Title: Kinks and Con Games
They met at the parcel lockers behind the station. She was wearing a crop top in winter, chewing gum like it owed her money, and asked if he could help carry her package because “you look like the kind of guy who’d open doors and close wounds.”
He laughed. She didn’t.
She was intense. Wild. The kind of girl who played with knives and meant it. Her name was Mia — or at least, that’s what she called herself that week. She liked his piercings. Especially the one through places most people don’t ask about on a first date.
“You’re weird,” she told him, grinning. “But not boring. That’s rare.”
Jona was already tired of boring. So he let her in.
It was sex. It was noise. It was sweat and cuffs and games played in the dark.
But underneath it all, he could already feel it again — the same old story dressed in latex and fishnets.
**
“I like you,” she said once, lighting a cigarette with one hand and scrolling Tinder with the other. “You’re freaky. But you’re too… clean.”
“Clean?” he asked.
She sighed. “You don’t need anything. That’s creepy.”
He blinked. “You mean drugs.”
“Yeah,” she said, unapologetic. “Like… if you had some blow or oxy or whatever, I wouldn’t be so fucking mad at you all the time.”
“Mad at me?”
“You’re so neutral, Jona. It’s freaky. Like talking to a mirror that doesn’t hate itself.”
He wanted to laugh. Or cry. Or walk away.
Instead, he stayed a little longer.
Until the day she stole his custom BDSM cuffs — the ones he had ordered from Berlin, titanium, double-locked, engraved. She textte hem drie dagen later:
“Sorry not sorry. I’m doing this thing now. Some gangbang thing. For coke. Don’t judge. Or do. You’re good at judging. Bye <3”
No anger. No shame. Just emojis.
He sat on his floor, staring at the empty drawer where his gear used to be. Not just the handcuffs — the whole box. She took it all.
And left him the echo of her perfume and a playlist full of songs about power and control.
**
He didn’t text her back.
Didn’t even block her.
He just unplugged.
Sometimes, survival is quiet.
Sometimes, healing looks like giving up on saving people who don’t want to be saved.
He put the key to the cuffs in the trash.
Didn’t need it anymore.
End of Chapter Three.