Texted Lies, Whispered Truths: Jason Collier's Story by Terri Browning (great novels to read .TXT) 📗

before Thanksgiving of 2020, and we sat and talked in the parking lot during that time, before arranging to meet up after she got off work for dinner. She brought her daughter. Afterward, Linda invited me back to her place to meet her parents, with whom she’d been living since her divorce.

I didn’t want to meet her parents, but I felt like she was pressuring me, and I hadn’t yet gotten what I wanted. Sex.

Our second date was the Friday after Thanksgiving, November 27. She had a girls’ night planned, so I just decided to hang around Lubbock for a little while until she was finished. But during the evening, she called and talked me into meeting her friends. While they were drinking, they all mentioned they were hungry. I was ready to leave, so I offered to get them food to take back to Linda’s house.

Once her friends left that night, Linda and I were intimate for the first time.

The following weekend, December 5, 2020, I returned to Lubbock for our third and final date.

This time, I got a hotel room, and Linda spent Saturday night with me. On the way home, I texted her and told her, “Hey, this isn’t going to work. We’re moving too fast.”

I can’t remember saying “I love you” to her, or even her saying it to me.

No, I never asked her to marry me.

No, I didn’t give her a ring.

And no, there wasn’t even any mention of buying a coffeemaker.

Afterward, Linda contacted O via Facebook, but when O mentioned it to me, I told her it was a scam against cops. Because Linda’s page looked generic, O believed me and blocked Linda so she couldn’t talk to her again.

At that point, Linda was the only woman I’d met in person, but I was chatting with several other women on Plenty of Fish and through the Facebook dating app as well.

One of those girls is the one the world seems to refer to as “FedEx Stefanie” since there were two women with the same name. I never met that particular Stefanie. But I did play more of a game with her. I would joke about things like, “Does Amazon Prime ship wedding dresses/wedding rings? I can mail you one, and you’ll be able to pick it up since you will already be delivering them.”

That was when she asked, “Do you send every girl you haven’t met a ring?”

And I followed up with, “Only the pretty ones.”

I never actually bought her a ring, or even a coffeemaker.

In hopes of getting what I wanted, I would string these women along. If they liked something, I liked it too, so they would think we had something in common. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t. If I felt like we had a connection, then we would meet up.

It was during this time that I was also chatting with a woman named Jessica. The two of us never met, never talked about getting married—and once again, no mention of purchasing a coffeemaker—but she did tell me about the video app Marco Polo. On this app, you just pick who you want to send a video to and then record the video, so I never sent the same video to multiple girls.

Actually, I didn’t even realize I never said anyone’s name in any of the videos until it was mentioned to me by Lonnie during one of our many interviews for this book. I guess it just became a habit not to call the women by name. It helped me not mess up when I was with them. The one time I did mention a woman by name in a video, the world seemed to think she was more special to me than the others, and I guess, in a way, she was.

12

Before I even broke things off with Linda, I was already talking to the Stephanie who lived in Kansas. She was probably the one I met the most often and got to know the best. She was also the one I was most attracted to, except for one other lady whom I met for the first time in January.

Stephanie had five kids, possibly twenty-five cats, and was paranoid that the entire town was against her. If you have followed this story from when it first went viral, then you are aware of what Stephanie’s issues are, but I won’t mention them here. That is not my story to tell.

We started talking on the dating app around December 5, 2020, while I was still seeing Linda. On December 11, I met Stephanie for the first time.

She was working in Liberal, Kansas, that Friday, which isn’t too far of a drive from Stinnett, so I asked her if she would like me to come up and meet her.

Stephanie was excited that I would do that.

We met in the parking lot of where she was working, and we sat in my vehicle talking—well, I sat and listened, because Stephanie talked and talked and talked. Afterward, I drove back to Stinnett, picked up my son, and went home, where he spent the weekend with me since M and I still share custody.

The second time I went to Kansas was the weekend of December 18. She thought I was arriving that Saturday, but I had this feeling she was seeing another guy at the same time, and I wanted to do a little detective work to see if I was right.

During our phone calls, she would always call me from her car so that her kids didn’t overhear what we were talking about or interrupt. I thought I had it timed just right to drive by and see if anyone else was parked in her driveway, but she happened to be sitting in her car as I did my drive-by and spotted me. Of course, she called me.

“What are you doing?” she asked as soon as I answered, and I played it off that I came up early to surprise her.

Because of