She Ruined my Life

This isn’t a love story. This is a hate story. An, “I wish I could rewind time and never have met her,” story. But we’ll get to that. It all started five months ago, when I pulled up to the coffee stand where I get my Monday through Friday afternoon Joe. There was a new girl working, a slender girl — her arms covered in sleeves of permanent ink, hippie drawings, horseshoes, flowers, that sort of thing. Her face showed some age. The classic crow’s feet sprouted from the corners of her eyes and she had deep smile lines. The first time I saw her, I didn’t think much of her. I didn’t think anything of her.

That all changed the next day when I pulled up to the window and I heard her arguing with a customer outside. I assumed it was a customer, but I wasn’t interested in hearing the details of their squabble, so I cranked up my music. I close my eyes and lose myself in the droning melody when I hear a high-pitched scream pierce through Peter Steele’s voice. My immediate response is to check on the welfare of the barista, so I pull my car forward so I have clearance to exit and that’s when I see an average sized man wearing a skullcap, holding the barista by her hair, sticking a gun in her ribs. Now I’m not a member of law enforcement, but I have a conceal carry permit, because in these days and times, you never know when you might have to protect yourself or others from a maniac. Someone like this guy. Acting on instinct, I pull out my nine millimeter Kimber from its home in my center console, then I jump out of the car and aim it at her attacker. I tell him in an authoritative voice to let her go.

His reply is saturated in desperation. “This ain’t about you, man. You have no idea what you’re doing.”

“I’m keeping you from harming an innocent girl,” I say as I glance at the plate on his car, quickly memorizing the seven-digit number. “Now get out of here. You haven’t done anything permanent yet. You can still walk away from this. We can all walk away from this.”

He hesitates, holding onto her tight. I can see the wheels turning inside his head, assessing the situation. Meanwhile, the girl is frozen with fear, other than her mouth, which pleads, “Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me,” over and over.

The stalemate ends abruptly when the man shoves her away and aims his gun at me, all in one motion. She runs around to the other side of the coffee shop and ducks behind my car while we continue to stare down the barrel of each other’s gun. The man shakes his head. He’s more than disappointed. He’s sweating bullets. He was longing for this. I can see the hunger in his eyes, like a starving wolf licking its chops before being interrupted by a more voracious predator.

“Take off, man… No one needs to die,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady so as not to give away how nervous I am at the moment.

The man takes a step back to his car door and opens it with one hand, only taking his eyes and his gun off of me when it’s open and he’s inside. He peels out of the parking lot in his black SUV, and I feel the tension lift from my chest, allowing me to breathe again.

The woman comes out of her hiding place and before I know what’s happening, she’s wrapped around me tighter than a boa, sobbing into my shoulder. After I calm her down, and learn that her name is Luna, I start in about calling the cops, an idea which she shoots down without a second thought. That should’ve been my first sign that something was amiss with this girl. But her excuse made sense to me at the time. She said that he was an ex-boyfriend who had serious bouts of depression, and that he wouldn’t have hurt her.  

“I don’t want to ruin his life,” she said.  

I could relate. I’d recently been in a long-term relationship with a woman who would throw things at me every time she had too much to drink. She always had it in the back of her mind that I was cheating on her. I didn’t like it. But when she wasn’t drunk, she was fun, caring, a good listener, so I never called the cops on her when she freaked out. Not even once. If anybody could understand the complicated emotions that come into play in a relationship, it’s me.

Luna closes up shop for the day after calling her boss and relaying a downplayed version of events, leaving out the gun and the fact that she knew the man who attacked her. When she hangs up the phone, she asks me to hang around for a few minutes while she tidies up. Then she asks me if I want to come over to her place for dinner.  

“I don’t want to be alone,” she says with this whimpering puppy dog look.  

I wanted to say no. I was tired after a long day of being tired, sitting behind a desk, scanning lines of computer code. All I wanted to do was stretch out in my recliner and listen to my new audiobook — a psychological thriller about mysterious traveling doctor and his unethical experiments — But this poor damsel lures me in, forcing me to melt like soft-serve in the sun. I got to know her sweet side that night. I got to know her inside and out, body and what I thought was her soul. The chemicals between us created sparks of burning passion, an insatiable craving which lasted into my work days. I couldn’t get enough of her. I started to understand the ex-boyfriend’s obsession. Why he couldn’t let her go without a fight. Although I opined that I never would take it to that extreme. But this woman was worth fighting for. She had a way of sucking you in, making you feel like the strongest, most powerful man on the planet. I started carrying myself differently. I walked around with more confidence. A swagger in my step. For once in my life, I found a relationship which was uplifting. One that helped me be a better version of myself instead of a weakened, insecure, walking on eggshells, tip-toeing the line version.

It was all going well. Better than well. I’m not ashamed to say that I was in love. Three months in, we were talking about marriage. I shared everything with her. My house, my bank account, credit card. She didn’t abuse the privilege, either. Only using my money to buy groceries and necessary household items. And then, one day, like an apparition in the fog, she vanished. I called her phone, but I got a recording saying the number was disconnected. I sat at my house, by the phone, playing out every scenario in my head, but when she didn’t show up after two days, paranoia got to me, and I filed a missing persons report with the police. I wasn’t optimistic they would help, because they told me she was a grown woman, and stuff like this happened all the time. Adults are unpredictable, I agree, but I never saw the first sign of wavering interest. She treated me the same way the first day I met her as the last day I saw her. Then I started thinking about the ex-boyfriend — The man who attacked her. I still remembered his plate number, so I called my step-father, who was a retired police officer, and asked him if he could get one of his buddies to run the plate for me. After assuring him I wouldn’t take the law into my own hands, he gives me a name and an address, which belongs to a man from Arkansas, a decent haul from where I am in Virginia. I look up the property on Google Maps and find out that it’s a gigantic house in a well-to-do neighborhood. I decide to check it out on Zillow and find that the firm that owned the mortgage had started the foreclosure process. I take my research a step further and pay one of those P.I. sights fifty bucks to dig up more info on this guy. What I find out shocks me. It’s no wonder the man was depressed. He was recently indicted for embezzlement and had declared both personal bankruptcy and bankruptcy for his consulting business. All the pieces of the puzzle fall into place when I remember what that guy said while he was attacking Luna.

“You ruined my life!”  

The first logical thought that crosses my mind is that he found her. I picture her tied up and tortured in a dark, dank basement somewhere. Then my mind flips for a second. What if she was the reason he was broke? What if she was this mastermind succubus criminal who took him for everything he had and…

I brush it off as an impossibility. Until she moved with me, she lived in an apartment hardly fit for a pauper. She owned nothing expensive. Hell, she didn’t even own a car. And she had stolen nothing from me. My bank accounts looked about right, as did my credit card charges. The only thing I could think of was something I had mentioned to her during some pillow talk one night. See, I own a dozen Bitcoin and some other cryptocurrency. I keep the keys stored on a flash drive that I keep in my desk drawer at home. I rarely think about it, no matter what the price is doing, because I believe in its long-term growth potential. It’s essentially my retirement plan, my future kid’s college fund. I remember this night; she asks me if I want to grind away behind a computer desk for the rest of my life. She wants to know if I have a retirement plan. An attainable dream.

I tell her about my crypto holdings. I don’t go into specifics on numbers, but I tell her I believe in the next ten years I’ll be able to do just about anything I want. Move anywhere, buy a boat and travel, that sort of thing. I should have left it at that, but I went on to tell her I didn’t trust any custodians with my Bitcoin, so I held my own, nice and safe on a flash drive.

I’m pretty sure you can figure out what happened next. I check my desk drawer for the drive, and low and behold, it’s not there. I tear the entire desk apart, rummaging through papers, checking every nook and cranny. I even pick up the desk to make sure it’s not underneath. It devastated me. Not to the point of that poor man in Arkansas, but devastated all the same. She left me with my life intact, but my retirement plan vanished. Hundreds of thousands of dollars gone without a trace.

I didn’t bother calling the police. I knew she wasn’t in Virginia anymore. Hell, she was probably on a plane to Europe or some Caribbean Island by now. I know that I’ll never see her again. 

Part 2

She took everything from me. I left my wife, lost my business, and now I’m in danger of losing my freedom, unless I force her to confess what she did. I’m willing to go to any extreme if she makes me. And I won’t feel sympathy, because this is all her doing. She created this monster. She created my problems. Now, she will take on the heft of the burden, which I’ve been hoisting around with me for months.

For her chamber, I use the basement of one of my vacant rental properties, which will go through foreclosure like my home before long. But that won’t matter after tonight. Nothing will. Even if my money’s lost, I won’t have to spend a king’s ransom on a lawyer to keep me out of jail. Then I can start getting back on my feet, rebuild my reputation, and salvage what’s left of my assets.

She hangs by her wrists, bound by a chain mounted from an eye-bolt in the rafters. The balls of her feet give her limited relief from the tension, but after a while, her toes will cramp. This is how I want it. She needs to be uncomfortable. She needs to feel that her life is at risk, so she will confess. I leave her alone for the first hour to allow her to bask in the seriousness of her situation. When I go down to start the interrogation process, I can see that she’s willing to admit to anything by the pain written on her face and the combination of tears and snot that soak her cheeks. She doesn’t ask why I’ve done this to her, because she knows. But little do I know, she has a bargaining chip ready.

She starts by apologizing for robbing me of my money, my dignity, and my heart. Then she says that she can guarantee me a new life and enough money to move to an island where I can spend the rest of my days basking in the sun. It sounds tempting. But it’s hard to trust her words when she’s deceived me so many times before. She convinces me to try. She says she has a post office box which contains an envelope. Inside is a flash drive with the keys to hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency. She says that she will tell me the address of the P.O. box if I simply release her, then we both go our separate ways.

I think about the trade-off. A confession from her would still leave me in a horrible predicament. I’m still bankrupt. My life is still in shambles. And, I have a serious cash-flow problem. I’ll still owe my ex-wife alimony, which I can’t afford to pay. Then there’s the problem of forcing Luna to confess without a gun to her head. I’m smart enough to know that a taped confession won’t do any good unless she regurgitates the same story to the police. But once I set her free, what is her motivation to incriminate herself?

A new start versus a life full of ready-set obstacles and unknowns. The choice isn’t a hard one to make.

I retract the wench which holds tension on the chain, lowering Luna to the ground. She rubs life back into her wrists while I keep my gun trained on her. Then I direct her up the stairs and into the driver’s seat of my Yukon and I warn her, “No tricky stuff. My life is already ruined. If you choose to cross me, you’ll only be committing suicide.” She nods without meeting my eyes. The shame she bears seems as real as her love once did. I must keep reminding myself that she is the devil in disguise. She’s an evil temptress. The vilest of womankind.

She says that the P.O. box is in southwest Virginia. About an hour’s drive from my rental property in Tennessee, so that’s where we go. She’s careful along the way, never once breaking the speed limit, or rolling through a red light. To my surprise, she doesn’t try to sweet talk me into a trance, either. Her mouth stays zipped up tight during the entire ride, giving me time to think.

My plan is simple. I’ll fly somewhere south and then I’ll purchase a car with cash and go somewhere warm. Somewhere where nobody will care about me as long as I pay my rent. There, I’ll find a good woman or two, or three, because why limit myself to monogamy when I could have the world? I’ve heard about the growing interest in cryptocurrency adoption, particularly in countries where their currency has been hyper-inflated and devalued. Governments are mining, whales are buying. There’s a good chance that the amount of crypto she’s talking about could support my margarita and hooker habits until my liver fails and I’m too old to get it up.

When we arrive at the post office, Luna takes a lone key out of her makeup case in her handbag. I escort her inside and she retrieves a bubble mailer from a medium-sized box. It’s the only piece of mail inside. She hands it over to me and we go back to the car where I open it up and find, just as she said I would, a flash drive the size of my pinkie finger. I tell her I need a computer to verify the contents of the drive before I can allow her to leave. To this she smiles and reaches in her giant handbag, retrieving a notebook laptop. She opens it and tells me to give her a second to get to the info.

“This thing is so slow,” she says as she clatters away on the keys. “I need to connect to a hotspot to get online so we can verify.”

Thinking nothing of it, I turn on my mobile hotspot on my phone and she clicks and clatters some more. Then she looks up and says, “Give it a minute to load, it’s having a hard time connecting.”

After about five minutes of waiting, I’m getting suspicious, so I look over her shoulder and see that the computer is trying to connect to the wrong network.

“Oh, no wonder… I’m such a ditz sometimes,” she says as she clicks on the proper network.

The connection is instant. I watch as she opens a browser. Then she asks for the flash drive. No sooner do I hand it to her when I hear a tap of metal on glass. I look over to see a gun pointed at my face.

“Stay still, or I’ll blow your head off, you piece of shit,” a voice says. “Luna, get out of the car.”

I remain rock-solid still, helpless, my pistol secured in its holster on my side as I watch my meal ticket, my last chance at freedom, my last chance at happiness, slip out of my car. The man instructs me to unlock the door and keep my hands within sight. I follow his instructions, and then he opens the car door. He grabs my shirt collar and jerks me to my feet and slams me over the hood of the car and pats me down, removing the pistol from its holster and taking my wallet from my pocket.

He rifles through it until he finds my driver’s license and says, “The police are on their way. You’re going down, man. Kidnapping, extortion, and I’m sure the cops will figure out more things to charge you with on top of your current legal battles. You’re screwed, dude. You should’ve left her alone.”

The voice sounds familiar. I’ve heard it before. Once, in a moment of heated passion and anger. Another face-off. A disappointment. I realize it’s him, the coffee shop savior. But how did he know we were here? Luna never left my sight.

“It’s having a hard time connecting.”

She had already connected. The clattering on the keyboard was her typing a message. Then she connected and disconnected, playing it off like she didn’t know what she was doing. But the sinister vixen knew exactly what she was doing. She played me like a fiddle at a square dance. And now she was working this guy over.

I plead my case, telling the man that she’s manipulating him. Begging him to listen, but he doesn’t respond with words. He responds by slapping his handgun against the exposed side of my face. “Stop resisting,” he snaps. “You saw that, didn’t you Luna? He tried to run.”

She walks into my purview, and she smiles at me. A smile that says more than words ever could. My life as I’ve known it is over. I’m going to the big house for the foreseeable future. I give it a month before her new beau regrets saving Luna, but she’s his problem now. I’ll probably see the poor sap in the can in the near-future. I don’t harbor any ill-will towards this fella. He’s wrapped up in her just like I was. The evil seductress, the devil-woman. Luna.