Page 44 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

Murdering a second person was easier than murdering the first. My father would’ve said using the gun was cheating. If I really wanted to feel something, I needed to do it with my hands.

But who cared what my father had to say? He was dead, and I was in a burning building.

Nicole didn’t die immediately. Unlike her, I had little experience with firearms, and despite the close range, I had managed to hit her leg, which was bleeding profusely.

“Ow! Fuck, that hurt, you bitch!” she said.

The fire hadn’t yet reached the lobby, though smoke was starting to pour in. The alarm continued to blare, and I knew it was only a matter of time before the security company arrived to check things out. I intended to be long gone by the time that happened.

Nicole was trying to get up. She’d gone from being concerned about her husband to caring only about herself. Pain revealed us all.

“I never liked you,” I told her. “But I think that you’re right about me. I am dangerous.”

I shot her again. This time I managed to hit her squarely in the head.

Ethan, who’d been silent since crashing through the window, moaned from the floor, as though he could sense his wife’s passing.

Without asking for it, Aidan took the gun from me and completed the job.

There was something romantic about Nicole and Ethan, soulmates, lying dead on the floor, in a pool of each other’s blood.

Nicole thought that Ethan’s committing arson for her was the ultimate sign of devotion, but she’d forgotten about death.

In the end, the two of them would be together forever.

Aidan approached me. The gun was still in his hand.

In the midst of Nicole’s death threat, I’d forgotten what she’d said about not killing Noah, meaning that the murderer continued to roam free.

Aidan was dangerous, a psychopath, and he was approaching me with a gun.

His jaw was tense. His eyes were hard. I didn’t run or fight or scream.

When he leaned down to kiss me, I took all of it in.

I knew what this moment was. The kiss in the rubble, when two people finally decided they were going to be together.

“We need to get out of here before the security company comes,” I said, reluctantly pulling away.

Flames were licking the side of the building, not caring about the cold.

I glanced down the smoky hallway, toward my office.

Was there anything I should try to save?

My computer, the picture of Noah and me, the threatening notes I’d tucked into my desk?

No, I needed to leave that stuff behind.

The things that I’d thought were important meant nothing.

“What should we do about them?” I asked, gesturing at the bodies on the floor. If I was going to prison, I didn’t want it to be because of Nicole. Even from death, she would view it as her own personal victory, and I couldn’t have that.

Aidan took a tissue from the box that the receptionist kept on her desk, and he carefully wiped down the gun with it.

He placed it in Ethan’s hand, pressing his pointer finger over the trigger like Ethan had pulled it himself, making the lobby look like the scene of a murder-suicide.

The cameras were off. As far as anyone else knew, Aidan and I had never been there.

Whatever had occurred between Nicole and Ethan, they took it with them to the grave.

I coughed, my lungs aware of the gathering smoke in a way that my eyes couldn’t yet register.

In the distance, a wail of sirens was starting to gather.

I took one last look at Nicole and Ethan lying on the floor.

I hadn’t really believed that they loved each other until that night.

I thought they’d gotten together because Nicole was the pretty cheerleader and Ethan the hot jock, and that they stayed together because it was the path of least resistance.

I’d considered Nicole too shallow to experience the depths of true love, an assumption that was a kind of internalized misogyny that was difficult to excise.

Now I recognized the passion that they’d felt for each other even after all the years they’d been together.

It hung in the air, clinging to the particles of smoke.

Ethan was so supportive of his wife that he was willing to spend Valentine’s Day burning down her workplace with her rival inside.

That was the kind of grand gesture that my mother would’ve approved of.

I didn’t regret what I’d done. After all, Nicole hadn’t given me any choice in the matter.

One of us was going to burn, and it wasn’t going to be me.

However, I did regret not taking her more seriously while she was alive.

I’d allowed her baby voice and her over-the-top clothing choices to woo me into a sense of complacency.

It was the type of mistake that my parents had made all the time.

They couldn’t fathom that there were people cleverer, better-looking, or more in love than they were.

That was their weakness, the reason why they were ultimately taken down by a child.

I was almost taken down by Nicole. Then someone saved me.

Aidan grabbed my hand and pulled me through the hole that used to be a window.

We ran to his car and peeled away onto icy streets.

The sirens grew in volume and intensity as more and more vehicles made their way to the Better Love building.

First the security company arrived, then firefighters and paramedics, and finally the police.

I was glad that I’d left my car far from the entrance, inconspicuous in the night.

My brain felt as if it were being swarmed by bees—in a good way. Nicole was dead and Better Love was burning, and I didn’t care.

Aidan parked in an unfamiliar covered lot.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” he said.

It quickly became clear that we were at the airport, but not in the place from which I flew coach. We were in the area where people kept their private jets.

He brought me to a small plane. Shortly before she died, Nicole had mentioned a future in which she was going to ride in private jets. Her prediction hadn’t been totally off base; she’d simply missed whom it applied to.

While Better Love burned below, Aidan and I ascended into the sky.

“You can ride in the back,” he offered, “or you can sit in the cockpit with me.”

It was in that moment that I realized I didn’t want to leave him, not even for a few minutes.

To tell the truth, I hadn’t really believed in soulmates.

Whether I believed in soulmates was a question that people frequently asked when they found out I was a matchmaker, and I changed my answer depending on the audience.

To the religious crowd, I suggested that God had created matchmakers, just as he’d created love.

To skeptics, I said that all of us were compatible with a multitude of people, and it was just a matter of finding them.

As for myself, I thought that love was about creating an image of the life that I wanted: a hot, successful husband; his mother, who could become mine.

I was trying to create a movie scene that I could live inside.

Aidan was all wrong. Sure, he was hot and successful, but he was also a psychopath who had killed at least two people and was obsessed with my parents.

The main problem that most people had with being in love with killers was that killing was morally wrong, which made it easy for me to overlook another problem, which was that Aidan might someday be taken away from me.

My mother and father had loved each other so intensely, and yet, when my father was murdered, they hadn’t seen each other in a decade.

It was inconceivable to me that anything could be worth all that drama—until I found myself flying through the sky with Aidan.

When we reached cruising altitude, he turned to me.

We didn’t need words to explain what was about to happen.

He ran a finger along my cheek and it was over.

I stripped off my boots, my pants, and my underwear, leaving my thick socks on, as my feet were cold.

He undid his own pants and pulled me on top of him.

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted this,” he said.

Normally, I found it a turnoff when men desired me so much.

Part of the appeal of Noah was that, because he was frequently at work, it was impossible for the two of us to get too close.

He would always be at arm’s length, and that was where I’d wanted him.

I’d thought that I wanted a man who didn’t know the truth about me, about my parents, but as Aidan and I stared into each other’s eyes, I had to accept that it was possible that I’d been wrong about everything.

He looked at me like he wanted to destroy me, and I opened my legs to let the destruction in.

We fucked like two people who needed sex to live. We fucked like two people who’d committed murder and set their lives on fire. It felt so good that I couldn’t even loathe myself for it.

Soulmate. The word hit my brain as I orgasmed. Aidan had been trying to tell me for weeks, and I hadn’t listened. But then, if love came easily, there could be no movie. The story was about the struggle to come together.

“How did you know where to find me?”

We were in a hotel room, lying naked on the bed. We’d flown several hours, through the night, and landed at an airport surrounded by palm trees. I wasn’t sure what state we were in—Florida?—and I didn’t care. After years of stability, a path planned and plotted, the unknown was exhilarating.

“I’ve been following you,” he said plainly. He didn’t look ashamed of or embarrassed about the admission. “You gave me access to your location the first night we met, because you didn’t want us to get separated. I take it you forgot about that.”

“So all these weeks, you’ve been stalking me?”