“I think you’re a predator wearing a boyfriend’s face,” she said. But she was smiling. It was a joke. Then the tape cut. The room was darker. The blonde woman’s hands were zip-tied to a chair.
“You’re going to tape over me like the others, aren’t you?” she said to the lens. “That’s your sickness, Marcus. You don’t kill us. You just… stop recording.”
GIRLFRIEND TAPES.
The screen went black.
The woman laughed. “You first.”
“I’m afraid of being alone,” Marcus said.
Not a number. Not a name. Just that.
“Tell them what you learned,” Marcus said.
It started, as most bad ideas do, with a locked drawer in a shared apartment. Girlfriend Tapes
The first tape was dated seven years ago. She slid it into the vintage player he kept under the TV. Static hissed, then resolved into a grainy image of a living room she didn’t recognize. A young woman with auburn hair sat on a floral couch, reading a book. She looked up, smiled at the camera—at Marcus, behind it.
“Tell them what you did,” Marcus’s voice said, but it wasn’t sweet anymore. It was flat. Empty. “I think you’re a predator wearing a boyfriend’s