A Pandemic Romance

Warning: This is a story about a serial killer and does get graphic.

“I have to go, I have a date with John.”

Rose had only really called her cousin so that in ten minutes she could tell her she had to go because she had a date.

“Oh my god,” Rachel screeched through the phone. “I forgot to ask, how long has it been now, a month?”

Rose removed her cup of boiling water from the microwave, pinned the phone to her shoulder with her ear, and tore open one of her herbal Juju teabags and plopped it in.

“Two, now,” she replied, returning the phone to her hand. She knew it had actually only been one and a half months, but saying two felt better.

“What does he do, again?”

“He’s a plastic surgeon, but he doesn’t like that title.”

Rose drifted into her office slash bedroom, threw the dirty gym clothes from her chair to the bed and sat down. A puff of BO mixed with deodorant swirled around her head.

“A picky professional. Who would’ve thought it?”

Now that Rose was in her chair with her tea, surrounded by her intimate smells, she regretted calling her cousin.

“What time is it out in California?”

Rose nudged the mouse and the black screen of her laptop changed to baby kittens playing with a pink yarn ball. She noted the time in the bottom right corner. “It’ll be three pm for him.”

“Okay, well keep me posted. It might turn out to be useful to have a plastic surgeon in the family,” her cousin snickered. “Lord knows my ass could use some work.”

“Oh, stop,” Rose played along. She tucked the phone back between her ear and shoulder so she could log-in to the dating app. “Speak to you soon, bye.” She grabbed the phone and frisbeed it behind her onto the bunched-up comforter on her bed. She could swear her last phone was still in there, somewhere.

Rose lifted the tea up to her mouth and the hot liquid stung her chapped lips. She winced and found the Blistex in the bottom drawer of her desk organizer, flicked off the cap, and smoothed it over the fleshy broken skin. She then dropped it back in with the papers and grabbed her make-up mirror from the top drawer, angled it at strategic locations around her face, and ruffled her already tangled auburn hair until some of it hung down around her cheek bones.

A window popped up on the screen. Johnny D is calling.

Rose dropped the mirror and it fell off the side of her desk into the trashcan. She clicked accept.

Light radiated into Rose’s dark room and a man with spiky brown hair sat wearing a white lab coat with emerald embroidered lettering too small to make out across the lip of his chest pocket. He had on thick black rimmed glasses and neat stubble naturally adorned the sides of his angular jawbone and diverted around his thin lips.

“Hey!” he grinned wide. “There you are!”

“Hey, Johnny,” Rose breathed.

She never made the entrance she wanted to make. He stole it every single time.

“Why are you always sitting in the dark? I can’t see you.”

Rose clicked on her lamp and felt decidedly defeated.

“You look great,” Johnny said quickly. “Did you make it out for a run the other day? You said it might rain.”

“No,” Rose shook her head. “When we got done talking it was too late here.”

Johnny glanced at the ceiling and was nodding along with her response. “Just one second, I’m having trouble hearing.” He reached off to the side of the screen and Rose could see his arm twitching in his white sleeve. “Okay,” he said. “Say something.”

“Is this better? Can you hear me?”

He grinned again. “Much better. So, what have you been doing since we last talked?”

Rose sipped her tea. “Oh, you know. Waiting around until our next call.”

Johnny laughed. “Come on now.”

The wall behind him was off-white, except for a large floral wall planner. Rose imagined it had all his planned surgeries neatly written in each box by a hand trained to use the utmost precision.

“I’ve been reading about microorganisms, and how they shaped civilizations.”

“That’s deep. Are you reading that because of the pandemic?”

Rose smoothed her hair back behind her ears and folded her legs up onto the chair.

“In a way, only because I’m staying in more. Not actually because of the coronavirus. My undergraduate degree is in microbiology.”

“Oh, that’s right. At Rutgers, didn’t you say?”

“Yeah, that’s where I went to college. Where did you say you went to med school?”

“At UCLA. The Manuel Ferrera School of Medicine. I’ll show you around when you can come out here.”

She sighed and let her feet fall back to the floor.

“Who knows how long that will be? If these asshats don’t start wearing masks and getting vaccinated, and governors don’t start mandating public health regulations, this pandemic will go on for another ten years.”

Johnny nodded and fiddled with his camera.

“I know, Chick. I know. It’s no fun working in the clinic these days. Admin keeps coming up with more paperwork and rules, making our lives difficult, and nobody’s coming in for the ol’ nip and tuck anymore.”

Rose sat forward and squinted.

“Did you just call me Chick?”

The corner of Johnny’s mouth pulled upwards.

“Maybe,” he said. His eyes darted back and forth, intermittently stopping to look at the camera. “You don’t like it?”

Rose blew on her tea and took a sip.

“I don’t know.”

“Hey, we drink the same tea!” he said, lifting his own cup so that the familiar pink label could be seen hanging over the side. “Juju, right?”

She smirked. There was something about his sudden childlike outbursts of enthusiasm that she really liked.

“Yeah, what are the odds? I actually had a box arrive this morning. Forgot I ordered it.”

“I still have a stash leftover from when I used to go grocery shopping. I’ll have to order some, too.”

Rose sipped a half mouthful and studied the brown haired geeky doctor over the rim of her cup, sitting in his office or wherever he was. Maybe once the vaccine was available for her age group she’d be able to travel and see him. She put her cup down.

“I could get used to Chick.”

“I don’t know,” said Johnny, his tone becoming more whiney as he seemed to look at the floor. “Now I feel too self-conscious about saying it.”

“Aww,” Rose sympathized. “We can see if it works.”

“Maybe if you came up with a name for me, I’d be less embarrassed to try?”

Johnny glanced up at the camera with a pouty puppy dog expression.

Rose didn’t know where to look. There had to be a name for him somewhere in those sappy thoughts of hers.

After what felt like too long had passed, she said, “I still can’t believe your parents named you John Doe.”

Johnny flashed a grin.

“If you think that’s weird, imagine how weirder it is that my dad was a homicide detective in the LAPD and he still named me that. He met my mom in the force, and I guess they just had a dark sense of humor.”

Rose yawned and finished her tea. “Excuse me.”

“My stories do that to people,” he said, his voice dropping in mock shame.

She sat forward on the edge of her seat and tried to compose herself. She’d probably been overdoing the workouts.

“Hey,” she said, and then stopped. Behind Johnny, the torso of a naked woman walked into the shot, turned around, and then walked back off camera. She had a shaved vulva and what appeared to be a flowery tribal tramp stamp above her ass.

“Hey, what?” said Johnny, not appearing to notice.

“Who was that?” fired Rose.

“Who was who?”

Rose’s face flushed.

“Don’t play dumb with me. That naked girl behind you. Who is she?”

Johnny checked his left shoulder.

“Hey, get out of here. I’m on a call.”

A muffled sound of the woman brushed over the microphone, but Rose could not make it out. This was the last thing she needed after investing one and half months of her life.

“Don’t worry about her, she’s my tenant from downstairs. She gets high and wanders up here from time to time.”

Lights flashed behind Rose’s eyes.

“From time to time? Why is she still living in your house? Why was she naked? You never mentioned a tenant.”

“I’m sorry,” said Johnny, he whined. “I never thought to bring it up. She has a drug problem, and I can’t just evict her, it would violate my Hippocratic Oath.”

The casual stroll of the woman on and then off camera bothered Rose. It was almost like her walking back and forth near Johnny while naked was perfectly natural. Her head began to swim.

Johnny sipped from his tea, watching back with eagle-eyed interest.

“Oh, I forgot to mention. I sent you the tea.”

Rose’s head fell forward onto the desk with a thud. Her skull felt like it was made of lead. She pushed up with her hands to see Johnny blurring from side to side.

“The tea?” she moaned. “What?”

She must have been overdoing the workouts. “Johnny?” she said. “What’s happening, Johnny?”

Johnny didn’t reply.

Rose vomited over the desk to the sensation of jackhammers threatening to punch out her eyeballs. She held herself at an angle to see Johnny once more. The room stopped spinning for long enough to see him standing naked next to the woman, who was on her knees as he thrust his penis in and out of her mouth with a hand on the top of her head.

The screen went black and Rose’s head slammed back down on the desk.

Had they been together for one and a half or two months?

Rose slipped off her desk into the trash can.