Sweet Romance15 min read
My Dead-Eye, His Cold Gaze, and the Pearls of Tears
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I woke coughing saltwater into my palms, a bus full of people drowning in my throat.
"Help—" I forced the word out like a last coin from a pocket.
Someone kicked up under my feet, and I broke the surface.
I woke fully then, heart sticking at the roof of my mouth. "No—" I whispered to the dark room, to nobody.
"Joe, are you okay?" Lena's voice floated through the thin wall.
"I'm fine," I lied, pressing my palms to my face until the world went dim.
This was the dream that had become a calendar for me: images of an accident, faces, the water, and always a small clock floating over someone's chest that counted down like a merciless app. I could see other people's timers. I could see who would die soon. I had no training, no choice, only the knowledge and a stomach-twist of responsibility.
That morning at the café, Lena stirred her coffee and watched me like I was an unlocked secret. "What now?"
"I dreamed a bus falling into the river," I said. "There was a little girl in a red dress."
Lena's fingers tapped the table. "Again? How many times—"
"Too many." I pulled my wallet out by force and nearly dropped it. The old photo of my mother slid free and landed face up like fate. I swallowed and felt the clock in my chest skip. "This time I saw her. The girl's timer said seven minutes."
A child with seven minutes—my feet moved before my thoughts did.
"Wait!" Lena grabbed my sleeve. "Don't be stupid. You can't—"
"I can," I said. "I've been wrong before, but I can't ignore it."
She sighed and let me go.
Outside the café a girl with black shoes and lace socks stood with a wrinkled old woman. She looked up at me with a frankness that spit light. "Sister, is this yours?" she asked, holding out a leather wallet.
I felt the world tilt. That girl's laugh, those shoes, the red dress: the image from the bus, the small tag on the back of a dying child's neck in my dream. My throat tightened. "Yes," I said and took it.
"Thank you." I offered her a bill. She shook her head. "My daddy said if you find something, give it back. Don't keep what isn't yours."
Her purity landed on me like an accusation. "Which school are you from?" I asked. "Who teaches you to be so honest?"
She only smiled, suddenly solemn. "My mother." Then she ran off, small as a comet.
I scanned her like I always did—because I have to. A number hovered, small and cruel: 7:00. Seven minutes.
"Joe?" Lena's eyes had filled. "She's going to—"
The bus stop had melted into the city bustle. I tracked the girl and the old woman as they climbed the steps and boarded. My breath snagged. A black Rolls Phantom idled. The license plate caught in my chest the way tags do in my dreams: K8888. I had walked through this film before. The phantom comes, hits the road, the bus veers, and the river opens.
I flagged the car.
The driver opened the rear door for me. The man inside sat like stone—tall, precise, and cold. He smelled faintly of tobacco and winter. His dark eyes were knife-edged and indifferent. His suit could have been tailored by a king. When our gazes met I forgot the word "please" and fumbled like a child.
"Excuse me, sir," I said. "Your car—please wait. If you leave now there might be an accident. Twenty people—"
He watched me as if watching a fly, not a human. "Sir," the driver said sharply. "Miss, we are running late. Please get out."
"Please," I said, louder and rawer. "Wait three minutes."
The driver frowned and stepped out. He meant to pull me out, but I didn't let go. I grabbed his shoulder like a life line. His cheek brushed my mouth and my face found the sideways of his jaw—an accidental press so intimate it stole the air. He jerked away like a man with no tolerance for inconvenience. "Get out," he snapped.
I clung where I could. "Just three minutes."
For those three minutes, my clock trembled. I watched the car melt into the roadway and three minutes later a roar split the air. The Phantom crashed into a sedan in a chain that threw the bus's driver into a panic. The bus careened, tore through the guardrail, and a spray of metal and scream hit the river. Sirens bloomed.
I stood in the mud and watched the man from inside the Rolls step out. He was everywhere in the news later: Carter Camacho—young, infuriatingly rich, an heir with a look that could freeze a room. He sat in a hospital with his head bandaged like a monument wrapped in gauze. His face registered a shadow that meandered toward me in daylight: he recognized me.
At the station, police interrogated me all night because Carter said I had a motive. He thought I had sabotaged him—an insult from a woman he barely knew. I expected the worst. But evidence and cameras cleared me. When we left the police station together the sneer in his eyes was intolerable.
"Why would you accuse me?" I demanded in the parking lot. "You reported me to the cops."
His eyes were small cold knives. "Were you planning a publicity stunt?" he said. "Are you some kind of oracle or con?"
"I'm not a—" I began.
He tried to walk away. I tripped on my heel and fell against his back, and somehow I hugged him, absurd and human. For the second time in twenty-four hours I found myself accidentally pressed to a man who barely tolerated breathers. Time stopped. My life-clock froze whenever I touched someone—an impossible gift I had learned to hide. It blinked: stopped. I tested it, the absurd power like a pulse in my palm. Close: time stops. Distance: counts down.
He shoved my hands away with a disgust I still feel. "Enough," he said. "You're embarrassing."
"You're really rude," I managed.
He said something that landed like a punch: "Even at your worst you wouldn't be desired by men like me."
It was a burn I recorded and kept.
That night my friend Lena and I sat in my tiny apartment. "You should follow him every day," she said. "If being near him freezes your clock—" She spread her hands like some amateur mathematician with a map of salvation. "Just cling to him. Live forever."
"I won't be a leech," I said. "I have one year and two months, Lena. I won't trade my dignity for breath."
A week later, fate laughed. Carter's charity gala brought us within proximity. I found a corner and scanned the crowd for someone with a clock about to stop. I found a woman with a black shadow shading her forehead. Beth Roy. Her seconds ticked down: twenty minutes.
"She's going to die," I said, and my feet moved again.
At the gala Beth was hauled out by security for shouting in the center of the room about Carter's name. I followed Carter into the back. He stiffened at the mention and ordered security to find and remove her. Ten minutes later the guards told us Beth had gone to the rooftop.
We sprinted to the roof and found her teetering on the lip. "Don't come near!" she cried. Her timer slid to seconds. She accused Carter of ruining her family—of a purchase years ago that tore their fishing village apart. I watched Carter's jaw lock into something that was almost sorrow.
"You!" she screamed. "You bought the land and left us homeless!"
His tone was ice at first. "Who are you? What do you want from me?"
She told him the story of mud, greed, and a collapsing life. Then she jumped.
He lunged, hands reckless. He caught her by the wrist. The view from thirty-three stories up is honest and unforgiving. Her hands—pale and desperate—were slick. For the first time his mask cracked. He held on until his muscles burned and his lungs felt like paper. For the first time in my tidy life of "stay away from trouble," Carter Camacho dangled, shaking, saving a woman he had been accused of injuring.
I grabbed his thigh. He almost fell; his pants tore embarrassingly. "Pull!" I barked, and together, between muscle and fear, and a ridiculous fashion disaster, we hauled her back. Then the wind changed. From below, something like grief clung to us and tugged. There—something in the water wanted us.
It wasn't human.
A figure slipped from the guttered edge of the roof: a thing with sodden hair and a green dress stuck to a figure that hadn't existed in years. It held the woman like a puppet and hissed in a mouth that smelled of drowned leaves. I couldn't meet its eyes.
"Don't let go," I told Carter. His face was white, and his hands trembled. He said breathless, "If I let go—" His voice stalled.
"Then you'll both die." I said, wickedly calm. "Let me pull."
We pulled. The ghost let out a sound like an ocean trapped in a throat. It wanted the woman for a reason I remembered from fragments: old rage, an unfinished life. We were saved not because we were strong, but because a group of the driver's men finally came with ropes and hands and a sound like machines.
Sometimes I think that's when he started noticing me differently.
Afterwards in the hospital, Carter finally turned to me. He was still proud, still sharp. Yet something softer under the ice: gratitude or unfinished curiosity. "You," he said, "you saw a woman resigning herself to death and not reported it." He stared at me like a scientist staring at an anomaly. "Why did you help her?"
"Because she's a human being," I said. "And because I couldn't not."
"Do you ever sleep?" he asked. He deserved the answer. "Do you ever stop looking at the clocks on people?"
"You cannot preach to death," I said. "But you can sometimes stop its watch."
An uneasy truce formed. He offered me contacts: "If you ever need..." he left the line hot and raw.
I was not prepared for how his name would settle in me like a fact. He was a fortress I did not plan to storm. He was the kind of man the tabloids ate with forks and knives. He was also the kind of man who could not understand fear.
Then the green woman we named "Chen's ghost" tugged again. She clung to a grieving woman named Gemma Greco. Gemma told us she had been at that bus accident years before—witness, survivor, broken. She started acting odd. She wasn't bad; something possessed her, made her deliver violent words and climb heights. I'd learned how ghosts search for bones to lie in: a living body to wear, a replacement heart.
"You can't exorcise pain," Reed said that night, his voice steady as a metronome. Reed Mercier was my childhood friend who'd drifted into the study of old things and new symbols. He'd been away for years, learning rites and lines of wisdom that don't translate to the skeptical. He'd come back smelling of sage and books. He never refused me anything.
"Reed," I said, "she's anchored to Gemma because her child died. I saw the child's picture in her mind when the ghost flashed her memories into me."
He nodded like an old man at a chessboard. "We need to find the living link. Whoever wronged her life needs to know. If the living man who betrayed her hears his reflection in public, the ghost will ease. It's a superstition—no. It's a social truth. People who commit cruelty raise ghosts."
We hunted. The ghost's husband had taken a compensation check and vanished. Names—files, receipts—unspooled. He now lived in a swank complex uptown and managed to keep his head unnaturally tidy. He was Nicholas Arnold: small town everything, a man who'd left his wife and child to buy a new life. He had given money and moved on. The ghost could not go. Because she had cursed him with a last whisper: "Until you answer for what you stole, I will not go."
"What if we bring him to the place where everything broke?" Reed asked. "Let him face what he bought."
"It's public," I said. "We have to force him to look."
I told Carter everything. He surprised me with one thing: "I'll help." He didn't ask "Why you?" He asked "How soon?" He assembled his influence like a warm jacket: a press conference at the site of the old village, reporters, a producer with a camera lens.
The punishment would be public—and it had to be complete.
"You will not make me a monster," Nicholas snapped the day we found him, voice a small tense animal. We had put out a formal inquiry as a community oversight, a call for restitution for families harmed by forced evictions. He had showed because he thought he would be praised, not pilloried.
"Money does not erase a life," I told him. I stood close enough that my life-clock slowed when our lips almost brushed. Cameras recorded. Carter's investors and neighborhood leaders were there to witness the humiliation. Reports were live.
"You took our land," I said. "You were paid, you made away. Where is the farmhouse she left? Where are the children's toys? Where is the apology?"
He tensed. "They were problems. I am a businessman." He tried his smile, the one brokered at the boardroom for deals.
Gemma stepped forward. Her voice broke. "My husband," she faltered, "he handed me a check. He left. He left my boy to hospital bills, Nicholas! Your men leveled our house!"
Nicholas's lips thinned. "I did what I had to do. It was legal. There were compensation packages."
"Legal," I repeated, and a reporter leaned in. "Legal is not moral." I turned to the cameras and made the mistake, the brave revelation every reporter loves: "We have his signature on the eviction orders, his fingerprints on the contractors' files, and receipts for payments he took. We can show the world the checks he cashed. People—turn your cameras."
Phones rose like reeds. A sea of lenses hung on his face as if capturing the soul of the accused.
"What are you trying to do?" Nicholas cried.
"Tell the truth," Carter said simply. When he spoke, the words landed with the weight of steel. "You took home the money and left her. You moved to your new life while we collected bodies and lists. Today you either—"
"—apologize in public, or we will publish everything," I finished. "We will inform the journalists, the banks where the payment crossed, the legal offices that handled the transfer. This isn't a rumor. We will make your choices public so the market of reputation—that thing you live off—crashes."
He staggered. For the first time, I saw white: a man who'd traded human faces for comfort. He looked old in five seconds.
"You will feel what you left behind," Carter said. His voice was not cruel. It was final.
The camera zoomed. The crowd pressed. "Nicholas Arnold, do you deny the checks?" a reporter asked.
He turned to me, eyes wide, and for the first time he was without a script. "You can't—"
"We can," Reed said. He produced documents: purchase orders, contractor agreements, photographs of the leveled homes. He handed them to the reporter, who fed them to the cameras live. The first editor published a headline within ten minutes: "Builder Nicholas Arnold Accused of Profiting from Forced Evictions."
You should have heard the sound—phones switching on, notifications chiming like verdicts. People who had been anonymous came forward. Neighbors who'd been silenced stepped into the light. The videos of Nicholas signing contracts with a smile surfaced. The thread of his life began to fray.
He didn't collapse physically. He collapsed publicly.
"You're lying!" he screamed at first. His face flushed the bruised color of a man losing currency. He licked his lips like a cornered animal. "Those were contracts. I just—"
"Send the money back," Gemma called. "Pay for the child's funeral. Pay for the village. Pay for what you broke."
The crowd's murmur turned to a roar. Men with cameras swarmed. A young woman shoved a microphone to his face: "Why would you trade a child's life for profit?"
His eyes flicked to the cameras like a man seeking a light, an exit. "It—" The word crumbled.
A man in a suit recorded the scene and streamed it. People who'd been his clients watched with rising horror. An investor sent a message; his shares started to falter on a rumor. Lawyers called. His bank called. The woman who ran the mortgage firm told a journalist she was pulling his lending lines pending inquiry. His name—once papered in polite press releases—turned into search keywords and angry hashtags.
Nicholas found himself surrounded by an unforgiving public made up of people whose faces he'd dismissed. They brought their anger like weather. His expressions skittered from denial to fury to pleading. He began to stutter, then to sob. "Please," he begged. "I didn't know—"
"He knew enough to cash the check," Gemma said. "He knew what it meant."
A kid recorded his own live reaction on a phone. The footage looped. Social feeds turned Nicholas into a cautionary tale. People called his partners, his neighbors, his ex-employees. They canceled deals. They stopped returning his calls. He tried to buy his way out with a public statement—the wrong statement—and it exploded.
He tried to make excuses. "I was young," he said. "It was legal." The crowd responded not with violence but with betrayal. "You made your bed," someone shouted. "Now sleep in it."
The cruelty of exposure is precise: people who profit from quiet crimes live in a vacuum of silence. Public light is like salt. It doesn't fix what happened, but it refuses forgetfulness.
Nicholas's change was not immediate. He tried to sue; his lawyers warned him the evidencestrong. He begged for private meetings. No one wanted to listen. Gemma held a press conference and read from invoices while a chorus of ex-villagers cried. The city raised a review into the land deals. Neighbors posted terrible pictures of the flattened coastline. His name circulated with hashtags, the kind that chew reputations.
He dropped to his knees once in the square outside City Hall. Live feeds captured the humiliation: a man who had offered comfort through payments now begging not to be ruined. He had made a public spectacle of repentance, and the world watched him perform sorrow.
When they escorted him away, he kept whispering the same trembling words: "I didn't think—" He had thought, but thought of profit. He'd traded human lives for a clean house.
The crowd's reaction fractured into segments: fury, vindication, applause, disgust. Someone recorded the moment and posted it. The video reached millions in a week. Nicholas's face—the man who cashed the check and moved on—was now a public lesson.
It was not enough to undo the past. Nothing could bring a child back. But Nicholas was stripped of the comfortable anonymity he'd relied upon. He had to answer to names. He had to sign return checks. He had to appear in hearings with floodlights aimed at him. He had to walk past the people he'd wronged and meet their faces. He had to hear the word "traitor" like a legal notice. He had to watch his own name be narrated to strangers and moved into headlines.
When it ended—never perfectly ended—he was a small man with empty pockets and an emptied life of polite acquaintances. He was left with an echo, not the silence of sleep, but the noisy consequence of his choices. He had to live in the audience's memory.
Later, the ghost eased.
We watched Chen's shadow dissolve like smoke in a wind tunnel. Her last breath was a pearl. It fell into my hands, a tear turned jewelry. "For you," she whispered as she left. "So you will remember."
That night Reed and I put the pearl in a glass jar. "There is power in remembering," he said. "And maybe in keeping the memory of what a life cost."
Carter came over the next day with a small, quiet look. He had his bandages off and the arrogance taped down. "Are you angry with me?" he asked.
"No," I said. "Why should I be? You pulled the roof down on your life when you nearly fell. You chose to reach."
He smiled like a man surprised at his own risk. "Will you stay?" he asked. He surprised himself with the softness. "Not because of my money. Because—because you saved someone I loved."
My life-clock stuttered and then, absurdly, gained a beat when his fingers brushed mine. "I have another year and two months," I said. "I can't promise forever."
"Then promise one more day," he said. His voice was not the boardroom iron but something made of simple wood—sturdy and honest.
"How about one day at a time?" I asked.
"Deal," he said.
There were things I taught him: how to make simple boiled eggs when the night has been long, how to stand in a rain without running, how to call people he's hurt and listen. He taught me how to use influence for a living person's sake. We argued like two stubborn stars clashing. We made tea at 2 a.m. and laughed at nothing. I squeezed his hand and felt time slow in a pocket where only we kept our small rebellions.
The pearls multiplied. Each time I helped a grieving mother see a lost child one last time, a tiny luminous bead fell into my hand. I put them in the jar like small rewards. Reed said once, "Don't spend them on wishes. Keep them. They are reminders that you didn't let the world forget."
"Maybe one day," I said, "they'll buy me a little more time."
Carter tilted his head. "Time can't be bought that way," he said. "You know that."
"I know," I said. "But every pearl is a life saved from bitterness. That's something."
He leaned forward and kissed the tip of my forehead, a small, perfect theft. "Josephine," he murmured, using my name the way adults use ceremony when they mean intimacy, "I will walk you through the days you have, and make them the best I can."
"I don't need you to save me," I replied. "Save yourself sometimes."
He laughed, a warm thing. "I will. For you."
The jar of pearls sat on my desk and winked in the sun. The bus's license plate—K8888—was buried in a newspaper clipping in a drawer. The clock in my chest still ticked for other people. I still dreamt water and saw faces. But I also learned to love a man who had once thought himself above life and found himself pulled not by profit but by the simple, stubborn force of being needed.
We walked away from the river together one evening. Behind us, the city lights shimmered and the old village's new life wheeled like a slow promise. The ghosts had names now, and so did their stories. The people who had done harm had to face a long, petty, human justice. It was not perfect—justice rarely is. But it was loud, and that loudness kept the past alive so it could be made right.
Later, when I opened my jar to count the pearls—two, six, more—they tinkled like tiny bells. I put my hand over them and felt some small hush in my chest.
"Don't be naive," Reed warned once as we walked home from a midnight ritual. "There are men who will still offend. There are still rivers."
"Then we'll be ready," I said. "Together."
Carter squeezed my hand and his pulse matched mine for a single, ridiculous second. The timer blinked and rested.
"I promised to walk you through your days," he said softly. "If you'll let me."
I looked at him and, for once, lied with contentment. "I want you to."
We kept walking. The river behind us was quiet, carrying old stories downstream. The jar of pearls waited on my desk like armor. The little girl with lace socks had given me more than a wallet: she had given me a duty. I would keep doing it. If the world wanted monsters, I'd fight them with documents, with lights, with people who would watch. If the world needed tenderness, I'd teach a reluctant boy how to make tea.
"Do you ever regret it?" Lena asked me once in the dark of the café where we had started. "Saving people like this—does it cost you?"
"All the time," I said. "But regret tastes better than what I had before: silence."
"Then good," she said, and slid me a napkin with a smile.
We kept living, one day at a time. The pearls caught the light. The city breathed. I learned that the most ordinary days are their own miracles: a bowl of soup shared, a hand held when someone trembles, a name given back to the dead. If I could not buy my life back, I could buy meaning for the lives I touched.
And that was enough.
The End
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