Chapter Nine Townsend
Chapter Nine
Townsend
It’s still dark when Townsend steps outside on Tuesday morning, and he can just imagine what Talia would say: Men don’t know how lucky they are, to be able to run alone whenever they want without fearing for their lives.
He doesn’t think about his male privilege—or, really, the many types of privilege he holds—as often as he should, but he doesn’t want to mull over that right now.
Instead, he sticks his AirPods into his ears and heads down Congress Avenue toward Butler Trail, which meanders along the north shore of Town Lake.
Right now, he just wants to listen to Jack Harlow and figure out what the fuck is going on.
The police don’t think he’s guilty; that much is a relief.
Or, at least, they don’t seem to think he’s guilty—Townsend has watched enough episodes of Law he would have noticed that.
Instead, she sunk her claws in bit by bit, so slowly that he felt little more than a pinch.
Their nights of weed and burritos and sex at her place turned into expensive dinners out and sleepovers at his, where she would hang around watching TV and eating his snacks until well past noon the next day.
She’d steal his Canali dress shirts to wear, then return them stained with orangey makeup.
When he bought her a mini woven leather tote from Bottega Veneta for their one-month anniversary, she asked if he could exchange it for the larger version.
Things really took a turn around Valentine’s Day, when Townsend treated Amanda to an expensive prix fixe at Jeffrey’s.
After leaving his condo the next morning, she posted a photo from the restaurant on Instagram (and he recognized the image well, as she’d spent half the dinner coaching him on how to take it).
Though he wished she hadn’t tagged him, the caption was innocuous enough .
. . but then the messages through Cuff started.
This feels like the beginning of forever.
I’m so fxcking in love with you.
Do you feel it too? What I feel for you?
When they first started seeing each other, Townsend had been reluctant to give Amanda his number.
It seemed too risky. What if Amanda called or texted him and Talia saw?
So they kept their messages to Cuff—the irony of which was not lost on Townsend.
But he’d heard Talia wax on about the app’s security and encryption protections enough times to trust that his communications with Amanda would remain private.
Even after Talia was gone and there was no need for cloak-and-dagger measures anymore, they continued to chat mainly through Cuff, mostly out of habit. But also because Amanda was always losing her phone and never remembered to back up her contacts.
Sometimes, she’d trick him into believing she was still the chill, free-spirited woman he once believed her to be.
They’d hang out, Amanda letting herself in with the key code that he only ever shared before with Talia.
They’d lay on the couch, fool around a little.
Maybe smoke a joint. It seemed totally normal.
But then she’d go home and send him messages on Cuff, asking crazy shit like what they should name their future children.
I want to have five kids, she wrote once, and I want them all to have your eyes.
It started out slowly, just one or two messages a day, but then she started to send them more frequently, and they became increasingly more intense.
She wanted them to grow old together. She wanted to know if he believed in soulmates.
The final straw came the first weekend in March. That Sunday afternoon, she showed up without invitation, as usual, and surprised him with a fantastic blow job. Then she invited him to spend the summer with her in Europe.
“You know that backpacking trip I’ve been talking about?” she asked him, still crouched above him in bed. “I want you to come with me. I think we’d have fun together.”
It was all too much: the over-the-top messages, the constant barging into his condo, the intensity of her stare as she looked at him.
He broke up with her right then and there, and though she left in a huff (“Your dick is too small anyway,” she called over her shoulder on her way out the door), a message appeared on his phone that night, calling him the love of her life.
I am not the love of your life, he wrote back. I am not anything to you. This is done.
He thought that would be the last he heard from her. If only he’d known.
The sun is getting higher now. Townsend feels sweat trickling down his neck, but still, he pushes himself harder, picking up his pace.
He passes by Festival Beach and—before he can think better of it—turns left away from Town Lake, heading into East Austin, his least favorite neighborhood.
East Austin, with its street art and dive bars and hipsters bitching about gentrification, not realizing that they are, in fact, the problem. Hipsters like Amanda.
A few days after the breakup, Amanda posted a picture on her grid, which he recognized as having been taken in his bedroom.
At first, she appeared totally naked—but when he zoomed in, he saw she was wearing a pair of his boxer shorts, like a prize.
True psycho shit. He unfollowed her, hoping to be rid of her for good.
But the Cuff correspondence continued, her once-saccharine love notes turned far more sinister.
Threats, taunts, lies—nothing seemed to be off limits.
And though he tried to block her profile, her messages continued to come through, undeterred.
Like she was impervious to being blocked.
He knew he should just delete the app—that would be the easiest way to put an end to things.
But the idea of doing so felt like admitting defeat.
Why should he let one crazy woman drive him off the only halfway-decent dating app left?
As unsettling as her messages had become, they were just words on a screen, and for all her talk of exposing Townsend’s secrets, she hadn’t actually done anything.
He told himself she was just desperate for attention, and if he withheld it from her long enough, she’d go away.
Townsend is outside her apartment building now.
Somehow, his body knew he was coming here when he left his place, even if his mind wasn’t consciously aware of it.
As he feared, that familiar white Honda Accord is parked in the lot beside the building, the same one he saw waiting for him after the birthday brunch with Mother. He wasn’t crazy; it was Amanda’s car.
After he ran into Talia back in May, Townsend drove over to Amanda’s place with a head full of steam.
He didn’t know what he wanted to do, exactly.
Just scare her a little bit. Make it clear that he wasn’t someone who could be pushed around.
He had his paintball gun in the trunk from going to the range the weekend before with his friends.
As much as he wanted to, he knew he shouldn’t fire a round into Amanda’s window.
There were too many eyes around—everyone had a Ring camera these days—and he didn’t want to risk getting tagged with a vandalism charge right before his next round of investor meetings.
So he just took a picture of the gun on the dashboard.
In the shadowy light of the streetlamps, it almost looked like the real thing.
He sent it to Amanda, along with the reminder that—even though he was stupid enough to have told her about some of his concerns about AutoInTune—she had shared things too.
She’d admitted to not-so-funny stories of things she’d done while drunk or high, involving break-ins and fender benders and almost setting her shower curtain on fire with a curling iron.
And one night, when they were lying in bed, legs tangled under the sheets, she confessed to something even worse, about her parents and how they died.
She broke down crying, and Townsend felt a surge of protectiveness as he pulled Amanda’s naked body tighter to his chest.
In that moment, he really thought he knew her.
Now, he’s got the police at his door, questioning his whereabouts, looking for any sign that Townsend might have done something to Amanda. Thank God he was hungry enough to grab tacos on his way home from East Austin that night. At least now he has a verifiable alibi for being in that part of town.
He thinks back to the text messages and phone calls he got a week ago, allegedly from Kaitlyn Reade, looking for her sister.
Townsend didn’t trust them. He feared it might actually be Amanda, using her sister as a screen to get Townsend to answer her.
But now he doesn’t know what to believe.
He hasn’t told Talia about the harassment, about the constant unhinged messages.
He almost did last night, but in the end, he didn’t want to burden her.
It wasn’t worth pulling her into his mess when it seemed like Amanda might finally be gone for good.
But is she really missing? Or just lying in wait?
All at once he feels dizzy, and thirsty, and like he might be sick.
He sits on the sidewalk, already sizzling hot from the late-June heat, and holds his head in his hands.
He wants to cry from the injustice of it all—would he be punished forever for pursuing the wrong girl?
But he can’t stay here, where anyone could see him.
He checks his watch; it’s getting late. He stands, wipes his face on his shirt, and starts toward home.
Talia will be awake soon, wondering where he went, and he can’t give her any more reason to question him.