Sweet Nothings

Newly divorced, Brian found dating to be neither fun nor the nightmare his single friends insisted it was. Mostly it was boring, a lot of looking at his phone, swiping left and right, texting that usually came to nothing. When he did make it to in-person dates, they consisted of polite but dull conversations that went nowhere, until he met Jodie.

Jodie was sweet and funny, with an appealing smirky grin. They were both from blue-collar upstate New York families, allergic to cats, and fans of sushi, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and David Bowie. It wasn’t the match of a lifetime, but Brian was a little hopeful, even excited, about where things might go.

But the drawbacks presented themselves almost immediately. For one thing, she talked constantly. By the end of their first date, he knew her entire life story from DNA up until the bowl of edamame they shared. He knew the names of her parents’ dogs, and that her sister worked for a newspaper. Whereas Brian only mentioned that he was recently divorced, Jodie provided the names of her last three boyfriends and details on why they had broken up. He heard about her co-worker who insisted on heating fish in the office microwave. By their third date, he felt like he was sitting through an endless monologue.

She was also emotional, getting teary-eyed when Brian casually mentioned that he had gone out on a date with another woman. It hadn’t gone anywhere, but he stopped himself from telling Jodie that. He was annoyed that he even considered it. Though he invited her to his apartment, she hadn’t stayed long, nor had they discussed being official. There was no need for her to be upset, let alone his immediately feeling guilty about it. He, frankly, didn’t like her enough to worry about walking on eggshells around her.

Brian decided by the end of the evening that he wouldn’t see her again. Yes, she was cute and funny, but her reaction to the news that he had gone out with someone else was a bad sign. He hadn’t even accepted her friend request on Facebook.

He spent much of the next day trying to come up with a polite way to break it off, and then remembered that there was no “it.” Ghosting wasn’t polite, but neither was making assumptions that three dates constituted a relationship. When Jodie texted to ask if he wanted to go to an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, he didn’t respond. Nor did he respond to the “?” she sent an hour later, or the “You ok?” an hour after that.

The next day, Brian woke up to “I see, ok,” and assumed that was the end of it. He deleted her friend request and went about his day, until, just as he was getting on the train to go home, he received another text: “What did I do?”

Brian felt a surge of guilt, immediately followed by annoyance. Any explanation would have sounded like a dumb cliche, but also, he didn’t owe her an explanation. He considered responding with that, then thought better of it and put his phone away.

He heard nothing more from Jodie until Valentine’s Day, when Brian had conceded to spending a quiet evening at home with pizza and Succession. Another text: “I left my scarf at your place. Do you mind if I come by to pick it up?”

Brian didn’t recall seeing her scarf anywhere, but found it hanging up under his winter coat, a long strip of fuzzy purple wool. “I can meet somewhere to give it to you,” he responded, hoping it sounded more sincere than he felt.

“I’m in the neighborhood. I’m on my way to a date.”

He figured that was either an assurance (or a little dig) that she was over it.  Fine, Brian thought, and let Jodie know it was okay to come. It didn’t occur to him until later to wonder how she knew he was home.

She arrived just as the next episode of Succession began. Brian was relieved that the sight of Jodie at his door didn’t stir any kind of feelings. He was neither mad, sad, nor happy to see her. She had already been relegated to the same place in his mind as Melissa, Angela, and Kimberly, just women he had dated and then forgotten.

“Well, hey, you!” she said, perhaps a little too cheerfully.

“Hey. Here’s your–”

Jodie ignored the scarf he held out towards her. “How are you doing?”

“Good, here’s–”

“Now, hold on!” she said, and that overly cheerful tone took on a sinister edge. “I have something for you, too.”

Brian shook his head. “You don’t have to–”

“No, no!” Jodie said, reaching into her purse. “It’s nothing, just a little thing to say no hard feelings.”

She pulled out a heart-shaped candy box, the kind you buy at a drugstore. Brian put his hands up in protest, still clutching Jodie’s scarf. “I really can’t acc–”

“Don’t be silly, it’s really nothing. I gave one to all of my co-workers too.”

“Except the one who heats fish in the microwave, right?” Brian said. Jodie looked momentarily startled at his joke, then let out a peal of laughter. “Yes, right!” she said, offering the candy box.

Well, what the hell, Brian thought. I’m not getting anything else today. He took the candy box from Jodie’s outstretched hand, and in one shockingly swift motion, she grabbed his wrist and yanked him towards her, while with her other hand, she pressed a gun into his stomach.

“Don’t yell,” she said softly in his ear. “Don’t say anything. Back up, and sit down.”

He complied, holding his hands up in front of him, still clutching both Jodie’s scarf and the candy box, and trying to find the couch without looking away from her. Jodie followed, pointing the gun and kicking the door shut behind her.

“Jodie,” he said. “You don’t have to do this. Whatever I did, I’m sor–”

“What’d I say?” she snapped. “I said don’t say anything. Just sit down and be quiet.”

Brian finally found the couch, miraculously without falling over the coffee table. “We can talk about this,” he said. “I don’t think you–”

“Jesus, are you deaf? Are you always this bad at following directions?” Thinking ahead of him, evidently, Jodie snatched his phone off the TV cabinet and put it in her pocket, then took a chair from his tiny kitchen. She set it directly across from him, then sat down.

“You can put the candy down,” she said. “Oh, and I’ll take this…”

Jodie snatched the scarf out of his hand and shoved it into her purse. They sat there in silence. She appeared to be deep in thought, and Brian braced himself to be chastised about his failings as a man, which, he had to admit, were many. Instead, she asked, “Have you ever played Russian Roulette?”

He started to answer, then quickly stopped. Jodie laughed, as if the whole thing was great fun for her. “It’s okay, you can talk now.”

“No, I’ve never played Russian Roulette,” he said, hoping his voice didn’t betray the fact that he was about to wet himself.

“But you know the rules, right?”

“I…I think so?”

“Good! Because we’re gonna play right now.”

The urge to urinate was joined by the urge to vomit. “What…with the gun?”

“No, stupid, with the candy.” She waved the gun towards the candy box. “Open it.”

Now wondering if he might have been dreaming, Brian, hands shaking, tore the wrapper from the box, bright, shiny red with BE MINE on the lid. Eight pieces of chocolate were inside, each nestled in its own individual wrapper.

“Here’s how it works,” Jodie continued. “One of those pieces of candy is poisoned. We’re going to take turns eating each one until we find out which one of us is the lucky duck and which one–”

“Wait, wait, wait, hold on a minute,” Brian said, as he began to stand up and then thought better of it. “This is a joke, right? You’re playing a prank on me?”

“I said you could talk, I didn’t say you could ask questions. Anyway, I told you before, I hate pranks. But I guess you weren’t listening.”

He vaguely recalled her mentioning it during a date, but said nothing more. “Now, just to be fair,” Jodie continued. “I dumped out the box and put all the candy back in different spots, so I wouldn’t know which one was poisoned. Wasn’t that smart of me?”

Brian nodded in agreement. “Yes, very smart. Jodie, can we–”

“I’ll even go first.” She reached down and took the chocolate at the center. “To Valentine’s Day!” she said, tipping it towards him, then popping it into her mouth. Jodie closed her eyes and chewed slowly, like she was savoring a piece of wagyu beef, then swallowed. After a minute or so, she sighed and opened her eyes. “Not that one,” she said, smiling. “Now you.”

Trying to keep himself from bursting into tears, Brian put his hands up in a show of submission. “Jodie, please, don’t make me–”

“Oh come on, maybe you’ll get lucky like I did.”

“Please, I don’t–”

“Do it.”

“No!”

“Do it!” Jodie leapt at him with agility that Brian didn’t expect from a short, plump-ish woman, and pressed the gun against his forehead.

“Okay! Okay! Okay!” He grabbed a chocolate out of the box. It was a ridiculous potential murder weapon, a little brown cube with darker brown squiggles on top. It made him think of his grandmother, a self-proclaimed chocoholic, who always kept a box of chocolates on hand when watching General Hospital. Brian put the candy in his mouth and let it sit on his tongue.

“Chew it up, like a good boy,” Jodie said, sitting back down. “Then swallow it. If you spit it out, I’ll shoot you.”

Brian thought he saw the gun tremble in her hand when she said that. But it was still pointed directly at him. He chewed slowly, not looking away from Jodie. His mouth filled with the sickly-sweet taste of caramel, something he had never been allowed to eat as a kid because he had braces. Sorry, Mom, he thought, then almost burst into hysterical laughter.

He swallowed and waited, as Jodie stared at him with a strange look in her eyes. Anticipation, maybe, but something else too. Brian didn’t know which symptoms he was supposed to look for. Pain? Nausea? He already felt nauseous.

After another minute, he too let out a relieved sigh, and so, curiously, did Jodie. “I guess that one was okay too,” she said.

She chose another candy and put it in her mouth. In the middle of chewing it, she started coughing and grimacing. Brian leaned forward, in the hopes of grabbing the gun away from her, but Jodie waved him away with it and swallowed. “Sorry, didn’t mean to get you all excited,” she said. “It was coconut. I hate coconut.”

And so it continued: Brian got a raspberry creme, Jodie got a truffle, Brian got a nougat, Jodie got a peppermint fondant, all untainted. One chocolate remained in the box, and it was Brian’s turn. They both stared at it like it was a bomb they’d been ordered to defuse.

“I guess this is it,” Jodie said, though there was now a tremor in her voice, and that look of anticipation in her eyes had been replaced with…fear? Yes, it was definitely fear, and Brian thought he could guess what it was fear of.

“There’s nothing in there, is there?” he said. “You didn’t poison anything. I bet that gun isn’t even loaded.”

“Yes, it is!” Jodie said, with child-like defensiveness.

“No, it’s not. You thought you’d come here and scare me and get me back for ghosting you, but you didn’t have any plan for what would happen if I cooperated. Now you’re realizing how much trouble you’re going to get into.”

“Shut up!” Jodie snapped, raising the gun towards him, but now it was Brian who waved her away. “You really had me going there for a second,” he said. “That was pretty scary. But just to show you how cooperative I am, and that I really don’t think there’s anything in there but chocolate and sugar goop, I’ll take my last turn.”

He reached towards the box, and Jodie leapt out of her chair again. “No, don’t!” she cried, snatching the last chocolate away from him and shoving it in her mouth.

Startled into silence, Brian watched as Jodie chewed and swallowed. Her breath coming in short bursts, she looked at him, the fear in her eyes now full-blown terror.

“Jodie…” he said softly. “What did you do?”

Tears streamed from her eyes, and she started shaking, while at the same time trying to move, dropping the gun to the floor. Brian ignored it and went to her, grasping her by the shoulders. “What did you do?”

Chocolate-streaked foam bubbled out of Jodie’s mouth. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I’m sorry.”

She collapsed in his arms, and he lowered her to the floor. Brian frantically felt around in her pockets for his phone. “Jodie? Jodie! I’m gonna get you help, you gotta tell me where my phone is.”

He watched in horrified awe as her face took on a shade of purplish-blue. Jodie’s eyes were already glassy, but she managed to look straight into his own. “You’ll…never forget me,” she wheezed. Her eyes rolled back as she went into full-body, shuddering seizures in Brian’s arms.

She was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.

Brian had been right about one thing. The gun wasn’t loaded.

It was, however, registered under Jodie’s name, and so was the order for the cyanide she put in the chocolate. Although the cops seemed reluctant to believe that Brian had been forced at gunpoint to eat candy (upon reflection, it did sound silly), that one confirmation email confirmed his version of the events.

He had to correct them several times about calling it a “lover’s spat,” or that Jodie had been upset because Brian ended their relationship. “We went on three dates,” he said. “I barely knew her.” Nor did he know why she did it. No one appeared to. She lived alone and left no notes behind.

Brian wondered if what Jodie did warranted a news story, or at least a write-up in the New York Post, though the Post would have almost certainly gone with the “jilted ex” angle. But, in the end, it was just a suicide, and suicides happened in New York City every day. Maybe if Jodie had chainsawed her own head off in front of him, it would have been a newsworthy event, but poisoning just wasn’t dramatic enough.

A month later, he was surprised to receive an email from Alice Wells, a reporter for a local paper that mostly focused on arts and culture. “I got your name through a source at the NYPD,” she wrote. “We don’t normally do these types of stories, but I’ve just been thinking about it, and how it’s an extreme version of the current dating scene. Would you be open to an interview?”

Alice Wells, as it turned out, was beautiful. Brian usually considered himself a cynic on such matters, but as soon as she sat down across from him at a coffee shop near his apartment, he felt it, that fabled connection. The vibe of the meeting quickly turned from an interview to a friendly conversation, and though he stopped himself from asking at the last minute, Brian was…75% certain that it could have ended with plans for a date. Instead, it ended with a lingering handshake, and Alice slipping him her business card.

The article ran a few days later, reflecting Brian’s side of the story as he told it. Seeing it in print, he realized that he embellished, for reasons he couldn’t recall, some of the details, such as mentioning that Jodie had “seemed a little off” from the beginning (she hadn’t), and that he had attempted to snatch the gun away from her (he hadn’t). But it made great copy, as the saying went, and the story went viral. Brian’s email inbox and phone exploded with links to the article and “Is this you???” It was a strange, almost out-of-body experience to just idly browse Facebook or Threads and see the story pop up, and strangers pontificating on what a sad and terrifying nutcase Jodie was. As Alice predicted, it triggered a conversation about the sorry state of modern dating, and how you couldn’t trust anyone you met online.

He almost felt bad for Jodie, especially since the article didn’t attempt to tell her side of the story. No friends or family were quoted, which was peculiar. She had mentioned being close to her parents and sister, and having a small but loyal group of friends that she had hoped to introduce him to at some point. But either Alice didn’t seek them out, or they didn’t respond. In the end, Brian supposed, it didn’t matter. It was Jodie who decided to do what she did, and her responsibility.

He came home from work the Friday after the story ran to find a bottle of champagne on his doorstep, with a card from the newspaper thanking him for being “our most read article since the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal!” Brian barely had time to put the bottle down before he got a call from Alice.

“Congratulations!” she said. “Today my little two-bit publication, tomorrow Dateline NBC.”

“Well, I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Aw shucks, I was just doing my job. Mostly I report on bands no one will ever hear of and how they’re supposedly the next big thing out of Williamsburg, so this was a refreshing change of pace.”

They fell silent for a moment, and then, surprising himself, Brian asked, “Hey, uh…if you’re not doing anything tonight, would you like to come over and split this champagne with me?”

He expected her to decline, perhaps saying that it went against journalism ethics or whatever. Instead, Alice said, “Yeah. I’d like that. See you around 8?”

Brian scrambled around to clean up his apartment, saying a quiet prayer of thanks that there wasn’t a tape outline where Jodie’s body had been on the floor. Eerily, there was no evidence that she had ever been there at all. The gun, the empty candy box, the fruitless EMT equipment, and Jodie herself had all been whisked away while he was at the police station, like it had never happened.

Alice arrived precisely at 8, and somehow even more beautiful than when Brian first met her. Their conversation was easy and animated, and the incident that brought them together wasn’t mentioned. It was becoming the best date Brian had ever been on, and he didn’t even have to leave his house.

They even neglected the champagne in favor of ordering Chinese food, but eventually Alice, sitting tantalizingly close to Brian, said, “That champagne isn’t going to open itself, you know.”

Brian managed to pry out the cork with a steak knife and poured two glasses. He handed one to Alice, sat down (closer to her than before), and toasted. “To the beginning of a lovely friendship,” he said, then immediately cringed.

But she only smirked, and clinked her glass against his. Brian took a long swallow of his drink, while she swirled hers around in the glass. “So,” Alice began. “Did she talk about me?

Brian thought he hadn’t heard her correctly. “What?”

“I wanted to know if she talked about me.”

“Who? Jodie?” Brian took another long swallow of champagne, hoping maybe that would clear things up.

Alice continued. “She was very proud of me. I’m sure my name must have come up at some point in all that…what did you call it, ‘word vomit’?”

Their first date, at a sushi restaurant. Trying to get a word in edgewise while Jodie talked animatedly about the small town she grew up in, her parents…the reporter sister she was so proud of. Amy, or maybe Amanda, or…

Alice. The moment her name came to him, Brian’s stomach cramped, and his mouth filled with the taste of vomit, and a coppery undertone that terrified him. “You’re–” he gasped.

“Now you’ve got it!” Alice said, as if he were a child who just figured out a difficult math problem. “If you had listened to her, maybe you’d have remembered that sooner, and wouldn’t have been stupid enough to talk to me. But you didn’t, and now look where we are.”

She put her still-full glass of champagne down on the coffee table. Brian’s stomach felt like it was turning itself inside out, and whatever vile soup was filling his mouth began dribbling out. He tried to stand up, but his legs collapsed underneath him as the room began spinning.

Alice’s beautiful, terrible face loomed over him, blurry around the edges. “You’re right, you know,” she said. “Jodie did talk a lot. Our dad used to call her Jabberjaws, like that old cartoon. She could be a pain in the ass. But she was a good kid. She meant well. She really liked you.”

Brian, his whole body shuddering and contorting, tried to speak, but could only emit a choked whisper. “I’m s-s-s-sor–”

Alice put a finger against his lips. “Shhhh,” she said. “Don’t. You’ve said enough.”

She leaned closer and whispered in his ear. “No one will remember you.”

The last thing Brian saw was Alice carefully putting the champagne glasses, the bottle, and even the Chinese food containers into a bag and quietly leaving his apartment. As if she had never been there at all.

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