So she decided that if he wanted to study her sleep, she would teach him what bad sleep felt like. She started small. Around midnight, once he’d dropped into deep sleep, she’d gasp loudly as if she were choking, and he’d bolt upright to check on her while she pretended to stay unconscious. She did it a couple of times a week, and before long he looked worn out.
Then she escalated. She downloaded an app that played faint whispers, creaking and scratching at random times between 2 and 5 a.m., loud enough to wake him but too quiet to trace. Rick decided there were mice in the walls and paid an exterminator to come out twice, and the man found nothing. She added sleepwalking, getting up at 3 a.m. to stand beside his side of the bed and stare at nothing. When he tried to steer her back, she mumbled about cameras watching them, and he started sleeping with one eye open.
What she called her masterpiece came when his brother Kyle stayed over. Kyle was in the group chat and had thought the videos were hilarious. While both men slept, she set up Rick’s own camera, and before she hit record she gave him lipstick, eyeshadow and drawn-on eyebrows, helped along by his nightly melatonin. She filmed him like that for an hour.
The next morning, while Rick was in the shower, she sent the video to his group chat from his own phone. She stood in the kitchen making coffee as his lock screen filled with messages. One friend asked if he’d lost a bet, Doug sent a string of laughing emojis, and Tony joked that Rick was joining a drag show. She unlocked the phone with the passcode he’d never changed and watched the chat turn on him in the same tone they’d used on her.
It’s worth noticing how familiar that tone was. Group chats like that run on the assumption that the person in the video can’t hear what’s being said, which is exactly why they get so cruel. She had flipped that assumption and made Rick sit inside it.
The Kitchen Fight Nobody Won
When the shower shut off, she set the phone back where it had been and kept pouring her coffee, hand steady. Rick came out in his work clothes and reached for his phone out of habit, probably to check his sleep score. She watched his face go from ordinary to confused to colorless as he scrolled, his hand starting to shake. He crossed the kitchen, held the phone up between them, and asked how she’d gotten in and whether she’d sent it.
She told him it was the same passcode he’d used for three years, and yes, she’d sent it. She wanted him to know what it felt like to be judged while asleep and unable to defend yourself. Rick called it completely different, since he had only watched her because he loved her, while she’d put makeup on him to humiliate him. She set her mug down harder than she meant to and listed everything back to him: months of recordings, the clips of her drooling, the dead seal comment, the emojis.
Rick said the guys were only joking and that guys talk that way. Then he turned it around. For weeks she’d tormented him with the choking, the noises, the standing over his bed, and he was so exhausted he’d gotten in trouble at work. She said she’d done it on purpose because he wouldn’t stop recording her, no matter how many times she asked.
He called it psychological torture, and then abuse. She answered that secretly filming someone’s body apparently wasn’t abuse, and that he’d only started using the word now that he was the one losing sleep. They kept at it until both ran out of ways to hurt each other, and Rick grabbed his keys and said he’d stay with his brother Reese for a few days. At the door he said the line she couldn’t shake: he didn’t even know who she was anymore.
Fights like this rarely go anywhere, because each person defends a real injury while denying the other’s. Both of them had been wronged, and both were wrong about being the only one.