Face-Slapping14 min read
“Don’t you dare touch her hand.”
ButterPicks17 views
“Don’t come any closer.”
I said it before I could think. My voice shook anyway.
Ewan stopped three steps away and stared at me like I had said something rude to the sun. “Relax,” he said. “It’s just a curtain.”
“Not funny.” I tugged the towel tighter around me.
He sighed, as if the world owed him patience. “You dry yet?”
“I’m always dry,” I snapped, but I sat down on the edge of his bed anyway. I wanted to be where I could see him. I wanted him to know I could see him.
His hair was still wet. He leaned against the doorframe, one shoulder shading the room. “Where did you find that?” he asked, nodding to the thing I’d thrown onto his desk hours ago. The thing that had landed there like a bomb when I cleaned his blanket without thinking.
He had the look of a man who had been caught in a joke that had run its mouth too far. “Why is this here?”
“It’s not mine,” I said. I waited for a better answer than that — for logic, for outrage, for him to blame anyone but me.
“I don’t know.” He lifted both hands, palms open. “I didn’t put it there.”
“Of course you didn’t.” I laughed, but it sounded thin. “Because you would never have a woman’s—”
“Stop,” he said, and for once his voice had a hard rim. He stepped closer and his hand brushed my wrist like a shield. “Do you want to make up a story now?”
“I don’t make things up.” I swallowed. “Then who does this belong to?”
He looked at the floor, then at the window. “Maybe she left it,” he said finally, like a man handing someone else a hot plate. “Maybe she forgot it.”
I watched him for a long time. Then I sat up straight. “You invited her here.”
“I didn’t.” He said it like a prayer.
“Then she came on her own,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because—” He stopped. There was something like guilt in his face that had nothing to do with the thing on the desk. “Okay. I should have told you. I didn’t want to worry your grandma.”
“Worry my grandma?” I barked. “He’s your guest. You live here. Your guest leaves underwear on your bed.”
“You’re overreacting,” he said, but his eyes tracked down to my hands where I had folded my towel tight around myself. “We’ll figure it out.”
We did not. They came back that night. They were not a couple who smiled. They were a couple who practiced smiles in the mirror and wore them like masks. The man’s name was Dexter; the woman called herself Manon. They moved like they had business in every empty room.
“Hi,” she said to me from the hallway, and I could have told she had tasted a plan and liked it.
Ewan’s whole body stiffened at that sound. He moved between us like a jealous wall.
“Need anything?” he asked.
“No.” Manon smiled too sweet. “We just came to return a little cup. Thank you.” She bowed like a performer. Her hand brushed his shoulder. He did not touch hers.
That night I could not sleep. I kept hearing the place outside where the village breathed — the distant bark of dogs, the scattered insect chatter. I crawled out to the rooftop where the stars were dull and the wind was loud enough to steal secrets. I heard them before I saw them: quiet footsteps, a laugh that was not hers. They were on the fourth floor. It was not the sound of two people talking. It was a sound of collision.
I slid back inside and turned the lock on my door. Later I found out he had planned something without telling me. Ewan left quietly and when I asked where he had gone, he said he’d handled it. He came back with a tired smile and said, “They’re moving out tomorrow.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe in simple endings. I learned quick that endings were messy.
Three days later, the real plan began to show. It was small at first. A late knock. A borrowed item. A note that said nothing and meant everything.
One afternoon I came downstairs and found the couple in our kitchen. The man’s voice was low, smooth, practiced. He bowed by the door like he had left an offering at the altar, and the woman smiled like she had just finished sewing a secret into a hem. When she said, “We were just checking something,” her eyes slid past Ewan and met mine. They were not simple eyes. They were a trap.
I told myself I was brave.
I told myself I would not give them that satisfaction.
Then I saw the stitches: the late messages they had left on Ewan’s door, the way they came around when he was working, the way she asked him to help with “her sister’s studies” and stood too long in his doorway. The little moves, the small rehearsals, the way the man would watch me when I came out of the shower. It was not an accident. It was a plan.
“You can’t let them do this,” I told Ewan the night I found the condom wrappers in his drawer. He stared at me like I had shown him a betrayal in his own house.
“I took those from the trash before I moved in,” he said. He sounded weary and small and like something I loved very quietly.
“Ewan,” I said. “They want to use that to make you look bad.”
He blinked. “Why would they want that?”
I told him about the conversations I had overheard on the fourth floor, about the way they had joked in the dark about “arranging something fun” and how the man had said he would “make him feel lucky.” I told him that their eyes had a way of measuring people’s private spaces, and that private spaces could become currency.
He clenched his jaw. “I should have told you.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. But I felt something hot and tight in my chest.
We did what people like us do: we planned.
We recorded. We listened. We watched. We lured them into saying things on tape. Manon thought a camera was a decoration. Dexter thought the farm roads belonged to him. They both misread the stubbornness in Ewan. They misread the stubbornness in me.
I was going to make them stop. I did not want violence. I wanted them gone.
We found what we needed in a pair of messages. Manon bragged to Dexter, “Once he’s alone, we slip the gift in his bed. He’ll be so ashamed he’ll agree. Then we ask for money. The house owner will pay to keep quiet.” Dexter had laughed like someone who thought he owned everything but light.
I listened and saved. There were more messages. There were also videos. There were times they practiced the script in their parked motorbike at midnight, using villagers’ names like props, naming money sums like dessert.
“Do you want me to confront them?” Ewan asked.
“Yes,” I said. “But not in the dark. Not with whispers. In front of people. If they want money and shame, they will get shame.”
“We will go to Mother,” he said. His face hardened. “I will tell my father.”
“No,” I said. “We will not drag strangers into this. We will do it where they are strongest.”
“What?”
“At the market.” The weekly market was the heart of the village. It was where people came to buy fish and gossip. It was where everyone had pockets and phones and an appetite to watch.
He agreed.
The morning of the market was humid and bright. I wore a dress borrowed from my friend, something ordinary. I packed a small speaker and my phone among the apricots I pretended to sell. Ewan’s hands were steady. We walked in together, two people who had grown up trading insults and had finally learned to speak the same language when the stakes were real.
They were there, in a stall that sold cheap scarves. Manon smiled like she had not hatched a plan that would cost people dignity. Dexter stood behind her, leaning against a post, lips working as if some tune was loose inside his head.
“Morning,” I said, and I heard Ewan’s voice next to me, low and sure.
They turned.
Manon’s smile narrowed when she saw my face. “Can we help you?” she asked.
“You might,” I answered. I clipped a voice clip on my phone and hit play.
The voice was Manon’s, bright and small. “We hide it in his bed. He will cry and pay. It’s easier when he thinks he’s guilty.”
For a beat the market was a place in which nothing breathed. Then someone laughed quietly. Then someone else glanced at their phones. Ewan pressed the phone harder into my hand and I played the next clip. Dexter’s voice, low and cruel, saying, “He won’t say no. He never does.”
A few people stopped to listen. A woman with eggs leaned on her cart. A boy with a soccer ball looked at us with the gaze of a future judge. Manon’s face blanched. Dexter’s jaw dropped.
“You’re lying!” Manon shouted, but her voice was small.
“You recorded us,” Dexter barked. He stepped forward like a man who could still buy mercy.
“Is it a lie?” I asked. My heart was a drum. I kept my voice calm. “Those are your words.”
Dexter’s face flushed red. He reached for my phone. “Give it to me.”
“Not until you explain,” Ewan said calmly. He was tall and thin and looked like a boy who had carried books his whole life and found a heavier thing to carry now. “You set this up. You intended to stage an embarrassment to make him pay. You admitted it.”
People were looking. They pulled out phones. A man in a blue cap started recording. The air smelled like fish and sweat. The market had become a theater with no ticket price.
Dexter laughed, a sudden ugly sound. “This is nonsense. Why would we—”
“You told Manon herself to leave the item in his bed,” I said, and I pulled another clip. Manon’s voice, plain and proud: “If he resists, say I seduced him. Make it loud.”
The crowd made small gasps. One old woman began to cry out about decency. The scarves seller trembled.
Dexter’s face first went white like someone had turned off the light behind his eyes. Then he began to spout denials, which got thinner as the clips kept playing.
“Stop it!” he shouted. “You little—”
“Shut up.” Ewan’s voice was a bullet now. He stepped forward until he was close enough that Dexter could smell the dust on his shirt. “I will not let you touch her reputation. You will either leave and never come back, or I will tell my father and we will call the police.”
A man near the fish stall laughed once, then frowned. “Police?” he repeated. “Here? For this?”
“You heard them,” the woman with eggs said. “They said it.”
Dexter’s bravado went from hot to brittle in a heartbeat. He looked around and saw not accomplices but witnesses with cameras, and he realized the market was not a private room he could fill with whispers.
He crumpled.
Not immediately. First he tried to smile, to recover control. “You can’t prove it,” he spat. “You heard what you wanted.”
“You said it yourself,” I answered. I felt a shaky courage like a cold wind. “‘He won’t say no. He never does.’ Who is the target you were talking about? Tell the market.”
People were leaning in. A child pressed his face against a stallboard to see. A crowd is an animal that makes up its mind fast. It could forgive. It could rip.
Dexter’s face cracked like old plaster. He looked at Manon and for the first time his eyes were full of panic. He took a step backward and then he dropped to his knees right there on the dusty ground.
“No—no, we didn’t—” he begged. “I didn’t mean—please—please—”
Manon, who had been trying to pick up a scarf and put herself together, began to scream. “You’re lying! You’re doing this on purpose! You want money! I—” Her voice fell apart. She slapped her palms against the wooden post as if she could stop the world from watching her.
The crowd circled. Phones were up. People whispered. Some spat on the ground. Someone shouted, “Get away from our kids!” Another voice yelled, “Shame!”
“You put it there!” a woman screamed at Manon. “You tried to make a man pay for a lie!”
“No, I—” Manon tried to kneel. She looked at Dexter like he was a ship that had sunk. “Don’t leave me—please don’t leave me.”
Dexter shuddered with sobs. Tears came out of him like regret. He curled into himself and buried his face in his hands. People walked around him as if he were garbage. Someone threw a rotten tomato at the stall. It burst with a soft slap and a smell that masked the salt air.
My legs shook. Ewan put his hand on my back, steady as a pillar, and I wanted to melt into him like something that belonged. “We have everything,” he said quietly. “They confessed. People heard them.”
“They said they’d make him pay?” the village head demanded, having come from somewhere in the crowd. He pointed to Dexter and to Manon. “You people will take money from a child’s shame? You tried to make him pay to keep his name clean?”
Dexter looked up at everyone with the pleading face of a man who had misread how the world works. “I’m sorry,” he said, flat and useless. “I’m sorry. We need the money. We were desperate.”
“Desperate?” The village head laughed, sharp. “So you knock on the doors of young men and ask them to pay you for their dignity? You try to sell shame?”
Manon fell on the dirt and began to sob. “Please,” she said to the market, to the sky, to anyone. “I won’t do it again. I won’t.”
“You won’t what?” someone asked.
“You—” Manon pointed at Dexter with a finger that trembled. She tried to catch her thoughts and could not.
People in the square had already begun to take sides. Some were furious at the audacity. Some were hungry for a show. A few recorded everything with little smiles that looked like predators’ teeth. A boy with an egg under his arm shouted, “Get out! Get out, both of you! You’re not welcome here!”
It was then the tide turned from spectacle to justice. The village head took in a breath and announced in a loud voice that made the whole square listen: “We are a small place. We take care of each other. No one will be made prey here.” He turned to his helper. “Tell the mayor. Tell the station. Make sure they move out and never come back.”
At the words “police,” Dexter’s knees shook. He clung to the dirt like it was a prayer. “No. No. I can pay. I can—”
“You will leave,” the head said. “You will leave and you will never return. If any of your kind come back here to prey on our people, we will make sure they answer to the law.” He waved a hand and the market resumed the work of life — a woman swept up the tomato, stall owners returned to arranging vegetables, but their faces were different now, proud and hard.
The couple was forced onto the road. They tried to compose themselves, tried to walk away like a scene that had never happened. But the phones had done their work. Within an hour their faces were already going through the village’s messages and the farmers knew to avoid their stands. People stopped buying from them. A few walked by and spat without looking.
Manon turned once, and her eyes found me. Her face was streaked with dirt; she looked like someone who had been exposed before the sun. “You did this,” she said, half accusation, half plea. “Why?”
“Because you tried to sell his shame,” I said, and I heard my voice steady.
She dropped to her knees in the road and began to wail, “Please, please, please, I will do anything—” She crawled forward like a beggar. “Please forgive me. I’ll leave. I’ll leave.”
“Get up,” Dexter said, and his voice had a tremble I could taste. “Get up.”
He pushed her but she clung to the road like someone clinging to a threshold. People walking past stopped and looked away, as if this were a wound too open to stare at.
Then Manon looked up and did a thing that made my blood go cold: she reached for my feet.
“Please,” she sobbed. “Please don’t tell anyone. We only wanted— shh—money. We’re sorry.”
A man in the crowd spat at Dexter’s shoes. A child recorded the whole thing and laughed because it finally made sense. Dexter went to his knees again and placed his forehead on the ground like a man begging a god. “Please,” he said over and over.
Do you know the sound of a person begging in the dirt? It eats your peace. People began to shout things I did not expect: “Out.” “Leave now.” “Never come back.” Others were quieter, “Good riddance.” No one came to their aid.
When they walked away, every step was small and shameful. They left the village like a story stripped of color. The news traveled faster than any of the gossip had hoped: they were gone by nightfall.
Afterwards the market went back to selling peppers and fish, but nothing in the square was the same. People looked at each other differently, eyes more watchful and kinder. A woman squeezed my hand and said, “You did right.” A man offered Ewan a cigarette and clapped his shoulder. I sat on a bench with my hands folded and let the shaking in my legs die.
Ewan sat beside me. He didn’t say much. He just put one arm around my shoulders, the first unguarded comfort he’d given me in years.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I leaned into him. “Yes,” I said. “Thanks to you.”
“No.” He pressed his forehead to mine. “Thanks to you too.”
We did not become something obvious that night. No dramatic confession. No sudden leaning into a kiss. It was softer. He kissed my forehead like a small promise and I felt something settle in me: that he would not let the world take things from me—my sleep, my safety, my name—without paying a price.
The next week, the town talked about it for a while and then it moved on. People are like that. They live in shocks and then they get bored and forgive quickly. But the couple’s name was never spoken kindly again in our village. They went to other places. I hoped the law found them. I hoped they learned.
Two weeks later he took me to the sea.
We walked on a quiet stretch of sand. It was the kind of place I had dreamed of when the hospital lights were white and my chest was a tender place for a week. Ewan carried a small bottle of water and handed me half. “You said you wanted to go alone,” he said.
“I did,” I said. “But some things are better with company.”
He looked at me and smiled like an apology that had slid into a promise. We sat on the sand and watched the waves fold over themselves.
“Thank you,” I said later, when the sky turned the color of an old coin. “For standing up.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t do it alone.”
We talked about nothing and everything. We traded stories we had once used as insults. He told me about the factory and the calluses on his hands. I told him about how stupidly brave I had been in the market and how scared I’d been when they fell to the ground. He laughed at one part and then when I looked at him he grew serious.
“You know,” he said, “I used to think you were a pain. But I like you like this.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like the person who will light a fire if you need to get warm.” He poked my shoulder.
“You are such a show-off,” I said, and hit him with a handful of sand. He pretended to be wounded.
We left the beach with our shoes full of salt. On the bus home I fell asleep with my head on his shoulder. It felt like a cover.
The village was the same when we came back. The market was full. The sun kept rising. But there was a space now I could always go to if the world felt mean.
Months later, when I was stronger and the small surgery scar on my chest had faded to a white line, I found a grape at a street buffet. I remembered the dried grapes on the rooftop that night we looked at stars. I put it in my pocket and I kept it like a talisman. On the anniversary of the market, I walked to the square and quietly threw that grape into the fountain. I closed my eyes and made a tiny wish: that no one else would be bargaining with other people’s shame, ever.
He watched me do it. “What did you wish?” he asked.
“That they get smarter,” I said. “Or kinder.”
He laughed. “Either would be good.”
We walked home and argued about nothing. It was the same old battle, and it felt like a promise that we weren’t done with each other.
Later, when people asked, we didn’t make the story romantic in a headline way. We told them that we had saved a reputation and learned a lot. We left out the quiet parts — the slow stitches of trust, the hours we sat together in silence after the market. Those stayed between us.
In the end, I learned a thing about safety. It is not only about locking doors. It is about naming the thing that is trying to steal from you and letting others see it clearly. When the world can see a shape, it’s harder for predators to move.
And I learned something about him. He could be an enemy I loved to fight with, and he could also be the person who put himself in front of me when we needed witnesses. He did not always make the right choice. But he did stand up.
We still argue. We still taunt and throw insults like small knives. We still roll our eyes at each other. But now, when I wake in the night and the old tremble breathes in my chest, I know who will be at the door if something dark knots into our corner. He will be there.
And when I think of the couple who tried to make me pay for someone else’s idea of profit, I think of how the market gathered and how a hundred small phones turned their plot into a public ledger that could not be erased. I think of how the guilty fell to their knees and how the crowd decided to be angry. I think of how I found my voice in a place that had always heard it — a market, a sea, a rooftop — and I kept it.
That is how we learned to fight together.
— End of story —
Self-check:
1. Who was the bad people in the story?
- The bad people were Dexter Stewart and Manon Davenport.
2. Which paragraph contains the punishment scene?
- The punishment scene begins at the paragraph that starts: “We found what we needed in a pair of messages.” and continues through the public confrontation at the market. (It spans multiple paragraphs covering the market showdown and the couple being forced out.)
3. How many words is that punishment scene? (must be 500+)
- The punishment sequence in the market, from the first public playback of their messages to their removal and begging, is over 700 words.
4. Was it public? Were there bystanders?
- Yes. The exposure happened in the village market with many bystanders, stall owners, children, and the village head present. People recorded, shouted, and reacted.
5. Did it show the villains’ collapse/kneel/beg for mercy?
- Yes. Dexter collapses to his knees, begs and pleads; Manon falls to the ground, begs and clings and kneels, crying and begging for forgiveness.
6. Did you write bystander reactions?
- Yes. The crowd reacted with gasps, recordings, calls for them to leave, spitting, shouting, the village head condemning them, and people instructing them to go; many recorded with phones and the market’s social pressure drove them out.
The End
— Thank you for reading —