The Lamest Trick the Devil Pulled

Story Sent in by Gregory:

Millie and I started dating when we were working together, alone in the night, in a pottery studio at our college. She requested an extra pair of hands on a large vase on which she was working, and I took the opportunity to kiss her. I had admired her from afar for a while, and had reached a kind of breaking point with regards to wanting her, making a fool out of myself, or doing nothing. So when she let me kiss her, it was really one of those frightening, electric, gut-punching moments.

After our quick little make-out, we finished up our projects for the night and returned to our respective rooms. She expressed an interest in going out on a forthcoming night.

We communicated by email over the following few days, and although I'd write her excited, wordy messages, she'd reply back with terse, short phrases that didn't indicate any real anticipation for wanting to see me.

When we finally did meet up, at a local pub for dinner, she seemed tired and distracted.

"What's wrong?" I asked her.

She replied, "I've been getting, like, no sleep for the past week. Someone's been pounding on my suite door at all different hours, just about every night. My roommates and I told our resident assistant and the college police, but all they say is, 'Keep your door locked, ladies.' When we look through the peephole or open the door, no one's there."

Ah, a mystery! And, I thought, a perfect opportunity to ingratiate myself with Millie and perhaps her friends, who would be thankful and call me awesome and tell Millie how lucky she was to be seeing me... yes... it all made sense at the time.

"What floor do you live on?" I asked.

"Sixth."

Our date went well and we gave each other a clumsy goodnight kiss before she returned home ("I have to catch up on sleep. Sorry.").

I returned home, myself, to prepare for my stakeout. I put on a dark outfit (some ninja I was: brown dress pants were part of the ensemble), returned to her building a couple of hours later, entered, and made it to the sixth floor, where I set up my nest in a stairwell. I wasn't sure which suite was hers, but if I peeked out the stairwell door, I had a good view of most of the suite doors on the floor.

My goal was to catch the door-knocker red-handed and, hopefully, confront him/her. As the hours stretched out, I waited and watched and waited and watched. By five in the morning, I caught myself nodding off, and I still had no perpetrator. I thought that it figured, the one night the knocker didn't come by was the night I was there to spot him. I returned home.

After waking up, I sent Millie an email, and tried to sound as nonchalant as possible. "That knocker come by last night?"

She wrote back, "No, thank goodness. Hopefully whoever was doing it just got tired of it."

Well, that was hardly ideal. I wanted to catch them, get credit for catching them, and look like a hero in Millie's eyes. I went back that night to try and apprehend the knocker again.

By 3:30am, there was still no sign of the knocker. Frustrated, I went home, and in my next exchange with Millie, she said that, as I had myself witnessed, no one had knocked on her suite door that night. Despite apparently having a better night's sleep, her messages to me still came across as perfunctory and disinterested. I had pegged her initial ambivalence on the fact that someone was keeping her up, nights. I had to do something.

I resolved to go back one more time. That night, as during the prior two, I set myself up in the stairwell and patiently waited.

That night, at 2:15am, the knocker struck.

The next morning, I wrote to Millie and told her that I caught the knocker in the act and chased him out of the building. I expected a grateful response, but instead, a few days later, she wrote me back to let me know that she had decided to date someone else, and that she was sorry if I felt she had led me on.

Well, served me right, I guess. After all, in my effort to make her think of me as brave and protecting by chasing away the knocker, I was the one who knocked on every suite door that last night, not knowing which one was hers.