First date, p.1
First Date, page 1
DATURA BOOKS
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Love at first fright
A Datura Books paperback original, 2026
Copyright © Gemma Amor 2026
Edited by Dan Coxon
Cover by Alice Claire Coleman
Set in Meridien
All rights reserved. Gemma Amor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN 978 1 91552 380 8
Ebook ISBN 978 1 91552 381 5
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For the lovers.
Actually, no. For me, for once.
Contents
Trigger Warnings
Prologue
Friday
Sunset
Binding Power
Celery
Connor
Clean Up
No Such Thing as Normal
Nerves
Now What
Rented Heels
Decisions
A Nap
Everything is Fine
Change of plan
Can’t Get the Service These Days
Phone is Weapon
Introductions
Get a grip
A Rose Without Thorns
Tomato Soup
Lone Diner
Fuck Them
Table Talk
Sorry Date
Never Been in Love
First Course
How Dare She
Edges
Brass Monkeys
Alone at Last
Reset
Too Many Truths
All Out on the Table
Without a Ride
Red Flags
Soft Spoken
Love Bug
Lone Driver
Out, Out
Off-Road
Crash
Sorry
Almost
Expectations Versus Reality
Ditch
Saturday
Wake Up
Bound
Acceptance
Waking Nightmare
Teamwork
Taking Stock
Too Easy
Brief Freedom
Phone Proof
Give us a Hand
Water for Fools
Poor Timing
First Base
Shared Warmth
Bound
Curry
Later
Tell Me a Joke
Escape
Free Again
Everything hurts
Lone Diner
Boathouse
Less Than a Man
Choice
To Run, or Not to Run
Deep, Dark
Sunday
Romantic Setting
Coupling
Fuck Them
Denouement
Exit Song
Is This Real
Garbage Disposal
Wait Here
Goodbye
Return
No Police
Wounds
Wednesday
No Crimes Here
Two Months Later
Too Much, Too Soon
Coping
Safe From Harm
Flames
Weak Glue
Space
One Year Later
Third Date
Dredge
Dawn Dive
One
Two
TRIGGER WARNINGS
Sexual violence
Torture
Explicit content
Violence towards women
Graphic descriptions of bodily harm
One reference to abuse of a child
Prologue
Water is noisy, even still water, although Amandine realised there was no such thing. The water around her naked, bound body moved constantly. It crackled and popped, licked and burped, slopped, slapped, sighed and even fizzed as if it could not help itself, a thick meniscus of ice latticed with odd, spear-like patterns jostling up against the edges of the jetty she lay upon. With a chorus of birds settling to roost for the night and rippling reeds moving in sinuous, percussive accompaniment to the watery diatribe, Hickling Broad gave out such an assortment of sounds it felt symphonic. Mistle thrushes worked mottled throats to release fluted goodnight songs in anticipation of the dark. Bitterns made odd, booming calls to each other as they waded through mud on stilted legs, lifting clawed feet fastidiously high, dancing a polka. Marsh harriers screeched as they wheeled overhead. The broads performed a cold rhapsody neither Amandine nor Connor – whom she was tied to, knee to knee, ankle to ankle, face to face, for all the world like lovers lying in bed, warm and satiated instead of starved and frozen, blood-crusted, abandoned – could enjoy in the circumstances.
Perhaps if they were warmer.
Amandine doubted she would ever feel warm again.
The weak winter sun had sunk down beyond the 1,500-acre expanse of man-made waterways and marshland acting as Amandine’s prison, as if wearied by the act of another day served. A bitter breeze chased in a northerly direction towards the remains of a drainage structure called Stubb Mill, the top of which was just visible above the feathery reed tips. The mill had fallen into disrepair long ago. Proud sails now reduced to a broken windshaft and a single jagged sail stock thrust upwards out of reclaimed land once drained and mined for peat. Other skeletons of past agricultural endeavours lingered nearby: slumping mills and desiccated barns, muddy foundations, an old stone cross boundary marker.
And a boathouse.
This particular boathouse, roofed with drooping, moss-infested thatch, was accessed via a rickety, rotting, green jetty that connected to a boardwalk raised six feet above the surface of the broads. The walkway, jetty, and house were built for reed cutters who transported bundled crops inland using the waterways.
Now, it was the favourite haunt of a pair of otters, and a man who had recently adopted it as his own.
It was also Amandine’s prison. She could feel slimy wood beneath her. Old nails, jagged splinters. Rough knots and ridges.
It can’t get worse than this, she thought drowsily.
It can’t.
That’s when it started to snow.
FRIDAY
Sunset
After a long, bitterly cold day, during which two lovers died with fingers stubbornly intertwined – until those fingers were removed, diligently, one by one, with a freshly sharpened pair of drop-forged carbon steel secateurs by a man who was not from around these parts – dusk finally fell.
Evening’s birth came slow and painful after.
There weren’t many places the man felt comfortable, or at peace, but this ramshackle hut on stilts and algae-slick jetty was one of them. His discovery of the boathouse, of the walkways and waterways and vast, high skies around it, had opened up opportunities he’d previously only been able to dream of.
It had broadened his horizons, literally and metaphorically.
He stood now at the very end of his jetty, on the last available plank, observing the dwindling light from behind smeared and spattered aviator lenses that rested at a skewed angle across his nose. The glasses caught the final bleed out-glow of the sun, giving him an otherworldly appearance: instead of eyes, he sported two burning triangles on his face. There was a sticky clot of blood stuck to his left eyelid, a gluey mass that made him blink funny, lopsided, like he was drunk, but he let it be. He liked the feel of it there. It aroused him. His dick felt hard as rock. If he had been less encumbered by his outfit, he would have pulled it out, then and there, and fed the broads his seed.
Access was, however, hampered by layers of clothes. An old-fashioned, wrinkled tux nestled under a once-white disposable coverall. He had the hood pulled up tight over his head. Over the coverall, which was drenched with blood, nylon waders rose right up past the waist, hoisted by elasticated braces. Beyond this assembly, a bowtie cut into his neck. It was too small, or perhaps his neck had just gotten larger since he bought it. His wife told him not to wear bowties for this precise reason, but he had long since stopped taking anything she said with any degree of seriousness.
Finally, in one rubber-gloved hand, the man held a single rose, the stem denuded of thorns. The rose had come from a bouquet that lay dying, ungifted in the boot of his car.
Roses are red, as the saying went.
So are the insides of people.
The man took a deep breath. Expelled it. His breath came out t hick in the frigid air, forming a blush cloud around his head. Dragon’s breath, but instead of fire, he breathed out panic, relief, elation, disgust, desire. He was every emotion a man could feel all at once, and also none.
Because he’d done it.
He’d finally done it.
His senses felt amplified by the cold.
He could smell mud, ice, wood rot, mould, still water, and mildew.
He could also smell blood and faeces.
And feel his own semen, crusted on the folds of his chin.
It was not an unpleasant sensation.
He was happy, he realised, suddenly. The sunset was beautiful, if a little unsure of itself. But then it was always beautiful, out on the broads. He imagined himself regent of this darkening kingdom, monarch of the reeds, sovereign of the glassy land.
Out here, there was enough space and peace to finally be himself.
Out here, he could escape judgement and scrutiny, and act as he’d always wanted to: without witness.
He looked down at a large blue plastic rubble sack that rested beside him. It leaked blood from a slit on the bottom. Liquid dripped through the gaps in the jetty planking and into the murky water below.
Inside the sack, jumbled, disassembled human remains.
Or at least, most of the remains. There was a nicely manicured hand sitting in a cool box in the boot of his car parked two and a half miles away. The man was glad it was as cold as it was. The hand would travel better, keep longer.
He’d held onto a few other trophies: a toe. An ear. A few matted clumps of hair.
Nothing that would take up too much space.
Easily stored anatomy.
What was left in the sack were the unwanted parts, like a bag of discarded Lego. Well-used. Pre-loved. Slot the pieces together, see what you can make. A fleshy jigsaw puzzle, dozens of possible permutations of build-your-own-person, if you were so inclined.
The man in the coveralled tux and bowtie was not.
It was time to say goodbye.
He tucked the rose into his coverall collar, bent and grabbed the neck of the bag, pulling the bulky object forward until it teetered on the very lip of the jetty.
Then, with a grunt, he kicked the sack over the edge, down into the water.
The resulting loud splash shattered any temporary illusion of peace that may have settled around him as night fell. Small, scared birds burst from the reed beds in chirruping clouds, scolding him. The pair of otters playfully squeaking and splashing in and out of the weed-garlanded groynes holding the jetty and boathouse aloft slid out of view. A heron barked.
The bag of body parts sank quickly below the surface of the water.
The man imagined cold, black liquid infiltrating the sack and embalming the dismembered parts within, spilling into open mouths and invading orifices with an unforgiving inevitability.
They only had themselves to blame, he thought.
He wiped his hands on his wader legs, observing the large ripples that emanated from the point at which he’d dumped the sack. The only visible marker of a couple who had, by all outward appearances, been very happy together, until he’d met them.
Soon enough, the ripples smoothed, leaving a small trail of bubbles that rose from the tied neck of the blue bag as it let out the last of its air.
The bubbles eventually stopped, too. The waters became glassy, a reed-punctured mirror once again, the broad’s surface capturing the death of the day and echoing it back to the sky above, infinite quietus, and the self-appointed King of the Broads smiled to himself in satisfaction.
Later, he would be given a new name:
Lone Diner.
Binding Power
In preparation for her date, Amandine dipped her finger into herself, gathered a dollop of fresh period blood and wrote a word on her belly with it, a Miracle Word. She’d read in an article online that the blood had some sort of binding power. That there was magic in it. That if you had sex with someone while on your period you tapped into a deep, primal, feminine power that created a special bond with the other person inside of you.
She knew that was bullshit, just like most of the things she read, but she found the notion intriguing enough to try anyway. It couldn’t hurt, could it? Amandine was jaded, disillusioned with dating and romance in general. She had been alone for a long time and had reached that phase of single life where she had to admit that, while doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results each time wasn’t exactly tantamount to insanity, it certainly wasn’t a winning strategy, either.
So, maybe a little magic blood would make all the difference. Who knows?
Her finger dragged across her soft skin, carefully scrawling the Miracle Word, but she felt sheepish and ashamed as she marked her stomach, almost checking over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching – which was absurd, because she lived alone.
You need to stop listening to pathetic advice written by copywriting bots, she told herself, crossly, as she wrote. Get yourself some real-life, non-artificial friends instead.
Easier said than done, though, wasn’t it?
Meeting new people.
And keeping them.
Which was precisely why she read so many articles.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t strike up a conversation, or that she struggled to get attention on either of the two dating apps she was signed up to. She enjoyed sex and flirting, and had gotten good at cutting to the chase when it came to what she wanted and how – grab my hair, now squeeze my throat, lightly, not choking, just enough that I know you could, now slap my ass, that’s perfect, now slow, now fast, gentle, bite just here, not too much… The mechanics of sex and intimacy were simple enough if you were clear and straightforward about it.
The problem wasn’t the sex. The problem was getting the connections she made to stick outside of the bedroom. She was beginning to think, after a string of unfortunate encounters, that she had bad taste in people. She repeatedly seemed to go for the wrong type. The ones who came across as genuine at first, then proved not to be.
Like the guy who had introduced her to his friends after their third hookup. She’d been excited by this gesture, knowing it was significant to meet a man’s friend group, thinking this would catapult their arrangement out of a casual sex thing and into a proper relationship, but it didn’t take long before the evening turned sour. The lads, who’d been drinking all day and were completely past the point of sensibility by the time she joined them, had been nice enough to begin with. As more drinks were consumed, however, they started to wink at each other and make stupid, wildly dramatic moaning orgasm sounds mid-conversation. Amandine realised her date had been making fun of how loud she was during sex to all his friends. The mockery ramped up as the evening wore on, progressing to hurtful remarks about her pubic hair, of which she apparently had too much, and the size, shape and consistency of her labia and breasts – both of which were evidently lacking on all aesthetic fronts, and even the presentation of her arsehole, which was unladylike, according to the men. She left the bar in tears, furious at the childishness of it all.
Then there was the man who’d sent flowers, texted sweet things, seemed so mild and nice-mannered and, honestly, a little vanilla until they’d slept together, whereupon mid-thrust, while he was inside her, face all screwed up in concentration, sweat pouring off him as if he had a fever, he pulled back, panting, and asked her quite seriously if he could push her down the stairs then jerk off on her, because he “had a thing” for it. He wanted it to look like an accident, he said. She did her best to remain calm and politely declined – changing the lock on her front door the day after, just to be sure.
After him, there had been the smart, funny, personable business owner with the raging cocaine addiction. They’d been in his car, driving to a country pub on the way to their first in- person date, when he slowed for a junction, pulled out a small vial, tapped it out onto his knee, and nonchalantly snorted several large piles of white powder. When the junction was clear of traffic, he drove on, pedal to the floor, oblivious to Amandine clutching the door frame white-knuckled beside him as he grew increasingly agitated and angry at other cars on the road, swearing and gesticulating the whole way. Amandine had been forced to hide in the toilets when they eventually arrived at the pub. When a barmaid came in to use the bathroom, she asked her to call a cab to take her home. The last she saw of that date, he’d been rubbing his left nostril and sucking frantically on his lower lip while he texted someone. His dealer, presumably.
