No More Vacations
Tears stand in your eyes and your partner stares at you in shock.
This is a collaborative choose your own adventure story. Click here for the chapter guide. Go back to chapter 1 by Linden Schneider here. Return to the previous chapter here.
The unknown messenger warned you that Vacation Roulette is a trap and will lead to nothing but death. They could not give you any evidence, however.
When you pressed them for information, they told you very little before deleting their number to cover their tracks. Before they disappeared, your unknown messenger told you that there’s no guarantee that the vacation organizers won’t bother you again, but at least you won’t be right in their clutches, and you’ll be at a safer distance away from them.
After a while, you decide that you’ve had enough. No vacation is worth risking your lives. Before you can regret it, you log onto your Vacation Roulette account and request to cancel.
A virtual agent pops up and asks:
We’re very sorry to see you go! Can you give us feedback on why, or whether there was something we could have done better?
You smirk to yourself. They could have given you more details on what the vacation entailed. Though to be fair, you and your partner had been lured in by the mystery of it, and by the cheap cost. You should have known that everything had a price, even if you don’t pay it all in money.
In any case, you decline to give them any feedback, confirm your cancellation, and log off. You climb back into bed beside your slumbering partner.
The next day, you wake to the sound of your partner yelling. “What the heck?” they say. “They just sent us a cancellation confirmation. Did you do this?” They shoot you a glare.
You avoid their eyes. “I’m sorry, but…” And then it all gushes out of you. In the morality quiz that Vacation Roulette gave you, the last question asked if you would kill your partner to save ten lives. You answered yes. Tears stand in your eyes and your partner stares at you in shock.
You go on to explain that you got a mysterious message in the middle of the night, warning you that Vacation Roulette is a trap that will lead to nothing but death. The messenger couldn’t prove anything to you, and at the end, just vanished, claiming to want to erase their tracks. Yet, you decided to cancel the vacation anyway, since you didn’t want to risk your lives.
At the end of this long confession, you break down into sobs. Your partner wraps an arm around you, and you just cry there for what feels like hours. When your sobs finally subside, your partner whispers, “I don’t blame you for answering the way you did on the quiz. But they asked me a very different last question. Want to hear?”
Overwhelmed with curiosity, you nod.
Your partner has a guilty look on their face. “They asked me if I would cheat on you if I could save somebody else’s marriage.”
Your eyes widen like saucers, and your heart starts racing. “And what did you answer?”
Your partner laughs, awkwardly. “I said yes!” They wiped tears from their eyes. “It was just a nonsensical question anyway. But — but I figured that you would understand, you know? You would know that I would never actually want to hurt you. If I did something like that, it would be for a good reason.” They lower their eyes.
Both of you sit in silence. Tentatively, you murmur, “Can we — forgive each other for answering the way we did?”
Your partner nods with a heaviness that you haven’t seen in a long time. “That’s all we can do.”
Indeed, the Vacation Roulette organizers never contact you again. But you gradually grow paranoid about your partner. It’s not as if you distrust them, but the last questions on the quiz disturbed you more deeply than you thought.
Thankfully, you never encounter a situation where you’re asked to choose between your partner’s life or other people’s. But you become very vigilant, and intensely jealous, of anyone attractive who gets too close to your partner.
Still, because of your paranoia, you and your partner become distant from one another. You have trouble leaving them alone with anyone beautiful, and your partner resents your attempt to control their friendships. One day, your partner calls it quits and breaks up with you. You force yourself not to shed any tears and agree. The anxiety has gone on for long enough.
It depresses you regardless, when you learn that your partner, just a few weeks after you broke up, starts dating a redheaded bombshell. She’s one of their “friends” whom you have long suspected.
Perhaps your partner never intended anything, but she was always too flirtatious, even if your partner insisted that she was just playful. Now you can’t help but think back on all the interactions between them.
Was your partner already cheating on you for months? And if so, did they do it to save someone else’s marriage?
You guess you’ll never find out. But in any case, you don’t speak to your ex ever again. Vacation Roulette didn’t kill you, but your heart feels dead now.
