Since she and Jordon had ended their time together, she had been having no luck whatsoever meeting up with any new guys. They’d match, they’d chat, they’d make plans to meet, and then something would either come up and they’d bail, or she would just be fully ghosted.
It didn’t bother her, really. Except she was just really fucking horny! All she wanted was to meet a hot guy, have some fun, go their separate ways. And yet, guy after guy kept disappointing her before even having a chance to disappoint her in person. It was for this reason that when she matched with a guy on FB Dating, that she ignored all his red flags.
Once they matched, he messaged her almost immediately. Derek was his name, supposedly. They chatted very briefly on the app before he asked if they could switch to texting. She usually didn’t give out her phone number so quickly, but in this case she did.
As soon as he texted her she asked him to send her a pic of him giving the peace sign so she’d know it was him. In all the times she’d exchanged numbers with a guy, this was the first time she felt the need to ask for a pic like that. She wasn’t sure why, but she just knew something was off with him.
He replied saying, “You’ll never believe this, but my camera’s broken”. “You’re right,” she replied, “I don’t believe it. But I’m choosing to accept this information.” He then sent her a couple pics she had already seen on his dating profile. Whatever, she thought. It’s probably him.
It was then, though, that she noticed his area code was not local. She googled it, and saw that it was an area code for a northern part of a neighbouring province. As odd as that may have been, she didn’t know where he was from. For all she knew, he could very well have had a long distance phone number.
They chatted a bit that day and agreed they’d meet up the next weekend. They chatted off and on throughout the week, until one day she received a text from a different number, but with a more local area code. “Hey, It’s Derek”, he said. “I had to get a new number. I was getting all sorts of random calls and stuff”
Though a somewhat plausible excuse, she still got a sketchy vibe from him. And yet, she still chose to accept the information he had given her. “Oh okay,” she said. Then asked, “Well now can you send me a pic?” “I told you my camera was broken”, he replied curtly.
“I just thought maybe you had gotten a brand new phone, in which case your camera would have been fixed” she explained. He then sent her another of the pics she had already seen. In hind sight, she should have kept the thread from his previous phone number. In accepting what he had said, however, she deleted the texts from his other number and carried on chatting with him on the new number.
Of course she thought this behaviour was weird at the time, she just continued to ignore her instincts. Continuing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
They had agreed to meet that Friday. She had had an appointment that evening, so she suggested they meet at 8pm once she was finished. He asked if they could meet for 9pm instead. Fine, whatever. He had originally wanted to meet at a shitty little dive bar in a sketchy part of town. She shut that down quickly. She had no desire to meet this sketchy guy at a sketchy bar. He then suggested a popular pool hall, one which she had been to several times before. “Okay perfect”, she agreed.
That Friday came. As she got in to her car, plugged in her phone for GPS and got on the road, a text from him popped up on her dashboard screen. Siri read it out to her, “Hey, my cousin told me about a cheaper place nearby that we could go to instead. No line ups to play pool either..”
What did she care about it being cheaper? She would happily pay for herself. She also didn’t care about long lines to play pool. “We can put our names on the list and then have a drink and chat” she replied. “But we could be waiting hours and hours to get a table. Do you want that?” Siri replied for him.
Her patience for this fucking guy had dwindled to almost nothing. So why, in that moment, did she not just turn around and say, fuck it? Instead, she voice replied “Fine, whatever. Give me the address, I’m driving”
She waited for a response. No response. She drove to their original meeting place because she didn’t know where else to go. She checked her phone and realized her voice text had never gone through. She then texted him again, told him where she was, and asked once more if he was sure he wanted to go to this other place. Why the fuck didn’t she just go home??
As she waited for him to reply, she texted her two girlfriends in the group chat and told them about this annoying fucking guy who kept dicking her around. They agreed how sketchy and weird he was acting, but nothing to warrant full on alarm bells… yet. Red Flags, though, definitely.
Fifteen minutes went by before he just replied, “Ya”, that he still wanted to go to this other place. She replied that she would meet him there, and told her friends where she was going. As she was driving there, Siri read out another text from Derek, “Can you wait for me in the parking lot so we can go in together?”
She ignored the text, didn’t respond. As she pulled up to this secondary location, she recognized it as yet another dive bar. A sketchy ass place she had been to only once before, a few years ago, in an already inebriated state. It was not a place you take someone on a first date. As she pulled around back to the parking lot, she noticed there were no lights, except one from a yard a few fences over. Only enough to dimly light a portion of the cars.
She reversed parked in the only parking spot available and looked to her left out the window, as she faced the drivers side window of the white SUV next to her. It looked like there was someone sitting in the front seat. Considering the type of establishment she knew this place to be, her immediate thought was that someone was getting a BJ. For some reason, that was a good enough reason for someone to be in a car, that she accepted her theory as fact and looked back down at her phone.
She texted him that she was there, but didn’t tell him she was waiting in her car. She also texted her friends to update them. It was then that one of them asked her to send a pic. She went back to screen shot a pic of his profile on FB dating, only to find that he had already unmatched with her..? She reported back to her friends and they told her to get the fuck out of there!
Without hesitation, she plugged in the GPS to get herself home and peeled out of the parking space. A quick left out of there and she was at the parking lot entrance. She lightly released the brakes and inched up, looking left to see one of those long, accordion type buses pulling up. Common courtesy, this bus driver should have seen her trying to get out and given her space to merge, before pulling up to the light, which then would block her in to the parking lot. He chose option B.
She panicked yet was fully in control as she reversed in a flash, pulled left, and drove off the curb of the side walk behind the bus. Sharp right and straight down a side street, she parallel parked like a god damn pro and texted her friends to tell them she was okay.
She sat there for a bit to get her bearings and calm her nerves, though she didn’t feel fully freaked out. The reality of what had just happened hadn’t yet set in. As cars drove past her, she started worrying that one of them could be this “Derek”, so she blocked his number, took a deep breath, and drove off.
As she was driving, a “No Caller ID” call popped up on her dash-screen. How can he be calling me if his number is blocked? Shouldn’t he not be able to contact me??, she thought as she ignored the call. It timed out, and then a text popped up, “Hey, sorry I was late. I was super nervous,” Siri read out.
She ignored that too and just kept driving. Except, she realized, she couldn’t go home. She had lied to her parents and told them she was going to play pool with a friend of hers, and that friend’s husband and his friends. It had only been an hour since she had gone out. She couldn’t go home yet for fear of having to explain to her parents what had just happened. Instead she pulled in to the parking lot of the nearby mall, close to her house.
As she sat alone in her car, in an empty, eerie, parking lot at 10pm on a Saturday night, her friend texted her and asked about Derek having given her a different number. “Yeah, he changed it mid-week,” she replied.
Her friend then responded that she had told her husband about the situation, and the part about changing phone numbers literally made the hair on his arms stand up. He immediately thought – sex trafficking.
It was then that the severity of the situation hit her like a ton of bricks.
“Broken camera”, red flag
Changed his number, red flag
Changed locations, red flag
Chose dark, sketchy, unsafe area as new location, red flag
Deleted dating profile/unmatched, red flag
Sketchy vibe in general, your gut telling you the whole time something was wrong, RED FLAG! RED FLAG! RED FLAG!
She suddenly started shaking uncontrollably. Like as if she had just done a polar dip completely naked. She was shivering yet she felt hot. Flushed. What the fuck had almost just happened to her?? Why hadn’t she trusted her instincts?? To have sex? To have what likely would have been mediocre sex at best?? That was enough to potentially risk her life??
Her friend was a saviour and let her text her late in to the night, long after she had finally gone home. When she did get home, though, both her parents were still awake. She made up a lie that her anxiety had been really bad and she hadn’t wanted to stay out with her friends any longer. Both her parents asked her separately if she was okay. “Of course,” she replied. Then she looked in the mirror. She was white as a ghost. Almost translucent. Pure terror was splashed across her face. Good thing it was dark in the hallway where her parents had seen her.
She finally felt calm enough to say goodnight to her friend, and she spent the rest of the night tossing and turning. The severity of it all getting more and more real the longer she stayed awake. She started replaying different sketchy moments from the night, questioning everything…
Why would he have asked to wait in the parking lot? To just drive by and scoop me up off the sidewalk and kidnap me?!
What if that person in the car next to me wasn’t actually getting a BJ? What if they were waiting for “Derek” as I parked conveniently in the only parking space available?
She then grabbed her phone and checked the number she had saved for Derek, the one she had blocked, against the number that had texted her afterwards. Same area codes, different numbers. Who the fuck texted her?? Was this one guy with a lot of burner phones? Was this multiple peope??
She eventually dozed off, having a restless sleep, to awake the next morning to a missed call from a number three provinces west of where she lived. Was she almost sex trafficked across provinces?!?!
It was now Saturday. She had scheduled another date with a different guy that afternoon. A coffee date with a guy who lived nearby and had given her good vibes right away. She debated canceling, but she chose not to. She had to get out of her head, and she felt much more comfortable about this date than she had about the sketchy one the night before. More on the coffee date later.
The next day was Superbowl Sunday. She spent the morning visiting with family, the early afternoon enjoying the mild weather at a winter festival with her parents, and by evening she had gone over to her cousin’s place for the big game… And by big game she meant, playing peek-a-boo with the babies while everyone else watched football.
Before the game started, she was filling her cousin in on her harrowing experience from two nights prior. Y’know when you tell a really traumatic story, but you’re so desensitized from it that you make light of it and the other person is horrified? Well that’s what happened there. Her cousin almost burst in to tears at the thought of her being nearly abducted. She knew then that this wasn’t something she could just laugh off and move on from.
Her cousin told her she needed to report this to the Human Trafficking hotline. Her friend had also told her to do that too, but it hits harder when you hear it more than once from two separate people. She promised she would call the next day.
She ended up being too busy at work the next day to even take a breath, let alone relive some new potential trauma while reporting it to the authorities, so she called the Human Trafficking hotline over her lunch the following day.
The woman who answered the phone had a pleasant, soothing voice. The woman listened intently while she unloaded all the details from her sketchy date a few days earlier. As she finished, the woman comforted her and reminded her not to blame herself. The people who run these sex trafficking rings are master manipulators and are experts at what they do.
That being said, there was nothing that this woman at the Human Trafficking Hotline could do for her if there was no victim and no crime committed. The woman did, however, suggest that she contact the non-emergent police line and report it to them instead. She thanked the woman for her time, and the woman ended the call by saying, “I’m so happy you’re okay.” As she hung up, a tear or two slid down her cheeks. She regrouped and checked the time. Her lunch was almost over so she would have to call again the next day.
Wednesday rolled around, and she was determined to get this over with so she could move on from it. She sat in her car to ensure she’d have privacy, and dialed the number. She reached the non-emergent police line and another kind woman answered the call. She then began to re-tell her harrowing tale yet again. Fortunately this time, she was able to actually follow through with reporting it.
The woman took down all the details, asked for both phone numbers “Derek” had used, plus the area code for the first number. The woman recorded all the locations, and ended the call by providing her with the police report number, and an e-mail address she could send his photo to so the police would have it on file.
She sent off the information and took another deep breath to regroup. She was happy to have finally reported it knowing that her experience could help prevent something like that from happening to someone else.
Reflecting on what happened, she knows how lucky she was to have gotten out of there when she did. How lucky she is to be here writing about it. This was a serious lesson learned, and a mistake she will not make twice.
The main purpose of sharing this is to remind people, herself included, that if your gut is telling you something is wrong, it probably is. No amount of love bombing, flattering, promises, lies, or even horniness, should be enough to put anyone in a situation they’re not comfortable with. Trust your instincts, and don’t be afraid of offending anyone. They’re opinion of you means absolutely nothing compared to your physical safety and well-being. It’s not an over-reaction, it’s not “just” anxiety. It’s your body’s alarm system telling you that something is not right and you are not safe. Listen to it. It could save your life.