story I wrote over 15 years ago