The Matchmaker’s Curse

DISCLAIMER: This story contains stalking, voyeurism, breaking and entering, attempted murder, gun violence, obsessive behavior, and character death. The protagonist engages in increasingly disturbing actions that escalate to violence.

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STORY: Amely watched them every morning from her apartment window.

The jogger in navy blue always passed by at 6:42. The man with the bichon came from the other direction at 6:45. They never spoke. Still, something passed between them in the brief second their paths crossed — a glance, a hesitation, a breath too long to be meaningless.

She didn’t know their names. She didn’t need to. They were her kind of people — quiet, routine-bound, unknowingly poetic.

Her laptop sat open on the kitchen table, surrounded by cold tea and rejection emails.

For months, she’d been dry. The words came in stutters, never complete sentences. Her last story: 63 views, 2 pity comments, and a refund request from her own aunt.

But this… this moment between strangers — it had rhythm.

She began typing.

“He passed him every morning but never spoke, afraid to disturb the spell of silence between them. Until the day the leash snapped. The small dog ran, and the jogger caught it mid-stride, all breath and laughter and apology. That was how they met — not through fate, but timing.”

She wrote the whole thing in a single sitting — a thousand-word piece about two men falling in love over morning rituals and quiet smiles. She posted it to her blog under her pen name, Elarin Rose, and closed the laptop.

For the first time in weeks, the silence in her apartment didn’t feel heavy.

***

A few days later, she saw them again.

Amely blinked. Her chest tightened.

It wasn’t just similar.

They were together.

The jogger’s earbuds were gone, replaced by easy conversation. The man with the dog carried two coffees — one already half-empty, like he’d handed it over blocks ago. Their shoulders brushed naturally. Their smiles were not polite but intimate. Familiar.

They had never spoken before.

Now, they walked as if they had always belonged.

She stared at the spot where they disappeared, fingers trembling slightly against the windowpane.

She told herself it was a coincidence, a strange echo, a trick of her imagination.

But that night, as she opened her laptop and began writing again — this time about the tattooed barista and the shy man with too many books — she didn’t look for logic.

She only looked for love.

And just like before, what she wrote began to unfold—quietly, perfectly, as if the world had been waiting for her to notice it.

She had seen them too many times to ignore — the tattooed barista who always glared at the espresso machine like it had insulted his mother and the customer with messy hair and trembling hands who ordered the same chai latte every morning and always dropped his change.

They had never made eye contact.

She gave them names and history. She wrote about the small moments: the forgotten sugar packet, the chipped ceramic mug passed hand to hand, the slow orbit of attention before the collision.

“He looked up when the customer laughed — the kind of laugh that cracked through shy armor. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t beautiful. But it was real, and it stopped the barista mid-pour.”

She published the story the same night. Her pen name, Elarin Rose, had started to attract a modest readership, especially among romance adepts looking for something “honest.”

She never used real names and, of course, never included locations.

Her readers assumed she was drawing from memories or dreams.

But Amely knew better.

Within the week, she saw them sitting outside together, two paper cups on the same table, tattoos and nervous energy twisting into one another.

The barista reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind the other man’s ear. The bookseller touched his wrist intimately.

It was working.

It was not once.

It was not luck.

Her words were making love bloom.

She began to watch the world around her like a matchmaker wearing mirrored glasses.

A violinist who played outside the gallery and a tired nurse who passed by with grocery bags every Thursday.

A man who always fed the pigeons and a person who danced barefoot on rainy mornings near the old fountain.

She stitched their stories together. She gave them sparks.

And they followed her script.

Sometimes, days later. Sometimes, within hours.

It wasn’t control, exactly. Not manipulation. It felt more like… tuning reality, bringing people into harmony.

She wasn’t changing them. She was revealing what was already waiting.

And the blog — it grew. Shares. Comments. A buzz from a niche romance reviewer who called her “The Matchmaker.” The numbers didn’t matter much, but the map of hearts did.

For the first time in her life, Amely felt like she belonged in the world she was writing about, even if no one else knew it was hers.

She didn’t see it coming—the first time one of her stories ended in blood instead of kisses.

It was the couple from the flower stall.

She’d written about them a week earlier: a florist with dirt-stained fingers and a construction worker who always bought carnations on lunch breaks but never smiled.

In her version, they collided in a thunderstorm, one holding a broken umbrella, the other offering shelter.

“The flowers got crushed between them, but neither of them minded.”

They’d started dating three days after she posted it.

She saw them walking together, sharing one of those awkward, beautiful silences that come before the first “I love you.”

And then, the news.

A body was found in a fifth-floor apartment with stab wounds and blood soaked into the mattress.

The police report didn’t give names, but Amely recognized the photo outside the building.

The florist’s stall didn’t open again.

Amely stared at her screen all morning, the cursor blinking like a warning.

No one else would make the connection. It was just another tragic story in a city full of them.

The blog readers continued to gush: “This is magic.” “You get it. You really get it.”

But Amely stopped checking the comments that day.

She told herself it was unrelated, a coincidence.

People hurt each other all the time. Love always carried risk.

She didn’t create the wound. She just... wrote the warmth before it broke.

Still, something shifted.

The following story she wrote took longer.

It didn’t flow. She kept changing the ending—did they kiss in the snow or part ways under streetlights? Did they make it work, or should one of them leave for Paris?

When the piece finally went up, it felt thinner. Not false, but less sure.

The couple came together anyway.

She watched them in the park, sharing earbuds, one head leaning on the other’s shoulder.

It calmed her, but not completely.

Something was off.

That night, sirens wailed down her block, and she caught a name from the open window.

Another one.

Amely didn’t go outside. Didn’t check the news.

Instead, she turned her back on the window and opened a new document.

“They met beside the library steps, where the wind always blew harder than it should have. He noticed his scarf first. Then his eyes.”

She kept writing.

Because if she didn’t write the stories… who would?

Across the city, someone else had noticed the pattern—someone who didn’t believe in fate but couldn’t ignore the statistics.

Lukas didn’t read romance, not by choice.

But Elarin Rose’s blog had a strange pull.

He’d stumbled on it during a late-night search after a break-up—a rabbit hole he hadn’t meant to fall into.

The stories were soft, slow, and ordinary. Not showy. Not perfect.

But too many felt familiar.

He began bookmarking them. Not because he was a fan but because he recognized the people in them. Sort of.

He worked in a patrol for District 14. A narrow, oddly-shaped patch of the city with more coffee shops than traffic lights and a disproportionate number of 911 calls labeled “domestic disturbance.”

The cases were always strange. Not just violent—intense.

Couples barely known to neighbors, yet already living together. Others who had just met suddenly spoke of soulmates, destiny, and forever.

It was like watching relationships unfold at double speed, right up until something broke.

And each time, when Lukas went back to the blog, there it was: a story posted days or weeks earlier that mirrored the real couple.

The details were cloaked in fictional metaphors, the names changed, and the faces never described directly.

But it was them. Always them.

He brought it up once, offhandedly, in the locker room.

His sergeant laughed. “What are you saying? A blogger is writing people to death?”

Lukas didn’t bring it up again.

Instead, he started walking the neighborhood more slowly. Noticing who lingered at corners. Who stared too long at strangers. Who watched love like it belonged to them.

The writer—whoever they were—had to be local. Too many stories matched his patrol zone. It was too specific to be random.

He didn’t know the name behind the pen.

But he was getting close.

Amely didn’t know he was looking for her when she first saw him—only that he looked exactly like someone she had already written.

It was a late morning Tuesday. The kind of day where the sky threatened rain but never followed through.

She had stepped out to buy tea from the corner shop. She usually ordered delivery, but her apartment felt too small and too quiet.

The window hadn’t shown her anything for a few days.

She needed to move, to stir the air.

And then she saw him.

Broad-shouldered but boyish. Dark hair shaved at the sides, neat but not fussy. The way he glanced at the sidewalk before entering, like the ground might speak if he listened close enough.

Her breath caught in her throat.

He didn’t look at her, not once. But that didn’t matter, she knew.

Some people walked like punctuation. Others walked like poetry. He moved like unfinished sentences — promising, open, waiting for her to end them.

She went home without her tea.

That night, she sat at her desk until her legs went numb.

“The officer with the hidden heart met the writer who waited in silence. She didn’t speak at first — just handed him the page where his name was already written.”

She didn’t just write the story. She felt it.

The electricity in it, the gravity, the sense of inevitability that bloomed when two orbits finally crossed.

He wasn’t a character. He was already half-hers.

She posted it under Elarin Rose, barely checking for typos, and refreshed the screen three times to see the first likes come in.

And somewhere — blocks away, almost at the exact moment she typed the last word — Lukas met a man at the public library.

Another writer.

He had soft hands and a sharp tongue and laughed at things Lukas didn’t realize were funny until afterward.

They didn’t fall in love that day, but something opened, something real.

And Amely, in her room of flickering light and closed curtains, never imagined that the story she wrote had already begun — without her in it.

It happened a week later.

Amely had started walking in the evenings, circling the neighborhood like a ghost tethered to longing. She knew which blocks he favored now — she saw him once in the bakery, once outside the library, another time feeding a stray cat near the alley.

She never approached. She was writing his courtship arc slowly, tenderly — one post at a time. The comments on her blog were already calling it “achingly hopeful.”

That night, the curtains across the alley weren’t fully drawn.

Amely had stopped outside for air, her tea long gone cold in her hands, when she glanced up and saw movement — soft and shifting behind the window glass.

Lukas. And another man.

At first, it didn’t register. She saw their outlines only, the rhythm of limbs and gasps and bare skin. Then, the light shifted, and she saw his face clearly — flushed, open, smiling in a way she had never written.

She watched his orgasm, his spine arching like a man finally allowed to feel.

Not with her.

Her breath hitched.

She backed against the brick, one hand over her mouth. Her heart wasn’t broken — it was dipped out, hollowed by the quiet truth blooming through her ribs.

It wasn’t supposed to be him.

It wasn’t supposed to be anyone but her.

She watched until they fell asleep, their limbs tangled, Lukas’ arm over the other man’s chest like a claim.

Amely turned, shaking, and walked home through the dark.

She didn’t cry. She didn’t write. Not right away.

But the next morning, she sat at her desk and opened a blank page.

“There are people who step into your story by mistake. People who steal scenes that weren’t meant for them.”

And then she began again.

This time, the story was different. This time, someone had to be removed.

It was just after midnight when Amely climbed the fire escape.

The city below whispered in blue and amber, the hush of traffic and rustling leaves painting a quiet stage for what she already believed was inevitable.

Lukas lived three buildings down.

She had followed him once, memorized the windows, the balcony, and the rusted drainpipe she now gripped with damp hands.

The lights inside were low, with no curtains drawn.

She paused outside the window, breath held like a hunter watching her prey.

Inside, they lay in bed, skin glowing against dark sheets. Lukas’ arm was thrown over the other man’s chest again—protective, unconscious, intimate.

They had made love earlier. She had watched. Not for long. Just enough to feel it again—the ache, the betrayal, the certainty that she had been written out of her own story.

She slid the window open silently.

The apartment smelled of books, laundry, and cinnamon — small, human things that made it feel more homey.

The knife in her hand felt light.

She padded.

Clothes were scattered across the floor. A mug half-full on the desk. Notes scribbled in another writer’s hand.

She approached the bed slowly, like a dancer trained to glide, until she stood over them.

They looked peaceful.

Lukas’ mouth parted just slightly in sleep. The other man’s hand was curled around a pillow, lips brushing its edge.

She raised the knife.

This was how the story ended.

Not with her suffering.

Not with him stolen.

This was a correction.

The plot demanded symmetry and sacrifice.

But Lukas stirred.

It wasn’t dramatic—just a shift, a twitch in his hand—but it was enough.

His eyes opened, instantly alert. They locked on her — the blade in her hand, the shape of her silhouette, the wrongness.

He moved without hesitation.

His arm swept down beneath the bed. The metal of the gun caught the streetlight’s glow for a millisecond.

The shot was fast, loud, and final.

Amely staggered backward, breath fleeing her lungs in a soft gasp.

She dropped the knife. Her knees gave out beside the dresser.

Lukas was already up, crouched protectively over his partner, heart hammering in his throat, firearm still raised.

She stared at him, stunned. The blood was flowering across her shirt like a blooming rose.

He didn’t recognize her.

He didn’t know she had written a hundred pages about him, that she had brought the jogger and the barista and the violinist into impossible love.

That she had done it all for this.

Amely reached for him. Her fingers brushed the floorboards.

And then she was still.

The story was posted the next morning.

A short one. Barely a paragraph.

“They met on a night with no stars. One of them remembered. One of them didn’t. But the page had already turned, and the ending could not be rewritten.”

It was scheduled ahead of time — queued before she left her apartment, still believing in the shape of a happy ending only she could see.

The post went viral.

Readers called it “cryptic,” “poetic,” and “devastating in its simplicity.” Some thought it was a metaphor for unrequited love. Others said it felt like a goodbye.

The comments poured in.

But no one noticed that Elarin Rose never posted again.

No one linked the story to the woman in the police report—shot in the chest during a break-in gone wrong.

No one recognized her in the grainy security photo from the alley.

And no one ever connected the string of deaths in that quiet district to the stories that came before them.

Only one man, weeks later, traced the blog’s old IP address to a building three blocks from the scene.

He stared at the data for a long time.

And then closed the file.

Outside, two people passed each other on the street.

They didn’t speak.

But something passed between them—a glance, a hesitation, a breath too long to be meaningless.

And above them, the sky turned a page.