Sweet Romance13 min read
Three Stairs Down
ButterPicks14 views
I woke up because my body thought it had fallen. "I fell again," I said out loud, but the voice sounded wrong in the dark room.
"Kiara, are you all right?" Dallas's voice came from the other side of the bed, soft and sure.
"I—" I touched my hands. They were sticky with blood. "Dallas—"
He laughed like a warm bell. "You had a nightmare. Go back to sleep."
He smelled like coffee and the clean laundry he always folded so precisely. His fingers threaded through mine. "I'll stay," he said.
I should have relaxed. I didn't. I had been falling inside falling for months, a stairwell that never ended and a cat-faced mask that never stopped ringing its bell. Every time I fell, I woke up somewhere else that looked like morning, or like an afternoon, or like a car heading home. Every time someone I loved bled in my arms.
"Tell me," I said. "Tell me about the night before the exam—about Su Meng."
"Dallas," I pushed his name like a knot. "Annika—Su Meng—do you remember what happened after the senior dance?"
He frowned. "You mean the masquerade?"
"Yes. Who was wearing the lucky cat mask?" I gripped his shirt. "Who left the mask on the floor at Longfeng Building?"
He blinked like a man pulling a memory from a drawer. "You wore it," he said finally. "You told me you were nervous, so you hid behind a mask."
"But Annika—Su Meng—" My throat closed. "She had a bell. She always wore a bell. He—someone—"
Dallas's face closed like a door. "You were tired, Kiara. You've been having those dreams again. Don't torture yourself."
"She came to me in the restaurant," I said. "She told me she'd come by my room. She said she'd help. She had a bell."
He touched my hair. "You haven't eaten enough sleep. Let me make it right."
That same night the bell came. It always came. It rang like a small thing that promised danger. "Listen," I whispered. "There's a bell."
Dallas sighed. "Go to sleep."
When I opened my eyes the next time, he was dead and a kitchen knife stuck out of his chest.
"Call the police," I heard someone say in a dream that smelled like iron and wet fabric.
"No—" I tried to say. "No, I didn't—"
I had learned to handle the knot of fear first. "Who is this?" I asked nobody, lunging for the light switch. My fingers found bright, and everything was red.
The knife in his chest matched the knife in my hands.
"Call the police," the switchboard drone said. "Stay in the room."
I stayed. I cried. The fear slid under my ribs and settled there like a second heartbeat. The doorknob rattled, then the door slammed open, and a person in black and a white cat mask came in and the bell clinked.
I know how this goes. In the dream I had once stabbed the masked person. The knife met flesh and I tasted copper and the masked man staggered and fell—but then I always woke in another bed or a car or on a stairwell and the bell was still ringing.
"Kiara, it's a nightmare," Dallas would tell me when I woke once more. "You are safe."
But the knife on the kitchen counter was always real. The bell was always real. Annika's voice calling my name was always real.
I tried to map the pattern like a mathematician diagrams a paradox. Penrose stairs in a model my hands had once assembled and given to him: "The staircase that never ends," he had called it, smiling like he trusted an impossible circle. I had loved how he explained logic as if everything could be ordered. He was patient with the world. He had patience for everything but the one thing I wanted most—proof.
"You think I'm lying?" I said to him the morning his shirt smelled of coffee. "You think I'm fabricating pain?"
"No," he answered, and his eyes were careful. "I know it's real for you."
Days folded. I tried to interrogate the dreams by refusing to sleep. I avoided rest until my eyelids burned. Sleep came like a thief. I would awake bleeding in a new loop: the second dream where a masked intruder bursts in and kills both of us; the third where I throw myself from a balcony to wake up in the car again. The anchor each time was the same: the little Penrose model on the table, the way light glinted on its four impossible runs.
"Why is the model always right?" I asked once.
"Because you made it," Dallas said. "You remember how we measured the angles. You taught me about them."
"I taught you?" I repeated dumbly. "Dallas, I'm unraveling."
He held my hand. "Then hold on to me."
"Annika came to me in one dream," I whispered. "She asked my room number. She came with a bell."
Dallas grew pale. Then he looked away. "Annika's—" he began and stopped.
That stopped everything. The name was the hinge.
"She never called me again," I said. "Do you remember why?"
He tightened his jaw. "She died the next day," he said, low. "She jumped."
"No," I said. "No, she wouldn't—"
"You forget things, Kiara." His voice was soft. "You forget painful things."
That phrase was like a key turning. My head flooded with blanks—gaps in the memory where a friendship used to live. In their place: a bell, a broken phone, a night on a concrete floor.
I pushed him. "Tell me everything," I demanded.
So he told me a story he had told before in a thousand small versions: how a boy named Tobias Hanson had bullied; how Tobias had secrets; how Dallas had worked for years to corner Tobias in the end—gathering evidence, shadowing him, letting him reveal himself to a false friend. "I put the pieces together," he said. "I wanted him punished."
"And me?" I asked. "Where do I fit?"
"You were there and you didn't help," he said. "You froze. You left Annika alone. You were too scared."
"I was too scared." The words were a stone. "That was the worst night of my life."
He didn't speak for a long time. When he did, his voice was even. "You forgot because your mind needed to. I needed more than justice."
He slid a glass to me. "I needed you to remember," he said. "To feel everything you erased."
"Why would you—"
"You asked why I loved you," he said, and he pressed my hand. "I loved you enough to make you remember."
He confessed a plan: the patterned repetition, the knowledgeable placements of the bell, the mask, the model. A constructed dream built from things I had touched and known—long nights of gaslight and manipulation. He said the house, the model, the small bell—all of them fed into the architecture of memory. "I made a space in your mind," he said. "If you couldn't remember to stand up, I would make you remember where you failed."
"You made me live it," I said. "You built it around me."
He nodded. "Only by living it could you understand the wound."
"You're insane," I said. "You turned my life into punishment."
"You will remember every name," he said softly. "You will remember Annika, and Tobias, and the cat mask. You will never be able to pretend again."
I wanted to hate him. I loved him. The two feelings tore me thin. He put the Penrose model on the table between us and smiled as if presenting a math problem. "If you want out," he said—"kill me."
He meant it. He handed me a knife as if passing an exam.
The world collapsed as I followed the instruction. I killed him in one dream; in another I pulled his mask and saw his face and I felt my hands red and the bell ring inside my skull. When I woke on my own couch days later, there was a stack of papers on the coffee table: divorce papers in neat type. Everything had been emptied—his shirts, his books—except the model, except a note that said, "Remember."
I signed the papers with hands that shook for months.
I never told anyone the full truth. "He left," I told friends. "We grew apart." It was easier. The dreams however, they did not stop. They thinned. They came in longer seams. I counted days by how many times the bell jingled.
Three months after he left for good, I found the shop again—the small atelier where I had ordered the large Penrose model. It still had a big one in the display window like an altar. I wanted to see it and touch something I had made.
"Who commissioned this?" I asked the old shopkeeper.
He looked at me with eyes like an owl. "A man. He loved impossible things."
I kept the model in my flat. "If this is a dream thing," I said to no one, "I'll learn the geometry. I'll break the design."
But memory is not geometry; memory is a crowd of voices. I found one of Tobias's old social posts—he was in prison. His face unchanged. People had called him a predator. The posts had been pinned by a man named Dallas Zimmerman under the username that now returned: frank, steady, meticulous.
My stomach clenched. I had something to begin with: proof that Dallas had pursued Tobias and had taken credit for getting him arrested. I had also an old video from a student forum showing the junior year masquerade: a cat mask on the floor and a bell beside it. The footage had been found and traced. The camera's metadata matched a university server. Someone had uploaded it under Dallas's account.
I did what I had learned in the harm he had taught me to orchestrate: gather evidence then time the reveal. There was one place Dallas could not stand the light—his lecture at the old auditorium where townspeople used to come for his "logic and life" talk. He had agreed to appear that week to talk about "truth." The irony was large and very public.
I called Franklin Bradford at the precinct and told him what I had. He arrived the morning of the lecture with a pale look and too many questions. "Is this safe?" he asked.
"It's my life," I said. "If you're sure."
The auditorium filled. Dallas walked in with the air of the man who has always been right. "Welcome," he said, smiling like a ribbon. "I want to talk about how we remember—"
"Stop," I said, stepping onto the stage behind him. The hush cracked like a glass.
"Kiara?" murmurs rose like wind. "What are you doing here?"
He flinched and then managed a practiced smile. "You weren't invited—"
"I'm here to talk about truth," I said. "I have a question: did you ever think about how you punish the living?"
He blinked. "This is a talk," he said. "We can—"
I turned and held up my phone like a small altar. "This is a video. This is Annika the night before she died. This is Tobias. This is you."
I played the clip. It showed a masked crowd, a shuffle of feet, the bell on the floor. The audience recognized the speaker in the footage and started whispering. I felt the bell inside my ribs ring.
"You did this," I said. "You promised justice and you built my hell."
He looked at the screen, and then at me. "This is not—" he began.
Someone shouted, "Liar!"
I had more. I had the receipts: messages, bank transfers to the shop that replicated the model, witnesses who had been paid to appear in staged phone calls. I had an email thread where Dallas had discussed "creating a framework" and "forcing a full recall." I put them on the projector.
"Who are you?" he asked then, small like a man losing altitude.
"I am the one you hurt," I said.
Then the room changed. People stood up and surrounded him with the eyes of a jury. Hearing the bell in my head, I spoke until my voice was raw.
"This man made my nights into a machine," I said. "He told me to remember until my skin split. He told me to relive a crime I couldn't stop. He told me to wake by killing him. He never wanted me to heal—he wanted me to remember."
A student in the front row, one who had been in our class, started to cry. "We thought he was saving people," she said. "He told us stories of righteous vengeance."
"Vengeance is not healing," said someone else. "It's construction."
Dallas's face reddened. The first line of his defense was practiced. "You all know me," he said. "I am a teacher. I sought justice when the law failed us."
"By creating a nightmare for one woman," I answered. "By stealing her nights."
His hands trembled. "This is—" he said, "This is not the whole story."
"Then tell it," I said. "Tell the crowd how you staged a labyrinth. Tell them how you placed bells and moved objects. Tell them how you waited for me to scream."
He half-laughed, then tried to pivot to legalese. "I retrieved evidence—"
"You retrieved," someone in the back shouted. "You manufactured."
The crowd split. Phones lifted like a thousand accusing hands. Franklin Bradford stepped forward and said quietly, "We will investigate. If crimes were committed, we will proceed."
"You're lying!" Dallas barked suddenly, and the mask of composure cracked into ragged lines. He turned to me. "You forget the years. You were complicit."
"Am I complicit?" I asked. "I was twelve the night we learned to be afraid?"
He faltered. "You always had power," he stammered. "You had the model. You could have spoken up."
"You asked me to be brave," I said. "I told you then I couldn't. You promised to be my shelter and then built a storm."
He tried another tactic—plea for sympathy. "I loved you," he said, voice ragged. "I loved you so I made you feel."
"By breaking me," I replied.
At that, something shifted. The first people to clap were not angry citizens but people who had known him for years—colleagues who had once admired his mind. "Is this true?" one asked. "Did you use your position?"
Dallas looked like a man being cut from within. "I thought—" he gasped. "She needed to remember. She would remember and repent and be better."
"Repent for what?" I said. "For being afraid?"
He opened his mouth and closed it. The room had become a crucible. The audience no longer listened: they witnessed.
Then the phone videos surfaced. Students who had attended his 'logic' classes produced photos of payment transfers to actors, of messages arranging stage cues, of a small bell handed to an actor to be dropped within the restaurant the night I said I saw Annika. "It's all here," said a woman from the front rows. "He directed the plays to make her remember."
"That is falsified!" he cried.
"Prove it," Franklin said quietly. "Prove it now."
He could not. The more he tried, the more his defenses dismantled. His face wilted. People recorded his face, uploaded clips, recognized his voice. The shame came slow at first; then it arrived like an avalanche. His supporters who had once admired his surgical mind backed away. "We were wrong," one whispered.
His reactions shifted exactly as the rules of shame predict: from confident to rattled, from denial to frantic, then bargaining. He pleaded with people to believe in his motive, to trust that he had been "correcting an injustice." He offered to hand over his files. He begged for understanding.
"Please," he begged me at one point, voice raw and small like a child. "Please understand why."
"Why?" I asked. "So you could recreate her death night after night? So you could keep control of the story? You took someone's life inside another's head."
People who had been watching began to chant. Not a chant for violence—no one asked to harm him physically—but a unified demand: accountability. "We want an inquiry," several voices demanded. "We want him removed. We want justice for Annika."
I watched him change. His face paled. He looked like a man seeing his own bones. He tried to brandish academic ethics, offered to take a leave, to submit to counseling, to repay money. None of that touched the hollow the crowd had opened.
Then someone from the back produced an envelope. "You said you paid to build a model?" the person asked. "What about the test subjects you used?"
He could not answer. His voice broke. He reached for the lectern as if it were a raft. "I thought I could fix it," he whispered. "I thought the end justified the means."
The crowd pressed closer. "Apologize," someone urged.
He bent, suddenly small. "I'm sorry," he said. His apology cracked the way cheap pottery cracks. "I'm so sorry."
The real punishment was not a single act of retribution. It was the slow unwinding of reputation, the public draining of respect that had taken him years to build. People took photos, shared stories of how he had presented himself as a crusader and found him hollow. A former student stood up and said, "He used our admiration to engineer pain. He will never teach again."
Franklin Bradford took him aside and said, "We will investigate." The police presence was polite but firm. "For now, we need statements."
Dallas's eyes met mine. There was no triumph in them. There was only that peculiar thing I had once misread for resolve: a man undone by his own designs.
When the official inquiries started, newspaper columns came out and reporters asked about ethics. "How can a person play God?" one editorial asked. "How many others have had their memories manipulated in the name of justice?"
A town meeting was held the following week in the square. I sat near the front as voices planned community oversight committees. "He turned love into a tool," an elderly woman said. "We must not be so enamoured of brilliance that we excuse cruelty."
Dallas attended the public forum in a reserved seat. He had turned himself in for questioning voluntarily, but the damage was already done. The faces in the crowd recorded, typed, whispered. When he stood to speak, his voice trembled. "I thought I was healing," he said. "I am sorry."
"No," the crowd said, not in unison but in a chorus of small, certain voices. "Sorry is not a cure. You have to show how you will repair what you've broken."
He offered restitution: psychological support funds, an open admission of wrongdoing, full cooperation. Franklin Bradford confirmed legal steps would be considered. The community's punishment was to remove his platform, to demand his name be connected in the record with the harm he created, to compile the stories of victims and survivors and ensure they had voice.
The public punishment lasted for weeks. At each hearing, his expression changed—first defiant, then pleading, then hollow—while the crowd's reactions moved with them: surprise, anger, disbelief, disgust. Journalists recorded his testimony; former supporters gave interviews explaining how they had been misled. Annika's parents, who had once begged for silence, sat in the back and watched. When he met them, his face crumpled beyond eloquence. He could not summon the old rhetoric. He could only say "I'm sorry" and watch as that apology was measured and found wanting.
That is the kind of punishment that leaves marks: the public record of deeds and defenses, the loss of trust, and a life rearranged into silence. When Dallas's professional affiliations were stripped, and his lectures canceled, and his name associated with manipulation rather than heroism, it created a cost that was slow and undeniable. People who had admired him now used his method as a warning. He had made himself into a cautionary exhibit.
I watched him at the final meeting. He stood alone before a small group and read a prepared statement.
"I will not defend my actions," he read. "I wanted to make you remember. I was wrong."
No one applauded.
When the police files closed with pending charges under review, the community moved on without him. That, too, was part of the punishment: to be erased from the places he once inhabited. The Penrose model sat in the window of the atelier; no longer a trophy but a relic.
Months later I walked past that window and saw my reflection feathered against its impossible steps. My hands no longer shook as they had. I had been forced to remember and I had been forced to testify to a truth that hurt, but the bell no longer startled me. "I remember Annika," I said aloud to the empty street. "I remember now—and I live."
I kept three things from the whole affair: the small bell that had belonged to Annika, a red thread I had tied around my wrist the night I decided to expose him, and a scrap of paper with Penrose written on it.
At the very end, when asked whether I forgave him, I could not offer an easy answer. Forgiveness, I learned, is not something you grant to people who taught you to live inside a loop. Instead I chose to remember what I had learned: that memory can be an architecture for truth or a scaffold for cruelty. I chose to build differently.
"Do you regret it?" someone asked me once in a café, months after the hearings. I put my fingers on the small bell.
"I regret that she died," I said. "I regret that we let things happen. I regret being afraid. But I don't regret making the truth visible."
The bell in my palm was small and the sound was sweet and thin. It did not make me dizzy anymore.
On quiet nights I still dream of staircases, but now when the cat-mask man comes I pull the mask and see a face I no longer mistake for love. I feel the dream unwind. I wake and touch the model on my table; the Penrose stairs are still impossible. They always will be.
But now when I look at them I do not feel trapped. I feel oriented. I know a path I can walk: not down forever, but forward, step by step, knowing where each illusion begins and ends. I remember Annika. I live.
The End
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