Page 37 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

“You can’t stay away from me, can you?”

I stood in the lobby of Aidan’s building. It was Saturday night, two weeks since our first meeting, and a week since Noah had disappeared. He had the face of someone I’d known forever.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Is matchmaking always this dire?”

“It’s not about that.”

I followed Aidan into the elevator. He wore black joggers and a T-shirt, as though he’d just come from working out. He hadn’t wanted me to come here.

“Let me fly you somewhere,” he’d said on the phone.

I thought back to my drive with Rebecca. It was one thing for a car to skid across a road, and another for a plane to fall from the sky. I didn’t trust him to take me safely back down from such a height.

“No.”

“A restaurant, then. Somewhere nice.”

“It can’t be in public. I don’t want to be seen.”

“Your house?”

“Are you saying that you know where I live?”

“Not until you tell me.”

“Let’s meet at your place.”

He’d hesitated.

“I don’t usually bring women here.”

“Why? What are you hiding?”

“Nothing. I just like my space.”

His defensiveness made me curious. I was sure that Aidan’s apartment—the physical manifestation of his psyche—would reveal the specific darkness of his soul, just as my parents’ various homes had revealed their darkness.

Once my parents had been arrested, forensic investigators combed through every one of my parents’ addresses that they could find for evidence.

They’d been shocked to discover that there was seemingly no attempt to cover their tracks.

There was trace evidence of the women everywhere.

Their failure to catch my parents earlier was an indictment of the entire investigative team.

They hadn’t even realized that serial murders were being committed.

Slutty women, they thought, disappeared all the time.

I didn’t think that Aidan was a serial murderer, like my parents, but he was something. A psychopath.

We took the elevator to the top of the building.

The penthouse. The doors opened to reveal a sparse, clean space that wasn’t entirely different from Rebecca’s apartment, except that Aidan’s was much larger.

On the walls were representational paintings of men on horses and ships at war with the water.

Next to a window was a telescope that was angled in such a way that I couldn’t tell if it was pointed at the sky or toward his neighbors.

I couldn’t detect the stench of death in the air.

If Aidan was holding on to the rest of Noah’s body, he was doing a good job of concealing it.

“Do you want me to show you the bedroom?” he asked.

“You know that’s not why I’m here.”

“Actually, I don’t know. You wouldn’t tell me why you needed to come here.” Aidan’s tone was snippy, and I conceded that recent events had caused me to get a little hysterical. I needed to calm down. I wouldn’t get anything out of him if I was upset.

“Let’s sit,” I said. I led him to the couch like it was my place rather than his. The comforting thing about being in the home of my number one suspect was that I was confident that no body parts would interrupt our conversation, because I was watching Aidan’s every move.

He took a seat next to me. It was like we were back on that bed in the hotel room, except that I was totally sober and was wearing leggings and a sweatshirt instead of something tiny and sparkly.

My brain locked into place. It came to me suddenly—a repressed memory —like on reality television, when things that had happened in past seasons were spliced with the current one.

Suddenly it unfolded in front of me like a note passed from one hand to another in class.

“I told you about my parents. Now what are you going to tell me?” I asked Aidan that night in the hotel. I hadn’t really expected him to give me anything. I was used to the lopsided nature of confessions. I was so good at winning the worst kinds of competitions.

“I was a difficult child,” Aidan began.

The room was spinning—or was it my head? I wasn’t sure what day it was. It felt like an eternity since Noah and Molly had told me of their affair, but it had been only eight hours. Now I was on a bed in a hotel room with a stranger— the handsome man .

“I threw these wild, uncontrollable temper tantrums. They came out of nowhere and there was nothing my parents could do to calm me down. They had me tested for the usual things, but I wasn’t that… usual .” He spit out the word like it hurt him.

“I guess they figured that I’d grow out of it eventually.

It was a phase. In the meantime, my parents would just have to deal with it.

They were worried that I might hurt my siblings.

I did hurt my siblings. It was all accidents—you know, sibling stuff—but after my sister’s broken arm they decided to do something. ”

“What did they do?”

“They made a padded room.”

“You mean, like, a cell?”

“Yes. They turned my bedroom into a padded cell that locked from the outside. Whenever I acted out, they put me in it. But I struggled to grasp exactly what actions would land me in there. I pushed the boundaries. I spent so much time in there that they ended up installing a slot for food.”

The man next to me was so handsome , so normal , that it was hard to envision him locked away like a mental patient in the 1950s.

No one went through something like that and came out totally ordinary.

My own childhood loneliness had driven me crazy, and I hadn’t been locked away; I had merely been abandoned for long stretches of time.

“Eventually I figured out how I needed to behave to stay free. It was like having a role in a play. I was someone else for a while, and then, when I was alone, I became myself again. In a fucked-up way, I started to like being by myself. Being around people was a lot of work. I constantly had to put on a different face in order to please them. In my head, though, I still thought I was like everyone else. How can you tell that you’re different when you’re the only person you’ve ever really known? ”

“How did you find out?” I asked.

“You mean, how did I find out that I’m a psychopath?”

“Yeah.”

“No one’s ever diagnosed me, if that’s what you’re asking. I’ve made sure to stay far away from mental health professionals. I diagnosed myself when I was sixteen.”

“What happened when you were sixteen?”

He paused, took a sip out of the bottle in his hand.

“I murdered someone,” he said. “You’re the first person I’ve ever told.”

I should’ve run away then. He’d just confessed to murder.

However, my parents were serial killers.

A little murder didn’t faze me the way that it might faze other women.

Also, I didn’t totally believe him. Murder could be a lot of things.

It could be accidentally hitting someone with a car on a dark night.

Handing peanuts to a friend, forgetting that they had a deadly allergy.

I figured that Aidan’s killing had been one like that.

“Did you really?” I asked.

His voice grew quiet; it was barely above a whisper, as if speaking softly enough would mean that the confession didn’t count. I put my hand on his knee. I didn’t know what to do about this pull I felt toward him now that he’d confessed to causing death.

“I had this girlfriend in high school. I thought we were in love. We started dating because everyone told me that we would be perfect together and I believed them. All my friends said she was the hottest girl in school, and it made me feel good that the hottest girl in school wanted me. She had this ex-boyfriend who went to a different school. He treated her horribly, or she claimed that he did. Later I realized that she was doing things to egg me on. She wanted me to be protective of her. She thought it was romantic. It’s difficult for me to parse who I was before we started dating and afterward.

It’s a weak excuse, I know, to say that she messed me up, but she really messed me up.

Or maybe I was already messed up. Maybe I’d been that way since birth and was looking for someone to pin it on.

Anyway, I became obsessed with her ex. I started following him around.

I actually stood up my girlfriend a couple of times in order to follow him.

I thought I was doing it for her, that it was what she wanted. ”

We both flinched when the heater came on with a creak.

There were so many red flags in what he was telling me, but it felt so good to really get to know a person like this.

All of Noah’s stories were like The saddest day of my life was when my team didn’t make the soccer finals .

I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed emotional intimacy.

“He was on the cross-country team. He went for these long runs by himself. At first I couldn’t keep up with him.

It was humbling. People think that I’m joking when I say that following someone is the best way to get into shape.

I’m not. I’d be lying if I said that I never thought about hurting him.

I did, but I had no intention of acting on it.

It was a fantasy. It was never meant to be real.

Then, one day, he was running and he noticed that I was behind him.

He shouted at me. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?

I know that you’re dating my ex.’ We approached each other.

Neither of us were very big, as we were teenage boys who ran all the time.

He probably thought we were going to have a fistfight, the kind of thing that boys do all the time.

It surprised both of us when I picked up a rock and smashed him over the head with it.

I thought I was doing the right thing by protecting my girlfriend.

I needed to eliminate him for her, for us.

That’s the kind of thing that a good guy does, right? ”