Chapter 5.

“Darling, I know how much you like condiments so I made sure to prepare a few that I thought you would love. What do you think? Does it look good?”

With a livid expression and monotone voice, I responded to her unfounded confidence, “uh… yeah, it looks delicious. Haha. Haha. Hahaha.”

“Well? Darling? Aren’t you going to eat? Go ahead, eat up, eat up.”

I was suddenly having thoughts that dying might not be so bad when I weighed the options on a scale in my head.

“Isn’t it still a bit too hot? Shouldn’t I wait for it to cool down a bit?”

“That’s not a problem, I’ll just blow on it a bit to cool it down and feed you like how we always did in the past?”

That is absolutely not going to happen.

“Uh, what about drinks?”

“Oh! That’s right! How could I forget about that? Silly me. Just give me a few minutes, I’ll prepare a drink immediately.”

She walked over to my desk with a scary smile on her face and she placed the disgusting platter down. My gaze was locked onto her crazy eyes as she picked up a cup from my table. She opened her mouth and allowed her saliva to flow down, slowly filling the cup. 

Why did she need to have the most disgusting ideas for meals? If I wasn’t holding myself back, my entire body would be convulsing and twitching in revulsion. Despite thinking as such, I somehow held back from displaying my true thoughts on the matter. If I miraculously make it out of this alive, I’m definitely moving. How did this crazy chick even find my new apartment anyways?

Ten minutes silently passed by quickly while she prepared what I presumed was my drink. When the cup was full to the brim, she placed it back on the desk beside the platter and said, “do you have any other requests you’d like for me to fulfill?”

“Can I at least have a straw?”

I’d really run out of ideas to stall and I was literally a dying man grasping at straws. It was humiliating to truly come to a personal understanding behind the meaning of the idiom.

“Anything for my darling.”

She left the room and not long after, she returned with a straw from the kitchen and stuck it in the cup.

With no other ideas, I reluctantly picked up the fork and knife from on top of the platter and cut into the rat. I dipped a piece into the bot fly condiments on the side and lifted the fork up to her and said, “ladies first.”

Her lips twitched a bit, but she still smiled and opened her mouth wide and moved forward clearly intent on eating it without the slightest hesitation. 

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Crash!

Just as the fork was about to enter her mouth, to our side, the sound of broken glass falling to the ground reverberated through the room. The next thing I knew a man with SWAT written on his back was pinning my ex down onto the ground and restraining her movements. He had already kicked the knife she had in hand to the far corner of the room preventing her from putting up any resistance.

There were pieces of shattered glass littered all over the desk and floor from his sudden entry through the window. It didn’t take long before more SWAT members came rushing into the room through the door. Seeing their reassuring bulky figures, I felt like I’d somehow just barely avoided the biggest calamity of my life by a very small margin.

“Tch. Darling, it looks like our reunion this time has been rudely interrupted by a bunch of lanky brutes.”

I’d been dying to find out for a while how she found me, so I asked her now that I had the chance, “Adele, how did you find my new apartment?”

“That’s a lady’s secret, darling. Maybe I’ll tell you next time when we have some more private time.”

“Please just leave me alone. I really don’t want to ever see you again. We broke up, so please just accept reality already. Isn’t it enough? Can’t you just forget about me and live a happy life? The longer you act like this the more of your life you’re going to waste away in that mental asylum.”

“What are you talking about darling? We’re the perfect couple. We were born to be together. You even told me you loved me the first time we met exactly eight years, four months, twenty days, one hour, forty-two minutes, three seconds, and thirteen-tenths of a second from precisely this moment.”

Scary! How the hell?! There’s no way in hell she can be that accurate for such a stupid event!

“That was just a result of university kids playing truth or dare!”

“Even if it was a dare, my love for you was eternal from that point forward.”

“Haven’t there been countless men who’ve told you that over the years?”

“They’re all dead liars. You’re the only truthful man alive who has ever told me that you love me.”

Crazy. That’s the only word I had for her. The first time we had sex was back in university where she nearly killed me by strangling me when she rode on top of me. I thought she was just the wild type of girl who was getting a bit carried away and it was honestly a bit hot at first. Little did I know how wrong I was back then.

One day I discovered, or should I say, she presented her deepest and darkest secret to me. We always met up at my place, and about three years after we started going out, I visited her parent’s house for the first time when she mentioned to me in passing that she wanted to visit her hometown to meet them together.

I truly never expected what laid in wait for me back then. My relationship with her was the longest, as well as the first, out of the five crazy relationships I’d been in. She was definitely among the very top of the list for the most psychotic girlfriends I ever had.

Back then, we traveled by passenger train to her hometown; she had a liking towards old fashioned modes of transportation and said she found it romantic. I didn’t bother to really question her about it since it felt like a girl thing. 

When we arrived at the train station in her hometown in the countryside, we walked hand in hand and followed along the road towards a forest in the distance. After we walked for about an hour, we arrived at the forest’s tree line where we proceeded down a trail that led deep into the forest.

She told me her family was quite well off, that they liked to stay distanced from the mundane world and closer to nature; thus they built a mansion out here in the boonies where they peacefully lived together in harmony among the wildlife. She also mentioned they were very deeply rooted here and couldn’t find it in themselves to move anywhere else. It was only later I understood how literal her words really were.