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Thick night air, choked with open lilies. Pale, blinding face of the full moon.
Then comes the fall—always the fall. Ground opening beneath her—knees buckling—the endless drop.
*
Some nights, Sayaka wakes up before she hits the ground. Chest heaving up, down, up. Heart drumming. She glances at the woman sleeping next to her, undisturbed. Closes her own eyes. Forces her breath into a steady pattern, reminding herself that she’s still alive.
Some nights, she feels her body crack, electric pain skyrocketing through her limbs. The world splinters into bright, searing colors. Bloody lily petals, a swimming moon—
It’s all she can do not to scream when her eyes fly open, meeting a plain white ceiling.
But she never wakes Kirari up. The night is kind to her partner. The moon bathes her pale face in strange, soft light. Her lips, even in sleep, curl ever-so-slightly.
You fell with me, Sayaka reminds herself, over and over and over. Kirari looks so lovely when she sleeps. Sayaka watches her face, sometimes until the morning comes. When the alarm rings at six, rousing them for another day of work, Sayaka always pretends to have been asleep.
*
Sayaka never quite brings herself to ask: What if I’d chosen a different door?
An irrational line of thought. She hadn’t chosen differently. And she knows what would have happened: Kirari wouldn’t have jumped with her. For good reason—why would the former president of Hyakkaou Academy have leapt to her death with a fool? The Tower was a testament to Kirari’s unerring faith in Sayaka, a monument to her unswayable logic.
This much Sayaka knows. For years, she’s even thought of it as romantic.
The nightmares start much later, after they’ve graduated. Life should be idyllic. They have a spacious apartment of their own. Sayaka has a lifetime position as Kirari’s right hand, idly managing paperwork and business meetings. There are no silly gambling matches to oversee, no vindictive house pets, no brutish power plays. If anything, the corporate world is far more predictable.
And Kirari is hers—as hers as she’ll ever be. Sayaka plays the doting secretary at work, the loyal partner at home. And it’s equitable, as far as these things go. Kirari is childishly liberal with her affections. Teasing, kisses, lovelorn ramblings at night. It’s far more than Sayaka could’ve ever imagined—and yet, and yet.
The bad dreams take a toll on her. She misfiles a bank document, accidentally flubs a business partner’s name. Such things don’t escape Kirari’s scrutiny, but what can she do? It isn’t as if Sayaka’s just her secretary anymore.
(And Sayaka wonders, too—with every kiss, every teasing word, every gesture of vulnerability—would you have let me die? Perhaps there was something noble about death, once upon a time. Something useful about adolescent devotion.
She puts the thought to rest. Kirari knew you would pick the right door. She would’ve never let you get hurt.
And even if she had, hadn’t Sayaka been ready to risk everything? Hadn’t she staked her whole life—her love—on a gamble she was destined to lose? Maybe it was her fault for accepting the risk in the first place. It was wrong to blame Kirari, and even worse to doubt her.)
*
One morning, she bites the bullet while washing the dishes. Speaks into their humdrum silence: “Whatever happened to the Tower of Doors?”
Kirari glances up from one of their many fish tanks. The sudden movement startles a goldfish, which swivels away in a flash of color. “Oh, it’s still around. Why, Sayaka? Eager for a rematch?”
The casualness of the reply rankles her. “Not at all,” she says. “I was just curious.”
“We can go for a short visit, if you want. Or we could play a game, just you and me. How about it? Loser jumps, of course.”
Sayaka tries to deny the bitter, dark feelings stirring inside her. “I could never hope to beat you,” she responds as placidly as she can. “After all, it’s your tower, and you know it better than I do.”
“Oh?” Kirari’s face is all amusement. “How dull. Suit yourself, Sayaka.”
Sayaka almost lets a mug clatter into the sink. Her world is smaller now, and her anger is harder to mask. “Not everything is about having fun,” she manages, heat rising to her face when Kirari laughs.
“How typical. You won’t even think about it? Not even for me?”
There was a time when those words would have meant something more. Compelled Sayaka to do anything, anything—buy votes, leap out a tower, cut out her heart. Now Kirari is just a woman with rumpled hair, unpainted lips. It’s too early in the morning for this.
Sayaka steadies her hold on the mug, fighting the urge to say more. “We have a long day ahead of us, President. Let’s talk about this after your meetings.”
She doesn’t have to look to know that Kirari is smirking. President—Sayaka hasn’t called her by that title in a long, long time. And yet she speaks it in her dreams every night, eyes shining: I humbly offer you my love. A younger version of Sayaka would’ve leapt to say it again.
Right now—standing in the kitchen, barefoot, thumb running over a barely-perceptible crack in the mug—she isn’t sure what to think of herself. Kirari’s gone back to staring at her fish, ever mercurial. Before she can help it, something violent rises in Sayaka. A terrible part of her wants to smash the thick glass of the aquarium until the shards fly, water and fish spilling out in a torrent.
*
Before she knows it, it’s their anniversary. When Sayaka returns home from the office, the apartment is awash in yawning white lilies. The air is thick with their crisp, poisonous scent.
Nausea blooms in her.
She grips the doorway to steady herself. Kirari is still out and about, attending to errant clan business. (Her gut twists, thinking of the day she proposed herself for the Student Council. How the look in Kirari’s eyes wasn’t quite hers, how that was the first of many more secrets.)
Intellectually, she knows that the flowers are a beautiful gesture on Kirari’s part. This perturbs her. Emotion should come first, blind emotion, the kind that masquerades as logic. Another version of Sayaka would’ve been ablaze with sentiment.
These days, her eyelids are so heavy. She fingers the petals of one lily, then walks to the bedroom, collapsing onto the crisp white sheets.
When Kirari returns, Sayaka is on the verge of sleep, body tensed as if to prepare itself for another drop. She opens her eyes, slowly. Kirari has her pinned down, blue eyes glinting from above. A traitorous heat floods Sayaka’s body, one that stops just short of being consuming.
“Well?” Kirari purrs, skirting her lips against Sayaka’s jawline. “How’d you like your present, mm?”
Sayaka knows what Kirari is expecting—blushes, stammered thanks. The impulse to please dies in her throat. “You shouldn’t have,” she responds, and it feels true.
Kirari pulls back, studying Sayaka’s face with curiosity. “You don’t like the flowers, Sayaka?”
The look on Kirari’s face is so tender, so inquisitive. Sayaka struggles to reconcile this with the Kirari who, years ago, compelled her to fall. “They were unexpected.”
“Oh dear. You seem out of sorts,” Kirari says, sitting back on her haunches. Distant amusement replaces the light in her face. Sayaka resists the impulse to blurt out an apology, some kind of corrective statement. But this muted look doesn’t scare her anymore.
Instead, Sayaka pushes. Sleep deprivation—some misjudgment of consequences—compels her to speak. “They reminded me of that night, at the Tower—”
“—a wonderful night.”
“In some respects.” Sayaka’s gaze doesn’t waver, and she resents the slow grin spreading across Kirari’s face. “Really, Kirari. You weren’t the one gambling everything away.”
“Oh, Sayaka!” Kirari bursts into a peal of childish laughter. “You’re bringing this up, of all things? It was a perfect night—far better than I could have predicted.”
“What did you predict?”
“That you’d do everything correctly, of course,” Kirari purrs, leaning in to sweep a lock of hair out of Sayaka’s eyes. “Why wouldn’t you have? But the aftermath of that game… well, that exceeded expectations.”
Sayaka flushes—though whether it’s out of pleasure or embarrassment, she doesn’t quite know. “You knew I would choose the right door,” she echoes. The ghost of an unasked question lingers in the air: And if I hadn’t?
Kirari only chuckles, bringing her lips to Sayaka’s ear. “I’ve never known you to make an irrational decision.”
Sayaka can’t relax her body. Everything is perfect—deliriously perfect—but her mind can’t commit. She glances around the apartment. Cluster after cluster of ripe lilies. Fish darting in perfectly kept aquariums. Kirari’s smile, both loving and mocking. And her: who is she, if not Kirari’s right-hand woman, the girl who made the choice to be her number one?
Sayaka closes her eyes as Kirari sinks her teeth into her neck, as Kirari’s fingers delve under her blouse. Kirari’s wrong, of course—Sayaka is more than capable of every irrationality. Her instinctive moans prove it. Her flushed face, her quickening pulse. Her willingness to surrender to someone who could throw away her life in a moment. No, Sayaka thinks, you don’t know me at all.