This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/No-Glass-3279 on 2024-10-25 01:44:19+00:00.

It started innocently enough. A glance here, a smile there. Grace sat two rows ahead of me in that stuffy lecture hall, her head tilted in concentration, fingers twirling a strand of dark hair. But it was her lips, painted a deep, velvety red, that I couldn’t shake from my mind. They were always perfect, like they could leave an impression on everything they touched. I couldn’t focus on anything else.

I tried to talk to her every chance I got. We bumped into each other after class, at the library, and once even outside the dining hall. Each time, she’d smile, those red lips drawing me in like a moth to a flame. For weeks, I made excuses to be where she was. After a couple of months, I finally worked up the nerve to ask her out.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said, her voice soft but playful. The way she smiled at me, the way those red lips curved, sent a chill down my spine, but I wrote it off as nerves.

We went out for coffee, and soon that turned into late-night walks, study sessions that lasted way too long, and eventually, we were dating. Things were good at first. She was beautiful, smart, and mysterious in a way that kept me hooked. But as the semester ended and summer rolled around, things began to change. Grace began to change.

It started small. She became possessive, always wanting to know where I was and who I was with. At first, I thought it was cute. She cared, right? But then it escalated. If I didn’t respond to her texts fast enough, her replies would turn nasty. She’d accuse me of ignoring her or seeing other girls. Sometimes she’d show up at my dorm, unannounced, demanding to go through my phone. It was unsettling, but I still told myself it was no big deal. Relationships had rough patches, right?

One night, I woke to a soft tapping on my bedroom window. It was a ground-floor dorm, so I assumed it was a branch or maybe the wind. Groggy, I got out of bed and pulled the blinds open.

There she was. Grace, hanging upside down, her body dangling from the roof above. Her hair fell toward the ground, her eyes wide with an eerie calmness. And her lips, still painted that deep red, split into a grin.

“Gotcha,” she whispered, her breath fogging the glass.

I screamed, falling back and scrambling for the door. She laughed as she climbed back up, disappearing into the dark. I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. The next day, she acted like it was just a prank, something silly to mess with me. But there was something in her eyes that chilled me, something cruel.

It didn’t stop there. She started messing with me more often. One weekend, we went on a trip to the lake with my family. It was supposed to be a relaxing getaway, but Grace had other plans. She found my dad’s shotgun in the cabin, loaded it, and pointed it directly at me.

“Bang,” she said, smirking.

I froze. My parents were out on the water, and it was just us. Her finger hovered over the trigger for a second longer than it should have before she set the gun down, laughing like it was all a joke. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that she had been just a fraction of a second away from pulling it.

She wasn’t the same Grace I had fallen for. Or maybe she was, and I had just ignored the signs.

The final straw came one night after she chased me around the house with one of the kitchen knives, her face twisted in something that was both rage and joy. I managed to lock myself in the bathroom, but she stood outside the door, banging on it, screaming my name.

“You think you can leave me?!” she shrieked. “You think you can get away from me?!”

The police arrived after I finally managed to call them. When they got there, the house was quiet, and Grace was gone. They searched everywhere, but she had vanished without a trace. They didn’t believe me about the shotgun, or the knives, or the time she dangled from my window like a nightmare come to life. Of course they didn’t.

That was two weeks ago. They still haven’t found her.

Tonight, I left work late. The parking lot was nearly empty, my car sitting under the flickering streetlamp. As I approached, I saw it. A lipstick mark, a perfect red kiss, pressed against the driver’s side window.