See introduction here.

The Night Of

Bryan: Hey, are you ready?

Stephanie: Yeah! I’ll meet you outside my apartment building.

Bryan: Cool, be there in 15 minutes.

She got up from her desk and looked at herself in her vanity mirror one last time. She smiled at herself in the mirror to make sure she had nothing in her teeth. “As good as ever, I guess,” she thought to herself as she did her own once-over. She didn’t wear makeup – she never became interested in it or was taught how to use makeup. She didn’t bother to learn; it was all just noise to her and a distraction from her education that she focused on when she was younger. She didn’t regret not wearing makeup now as an adult either, she frequently received compliments from other women about her “natural beauty.” She clearly had blemishes, scars, and redness on her face. Sometimes she wished she learned how to use makeup to hide the blemishes during important events, but she figured that would probably make her blemishes worse anyway. Her skin was extremely sensitive. She didn’t like the idea of looking like a completely different person with a full face of makeup either. She wanted to look like how she looked, even if that meant blemishes and redness. “You get what you get,” she thought to herself. 

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes upon exhaling. “It’s fine. It’ll be fine. Everything will go great,” she attempted to reassure herself. “He is definitely not a catfish because we’ve video-chatted before. That means something, right?” The thought of, “But there’s deepfakes and AI and even more advanced technology,” nagged at the back of her brain.

This would be her first time meeting “Bryan” in person. Was that even his real name? She had met him over an online dating app and they exchanged IMs to continue the conversation. This was her first time meeting someone in person that she had met over the internet. It was all a new (and scary) concept to her. 

They started messaging one another outside the dating app about two months ago. The text messages went on consistently for a few weeks before they progressed to phone calls that lasted on average five hours and took them well into the night. She typically despised phone calls, but there was something about his voice and how he patiently listened and asked questions about her that soothed her. They each talked about their passions, life goals, what they were looking for, and what they each wanted in a relationship. They had a few video calls over the past few months, but she still felt hesitant about the whole situation because this was her first time trying online dating.

She glanced at her phone for any incoming messages from Bryan.

No new notifications.

She opened her purse and confirmed that her mace, taser, and pocket knife were all there. She never left home without these items. She never had to use any of them before, and she hoped that she never had to. She closed the zipper on her purse and headed out of her apartment. 

The hallway was empty, but there was so much commotion going on behind each of the doors. Parties, yelling, TVs blaring. It was never a dull moment. She trotted down the few flights of stairs to her building lobby. Her apartment building wasn’t particularly special in any way – a typical high-rise apartment building in a bustling city, with a secure front door, accessible only by key or being buzzed in by a resident, and the typical brick, mortar, and concrete aesthetic. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t an eyesore – it just was. 

Just as her feet landed on the ground floor from the stairs, her phone buzzed in her hand. 

Bryan: Hey, I’m outside – I think.

She instantly felt nauseous seeing the notification – a typical response to her anxiety. She looked up from her phone and saw a man standing on the sidewalk in front of her building. The man was wearing a brown wool trench coat over a pair of white pants. He was glancing around the street, blowing warm air into his hands as he stood outside. It was an odd sight to see someone just standing on the sidewalk in this city. Typically, everyone had a place to be and no one made time to stop. She saw the man getting pushed around by passersby, each of them holding an irritated glare towards the man, as if his standing on the sidewalk was the most inconvenient thing on Earth. 

Despite being glared at and pushed, he seemed blissful. His gaze circled around the street until it fell back on her apartment building. His eyes trailed from the top of the building slowly down to the lobby. They made eye contact. She smiled shyly at him and raised her hand to wave at him. He grinned widely and joyfully waved at her. 

“Well, I guess that is him. At least he’s not a catfish,” she thought to herself. She felt slightly vindicated seeing that he looked just as he did in his photos and on video. The comments from her friends echoed in her head:

“Are you sure that’s actually him?” 

“What if he’s just getting photos off the Internet?” 

“What if he’s really a woman?!”

She pulled her fleece coat over her shoulders before exiting her apartment building into the chilly winter air. As she walked up to him, her warm breath broke through the frosty air, creating a visible exhalation before her.

“Hey! Stephanie, right?” Bryan beamed at her. The same charming smile she had seen over her phone screen for the past few months. 

“Yep, that’s me!” She smiled up at him. She didn’t realize how tall 6’3” was. He was a whole foot taller than her and then some. She only measured in at 5 ‘1″. Maybe she’ll gain some neck muscles from dating him from craning her neck up to look at him.

“Let’s go? The reservation’s in about fifteen minutes. It’s just around the corner.” 

“Lead the way,” Stephanie said, gesturing in front of her.

Bryan led the way down the street with Stephanie by his side. He walked slowly, trying to keep pace with Stephanie until they arrived at the intimate, hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant that he had chosen for their first date. Bryan was new in town; he had just moved into the neighborhood a few miles away. He had never lived in a bustling city like Willowbrook before. It was new, exciting, and there were plenty of opportunities available. 

Bryan originally grew up in Fallow, a small, friendly town in the Midwest. It was the kind of place where everyone knew one another by name – a place where your business soon became everyone else’s. There was a routine to the city. If old Mr. Hal down the street didn’t come out each morning at 8:00 AM, it likely meant that he had passed away the night before. If the girl next door was moving away for college, the entire town hosted a farewell party. There were very few occasions in which the town didn’t know the goings-on of a particular resident at any given time. It was maddening to Bryan. He felt as though he had no privacy. He hated the prying questions from other townspeople. 

“What happened with that girl you liked, Bryan?” 

“Why didn’t you make the soccer team, Bryan?”

“Why aren’t you going to Harvard or Yale?”

He felt suffocated. He began to figure out that the less he said and did, the less other people knew, so he started keeping his head down and his mouth shut. 

After graduating high school, he kept quiet all throughout college. He made a few friends throughout college, but none turned out to last very long. Once he and his friends graduated college, they all fell out of touch. It was nothing except the occasional, “How are you doing?” “I’m good, what about you?” small talk. 

After graduating college with a bachelor’s degree in legal studies, Bryan sought any entry-level legal work, hoping to land something exciting like criminal law. Being the small town that Fallow was, there weren’t many job openings to pick from unless the previous person died or retired – which is how Bryan ended up in Willowbrook. Willowbrook was about twelve hours away from Fallow by car, a bustling city where everyone rushed to and fro and didn’t stop to chat on the street, even if it was their own mother – and that’s exactly what Bryan wanted. He wanted to move to a place where no one knew his name, knew who he was or what his family did, and he didn’t want anyone from Fallow to know his whereabouts anymore. He wanted to be no one.

To be continued…