MATTHEW, PART I

The Quiet Violence of Being Watched

It was hot. Not charmingly warm, not sun-drenched and coastal, but invasive. A dull, atmospheric oppression that blanketed the city in sweat and silence. The heat had a narcotic quality, making everything feel slower, stickier, blurred. People moved like ghosts, aimless and glazed. No one in Los Angeles knew what to do with real weather.

His profile read:

“Fabricator/engineer building motorcycles and restoring vintage
Love gardening painting and working with my hands
Looking for fun connections with interesting people :)
Located in Hollywood”

The smile in his photo was soft, maybe even gentle, and he held a puppy like it meant something. Like he was the kind of man who cared about living things.

We met in the digital backrooms of the internet, an app built for people who wanted sex without having to pretend otherwise. It was clinical. Clean, in a perverse kind of way. No one lied. Everyone curated, sure, but the premise was transparent. No one was playing coy.

I was unraveling. Still raw from a breakup that had taken everything out of me. The kind of heartbreak you can’t justify because the person you lost was never really yours to begin with. He had picked someone else; chosen her in broad daylight and I’d been left clawing at the wreckage, desperate to find something solid in the ruins.

So I swiped. Out of boredom. Out of loneliness. Out of that particular kind of L.A. emptiness that seeps in when the sun won’t let up and you realize everyone you know is pretending not to feel dead inside.

I wasn’t particularly interested. His message was short, casual: swing by the shop sometime. So one slow, shapeless afternoon, iced coffee in hand, I did. The place was empty. No sign of him. Just the mechanical stench of oil and something burnt. I stood there for maybe a minute, stared at the silence, then left.

Two hours later, he texted. Said he was sorry he missed me. Asked if I had actually come.

I responded curtly, yeah, I stopped by. Then hit send without thinking twice. No follow-up. No emoji. Just a flat acknowledgment before I tossed my phone aside and moved on with my day.

A few days passed. He texted again. Same tone, low-effort, vaguely inviting. So a few days later I went. Again. Same coffee, same sun, same boredom, no heads up. This time he was there. Covered in grease, sweat darkening the collar of his shirt, eyes tired but bright. He looked at me like I was a surprise he hadn’t dared to count on.

He told me about his sisters. Three of them. He was the youngest. East Coast transplant. Boston or somewhere nearby, he spoke like he was still half-lived there. Came to L.A. through San Francisco. The interaction lasted maybe twenty minutes. Just long enough for me to say yes when he asked me to get a drink.

I showed up thirty minutes late. I figured it was a formality. Drink, maybe two, then somewhere dark and forgettable. But he had made a reservation. Dinner. An actual table at one of those places people take photos of their food. I was confused. Mildly impressed. And, if I’m being honest, flattered. The bar was low, but even that slight gesture, a reservation, felt radical. It made me feel, if only briefly, like someone worth showing up for.

I sat down and ordered a martini, lightly dirty, three olives. “Two’s bad luck,” I told him, like it mattered. He smiled, distracted. Apologized for his appearance, said he came straight from the shop. His shirt was rumpled, faintly streaked with grease, like he hadn’t changed or cared to. He looked embarrassed, but covered it by diving straight into conversation.

He asked where I was from. I told him I grew up in the Bird Streets. He blinked, clearly unfamiliar. There was something almost amusing about it, like talking to an alien who’d landed just west of Laurel Canyon and hadn’t been briefed. I said I was half Japanese. He nodded like that meant something, like it was an answer to a question he hadn’t asked. I asked about his background. He hesitated. There was a long pause, the kind that makes you put your drink down.

“Well,” he said, “I always thought I was just European. Standard-issue white. But turns out I’m half Hungarian. I took a 23andMe and found out my mom had an affair. One of my sisters and I… turns out we’re not my dad’s. The guy who was our dad died in 9/11.”

I stared at him. There wasn’t a playbook for that kind of revelation. It just hung there; tragic, dramatic, too big for the table.

He kept talking. Said he didn’t really know what to do with the information. That it had thrown everything off. I nodded, sipped my drink, ordered a second, tried to reroute the conversation toward something easier, something with a script. Exes.

He said his last girlfriend was “crazy.” Then corrected himself. “No, like…really crazy.” He shifted in his seat. Said he didn’t want to talk about it. Actually said the words: I’d really rather not talk about it.

That should have been the red flag.

I looked down and noticed the Marlboro Lights—soft pack—resting on the table, balanced on a cheap Lee’s wallet, the kind of knockoff leather that peels in layers. It was worn at the corners, fraying like something long past its expiration date. I exhaled, relieved. “Thank god you smoke,” I said, laughing under my breath, a little drunk, maybe just grateful to feel understood in some small, carcinogenic way.

He grabbed the check without hesitation. Paid in cash. Crumpled bills, no ceremony. I hesitated. Not because I couldn’t afford it, I could—but because I knew the dinner wasn’t cheap and this was a man who worked with his hands. Still, I let him. It felt like a small act of surrender. Maybe control.

We got up and started walking. He lit a cigarette for me and said he lived a block away. He did not live a block away. He lived almost a mile away—maybe more. But I didn’t stop.

I kept walking, Chanel flats already starting to rub, the outfit from Bode costing six times what dinner had, but I wore it like armor. He kept pace beside me, and we talked aimlessly, lazily. Nothing important, nothing urgent. Just smoke curling into the warm night and half-formed thoughts pretending to mean something.

Cigarettes burned down to the filter. We tossed out loosely philosophical nonsense, the kind you say when you want to sound like you’ve felt things deeply but haven’t yet had to pay the price for it. We talked about life like two people circling the edge of it, afraid to dive in.

It was during that walk I started really looking at him. The shape of him. Broad shoulders, tall frame, handsome in that accidental way. Calloused hands. Grease-stained jeans. A little tragic. A little dangerous. And that was it. Decision made somewhere beneath the surface of reason. I knew I was going to sleep with him. Of course I was.

We finally got there, one of those forgettable, sun-bleached Hollywood apartment buildings you pass without registering. Beige stucco, chain-link fencing, the faint smell of old weed and scorched plastic. I’d seen a thousand of them from the outside but had never actually stepped inside. Until now.

The apartment was small. Not minimalist, just small. Cramped. Claustrophobic. Every surface was covered in motorcycle parts—frames, gears, greasy tools, stacks of things that looked broken but maybe weren’t. It smelled like metal and something else I couldn’t place.

He motioned toward the bedroom. Told me to wait there. No explanation. Just stay. So I did. Sat on the edge of the bed, vaguely confused. I heard the water start. The sound of him scrubbing like he was trying to wash something off.

I pulled out my phone. Scrolled, aimlessly. Notifications, apps, distractions. A way to pretend I wasn’t wondering what the fuck I was doing.

When he came back, he looked different. Clean, but raw. Beautiful in that slightly dangerous, vaguely unhinged way. He didn’t say anything. There were no lights, no lamps, no overheads. Just darkness. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust, but even then it was barely visible. Just outlines and silence.

He stood in the doorway, towel slung low on his hips, water still dripping from his collarbone. I couldn’t see much just fragments. The vague outline of his body. The glint of moisture on skin. The soft sound of his breath, steady, close.

He stepped toward me and let the towel drop.

There was no conversation. No buildup. Just movement. He knelt in front of me and pulled my skirt up slowly, like he already knew I wasn’t wearing anything underneath. His hands were rough, a mechanic's hands, calloused and sure, moving with a quiet authority that said he’d done this before. A lot.

I leaned back on the bed, legs parting almost automatically, like this had been decided long before either of us knew it. His mouth was warm. Focused. There was nothing tender about it—just intention. Precision. Like he was trying to erase someone else from my body.

I let him.

When I pulled him up to me, I caught the smell of soap still clinging to his neck cheap motel soap, sharp and citrusy and underneath it, sweat and oil and something distinctly male. He kissed me then. Finally. Deep and consuming, like we’d skipped the part where we pretended this was casual.

He pushed into me without hesitation. No words. Just a low grunt in the back of his throat and the slow, steady rhythm of someone trying not to lose control too quickly. The bed creaked beneath us, springs protesting, the only sound in the room aside from our breathing fast, shallow, uneven.

I wrapped my legs around him. Bit down on his shoulder. Scratched at his back. It was messy. Hot. Not romantic. Not soft.

And still, in the dark, in that tiny bedroom filled with motorcycle parts and old secrets, I felt something like peace.

Something like silence.

From there, it grew into something. Not love, not anything close to it. But a rhythm. I’d stop by the shop. Pop in to say hi. He’d wipe the grease off his hands, kiss me on the mouth, offer me a Heineken from the mini fridge in the back like it meant something. It became a kind of ritual. Familiar. Comfortable in that strange way people can become habits. And it was nice, or at least not awful.

Mostly, it was a distraction.

He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t press. I didn’t have to explain anything to him. And in return, I’d come over late at night, sometimes after dinner, sometimes closer to 2 a.m.—and let him fuck me in the dark, on a black wooden bedframe he said he’d inherited from his father. It was cheap, split down the middle, creaking under us like it might give out. The mattress was pushed up against a wall cluttered with engine parts and laundry he never folded. It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t even particularly tender. But it was consistent. Familiar. A kind of ritual.

It was transactional in the most human way; mutual need, vaguely disguised as affection.

Then one day the bomb dropped.

An ex-boyfriend called me. Someone Matthew knew, distantly, through the mutual friend web of East Hollywood degenerates. I picked up out of instinct. There was a beat of silence, then:

“Hey. I’m not sure how to bring this up, but… you should know. His ex—the one he called ‘crazy’? She had him arrested. Domestic assault. It wasn’t some misunderstanding. It was serious. Bad.”

I didn’t say anything. I just sat there, phone pressed to my ear, letting the words hang in the air like smoke.

He kept talking, filling the silence, naming details I didn’t ask for. Court dates. Hospital photos. A mutual friend who’d bailed him out. Things that didn’t belong to me but now lived uncomfortably close to my skin.

When I hung up, I stared at the wall for what felt like hours.

It didn’t feel real, but it also didn’t feel surprising.

I found myself driving to the shop almost without thinking. Why? I don’t know. There was no plan, no logic. Just instinct. Some compulsive need to see his face, to hear it from him directly. When I got there, he was pale and visibly shaken, color drained from his skin.

He didn’t say hello. Just pulled me aside like we were in some kind of thriller, like someone might be watching. “I need to tell you something,” he said.

And then he did, everything. He laid it out before I could even tell him what I’d already heard. But his version was different. Looser. Selective. He looked panicked. Not angry, not defensive just scared. Like a little boy caught doing something awful who still didn’t fully understand the damage.

And maybe it was that—his fear—that got to me.

He said his court date was in a week. He didn’t cry, but his eyes were wide, almost vacant, like he was dissociating in real time.

I should have walked away.

Instead, I went into crisis mode. Full triage. I left the shop with my head spinning, feeling weightless and stupid and adrenalized. I pulled out my phone. Started making calls. Big ones. Favors I’d been sitting on. Like somehow this was my mess to clean up.

And I did. I made it go away.

And that’s when he knew he had me.

Something shifted after that, subtle at first, but unmistakable. He began watching me more closely. Listening, really listening, not like a lover, but like someone taking notes. Every offhand complaint, every bitter aside about my friends, the industry, the phoniness, the way I said I couldn’t stand people who couldn’t sit in silence without reaching for their phones—he took it all in. Like data points. Like he was building something.

And then, almost imperceptibly, he began to change.

He became the antidote to everything I said I resented. The anti-thesis to my world. Detached from social media. Unimpressed by status. Gentle in the exact ways I told him I hadn’t received. You could call it love bombing, and maybe that’s what it looked like on paper, but it wasn’t love. Not even infatuation.

It was mimicry.

Now I see it clearly: the behavior of a codependent man, hollow at the core, shape-shifting to stay wanted. He wasn’t authentic. He wasn’t grounded. He wasn’t any of the things I thought I was falling for. He was a projection. A facade built brick by brick from my own discontent.

And still, I fell.

Because it felt tailored. Intimate. Designed. Because when someone reflects your pain back to you in a voice softer than your own, it doesn’t feel like manipulation. It feels like safety. It feels like a connection.

But it was neither.

He was becoming someone it felt impossible to detach from, not because he was real, but because he had made himself essential.

It went on like that for three months.

The sex wasn’t just good—it was obsessive. Consuming. Like we were both trying to crawl inside each other to escape something. There was this constant, charged tension between us, even in silence, even in sleep. His body felt like a drug, warm, solid, elemental and mine responded on instinct. I’d flinch when he wasn’t touching me, like I needed the anchor. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. At the shop. In the car. His apartment. My floor. It didn’t matter.

I’d show up late at night, barely say a word, and we’d be on each other in seconds. Clothes half-off, breathless, frantic like we were afraid it might disappear if we slowed down or looked too closely. He’d press me up against walls, lift me onto counters, pin my wrists back like he needed to feel power but never said it out loud. It wasn’t tender. It wasn’t sweet. It was something raw and wordless. Desperate. Beautiful in that ruined, cinematic way.

We’d fall asleep sweaty and tangled, wake up hard and half-dreaming, and do it all over again before the sun rose.

I told myself it was passion. Told myself I’d found something rare. But it wasn’t intimacy; it was compulsion.

And still, for a while, it was enough.

Because the sex made everything else feel quieter. Simpler. Like maybe I could ignore the static building underneath. The flickers of something darker. The strange way he’d study me when he thought I wasn’t looking. The moments when the mask would drop and something blank and unreachable would pass over his face.

It took three months before I really saw it.

The real him.

And by then, he wasn’t the only thing I was afraid of.

PART II COMING SOON

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