Evelyn's Home

I still have that nightmare sometimes.
I open the door and I am immediately assaulted by the pungent smell of artificial flowers and detergent. It makes me gag.
Everything is pristine, from the chrome of the faucet to the slight space between the porcelain tiles. The bathtub is so perfectly polished I can almost see my reflection in it. Every corner, every nook and cranny of the place has been scrubbed clean down to it's barest, whitest bone with a ruthlessness that sends shivers down my spine. And as I am left shaking, eyes wide and breath short, I keep wondering: How can you do such a thing ?

My nightmares have gotten awfully specific since Evelyn and I started dating.
(It's not her real name by the way, I would never disclose such informations after what happened.)

I met Evelyn 7 months ago on a lesbian dating app. Her intro was sweet and funny and the conversation flowed easily by message, so we decided to go on a date. It was amazing. She was just as funny and kind in person and our common interests in cryptozoology and horror made it so our conversation never ran dry. We started dating quickly after and for the first few months everything was great.

Now, there were a few odd things right from the start.
For one, Evelyn had a perfect skin. And I don't mean « you must have a really good skincare routine » level of perfect. No, I mean the « how can you look like you are photoshopped in person ?! » kind. Her skin was absolutely flawless. Never a pimple, a rash or a black head anywhere on her body no matter what she ate, did, or how little she slept. Some people might say it was the melanin but if it was, she must have had received the better kind because mine sure didn't work the same. Frankly, I was a little jealous.

The other, more aggravating thing was that she would never stay at my place more than one night. She would hang out at my apartment all day, stay the night, and eat dinner with me the following day ; but as soon as the second day ended she would get back home faster than Cinderella after hearing the first stroke of midnight.
At first I understood, we had just started dating and I thought she must have found it awkward to stay with me for long periods of time. Or that she had a pet to feed. But as we kept seeing each other it became increasingly clear that her behavior wasn't going to change.

Finally, she would never, ever, invite me to her apartment. And that's what made me tick.
At first she said her neighbors weren't very open-minded and that she was worried something would happen to me if I came to her place. But when I insisted that I would be careful or that I was ready to face them if it came down to that, her reasons for refusing to let me visit became increasingly ridiculous.
One time an homophobic family member was visiting, another pest control was treating the room against cockroaches, some other time there was a leak that had flooded the whole apartment...
Smelling bullshit, I sat her down one day and told her that I had enough of her lies. For all I knew, she could have been hiding a spouse and kids this whole time and I refused to stay in a relationship with someone who constantly lied to me.

To my surprise, she bursted into tears, told me she loved and had never wanted to lie to me but had felt she had no other choice. Then she said: « If you're going to leave me anyway, I might as well show you. »

And so, 4 months after we had started dating, I was finally allowed to visit my girlfriend's apartment.
I don't really know what I expected to find there by that point, but let me tell you, it was not what I saw.
The hallway looked normal enough at first glance, white paint, shoe rack, coat hanger. But it was very, very warm in the room. Warm and humid. I was about to make a joke about it and ask her if she lived with reptiles on the loose...

When I noticed the first lump.

It looked like the inside of a mouth or the inner walls of a vagina. It was a shocking shade of reddish pink, fleshy, pulsating and glistening with fluid. It formed some sort of root that was anchored in the wall and made a trail I could follow to the rest of the room. That's when I realized: The entire living room, no the entire apartment, was covered in the stuff.
It almost looked like it had been entirely made out of flesh: Capillaries carrying blood through something that looked like a sofa, walls beating rhythmically and floors oozing clear saliva like fluid that emitted no smell I could recognize.