Chapter 17: The Fork and the Locked Door

I walked through the house because standing still would make me replay Gary’s thank-you until I crawled out of my skin.

My curiosity flared again. How little I actually knew about Tyler. I decided to poke around. I was not going to open the drawers. I was not going to be the woman who searched his socks for proof. I looked at what was already in the open, which felt like a distinction I could defend if anyone asked.

The living room first; I had history with this room and had already had more sex in here over the last two months than during some entire relationships I had in the past. The bad paintings he had done and kept since high school were still bad. The bookshelf still held the various keepsakes, including the cannibal fork, carved wood, two prongs, sitting where he had put it back the day he told me what it was. It had come from Fiji, where, after a war, the victors ate the vanquished; however, the Chiefs and priests were not allowed to touch cooked meat with their hands, so they used the fork. It was an act of consuming your enemy as revenge and public humiliation after someone had lost.

I had asked him that day whether he was going to eat me or I was going to eat him. Later I had cried and told him that he had killed me and eaten me with his stupid fork. I looked at it now and ran the new information against the old story.

Suppose I was the one who lost, the fork still fit. He had been consuming me slowly over the past weeks, in pieces. The picture, the plug, his initial on a bracelet on my ankle, Mike on the phone while he fucked me, the Uber driver a few hours ago, a shoe, an hour ago, while a man named Ray waited on a phone, Gary watching from the window. Gary in the driveway, thanking me for the show. That was a public humiliation, whether or not anyone called it a ceremony or not.

If Gary was telling the truth, the fork did not fit as cleanly. Two months ago, the train of other women had stopped arriving. Tyler had put up the lights and other decorations in the yard because he could not take me on a normal date. He had told Gary I was not only hot as hell but pretty darn special. He had his eye on me for the longest time. He never approached, which matched the story he had told the first night at the party and what he had told Amber this morning, and it made me angry that it matched, because matching is how liars work and how honest men work, and I couldn’t tell them apart from a bookshelf.