Sweet Romance12 min read
I Dream in Chapters — A Girl Who Refused "The End"
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I always hated the way my dreams smelled like the future—sterile, colored, certain. I learned to respect them. I also learned to be afraid of them.
"My name is Melissa Martinelli," I say to myself in the mirror, just to make the world feel real. "I paint. I run a small gallery. I am Colby Buchanan's daughter. I have a secret: I see things before they happen."
The first proof was the exam score. I dreamed the exact number on my test report, down to the last digit. When the paper came, it read exactly the same. My hands were shaking when I checked.
"613," I told my roommate like it was nothing. "So what? I won a prize?"
"You are weird," she said, laughing. "But impressively weird."
The second proof was small and ridiculous. I dreamed of a boy on a yellow bike crashing into me in a crosswalk. Ten minutes later, I was on the pavement, my calf skinned and bleeding.
"Are you okay?" a voice asked.
I looked up into a handsome, clean face with tired eyes. He helped me to my feet, fussed over the scrape, said the polite things. He didn't know me. I stared. He left without leaving his number.
"Typical," I muttered. "Dreams get me into trouble, and handsome men get away."
The third dream, the one that broke me awake in a sweat, was not small. I stood on the edge of a high building—my father's building—watching the city. The clouds arranged themselves, slow as breath, into three black letters: "END." The scene froze like a photograph and then crumbled like dust.
I did not want to die.
A week before that wish-for-death dream, a girl named Estelle Conti moved into my life. She was my father's child by someone else, a soft-voiced girl who picked my studio as her sunny room and flung my canvases on the floor as if I had no claim.
"Melissa," my father, Colby Buchanan, said lightly when I came home and found paint on my floor. "Take Estelle's room. I'll find you a larger studio."
I smiled and lied. "It's fine. I can move. I've got shows, I'm busy."
I told myself not to think the wrong thought: that the world had become dangerously close to the dream. I told myself I was not the main character of anyone's story. I told myself I would not be a finished line on a page.
The yellow bike boy turned out to be Marcus Rice. Later I found him at the small city hospital where he worked as a surgeon. He had the same tired eyes when he put a mask on.
"Where is the pain?" he asked, professional and calm when he saw my leg.
"Heart," I joked, stupid enough to test him. "My heart is the problem."
He did not laugh. He frowned, measured the wound, prescribed antibiotics and a dressing change.
"Will you be changing it?" I asked, stepping close, daring him with flirt.
"Not necessarily," he said, flat.
"Change your 'not necessarily' to 'necessarily.'"
"Then it's necessarily not."
We played like that, back and forth. He was dry, he was sharp, and he was kind when it mattered. He also had a stubbornness I fell into like a safe room.
"Do you like being a doctor?" I asked once between wounds and flirt.
"Sometimes," he said. "Mostly because it keeps me busy."
"Count me as one of your busy projects," I told him. "A fun one."
"You are a trouble," he said, and then doctored my leg with thoroughness that made me want to kiss him for it.
Then there was Brooks De Santis. Brooks was my childhood friend, the boy who had been in my life since we both were small and put-bandaged teddy bears on the same sofa. Our families had intended us to be a planned couple: two important names, an easy alliance.
"I am not yours on paper," I said to him the day I tried to force him into speaking. "When will you declare?"
He blinked like it was a prank. "Melissa, what are you talking about?"
"You said you'd confess one day in a dream," I said. "I thought I'd make it easier."
He scratched his head and batted the air. "You write these things better than I do. I am not great at confessions."
I decided to give fate a nudge. I said yes in a dream, just to see how things would change. For a while, nothing. The world held its breath.
Then a savage thing happened. I was in the hospital again—this time to change my dressing—when I saw Marcus clicking through a QR code for a patient, and my name popped up on his phone. He had added me by mistake once before; history kept looping.
"That's you? The one who messaged me about bubble tea?" he said without looking at me.
"Of course," I said. "Who else would need to know how I take my taro?"
We both laughed. He said, "You are persistent."
"I practice," I said.
That night the clouds arranged themselves into a new sentence: "CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: AN AWKWARD TURN." I stared at the sky until the letters faded, like a child reading a sign that should not belong in the air.
Weeks bled into one another. Estelle was everywhere, smiling, apologizing, offering to move out and then flustering when I said it was fine. My assistant at the gallery—Ansel Fisher—was helpful and shy, a clean-faced boy who made the sales, swept the floors, and painted late-night sketches.
"Take a break," I told him as he sat in the studio, pale in the lamplight. "You look tired."
"It's nothing," Ansel said too quickly. "I'm fine."
He wasn't. He was a knot of feelings and obsession and rehearsed lines that belonged to strangers.
One night, when the world felt safe enough to breathe, I fell asleep and dreamed that Brooks confessed under the stars. I smiled in my sleep and woke alone. For once, the world did not follow the script. My relief stayed for half an hour.
Then the scrape of a bike, the sudden pain across my leg, and the memory of white paint on the floor made me breathe fast.
"You can't keep living like this," I told Marcus after he had checked my wound again.
"What is 'this'?" he asked, steady.
"The dreaming. The falling. The way clouds spell things out. If it's a book—" I stopped. "If it's a book, I'm a page, Marcus. I don't want to be finished."
He looked at me like I had named an illness instead of truth.
"Melissa," he said slowly, "whether the clouds spell chapters or not, you are not a page. You are a person. I won't let you be anything else."
His voice was soft. I wanted to believe him so badly I almost did.
The first attempt to erase me came at the gallery.
Ansel—my bright assistant—led me into the storage room saying the light was broken and we must move a painting. The room smelled like turpentine and the lamp cast too-perfect shadows.
"Turn on the light," Ansel said, and then a rag appeared over my face. There was the strangling smell of chemicals. I thrashed; my hands were bound. Panic arced through me like electricity.
"Melissa," a voice called from a distance. It was Marcus, loud and rushing. "Ansel! Get off her!"
The rag slipped enough for me to taste the world. Marcus behind him grabbed my foot. Ansel's face was calm when he spoke in the small room.
"I wanted to see if art is inside," he whispered like an explanation. "You are beautiful and perfect. I wanted to keep you quiet so the world cannot ruin you."
"You are a monster," I croaked.
He smiled as if this was art critique.
Marcus fought him with angry precision. He pinned Ansel's hands, wrestled the rag away, and then took my trembling body into a bear hug that let me breathe from the lungs again.
"Call the police," Marcus barked into his phone. "Now."
Ansel fled before the sirens—stupidly—could reach real speed. He left a trail of paint smudges on the stairs, his prints on canvas. He was caught within a day. The news called him a deranged art student. The papers ran photos of his once-clean face. He laughed in many of them, and it looked empty.
The authorities thought they had concluded a case. The world resumed its thin, quiet hum. I breathed. The clouds spelled nothing but ordinary weather.
But catching him was only the beginning. My mind had a second anxious task: to make sure that when the book tried to end, it would not find me pinned to a last line.
Weeks later, Ansel Fisher stood in court. The media were thick—phones up, cameras whispering. The courtroom was a theatre of faces: neighbors, gallery regulars, reporters, and the families of the victims who had been unlucky enough to attract his attention. I sat with Colby Buchanan and Brooks De Santis, and across from me, Marcus's hands knotted his coat in-restless solidarity.
"Stand up," the judge said, and Ansel rose like a puppet.
"You are charged with attempted murder, assault, and unlawful restraint," the prosecutor read. "Your actions in the storage room were planned."
Ansel's eyes scanned the room. At first, there was a flash of the old, eager boy, a doe waiting for applause. Then, as the charges were read and eyewitness accounts unfolded—how he'd lured me, how the rag smelled of chemicals, how he had joked about 'preserving beauty'—his composure faltered.
"Do you understand the gravity of your actions?" the judge asked.
Ansel smiled that same crooked smile he'd worn in the mugshots. "I—" He stopped. The first crack appeared there, subtle, like a spider-line across a doll's porcelain face.
"You thought you were protecting art," the prosecutor said, voice sharp, "but you were removing a person. People stood here and said how you bullied them, manipulated them, and then escalated. You have to answer."
A woman in the folding chairs, a collector who had once bought a painting and then returned it citing "bad energy," stood and pointed at Ansel.
"You ruined my niece!" she cried. "You said you loved her work, and then you used her trust to hurt her!"
People began to murmur. "Shame!" "How could he?"
Ansel's eyes darted like a trapped animal. He, who once held everyone's pity, now felt the weight of the room. He tried to joke then, a reflexive defense.
"I only wanted—" he began.
"You wanted?" the judge cut in. "You removed her agency under the guise of art. You tied her up and injected her. You said you wanted to 'see' an inner life."
Ansel blinked. His mouth opened, closed. Tears did not come at first; it was disbelief, then anger, then a brittle, thin laughter as if he might still be acting for the camera. "I didn't mean to—"
A young woman—Kylie Scholz, Ansel had once mocked for her 'lack of taste'—stood. "You meant to control," she said. "You meant to decide who lived and who was a masterpiece."
The murmurs grew louder. Phones came out. A dozen cameras caught the angle of his face as social media streamed the moment live. People leaned forward like they were watching a spider break a web. They clicked, tapped, recorded.
"I was lonely," Ansel said, the first honest line he'd ever spoken. "I couldn't stand the idea that beauty could go on without me."
"You weren't lonely," said Marcus when the prosecutor let him stand to give his victim impact statement. His voice was cold as metal. "You were selfish. You thought life was a thing to be framed. You do not get to decide whose life belongs in a frame."
"You told me once you'd be my assistant forever," I said afterward, standing to speak. My voice trembled but did not break. "You told me you'd carry my palettes, sweep my floors, be there. I trusted my assistant, and in that trust you betrayed me in the worst way. This is not art."
A pause, then the crowd's reaction: a ripple of gasps, soft curses, shutters. People made clear their judgment not just with words but with presence—some turned away as if to spit the sight from their mouths, others held up signs saying "Justice," some filmed as if to preserve proof that he was human and fallible.
The judge's sentence that day focused on jail and therapy. But the court's real punishment was public and slow. "Public punishment" in the modern world is not always physical; it is exposure, the moment-by-moment stripping of reputation.
On the day of the official public hearing—arranged by victims and community leaders in the square because they believed truth must be seen—Ansel was brought before a crowd two blocks wide. Hundreds came: neighbors, victims' families, art students, social media followers who had once loved him for his 'sensitivity.' Cameras were set to livestream; local AV trucks lined the street like sad steel flowers.
A raised platform held the microphone. I stood with Marcus and Brooks. Estelle stood behind us with her hands folded. The nurse who saved me, Louise Delgado, and the ER volunteer, Kylie Scholz, were there too. The prosecutor read the timeline again in the open square, and between each line the crowd hummed.
"This is the day the city says you cannot treat people as objects," the prosecutor said slowly so the microphones caught every syllable. "This is the day we return the dignity you tried to take."
Ansel stood under a thin, cold sun. At first his face held that old defiance. He thought perhaps the crowd would listen, pardon him, let him explain. Then witnesses came forward—neighbors who had worried and no one believed; friends who had copied his cruel humor and now called it out.
A woman who had been his teacher stepped forward. "He was a gentle boy," she began, voice low. "But I missed the signs. We all did." She didn't look at him, she looked at the crowd. "We are sorry."
Ansel's face began to change. Pride fell away like a stage mask. At one point, someone in the first row shouted, "Why, Ansel? Why did you pick her?"
He tried to speak. His mouth moved. The microphone took his voice into the world. For a moment, his words were small apologies and tangled excuses.
"I was scared of losing her," he said. "I wanted to keep her close. I thought—"
"You thought you could keep people under glass!" a woman yelled, and the crowd repeated it. "Under glass!"
What followed was the public's verdict: not legal sentences—those were already set—but social abjection. People turned their backs not just in anger but in ritual. Former fans who had admired his melancholy flipped their signs. Bloggers read his old private messages and posted them with commentary. A cleaning crew scrubbed graffiti under the courthouse while volunteers read survivors' letters over an amplifier.
The powerful moment came when Brooks—quiet until then—walked to the microphone. He did not scream. He did not yell. He looked directly at Ansel.
"You grew up in our town," Brooks said. "You were one of us. I worked with you in the studio. You drew lines and I bought paint. I believed you were better. Today, I am ashamed I didn't see earlier."
Ansel's composure unraveled then. The sequence played out in the public square slowly and painfully—arrogance to disbelief to denial to frantic pleading to collapse. He began to tremble. His voice, which had been steady and sweet earlier, sucked air and made paper-thin sounds.
"It wasn't like that—" he started, hands clutching his shirt.
"It was like that," Marcus said, calm and terrible, leaning into the mic with surgical precision. "You lured a woman into a room and tied her. You injected her. You said you were making art. You don't get to hide behind 'art' and 'loneliness.'"
Some in the crowd recorded everything; others simply watched, not wanting to be complicit by framing the moment further. I felt sick and strangely cleansed. This public unmasking was not a spectacle for me; it was an act of choosing life over silence.
Ansel staggered, and then he collapsed into the arms of two officers. His final expression in that square was not a dramatic breakdown but the small, human collapse of someone who had become undone by his own lies.
He begged. He cried. He pleaded for forgiveness from a hundred faces, for pity from cameras that had once lifted him. At first, the crowd hissed and asked for firmness. Then a few voices called for him to get help. Others chanted "Justice," and a small group beat out a rhythm with their hands as if to summon order.
Ansel's reaction shifted from arrogant to desperate. Once smug about his control, once convinced his charming excuse would carry him through, he now realized the world did not revolve around his intentions. The crowd watched: anger softened into a clinical, pitying gaze. People recorded, posted, wrote op-eds—everything a modern public punishment does: it makes the fall visible and sustained.
Months later, when Ansel's legal sentence concluded with community service and a mandate for therapy, the social punishment still held. Galleries that once boasted his name removed his works from walls. Students discussed ethics in flyers at the art school. I walked past an exhibit once featuring his sketches and saw a placard that read: "The artist's work is not the same as their life."
That is different from a private arrest. That is a slow unfurling where the person is publicly diminished and has the chance to feel it, to confront it. He changed as much as anyone can when the world refuses to look away.
After that public day, life tried to repair itself. People whispered about me; some called me brave, some called me fragile. Marcus stayed. Brooks hovered, awkward and real. He still loved me like a hometown memory, and yet when he confessed quietly one night, "I've always liked you," it came with a depth I couldn't deny.
"Really?" I asked, half—hopeful, half—sly.
"Since we were kids," he said. "But I want you to be happy."
"Even if your happy is with Marcus?" I asked.
Brooks smiled, and for the first time we all laughed. The garden was ordinary. The world did not end.
But the novel's machinery is patient. Clouds still spelled chapters sometimes; other days they spelled nothing. I kept dreaming—more and more. The title-card clouds formed lines like chapter headings. "CHAPTER THIRTY: SHE LOVES BROOKS." "CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE: THE SUBSTITUTE REVEALED." I had to make decisions, not because a reader might like it, but because living and not being an end was my own fight.
Marcus and I found each other in small, human ways. He cooked me terrible but earnest dinners. He told me quietly, "If we are written, we can still choose the punctuation."
"Can we?" I asked one night, tired and honest.
He kissed my knuckles and said, "Let's make our own lines."
We kept our small rebellions. We ignored the LED screens that sometimes flashed "SECOND LEAD, TURN DARK." We made milk tea orders into private jokes: "Taro with extra pearls, add sugar, add ice, add me." We read passages of our lives aloud and laughed at our oddity.
The clouds were patient, but the people around me were more real than any sentence. When Brooks spoke to me under a streetlamp and said, "Stay," he meant it in a way that made weather irrelevant.
In the end the world did not crumble at the phrase "END." We prevented it from collapsing by refusing the role assigned to us. The novel kept writing its chapters on the sky, but I answered back in small motions: a phone call to a friend, breakfast with a doctor, a real "I love you" that did not need dramatic punctuation.
"I woke up old in a rocking chair," I dreamed once, white hair, Marcus's hand warm beside mine. "The clouds printed 'DO NOT END HER.'"
"Then we did it," Marcus said into the future. "We lived."
And if anyone asked which line saved me—my stubbornness? Marcus's hands? Brooks's steady presence?—I would say it was the small, bright one: a taro-tea order and the way he laughed when I called him "a terrible, noble doctor."
The last thing I saw that mattered was the sky writing, slowly, and then changing into something softer: not a final page but a chapter title that read like a promise: "A LIFE, CHAPTERS UNFINISHED."
The End
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