My entry for the Week 14 Trifecta Challenge using the word safe as “affording safety or security from danger, risk, or difficulty“.  This is a continuation of my previous entry for the Week 12.  I like the idea of using these exercises to tell a story, but slightly out of order.  This segment is later in the story than the beginning from last week.

Edie ran down the hallway of her building, breathless and frightened, cursing herself for picking yet another loser.  Although, this one – Trevor – was by far the worst.  When she saw his profile online, she definitely had the impression that he was safe.  He didn’t have any weird interests and his hair was well-groomed.  As she fumbled through her pockets for her keys, she laughed to herself.  Safe, he was not.  Quite the opposite.

She found her keys and stopped shaking just long enough to put them through their appropriate locks.  She heard Trevor coming up the stairs.

“Ooooh, Eeeeedddieeeeee,” he screamed in a fashion she thought only done by movie villians.

In addition to sounding stereotypically (and a bit ridiculously) evil, he didn’t seem out of breath.  She found this odd since he had been chasing her from the subway stop three blocks away.  As she shut the door and turned the locks on the other side, she realized that being a total pyscho probably does require that one work out.  She had liked that, too (and, if she was being honest, a small part of her still did) when she first saw his picture – he was fit.  Not in the I-spend-all-my-free-time-at-the-gym kind of way her ex Tony did.  Tony was hot, but he was a dolt.  Rather, Trevor was fit in the I-take-care-of-myself-and-care-how-I-treat-my-body kind of way.  She was wrong about the safe part, but he was certainly physically fit (if not mentally).  It was beginning to occur to her that she better re-think her criteria for selecting men.

My entry for the Week 12 Trifecta Challenge using the word image as “a person strikingly like another person”.

While Trevor was in the bathroom, Edie took the opportunity to spy on his books and pictures.  She didn’t trust any guy’s online dating profile, nor did she trust the self a guy put out during the first date.  But books and pictures don’t lie.  She could tell everything she needed to know by glancing at a potential mate’s bookshelf (all business books mean the guy is a bore, workout books mean he’s a douche) and pictures (photos of brothers and sisters good, paired shots of him and his mother not so good).

First, she tackled the bookshelf.  She liked what she saw: many of the books he had were on her own shelf.  This is good, she thought to herself.  This is really good.  What a guy read was tremendously important to her and she began to imagine she and Trevor pouring themselves glasses of wine and discussing the latest in literary fiction.  She pulled out his worn copy of one of her favorite books – The Brothers Karamazov – and saw that it was marked up and almost unreadable with his notes.  Her knees buckled.  She put the book back onto the shelf as she named their children Dmitri, Ivan, and Alex.

Buoyed by the great news had from his bookshelf, she moved onto his pictures.  He did have an unusually high number of framed photos of which he was in every picture.  This is okay, she thought to herself.  There’s always someone else in the picture, so he’s not a total narcissist.  Then she happened upon the picture.  The picture that would send her on a several month long mystery.  It was a picture of Trevor (recent from what she could tell) with his arm around a woman his age.  The woman had her head on Trevor’s shoulder.  This alone was not alarming – it could be a close sister or best friend.  What really disturbed her was that the woman was the image of Edie.

What the fuck? she thought to herself.