When I was 29 I robbed a bank. I was in a sort of relationship with this girl named Beth, who I met the year prior. She was 26. I met her online, on a website called fetlife. A social media website like facebook, but for kinky people to try to fuck each other. I wasn’t sure what I was searching for. Mostly just seeing what it was all about. I participated in some groups, got to chatting with a few people, and established a pretty good name as a nurturing dom. One day I get a random message from a girl. It simply said:

“Hi, I like to do dangerous things. Like you.”

I had mentioned in a group chat a few weeks prior that when I was 16 I had gotten arrested for stealing a nice car from a farmer’s shed and gone joyriding, and had to do some community service to get it expunged. Truth be told, I stole that car about 20 times before I got caught, but I never even told Beth that. I have a very professional image and role helping people in the community. Talking about joyriding a car and getting caught once as a teen makes a person endearing, but habitually driving a car without permission tends to be more threatening. 

Beth had some issues. By her account she had been raised by distant parents. Her mother was in prison for drugs, and her father spent all his time with his girlfriend or working. She was from a very conservative village in Wyoming and had married some local she went to high school with. She said that she always felt like she didn’t fit with her community. She liked doing dangerous things. She talked about one time she had snuck out while her husband was sleeping and climbed a billboard sign and dangled from the railing, wondering what it would feel like to let go and hit the ground. She didn’t want to die, but she certainly was obsessed with death. 

Obviously some of what she talked about sent up some red flags. But I could relate to her. Not in her fascination with death, of which she had plenty, but in that urge for danger. See, at this point I had been breaking into buildings for a couple years. Rarely to steal anything. When I did, it was usually a pen, or a piece of paper. Something nobody would recognize, but that I could keep around as a memento. The reason I did it, though, was for the fun of the chase. 

I loved reading those articles about a random break in at a local office building or school. Often I would be able to get a lock open with a basic pick set, and then just for fun break the window out from the inside, just to make the police wonder why someone broke the window from the inside. I was disappointed how rarely stuff like that showed up in the articles.

Beth had that love of danger. And we seemed perfect for one another. She would talk to me while standing as close as she thought she could to a passing train, and I would lounge in a chair in some dean’s office carving shapes into his desk. At least, that’s where we found ourselves one particular October night. 

“I want to meet you and do dangerous things together. Like really dangerous things.” She said. 

At this point ‘I like to do dangerous things’ had become something of a meme between the two of us. But the way her voice lowered at the end sent chills up my spine. I had no idea what the next few months were going to lead up to, but I remember having a very certain feeling that choosing to meet up with this girl was going to lead to a lot more danger than I had imagined up to that point. I knew she meant it. I knew we were absolutely horrible for one another. And I knew I was going to be with her.

Beth and I had been talking for about three months when we first met in person. She was gorgeous. She had always joked about how short she was, but meeting her I realized I had overestimated how tall 4’11” actually was. As soon as she saw me her eyes lit up. Deep, wonderful emerald eyes. 

The thing I notice first about any person is their eyes. Eyes are beautiful. Every time I really look at someone’s eyes I am surprised at how much depth and character you can see. A lot of a person’s personality is present just in their eyes for a keen observer. But some people have an extra layer. A rare depth of soul that most people don’t even notice is there. 

Beth was surprisingly shy and timid on the outside, compared to the girl I knew on the inside. She opened up to me pretty quickly once, but I expected her to be fearless and bold in public like she was in private. Beth was anything but bold in public. I grew to love this reality of her. I was the only person with whom she could be her true, reckless, dangerous self. I myself had always enjoyed the solitude of being the only person to know about my alternate night life. But she made it better. She started coming with me on my break-ins, and I climbed a construction crane with her. I’m not sure I would choose to do something of that sort on my own, but her enjoyment of it made me genuinely enjoy her dangerous activities. 

“What if we broke into a place during the day?” She said one night while we were dangling our legs from a hotel rooftop. 

“I’m pretty sure we can just walk in to most places during the day, dear.” I chuckled back at her. 

“Okay, what if we take something?”

“What, like shoplifting?”

“Maybe, but like shoplifting money? From a bank?”

I rolled my eyes and laughed as I laid back on the roof. “Beth, dear, are you suggesting that we rob a bank?”

“Really. Dangerous. Things.” She said in that same dark tone she had used before on the phone. 

I would be lying if I said it didn’t chill me a bit. She was generally so bubbly and gregarious when it came to our chats about breaking the law. We had been living together for about a year at this point, and had stuck to minor crimes for our own entertainment. But her whole personality changed at that point. 

“Okay.” I said, after thinking for a minute. 

“Really?” She sounded so cautious. She had obviously not expected me to agree. 

“Yeah. You want to rob a bank, little psycho? I’m in.” The words coming out of my mouth felt a lot like a joke, but I knew deep down that I had just set free some sort of monster in her, and it did nothing but thrill me.

The next three weeks we spent our spare time planning. Nothing like in a movie. We weren’t pulling up maps and meeting with shady characters. We were just going around town to different banks and checking them out. We didn’t want to go inside to case them and get ourselves on camera, so we picked a bank on the edge of town with big glass windows in front. From the parking lot you could almost the entire counter, as well as the bank manager’s desk.

Beth was over the moon the whole time. The fantasy of the whole thing was fueling what I can only describe as an anticipatory mania. She would start talking about the steps in our plan and begin pacing and twiddling her fingers. When I told her we should probably go in armed, she smiled in her sleep for two nights. I knew at the time that the more in encouraged her, the more dangerous she would want it to be. But at this point, we both craved the danger. So fuck it. 

The morning of the robbery Beth woke me up at 0600. She said she was too excited to wait any longer and wanted to go over the plan again. She reminded me of a kid on Christmas too excited to wait to open her presents. It wasn’t much of a plan, really, but she loved going over it. 

We loaded up our supplies in the truck I had stolen two nights prior from a work client who was out of town. It seemed unlikely that the vehicle would come back to me through him, but I stole the license plates off a car and swapped them anyway to create a bit more separation. 

Pulling up in front of the bank, I remember feeling nervous, but not at all scared for some reason. I thought it was odd that I felt more like I was about to walk into a party for me than a bank robbery. Beth was nearly vibrating. She couldn’t stop fidgeting and shifting in her seat the whole ride. I looked over at her as I put the truck in park right in the dropoff loop by the main doors. There were three tellers we could see, and the bank manager was standing chatting at one of the teller windows far from his desk. There were only 3 customers in the bank.

“You want to go rob a bank, little psycho?”

Beth smiled wide and shoved the truck door open. She had a .308 Tavor on her shoulder, and I had a Remington 870. She was first in the bank door. Her shy public demeanor failed to make an appearance that day. She immediately started screaming at everyone to get down. One guy stood there and stared at her, obviously confused, and she rammed the barrel of her weapon directly into his teeth. 

I was more than a little shocked to see her behavior. I had seen her get pretty excited over danger before, but she was absolutely unhinged. I loved everything about it. I confronted the bank manager and put him on the ground while she got up on the counter and began threatening the tellers and having them empty the money in their registers into a pile. She shoved all the money into her backpack and turned to the drive through teller.

“Ma’am, I don’t want to hurt you, you need to come down from there and put down the gun.” A quivering voice said behind me. 

My heart dropped. I turned and saw a man standing 4 feet away from Beth pointing a gun up at her on the counter. Beth was frozen. I wondered where the hell this dude came from when I had all the customers in front of me, then it occurred to me that this dude must have been in the bathroom by the door. Fuck. 

The man identified himself as an off-duty police officer.

I was certain that one of the tellers would have hit a silent alarm by now, but if they didn’t this guy definitely called before he came out of the bathroom. I was about to lift my weapon to initiate a standoff when Beth wheeled around on her heel and pointed her weapon at him. Before I had time to think I heard six shots ring out. The back of the mans head exploded. Five .308 bullets went right through his face. I heard Beth yell out in pain and call him a fucker, before she unloaded her magazine into his body on the floor. 

“This bitch shot me!” she yelled. 

I could tell from where she was holding and how she was moving that he had shot her in the vest. It was obviously time to leave so I reminded all the customers and the manager to stay on the ground. Then I hear Beth again. 

“Open that fucking register and put the money in here!” 

I looked over and Beth had resumed the robbery as if nothing happened. She was standing over the drive through teller making her empty her register into the backpack. This girl had been shot, and was still smiling, laughing, and robbing people. I guess I would call that the moment I really fell in love with her. 

I called for Beth and told her we should go. She yelled some other things I wasn’t listening to and then actually groaned and said “fine” as if I had told her it’s time to leave her favorite store. We ran back out to the truck and jumped in. I expected to hear sirens, but it was silent. Once we pulled out of the parking lot, there was still nothing. 

I had only seen bank robberies in movies and the lack of fanfare was jarring. We had just robbed a bank and killed someone, and everyone was just driving about their day. At the last second I noticed the police car in the opposite lane. For the first time that day I remember feeling truly nervous. I saw him cruising and looking at his computer. 

At this point I expected half the county to be after us. I remembered an app I had on my phone for police scanners. I turned it on and we listened to it the whole way back to my client’s house to drop off the truck and switch the plates. Most of the traffic was regarding a homeless man refusing to leave a public restroom he was caught sleeping in.     

Beth began laughing maniacally just as I was beginning to believe we had hallucinated the whole thing. It had been almost 20 minutes since we left the bank and the police scanner had nothing. Then we heard it:

“All cars, report of active shooter at ‘x’ bank”

Beth cheered and giggled as we listened to the radio traffic intensify. The absolute bliss we shared while listening to that radio traffic turned quickly into pure passion. We fucked for about 6 straight hours with that radio traffic playing. Beth would even pause to listen to some little snippet and then keep going. I have never seen an aphrodisiac quite like a bank robbery, to be sure. 

The robbery certainly did not go to plan, and was much more messy than I would have liked, but the first one always is I’ve found.