Page 38 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

Aidan laughed. It wasn’t the bitter laugh that I was expecting but something sincere, like he was telling a joke.

“It happened so fast. Once you realize how fragile humans really are, it’s amazing that anyone survives until adulthood.

A single hit was enough to take him down.

I didn’t mean to kill him—that’s what I tell myself, anyway.

I just wanted to make sure that he never hurt my girlfriend again.

I didn’t tell her what I did. I couldn’t.

I didn’t want her to think of me like that— as a killer .

The irony was that she was so distraught over his death that she told me it wasn’t fair to us to stay together .

It was confusing to me. I thought she wanted me to get rid of him, and instead, that was the very thing that came between us.

It took me a long time to realize that she never really loved me.

It was him that she was fixated on the whole time.

He was the one she couldn’t stop talking about.

I was the stupid rebound who thought we were in love.

I never told anyone what happened. I didn’t want to give anyone the power to put me behind bars the way that my parents had. ”

“Why are you telling me now?” I asked.

He looked at me like I was a lit window in the middle of the night and he could see everything that was happening inside.

“I haven’t been totally honest with you,” he said.

“You made the story up, didn’t you? You’ve never killed anyone,” I said. The lie irritated me. I was ready to leave, to go home and win Noah back. What was I doing with this man?

“No, I did. The thing is, Lexie, I approached you tonight because I saw you across the room and knew exactly who you were.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. I thought he meant “knew” in the way that similar beings could recognize one another across the universe. Aidan, however, had been literal in what he said.

“I knew who your parents were before you told me. I know all about Peter and Lydia Schwartz, their murders, their love story. You.”

The room stopped spinning as adrenaline coursed through my veins, canceling out the effects of the alcohol I’d drunk.

The handsome man had known who I was. He saw me in a bar and approached me, and now we were alone in a hotel room.

I’d gone from being the child hiding in her room to being one of the screaming women.

Aidan didn’t seem to notice my distress. He continued his monologue. Men could be so oblivious to the danger that they represented.

“I was fucked-up after that. Or maybe I was fucked-up before that and that’s why I did it.

Anyway, I was fucked-up. I’d worked so hard to fit in with the cool, popular kids, and suddenly I couldn’t even pretend.

I didn’t care about their stupid parties or the girls who threw themselves at me.

I was so fixated on how it felt to bash that guy’s head with the rock.

I wanted to do it again, which I knew was wrong.

I couldn’t tell anyone how I felt. I was completely alone.

I started doing these searches online. Covert, of course.

I couldn’t type I want to kill someone and don’t know what to do .

Even as a high school student, I wasn’t that stupid.

Eventually I discovered your parents, what they’d done.

I understood that they were like me. They took pleasure in something that wasn’t supposed to be pleasurable.

Unlike me, they didn’t spend all their time trying to resist. They gave in.

They were a warning. They were a love story. ”

As much as I wanted to tell Aidan that he was wrong, that they were total monsters, I saw truth in what he said. My parents did, somehow, truly love each other. There was something beautiful about that, that out of all the fish in the sea, they each found the one whose bite was equally vicious.

“How did you find me? Have you been stalking me?”

I pulled away, putting space between us on the bed. It disgusted me to think that he could be one of them, one of my parents’ followers .

“No, no. It wasn’t like that. I saw you in the bar and thought you were hot. I was looking for a hookup—that’s all. Then I got closer and saw your face and just knew that you were the person I’d been searching for my whole life. My soulmate. The only one who can really understand me.”

The confession made me sick. I thought we were having a metaphorical dick-measuring competition, only the length was a measure of childhood trauma.

Instead, I’d discovered that the handsome man—someone I’d kissed—had killed someone and was obsessed with my parents.

I stood up to leave, but the spinning of the room had increased and was like the worst kind of carnival ride.

I ran to the bathroom, hurling up all that was inside me.

It was my bodily functions that forced me to stay, but stay I did.

It seemed fitting that other people’s lives were changed when a butterfly flapped its wings and mine was altered when I spit up half-digested food in the toilet.

On the couch in Aidan’s apartment, I stiffened.

“You knew who my parents were before we ever talked,” I said.

I’d been unable to figure out why Aidan was so certain that we belonged together, especially since I’d told him that my parents were serial murderers.

I’d thought that he was allured by the chase.

He couldn’t have me, and that made him want me more.

But no, he wanted me because of who my parents were.

People liked to talk about nepo babies, the children of famous people, who were given a leg up in life because of who their parents were.

Everything that they achieved was marked with an asterisk that noted that they came from wealth and fame.

It meant that nothing could ever be their own, not really.

I was the nepo baby of death. As long as I was affiliated with my parents, nothing would ever be mine.

There was also the fact that he killed a person, but that was a concern that I would get to later.

“It was never me that you wanted at all,” I said. “It was my mother or my father. Which one is your favorite? People usually pick. Do you love the siren or the madman? You don’t know what it was like growing up with them, how that kind of environment destroys a person.”

“I do. You told me. I get it, Lexie. I really do. Don’t you see? We’re the same. You spend all your time setting up couples, and you can’t see what’s right in front of you.”

“I was supposed to marry Noah. We were going to move to the suburbs. I was going to have ordinary children, maybe get a dog. That was what I wanted, not whatever this is.”

Aidan grabbed my hand, and I was too startled to take it back.

“You can play this game all you want, but I see you, Lexie. I know who you really are. You’re not this good-girl housewife married to a doctor.

You would’ve been bored within five minutes.

That’s not the kind of love you want. You want passion, excitement.

It’s what I want too. We can do everything together—travel the world, eat the best cuisine, see the greatest works of art. ”

“Kill people,” I added.

“No,” he said.

“You did kill someone though.”

“Just one.”

“Really? Tell me the truth, Aidan. Am I really supposed to believe that you stopped with a single person? You idolize my parents. They’re serial murderers.”

“You idolize people on reality television, and I don’t see any filler in your lips. That’s not how things work. I idolized them because I was lonely. You understand that, don’t you? Loneliness? I just wanted to be seen. I wasn’t trying to be like them.”

I pulled my hand away. All parts of myself belonged to me.

“Bullshit. I don’t believe you. I’ve been through hell lately, hell .

My fiancé left me for my best friend, and now he’s dead.

You killed him, and you’ve been delivering him to me in pieces.

Isn’t that what you do, Aidan? Protect women by killing their exes?

Guess what. It’s not a great way to woo someone!

Every time that I think I’m safe, something new shows up.

Do you even know how hard it is to bury things in the wintertime?

Of course you don’t, because you don’t bury things.

You keep them and deliver them to my doorstep in gift-wrapped packages.

And what is with the stuff at work? The roses were one thing, but the dismembered mannequin went way too far.

Nicole suspects something—I can tell that she does.

She’s trying to get me fired, and I can’t let that happen.

I’m a matchmaker . It’s what I’m good at.

I have nothing else left. Molly is gone, Noah too. What am I if not that?”

I talked and talked and talked. I might’ve gone on forever, but in a moment of clarity I realized that I sounded like my mother on the phone, the way that, when she’d gotten started on a perceived injustice, she couldn’t shut up about it.

It made me insane. I hated that I had the same impulse.

It was Aidan; it had to be. He’d killed Noah, delivered pieces of him, and brought out the mother within me.

“I didn’t know all of that was happening,” Aidan said quietly. “I wouldn’t do something like that, Lexie. I don’t want to hurt you—don’t you see? I want to love you.”

I had no patience for his weak denial. The truth was so clear in front of me.

“But you have hurt me—don’t you see? I’m not like my parents. I don’t appreciate bloody objects wrapped in tissue paper. Murder isn’t a love language!”

I stood up. I couldn’t remember why I’d come.

I needed to keep Aidan away. He was like my parents, an agent of death.

But I couldn’t call the police, because he’d implicated me in his crimes.

It was smart, really. It was a common plot device in romantic comedies—two people, unable to avoid each other, finally realize that they were meant to be.

That was what he wanted, but I refused to give in to his machinations.

I was in charge of my own fate. Maybe I couldn’t have Noah, but I could find someone else like him.

Someone ordinary, with a mom who stayed at home and made casseroles.

A kind of person who couldn’t fathom how traumatic my childhood had been.

“If you care about me at all, you’ll stay away from me and Better Love. No more packages, okay? I don’t want to see a single fingernail. Do whatever you want with the rest of him. I won’t call the police as long as you return the favor. Please, Aidan. Please. I want my life back.”

Aidan followed me to the door.

“Please don’t leave,” he said. “I can he—”

“I’ve said all I have to say, Aidan.”

A hand took hold of my arm, at once firm and gentle. Something about being held like that made me want to stay, to turn toward him. He was even more dangerous to me than I’d given him credit for.

“Just stay. Hear me out. You don’t have to be alone anymore.”

It was so like a man to create problems and then hold an unwilling audience captive to hear him rationalize them.

“I’m leaving, Aidan. Let me go.”

He did as he was told. It annoyed me that I almost wished he hadn’t.

My arm burned with the memory of his touch, and I couldn’t help but remember how it felt when our lips were pressed together on the night we met.

I made myself stop. I couldn’t think of him in that way.

Aidan had hurt Noah—or at least I was pretty sure he had—and I wasn’t about to let him do the same to me.

I left the condo. I entered the elevator and watched the doors close, and it felt like an ending.

It was the kind of shot used to indicate the end of a season on television.

I forgot about the documentarian’s favorite move, the one where the screen went black and then words like Two months later ominously appeared to show that the end of the story was never where we thought it was.