Roast Beef

I never thought in a million years I’d be posting this kind of thing. My whole life it’s been one friendzone after another. There have been a few times where I’ve had a real meaningful connection with a girl, but most of the time something goes wrong, or it turns out they’re a psycho. They’ll talk about how they want romance but freak out when you surprise them. And, unfortunately, if you’re like me and you struggle to understand people or you’re prone to taking statements at face value that makes you a very vulnerable target. A lot of girls have used me in the past, exploiting me for money, free rides, and most of all, as an emotional shoulder to cry on. In my experience, most women love to play games, flirting with you one moment and then withdrawing the next. And by doing that, they can keep guys like me dangling for years because we’re just too trusting.

That’s what makes Valery different. She’s never asked me for anything like that. And I know she’s super smart. The way we communicate is so fun. She does such clever little things, like leaving me a note asking me to leave the apartment block door open so she doesn’t have to find her keys in the dark. It’ll just be a note pinned to my door but it’s her way of letting me know that she’s thinking about me.

Other times she’ll ask me to hold a door open while she walks past with her groceries. When I do, she’ll look at me and smile in a way that makes it clear she likes me. God her eyes just light up when she looks at me. It’s unbelievable. She has this mousy brown hair that’s shoulder length and I notice that when she goes out to work she wears nice, conservative clothing. But when she’s just walking around the apartment block, washing clothes or collecting post, she wears low-cut tops and loose pyjama-shorts that just draw your eye to her thighs.

It’s obvious she knows how those clothes are gonna catch my eye and I appreciate it. For men, sex is a huge driving motivator but for women it’s not. None of the girls I’ve been with were very enthusiastic about sex with me. So it means a lot to me when a girl reaches out and offers some kind of intimacy, even if it’s just a small thing like wearing a short skirt or exposing their shoulders.

But it’s more than just attraction. We have a really deep connection. Sometimes she’ll walk downstairs bare foot and I’ll say,

“Nice shoes,” and she’ll laugh. Over time it’s became our little in-joke. We’ve had this back and forth for nearly a year. I always try to catch her going up her stairs and I come out and ask how she is and she’ll smile at me and laugh at my lame jokes and it’s just perfect.

And I’ve needed it. I’ve been in a dark place for a long time. I came out of university and got a job working from home and without any real reason to go outside I pretty much just stopped. I played games, jerked off, and ate pizza. I’ve gone weeks without leaving my flat. It was like that for so long. I became scared of going outside or speaking to other people. And then one day she turned up and unlike so many people I know, she went out of her way to be nice to me.

Without those flirty moments I think I might have gone all the way down a dark path that ends with suicide. But now that she’s moved in… well, I go outside and she’ll be in the hallway, laundry basket tucked under her arm, just waiting to ask me questions about my day. And not just generic stuff either. She remembers things I talk about and she asks how it’s going. She’ll ask about my work projects, or my hobbies, or if I’m excited about a new game she remembered me mentioning.

It’s incredible to have that kind of meaningful relationship. And lately, I think it’s been escalating. Just the other week she left a pair of panties outside my door. It was so clever that she left them there after doing a load of laundry. But, c’mon, right outside my door? It’s so smart because it’s clearly deliberate, a kind of breadcrumb to remind me of why I need to come out of my shell and approach her more directly, but it’s also just accidental enough that I don’t feel too much pressure. Sometimes girls don’t know just how much we want them, and how much time we spend staring at them and thinking about them. When a girl does something like that, it’s like she’s saying,

“Yeah, I know you’re watching. Here’s a bone to keep you going through the drought.”

And honestly, no other girl in my entire life has made me feel cared for like that.

That’s why I need to keep her safe. I don’t think she knows but I managed to get into the CCTV for the building. The landlord asked me to help set up the internet in this place and I got him to let me take care of the building’s IT stuff in return for a rent reduction. Now I can check the cameras all throughout the public areas of the block. Well it’s really good I can do that because lately I’ve had to intervene to keep Valery safe. One guy followed her home from a night out and I could see her lean into his ear and whisper something, telling him to leave. Poor girl was probably too scared to say it out loud. But then she trotted up the stairs and he waited a moment and followed.

The thought of how he would have hurt her… it makes me scared. Not for her, but for him. Because the things I would have done to him… he would be begging for his life. I don’t think that guy can even imagine what this 350lb almost-six-feet-tall silverback would have done to him if he’d hurt one hair on Valery’s head.

After he went upstairs I went and buzzed her flat over and over. It must have scared the guy away though because when she answered she said her place was empty. She was sweaty and her clothes were torn but she told me she was just exercising. I couldn’t give away the fact I’d been watching her because it’s important to seem aloof and I don’t want to come off as needy, but the guy never actually left her flat. I checked the cameras over and over to make sure he wasn’t lying in wait, but nope, he went up the stairs and never came back down.

Thing is, there’s no back door in this building. There’s just the one entrance. That can only mean one thing:

He was so scared of me, he jumped out the window.

That’s exactly the kind of protection I can bring to Valery. It’s very important to me that I can keep her safe. Unfortunately, I’m worried about how a relationship is going to work if she makes it so hard to protect her. Because, the big thing is that this incident wasn’t a one off. It keeps happening. I’ve taken to hanging around the front door when she goes out so that when she comes back I’m here waiting, ready to shoo any guy away. She always seems really icy and weird at the time, but whenever we meet afterwards she’s clearly appreciative because she’s back to normal, smiling and asking how I am.

I wonder, is it just fear that makes her seem annoyed when she comes home and finds me waiting? I can’t help but wonder what she thinks is happening when she lets these guys follow her home. She’s putting herself at risk. Thank God I’m there to intimidate them because none of them ever come back out the front door. They must walk straight up the stairs to her place and jump right out the window just to avoid passing me again. That’s a pretty crazy thing to do considering it’s not the ground floor.

I will say, Valery is young. And I’d like to think as she grows up, she’ll become a more sensible young woman. But that’s not the only red flag for me. There are others. For one, there’s hygiene. Valery always looks incredible and she smells great. But the few times I’ve got a whiff of her flat it’s been…

I don’t want to come off as alarmist. It’s just it smells fucking awful, like eye-watering, skin-blistering, paint-peeling, fucking awful. Like my dad used to say “that smells worse than dumpster outside a zoo in the middle of August!” and the smell coming out of Valery’s apartment fits that saying perfectly. I mean, it’s really hard to maintain this image of a precious little princess when you know she lives in a place that smells like a post-orgy butcher shop. I tried to get a glimpse of her flat when she answered her door that one time but it was all dark. Again, I know she isn’t perfect. I just didn’t expect one of her little quirks to be so gross.

I don’t even know what’s making the smell but I know the guy above her made a bunch of complaints via snarky post-it notes but he stopped recently. At first I totally blamed him (how dare he say something mean about my girl!?) but now the smell is starting to seep downstairs. I’m pretty grotty myself but sometimes I smell it and it’s just like… holy shit, she lives in that? I’m concerned for her health if she doesn’t get out of that unhygienic place. It’s too embarrassing for me to approach her about it so a while back I figured maybe I’d try and speak to the guy upstairs and get him to file a real complaint with the landlord.

I knocked for like ten minutes and didn’t get an answer. Thankfully I’m super close with the landlord and a while back he gave me a master key because I needed to get into various crawl spaces between floors to lay ethernet cables down. Long-story short, I made a copy before I returned it to him. I swore I’d only use it in case of emergencies, but I figured maybe it was an emergency and if anyone asked I’d just say the door was open.

I didn’t expect the smell to be so bad. It wafted out when I pushed the door open and it was almost as bad as Valery’s place. The apartment beyond was dark and humid and crazy hot. The old guy had pumped the central heating up to maximum and the effect was like walking into Jumanji. I called out his name but no one answered so I started exploring. It was the usual old guy place: newspapers were everywhere, magazines piled up high, for some reason he had a radio he still used (boomers, amirite?), and a bunch of microwave meals. I did see some pictures of him with his late wife and wooh, she was not a looker. I couldn’t imagine how some men settle for women that look like that. He actually looked happy in his wedding photos. How sad is that?

Anyway, I went through his apartment but couldn’t find the old guy. I did, however, find the source of the smell and clearly there must be some kind of infestation. I don’t know if there are cockroaches or wasps or some crazy exotic pet that got loose in the building because something had piled up a bunch of rubbish in the bathtub and started making some kind of hornet’s nest out of it. It was about chest high and shaped like a weird bubbling island that jutted out of water the colour of blood and oil. The hive itself was made of rotting meat, chewed up paper, discarded fruit, and all kinds of random stuff. Hell there was even the old man’s robe in there, and that guy never took that thing off. Looking around a bit more I saw that the fridge door was wide open and it was completely empty, so the old guy must have taken all his food and put it in the bath. Weird, right?

Either way, the nest looked completely emptied. Whatever had made it was long gone now so I decided to give it a little poke. It felt like rotten wood beneath my finger but it was somehow greasy. It left a residue on my finger the colour of Bolognese grease and it stank for days. I sniffed my finger and started gagging when out of nowhere this groan came from the hive and it moved, just a little bit. It sounded an awful lot like someone saying “help” but it was so muffled and I was so scared I didn’t really get a chance to think about it because I was running for my life!

Looking back, I’m 99% sure I heard it wrong, but there was no denying that whatever was in that hive sounded an awful lot like a person. I’ve tried googling to see if I could find out what that thing was, but I couldn’t find anything useful. Whenever I search “bugs that sound like people” it just shows me a bunch of children’s films. There must be something in nature that makes that noise because sometimes when Valery goes out I sneak up to her door and press my ear close to it and I hear the same thing. It’s all weird and distorted but it definitely sounds like the word “help”. The infestation has clearly spread and whatever bug is responsible could be dangerous.

I even dared to open her door once just to see if I could glimpse how bad her apartment is. I literally just popped it open and looked. It was too dark to see anything but she must have some kind of pet because something came stumbling out of the dark towards me. It was like a person made of paper or rotting wood, with their back and face covered in little white bumps about the size of a pea. This thing covered the distance so quickly, even though its hands looked awkward and clumsy as it slapped them down on the floor to come towards me. When it opened its mouth there was nothing but this swollen piece of meat that stopped any sound. It looked like raw steak and it dripped grease the same colour as the bath. I cried out and slammed the door shut but a second later something thumped against it.

That’s when I finally realised what was happening! I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me earlier, but Valery must work in special effects! I felt like such an idiot as the thought sunk in. I always knew she was a creative. Women always are. Anyway, it suddenly made sense why there was that hive upstairs and why Valery was taking so much stuff out to the bins. It might even have explained the smell, although that doesn’t necessarily make the hygiene aspect any better.

I do worry that Valery knows I opened her door. Earlier today I saw her dragging something in a big thick bin bag down the stairs. I rushed out to help her and went to help but she pulled it away and looked at me real angrily. She snapped at me, telling me to leave her alone. For a second I almost listened, but girls never really know what’s best for them so I went to take it anyway. Unfortunately, I just ended up ripping it. I expected Valery to get really upset with me, maybe even cry, but both of our eyes were drawn when something plopped out of the sack that thudded its way down the stairs like a rotten cantaloupe.

I ran down and looked at it, not knowing what it was at first. It looked like a bunch of unhardened papier mache and it was very similar to that nest from the old man’s place, but drier. When I reached down and picked it up I saw that it had hair and these empty eye sockets and even a stump where the neck should be and there were there thousands of pockmarks all along the face, like little dents or burrows. That’s when I realised this was the prop that I’d seen in her flat! I asked her,

“Do you work in special effects? It must be a uh,” I took a good look at the head. It didn’t look very realistic at all. Everything was out of proportion and all bloated. “Is this a work in progress?” I asked politely. I don’t know why but I kind of muttered, “I’m sure you’ll get better.” I wanted to sound reassuring but as soon as I said it my heart dropped. I didn’t want her to be upset at me!

Thankfully Valery just kind of stopped, looked at, and then laughed her ass off. If anything, I think she appreciated my honest criticism. Afterwards she smiled this sort of cheeky flirty smirk and asked me to help clean it up with her, so I did. It took hours for us to do it properly, but being knelt down together, scrubbing the floor, was the closest we’d ever been physically and I liked it. Plus I got to see just how creative she was because there was all kinds of cool stuff in that bag including mulched up feet, severed fingers, and these crazy wasps the size of my fist. None of the human stuff looked any good, but the bugs were amazingly detailed and so realistic. One fell out of the face’s nose and when I picked it up, Valery looked so sad. I asked what was wrong with this decoration—pointing out just how realistic it was—and she said that sometimes the process just doesn’t work out.

I almost made a joke but I could see just how bummed out she was about it. Personally, I couldn’t see what was wrong with it. The feel of the wasp’s hair, that long creepy stinger, and the way it plopped out of the guy’s nose, it even had bits of gore in its mandibles! It was so realistic I reckon she’ll be famous one day like Tom Savini. But I also know what it’s like to feel like a failure no matter what, so I just put a hand on her shoulder and said it’ll be okay. I think it paid off because afterwards she asked if I wanted to come up to her place for coffee.

One weird thing was that, early on during the clean up, she looked up at the camera for a real long time and her eyes narrowed, like she just realised something important. For a second I wondered if she realised how I’d seen her struggling on the cameras, but aside from the weird look she never mentioned it. And besides, during the clean up she was super nice to me, asking about my family, my parents, if I have any siblings or friends. And then, finally, she asked if I wanted to come up! I could have squealed like a school girl when she said that. Obviously I said yes!

I am nervous though. What if she keeps doing risky things like letting men follow her? And what if she’s a really bad home maker? I’ve smelled her flat and I’m not sure I want a woman who prioritises her career over basic domestic chores. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.