Face-Slapping16 min read
Hydrangeas, Hypnosis, and a Dangerous Kind of Love
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I remember waiting at the mall entrance, tapping my watch with a small, petulant smile. The sky over the glass roof was the color of pale tea, and I kept thinking of hydrangeas. Hydrangeas made me calm. Hydrangeas made me draw.
"My phone's stuck in traffic," Wilma moaned into the screen. "Three minutes, I swear. Do not leave without me."
"Three minutes, or I'll charge you for emotional time," I typed back and then felt silly for being childish and serious at once.
Wilma arrived breathless and bright. "Astrid! Sorry—"
"You are always three minutes late," I said, peeking at my watch.
"I ran, I ran," she sighed dramatically and leaned her head on my shoulder. "Buy me a dress and I'll forgive you for ever being late."
"Deal." I grinned.
We were headed toward a boutique window when I literally walked right into a stranger and his smell hit me before his face did. A cool, crisp scent—leather and mint—and then eyes: sharp, dark, and bright like cut glass.
"Sorry!" I said too fast, stepping back.
He didn't smile. He only watched me as if he'd been waiting a very long time. Then his face shifted—there was recognition in it, a gasp like someone finding a lost photograph.
"You're—"
I hadn't the faintest idea who he was. He had a jawline like a classical statue and the kind of face made for magazine covers and whispered gossip. My heart, traitor that it was, thudded as if it knew something my head did not.
"Hi," I said. "Do I know you?"
He grabbed at air and missed. Panic crossed his face like wind. He called someone's name—"Finbar?"—as if a familiar anchor could anchor him. He lurched forward and then, as quickly, steadied himself. I took one step away.
Wilma, unbothered, tugged my arm. "Astrid, see that dress? We have to try it on."
"I'll wait." The stranger—Griffin Calhoun, he said eventually, his voice low like someone used to being listened to—stayed where he was. When one of Wilma's fan screams broke through the hum of the mall, he turned his whole attention back to me and said, "You look like the picture I keep in my head."
The world rewired for a second and I laughed because it was absurd and because the sunlight bounced off his cheekbones as if to dare me to be calm. I told myself later that I was being melodramatic. I told myself later I had been looked at by a man haunted.
"I—" I started and then the phone in my pocket buzzed. Wilma's voice: "Astrid, Li Tong apologized. He bought dresses. He paid. I'm done being mad." Her voice bubbled with relief.
"You forgive him?" I asked, red with sympathy and exasperation.
"Of course," she gushed. "He's so sincere."
I felt stupid. "I'm leaving."
I did leave, because crowds and famous faces and strangely intense men are a thready mix for someone who wants quiet. I hailed a taxi, hugged my bag of instant noodles for later, and slept on the ride home. I never noticed the dark car that followed.
That night I woke to warmth against my cheek and a breath that smelled faintly of mint. Someone was in my small rented room.
"Who are you?" The question came out high, small.
"Don't be afraid," he said. He smelled like rain on pavement. A name slid from his mouth—"Griffin Calhoun." He sounded certain. I sounded like the person who had been in someone else's life in a movie and had just woken up from a different film.
"Griffin?" I asked, incredulous. "I don't—"
"Please," he said, suddenly close, fingers gentle on my wrist. "You don't remember me, but you will."
I told him to leave. My voice found courage, raw and immediate. He didn't scoff. He watched me like someone watching a fragile thing that needed careful steps. His thumb brushed my palm and a hunger, a trembling edge came into his eyes.
"Don't make me prove this by force," I said. I had no idea why I said such a thing to a handsome stranger, but I said it. He looked shocked and then tender. "I won't hurt you," he said in a voice that suggested he'd already hurt in other ways and wanted to be forgiven.
"Please go," I gasped, and then I lost time.
I woke hours later in a big, quiet room with molding on the ceiling and a rug that smelled faintly of perfume. Griffin hovered, his face like a prayer.
"You're safe," he told me.
"Your house?" I asked. My throat was raw.
"Yes."
Panic was still something I recognized, so I clutched the bed. "You came into my—"
"I came because I couldn't stop worrying," he said simply. "Come downstairs, eat. You're pale."
He made me food I would later recognize as all the things I loved—braised ribs, lotus root, a plate of small lattice cakes. Everything was exactly right. I had never told him my favorite dish. I wasn't sure why that unsettled me more than the rest. He downed a glass of water and didn't eat.
"You ate?" I asked.
He smiled. "Earlier."
At the table he asked small questions, and when I said I was from Yu City he said, "Good." He smiled the sort of smile that suggested a plan now had reason.
When I excused myself to use the bathroom, Griffin rose and followed, though he was careful to seem casual. He waited at the door and when I reemerged he said, "If you like, we can go home tonight."
"I—" I was dizzy. My stomach felt raw and hollow in a new way. "I should leave."
"Stay for tonight," he said, gaze earnest. "I'll drive you to school in the morning."
There was a steady pressure in my chest. Safe, I told myself. His presence was both a cloak and a cage. My body wanted sleep and rest and the softness of his couch. I accepted, then slept wrapped in a blanket of strange, beautiful safety.
In the morning the house smelled like tea and wet paper. Griffin watched me wake with awe, as if I were a shared sunrise he had waited for a long time. He kissed my hair and called me "my Astrid." It made me feel small and adored. I had a head full of fog—two years lost to me—and there were moments when I recognized nothing but the shape of his voice.
"Morning," he said when my eyelids fluttered open.
"Where am I?" I asked, voice thin.
"Home," he said simply. There was a ringing tenderness in him that flickered to something darker when the word wasn't returned.
It turned out he was famous, once. Once was all the world knew him: a contestant on a TV program, someone who had been talked about and then vanished. People said he belonged to blue-blooded lineage, that the world he left behind wasn't meant for TV bright lights. People said things when people wanted stories. I only saw his face up close, and I felt the gravity of it.
There was a man named Bernardo Sokolov—soft-spoken, with gentle manner and the patient voice of someone trained to take trauma and rearrange it. Griffin brought Bernardo in to "help" when I was frightened and fragmented. "Hypnosis," Bernardo explained to me once, his fingers steepling. "It can be a bridge to memory, to calm."
"Is this necessary?" I asked. I could feel my memory like a torn photograph.
"It can help you sleep without nightmares," he said. "I won't make you lie; I will help you heal."
I had no real context to decline. I did not remember my past two years clearly—only blanks and bright, jagged edges. Bernardo's voice was calm. At night, under soft lights, he told me details about things that had once been mine—like the blue hydrangea on my balcony—and I nodded because his voice felt like a safe place to put my head.
The caution in me melted like frost under the sun. If someone with kind hands said, Come home, would I refuse? I didn't know anymore where my edges began.
Griffin doted. He fed me, wrapped me in towels, gave me little comforts. He was fierce when he wanted to be—insisting I eat, forbidding the world to peck at me like a scavenger. He watched me sleep, forehead pressed to my temple, whispering, "Don't leave me."
And I, in the fog of sleep and Bernstein's slow chairside voice, learned to say his name when he asked.
"Say my name," he murmured once, fingers warm on my jaw.
I said it, because the sound comforted him and because the memory pinned like a note: "Griffin," I whispered.
The line between repair and theft blurred.
"You're mine now," he said once, after a long day of watching hydrangeas on the vase tilt toward the light. It could have been tenderness. It could have been a claim.
For a time I let it be tenderness. I let the days fall like petals into something gentle, a harbor. He called me privately "my moon," and I called him the first name I trusted.
Life should have been safe.
It wasn't.
At school the summer breeze rolled hydrangea petals loose across campus. I walked between the blossoms and felt eyes on me. A lecture was scheduled—Professor Sebastian Engel in uniform—his presence like a blade of poetry: a body in straight lines, a face that had made my cheeks bloom at first sight. He asked us to fill in assignments, and when our eyes met on him, the room hummed. He later found me alone under the hydrangea trees and gave me a folded blossom, his fingers cool on mine.
"Keep it," he said. "You look like you belong with it."
I said thank you. I left with my sketchbook heavier with some new, bright idea. He watched me walk away and something like ownership sparked in his handsome face.
A week later, a set of messages spread like spilled ink. Videos that were private turned public. The campus saw me in photos, in quick, grainy clips with Griffin and with Sebastian, and gossip spun into knives. My classmates' whispers turned into acts. It was one thing to have quietly admired someone from a distance; it was another to drag someone into rumor until they became a target.
I learned then that people who loved the idea of a person sometimes loved the person more when they could tear pieces off them in jealousy.
Sebastian's response was not gentle. He made a show of disliking me. He said cruel, possessive things—things that left marks. Once, I walked away from a lunch counter in writing class and his hand closed on my neck like a clamp. The press of fingers hurt. He laughed as if to make a joke, but his laughter was a blade.
Griffin saw the mark. The way he saw it changed something inside him; something jealous, raw. "You are mine. No one touches you."
I did not want this: the way his hands tightened, the way he watched me like a flame to be guarded. He said he would cut down anyone who laughed at me. He called Bernardo, then called Finbar Bryant, who worked with him, and ordered investigations that felt like siege plans.
Then the worst: a night when I didn't return home. I had been going to the library when the world snapped. I remember someone forcing me into a van, hands rough, and the nauseous churning of metal. I remember stinging smells and a dull, distant knowledge of a basement. I remember being tied, blindfolded, and the cruel amusement of being set up to think I'd escaped.
I had managed to cut the ropes once—God knows how—and for a breath I stood, knife-bright in the dark, a cut in my side. For that fragile moment I thought I would run.
Then the blade bit.
Someone laughed. The devilry of it was cold. My back was a map of pain and the camera whirred and whirred. The man who kept his distance—Chandler Hansson—thudded with cruel satisfaction. He filmed and filmed, and my blood and breath and voice turned into someone else's trophy.
"Please," I begged. My voice broke. "Please—stop."
Chandler smiled. "This will fetch a price. Tell Griffin to pay up."
Pay up for my life? The idea curled in me like a knife. I tried to imagine Griffin furious, the way his teeth would show. I tried to imagine having someone to call and say: I'm here. He wasn't there.
I woke in a hospital with my head bandaged and Griffin like a shadow guarding the door. Tears burned my eyes—not because I was in a hospital, but because I had been made into a thing.
"Who did this?" I whispered.
He swallowed hard and admitted, "They said if I didn't pay, they'd—"
"Who?" I demanded.
"Chandler," he said. "And the man who thought he owned you, Sebastian Engel."
The world closed to a point and then broadened into a road of fury.
The next day I watched as the university assembly tried to make sense of rage and injury and the economy of celebrity. A clip leaked online—someone had filmed parts of a fight between Griffin and Sebastian on campus, and another clip showed masked men in a van. The dean called for a hearing. People lined the hall like a thrumming sea and phones were lifted like small moons.
On stage, under a light too harsh, Sebastian sat with that cool, composed face people trusted. He had a presence that commanded an audience. I sat in the second row, fingers cold in my lap. When the moderator introduced "evidence," I felt sick.
"Roll it," the dean said.
The video we all watched wasn't just a brawl. It was a record: Sebastian hand-clasping my neck, Sebastian touching my hair in a way that betrayed claim, Sebastian in the hydrangea grove. Then another piece: a voiceover from someone who had been inside the van—Chandler's voice—describing how they had followed my routine and how Chandler's crew had taken me.
Sebastian's expression changed. At first a thin mask of surprise. Then denial. Then the slow peel of panic. The hall exhaled in pity when a student shouted, "Isn't he the one who bit her neck?"
"That's a lie," Sebastian said immediately, his voice flat like a coin. "You are accusing me falsely. This is slander."
"Is it?" replied Finbar Bryant, calm and steady, the witness who had seen Sebastian near the hydrangea grove. "I was there. I saw you leave the grove with her, and I saw you return with a smirk."
"That proves nothing!" Sebastian snapped, his fingers tapping a rhythm that had gone from smug to frantic.
"You also hired people." A teacher's voice came from the side, firm as a gavel. "We have receipts, text messages, witnesses. You didn't expect to be found out."
"When the dean invited us to speak," a baritone prosecutor said, "we found transactions to an unknown Chandler Hansson, a man currently identified as the actor behind the van abduction."
A murmur ran through the crowd like thunder. Phones clicked. "Play the second clip," someone shouted.
They did. A grainy image: the van idling in an alley. A recorder capturing Chandler's mocking laughter as the masked men made a plan. In the playback Chandler's voice said, "Make sure she screams. The price goes up if she tries to run."
That was the moment the hall became a furnace. Sebastian's face drained of color; recognition turned his poison into horror. He blinked, then looked to the gallery and sought some golden rescue that did not exist.
"That's not mine," he said. The denial was brittle. He sounded like a man with a carefully maintained suit who had just realized it was on fire.
A student in the back stood, courage raw. "You told us you admired us from above," she said, voice steady. "Why would you hire people to injure what you said you admired?"
"I never—" Sebastian's tone shifted through the stages: proud, then flustered, then insane with self-defense. He started to backtrack, to point fingers, to call it a conspiracy. Friends near him scuttled and tried to cover his tracks with slogans and excuses.
"Enough." The dean's hand went up. He had a document, a ledger that mapped payments from Sebastian's account to a shell company, and phone metadata that tied Sebastian's number to messages mentioning "the girl" and "make her remember pain." The dean read line after line. Each sentence was a shovel shovel shovel.
I watched as his arrogance cracked. He tried to laugh and failed. He reached out for a defense that none of the audience would give. Students filmed with their phones, faces lit by a theater glow. Whispers hardened into a chorus of condemnation. Someone began to clap slowly, then more hands joined—the clap of justice.
Sebastian's mouth opened, clamped shut, and finally, with a sound like a man hitting a wall, he muttered, "This is—"
"It's not true," he kept saying, the phrase turning into a plea that landed with no one. Then he tried to stand. He tried to call someone to vouch for him, but his friends shuffled away as if animated by the same fear. He looked smaller under that light, and the camera caught everything. It would be on phones and feeds and in the mouths of those who wanted to see a titan fall.
Then the collapse came.
He stood up abruptly, eyes bright with a sheen of bloodless panic. "You can't do this," he cried, and the voice went high-pitched, shrill. "You can't— I didn't—"
People drew back. The dean gestured for security. Someone from campus law enforcement stepped forward. The bolt of authority was public and immediate. As two officers guided Sebastian toward the stage exit, he tried to plead. His pleas followed the arc of someone who had been celebrated and now had to request mercy from the crowd that loved spectacle.
"You're making a mistake!" he shouted. "This isn't me! Please!" His face had lost its composure and embraced panic.
A student raised her phone high and recorded every second. Around us, the crowd's reactions roiled: some were shocked, others cheered, others cried at the betrayal. One of my classmates whispered, "He looked at Astrid like she was his prize." She was looking at me, pity soft on her face.
Security pushed Sebastian onto his knees at center stage for a moment, a way to mark that his authority was gone. It was humiliating and the hall pressed in like walls. He stayed on his knees and begged, twitching between denial and whispers of apology. "I'm sorry— I'm sorry— please— I can explain—"
Glasses clinked in the hands of some of the more cruel viewers. Others shook their heads and wept. Students pressed their phones to their chests like prayer stones. A woman front row raised her fist and the entire hall echoed. "No!" she shouted. "We won't have predators!"
Sebastian's face went through the stages everyone had declared: first smugness, then confusion, then fevered denial, then finally surrender. He fell to crumpling tears right there, palms pressed to his face like a child punished. The cameras did not look away.
"Please," he asked, then choked on the word. "I didn't mean—"
"No one cares about your regret now," a voice called from the balcony. "You can't steal someone's life and then beg at a podium."
People started to chant: "Accountability! Accountability!" The chant spread, and Sebastian faltered, his pleas swallowed by echoes. Students stood. Professors released statements. The dean read his pronouncement: Sebastian Engel would be suspended pending criminal investigation; the university would cooperate fully with authorities. The applause for that line felt like order regaining its place.
As the officers escorted him out, he reached for me—almost like exalting himself with my presence one last time—and I looked away. He fell to his knees again on the courthouse steps outside some cameras had followed him to. I watched a man I thought handsome reduced to a sobbing, pleading shape, his satin of dignity stripped away.
Chandler Hansson's fate came swiftly after. The footage played in court later was worse. He had been smug on his feeds—smug and proud—and then witnessed public shame unfurl the same way. When his identity surfaced, when his face mapped onto the van's license and when witnesses recognized his voice in the recording, the community's fury found him.
At his arraignment a week later, the courtroom was packed. "You thought us soft," people said in the whispers. "You thought brutality could buy you silence." The prosecution laid out the clips: Chandler's laughter, the cuts, the threats. He went from cocksure to pale, to denial, to pleading. He begged the judge like a man trying to bargain his way out of himself. Spectators shouted questions; some filmed; others stood to applaud when the judge read bail denial. His collapse was public: he slumped in shackles and begged for mercy as cameras recorded. That day the feeds showed a man stripped down to his boilerplate confession, and the crowd's reaction was a hard, necessary thing—alarm, vindication, outrage, relief.
"You're disgusting," someone near me hissed watching him. "Do you understand what you did?"
He couldn't meet the gaze. He shook. He said, "Please—please—" and it was less a plea than a raw, ragged question: why did I do this? He had nothing to say that could add up to what he'd broken.
On campus, consequences rippled. The student offenders associated with the episodes were expelled. The university's decision was a public spectacle: those names were read not to shame all, but to show that lines had been drawn. Parents stormed the dean's office; some threats were shouted; others fell into hollow pleas. The dean's voice remained steady. "Harassment, abduction, threats—those have consequences." The justice seemed clinical and final.
I felt torn: relief that the men who had violated me were finally accountable and a sick guilt for the disruption it caused to lives around me. Wilma hugged me and said, "This proves he's a monster, Astrid." I wanted to believe her.
Griffin stood beside me through the hearings and the phone calls and the social hurricane. He loved me with a kind of possessive devotion that frightened me sometimes, but when I saw the way he crumpled in private—teeth clenched, hands trembling—I also saw how much he had done to keep me safe. He had hired people to track, to protect, and in the shadows maybe he'd done more than protect. I forgave when I shouldn't, because forgiveness is a crooked shelter we build when we are too tired to stand.
After the public punishment, my days returned to strange new rhythms. Bernardo continued to meet with me. He explained slowly that the human mind protects itself by layering memories into pockets, and sometimes those pockets get seeded by other people. "You may find an affection you didn't feel before," he said once, patient. "It isn't always false if it's been offered much gentleness."
I wanted to unpick the ethics of that. I wanted to wrestle from the world a truth that wasn't borrowed. I wanted my own claims to mean something.
One afternoon, in the garden where the wooden hydrangea tree had been planted, I sat with my sketchbook. The petals arced like small moons. Griffin came and sat beside me, hesitant and altogether present.
"Do you remember the painting you left?" he asked.
"Sometimes," I admitted.
"Do you remember that you like hydrangeas?" He watched my face as if it was an answer he'd been waiting for all his life.
"I love them," I whispered, perhaps out of truth, perhaps out of a desire to keep the man who had kept me.
He smiled, soft and brittle, and kissed my knuckles. "Good," he said. "Then stay. Stay with me."
I looked up at the sky cutting through the trellis like blue glass. The world had been cruel and kind and sharply complicated. I thought of Chandler in the courtroom, Sebastian on his knees, the gasp of the crowd as evidence plays—that terrible public remedy that made villains smaller and honest people safer.
"Griffin," I said, my voice only a small thread. "I will stay with you. But you have to let me make my choices."
He looked at me, and for a moment his face showed that raw, aching hunger to be loved in return. "I don't want to be the thing you tie your life to," he whispered. "I want you to choose me."
"I choose to be with you," I said. "But not because I'm hypnotized or coerced. Because when I remember, I still want you."
He looked stunned, as if I'd given him a currency he thought impossible. He traced a hydrangea petal between his fingers and pinned it behind my ear with ridiculous gentleness. "Then let me keep it."
Time does not cure everything. The scars on my neck and my mind remain traceable. But the public unmasking, the humiliations of those who thought themselves above harm, taught the campus—taught me—that a community could choose to protect instead of to preen.
When Sebastian's trial proceeded, he came into court in a stiff suit. He looked at me and his eyes had a hollow, pleading quality that the public spectacle had not erased. He was ordered to a criminal investigation; his name was down in records and the rumor mills fed on it. Chandler got no mercy: his sentence would be public and stern. That day, the judge's gavel sounded like a lid slamming on a pot. "Justice was served," some said. "And not fast enough," others countered.
I will not pretend everything repaired itself, nor that the man who loved me—Griffin—was no more dangerous than the men who hurt me. He was. He still is. But love is a wide, complicated country and we both live in it, sometimes stumbling.
The story I tell now ends at a small, particular place: the hydrangea tree outside my sketching corner. On its lower branch, near a place where bark had flaked once, I keep a tiny engraving of a date—the day everything changed.
One warm dusk, I set my hand on that spot and remembered a voice that had been mine before anyone rewrote it. I closed my eyes and felt the summer wind. Griffin came and sat down without asking. He took my hand in both of his, thumb rubbing circles on my knuckles. I felt the pulse of him, steady as a drum. I felt mine answering.
"Remember this," he said softly.
"I will," I answered.
And I did. I remembered how brave it had been to step out into the light and to watch the tide of people and to see monsters dragged somewhere they could no longer reach us. I remembered how brittle apology can be, and how necessary accountability is. I remembered hydrangeas and how their petals keep secrets.
That night I sketched a hydrangea with both hands—one shading, one steadying—and I signed it with my name for the first time in three years.
When I placed the finished sketch in a frame, I set it on Griffin's piano. He looked at it the way a sailor looks at a safe harbor.
"You kept your promise," he said.
"I kept mine too," I said.
He leaned in to kiss me, slow and even and demanding. I let him, because choosing him was not the same as being stolen. I had lost years and somehow found a choice.
"Be mine," Griffin whispered.
"I am mine," I said.
He laughed, not at me but with relief. "Then be mine too."
I rested my head against his chest, where once his hands had been the shackles that terrified me and now were the weight I loved. I couldn't promise forever. No one could. But I could promise presence and honesty and a refusal to let the world strip me quiet again.
Outside, the hydrangeas tilted toward the moonlight and shone like small, bellied seas. The echoes of the public punishment—of the courtrooms and the dean's lecture—had changed the campus a little. Or perhaps it had only made one place safer. Either way, that night I fell asleep with the sound of Griffin's breathing against my hair and the steady, very human beat of my own chest.
The End
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