Cheating on a night out! Blacked by the thugs! - BLACKED! short stories

She wore the dress for him. He didn't even look.

Jess is twenty-six, three years deep into a relationship that looks perfect from the outside. Ryan is the kind of boyfriend her mother brags about — reliable, kind, never raises his voice, always remembers her birthday. He's safe. He's stable. He's also the most boring man she's ever been with in bed, and she's been faking every orgasm since the sixth month of their relationship.

Tonight, Ryan takes her to a club. She spends an hour getting ready — blowout, makeup, a silver dress that leaves nothing to the imagination. She wants him to notice her. He doesn't. He spends the entire evening chasing clout with some D list internet celebrity while she stands next to him holding a drink like a prop. When she tells him she's leaving, he kisses her forehead without looking at her and tells her to get home safe.

She walks out of the club with no phone, no purse, and no ride home.

The walk is long. A mile and a half through the city at midnight in a dress that catches every streetlight and heels that tear her feet apart. She takes them off. She walks barefoot on cold concrete past catcalling strangers and whispering couples and closed storefronts. She is angry, cold, and completely invisible — exactly the way she's felt for the last year of her relationship.

When she spots a shortcut through a dark alley, she takes it. She knows she shouldn't. She goes anyway.

Three men are inside.

All black.

She sees them by the flash of a lighter — big, dark, leaning against the wall with a bottle and a phone playing music. They see her. The silver dress glowing in the dark. The bare legs. The fact that she's alone.

She tries to walk past them. They call out. She keeps going. She almost makes it to the other end.

Then she stops.

She doesn't know why. The anger, maybe. The restlessness. The feeling that she's twenty-six and already invisible and the safest thing she can do is also the emptiest. She turns around. She faces them. And what happens next unfolds across a single night that changes everything Jess thought she knew about herself.

By the time she walks out of that alley, the dress is destroyed and she doesn't recognize the woman who walked in.

When she gets home, Ryan is on the couch posting about his night on social media. He doesn't look up. He doesn't notice the state she's in.

Jess wouldn't have wanted it any other way either.