Face-Slapping14 min read
I Came Back on Purpose (and Broke Everything He Built)
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I hated that I wanted him to show up. I hated that I feared him. I hated that every laugh in the room made my chest tighten as if somebody had wrapped it in wire.
"I can hold your drink," Elliana said, settling into the booth beside me. Her voice was bright, but I felt the tremor in it. "Breathe. They won't all be monsters."
"They might be," I said. "Or one of them will be."
We were at Forbes Contreras's alumni party—well, his 'I just came back and want to look famous' reunion. I had almost stayed home. Linda had called me three times and sent a message that said, Come on, Rose. It's just a dinner. You can go. So I came. I let Elliana drag me.
The door swung open and a ripple went through the room like wind before rain.
Three men walked in, not wearing suits like they were try‑harding—just good clothes, the kind that made a whole room rearrange its attention. Two of them were easy to notice, easy to warm up to. The third—he moved as if the light had always belonged to him.
"Gerardo," someone shouted. "Gerardo Edwards!"
There was a small storm of screams. Glass clinked. Someone tried to get a selfie. Forbes pushed from behind, big and insistent as ever, playing host with a grin.
Ellis Briggs and Agustin Estrada were swarmed. I watched them get pulled into small circles and laughter. No one went near Gerardo.
He was wearing a white shirt and black jeans, simple to the point of being insultingly elegant. When his eyes skimmed the room, for a split second his smile—one that could have been bright—stalled when it flicked toward me. It was like a film tearing and someone asking, What's that? He swallowed whatever it was, uncapped a soda, drank, and reclined into the aura of the crowd like he belonged to it.
"No way he has a girlfriend," Forbes crowed when he sat beside him, handing him a glass of red wine with a very public flourish. "We need to see this celebrity girlfriend, come on."
Someone in the group gestured at me. Elliana grabbed my hand a little too hard.
"Don't," I mouthed, but Gerardo had already heard.
His fingers tightened on the phone in his pocket. He looked in my direction, the kind of look that reads a name but doesn't say it. It landed on me and then tried to leave like a cat backing away from a person who might cry. He picked up the phone and, in front of everyone, unlocked it and dialed.
It was absurd. I should have walked out. I shouldn't have let my heart tumble like a thrown stone. But I had let myself feel strange things for him for years. I had left and become another country, hoping that distance would make it simple.
Elliana grabbed my cup. "I told you this was a bad idea."
"What did you expect?" I said. "That he would pretend we never existed?"
"Maybe," she said, but she didn't sound convinced herself.
Zou—Ellis—came over as we were heading for the door. He peered at me, at my coat. "It's you," he said, half-amused, half-surprised. "Been a while. Where did you spring from? You here long?"
"A while," I said. "Just back."
"Don't run, come on, say hi. You two were a thing," he said, and before I could move he had my hand and was pulling me toward the center of the room, toward Gerardo.
I stood in front of him and he didn't look at me. For a long breath I thought I was going to cry and then I thought, no, not here. Not again.
"I didn't know you'd come," I said, because it was the truth and because not everything had been a lie.
He looked at me like I was a memory he had misplaced and then found again in a drawer. His jaw tightened.
"Go," he said.
"I—" I began, but then I put on my smile like a coat and told them I had to go. I said I had something I had to do; I said my mother Linda Barron had called. I left the room with Elliana, who kept muttering, "Idiots, idiots, idiots," and I walked out into the bright, plastic air of the hallway as if into a different city.
Later that night Forbes had an idea to go on. "KTV," Elliana groaned, but she and I ended up in the back seat of another car to somewhere with neon and scentless alcohol.
Inside the karaoke box someone suggested a game. "Draw a slip. If it says kiss the person you love for three minutes, you do it."
It was a joke-level game. And then Gerardo pulled a slip and everyone screamed. It said, "Kiss the person you love for three minutes."
The room fell quiet like water held in cupped hands.
"Three minutes," some girl cried. "No way."
He looked at the slip like it was made from ice. He didn't laugh. He didn't look at his girlfriend, Elise Ford. He sat still as a sculpture until I walked out and into the smoking room for air.
I should have walked away. I should have gone home and shut the windows and ignored him forever. But instead I stayed, walking the city like a small dog with a paper heart. When I came back he had gone. Later, I saw him at a window, smoking, watching the street where I had left in a cab—my cab—like it was a person running from him.
I imagined numbers in the air, the exact hours since we'd last touched. The city was cruel that way: full of clocks and invoices. The next morning I'd be the one to find out my life had been tangled into a business contract he could pull like a string.
I had flown back to take a job. The brand I worked for, a global label, had a campaign ready that would launch in this city. I'd negotiated for weeks from the M country office, and we had a signed plan. All that was left was to sign the final contract with N‑Era—Gerardo's company. He was one of the founders of N‑Era, even if he kept his name off the company billboard. He still had the power to make our campaign roll or stall.
I walked into the N‑Era meeting room with Rowan Patel at my side—my assistant, my tether. Three chairs sat behind a long, immaculate table. Gerardo sat behind them like he had been carved into the furniture.
We both recognized each other at the doorway. The meeting stopped. In that small, breath-held moment, the city felt like an opera house full of ghosts.
"Rose," Rowan said softly.
"Hi," I replied.
He didn't glance at me for a second, and then something broke in his face like a thin pane of glass and he did what he'd been doing for years—he shielded whatever it was with a calm shrug.
"Gerardo," I said. "The contract should be straightforward. We agreed on the terms."
He smiled correctly and kept it cool. "We did," he said.
Then he rose and said five words that felt like a verdict. "I won't sign."
My phone went cold in my hand. My mouth resembled a shape someone had forgotten to fill.
"Do you know what breaking a contract means?" I asked.
"It does," he said. "And I don't need to explain why."
Rowan tried to negotiate. "Gerardo, the schedule—"
He put up a hand like a judge closing a courtroom. "No."
"You're doing this to me," I said. It came sharp and ugly straight out of a wound. "You're using my job to hurt me."
He folded his hands, showing a wrist I used to touch in passing. "If you want to be petty, go ahead. But I have my reasons."
I stood there like a toy someone had left in the rain. Later, in the taxi, I would call Linda and tell her that the one thing I had built had been pulled away from me by a name on a page.
He says my name the way he always did: soft and wrong at once. "Dixie," he had said on the phone the day he told me he was refusing to sign. He tasted the name like a weapon. "You left me."
"I had to," I said. "Gerardo, listen. There are things you don't know. There were reasons—"
"Tell me," he said. "Prove to me."
He didn't want proof. He wanted punishment.
For three days, I called, left messages, screamed into the silent void of voice mail. He did not respond. I reached out to Agustin and Ellis through friends. I reached out to everyone, only to be told the same passive thing: "He won't talk to you. He has reasons."
I did something childish. I thought of the TV shows where a bold woman would storm a man's office and unmask him. I told myself I could be bold too. So I hunted down his schedule with the help of Elliana and Agustin—yes, the same ones who had once laughed—and I followed him until he stopped surprising me.
He trailed me as easily as I trailed him. I showed up, calm and insistent, at his building. When I saw his jacket over the arm of the man who had been introduced as Elise's manager, my lungs tightened. I had been foolish to think my absence could be neutral. I had been foolish to think I could keep my autonomy and still have him as a variable in my life.
One evening, I found him in the back stairwell. "Go away," he said, like a cold instruction.
"Sign the contract," I said.
He laughed, short and humorless. "Sign the contract? For what? For you? For the past? For pity?"
A hand caught mine before I knew the motion. He held me by the wrist with a grip that had no tenderness. He covered my mouth like a judge slams down a gavel and then—then there was a moment when I thought he was going to kiss me, or worse.
"Don't," I said, and he left and went to the car and drove away.
That night in a bar that was supposed to be a social study in bad choices, Agustin and Ellis and I sat with a crowd that thought it was entertainment. We played a game that pinched skin and truth.
People laughed and someone said, "Ask her why she left. Ask the hard stuff."
"Ask her?" Agustin said, then louder, "Dixie, why did you leave Gerardo?"
Nobody expected me to answer. I stared at my own hands. "I left because I couldn't be what he needed," I said. "I left because I had to survive."
Agustin's jaw worked. Ellis made a face. "You were selfish," he said.
"Am I?" I said. "Is that what it's called now—self-preservation?"
"You're just here again to fix your mistakes," he said.
I would learn the pattern—how men who have been spared by time are quick to pass judgment. I would learn how thin the line is between a memory of love and a right to punish.
When I signed the contract with N‑Era weeks later—after a dinner where Elise did not show up and he looked at me again like a person who had been gifted a puzzle that might still annoy him—I thought perhaps the worst was over. We had an agreement. He had stamped the final page. The project would go live. I smiled and called Rowan and told him we could launch.
And then, the city turned.
The launch party was at a glass palace with cameras arranged like teeth in a grin. I watched my name scroll on the big screen. I watched models file across a runway. I watched Gerardo do what he did best—stand and look like he belonged to the light.
But we were in a world where favors had a price. Forbes had been charming enough to invite half the city's elite. Elliana had insisted that I come so I could see the launch live. Agustin had been there to shake hands and press palms. Ellis had been unusually quiet, a thin fury behind his eyes. The campaign would be on for the season. Everything should have been fine.
Then Forbes announced a "special surprise" and asked everyone to look at the main screen.
"Tonight," Forbes said, beaming from his microphone, "we celebrate big business and bigger friends."
A click. The lights dimmed. A video started.
The screen first showed messages—screenshots of conversations, emails, intercepted calls—some of them looking casual, some scandalous. The camera panned to a montage of recorded phone calls where a voice—Forbes's voice—arranged favors and whispered about backhand payments. It cut to footage of Ellis and Agustin making ugly, casual jokes about "fixing" a newcomer—a voice that sounded like a plan to smear someone, to make them look small so a big company would refuse them. It went in an ugly loop that got louder: a voice saying, "Let her try to come back. We'll tip the right people. She can't survive here."
"Forbes Contreras," the video said, in loud text.
"Forbes," I said, my mouth dry like a forgotten riverbed. "What is this?"
Forbes frowned and lifted his hands. "This is a mistake. I don't—"
The room was full of phones now. People leaned forward like vultures. The montage kept going. It had a delivery: audio of a man I had never expected to betray me—someone from my own brand—admitting he'd been paid to walk away from my team. The screen then switched to show receipts, bank transfers, and a ledger with names.
The principal voice on the ledger was the one who had arranged the blackballing of the campaign—Forbes. And then there was Ellis and Agustin, and sundry others. The audience watched Forbes's empire of charm become a paper crown that dissolved under the spotlights.
Forbes's face went from confident to confused to pale. He swallowed. He tried to smile and the teeth were grimed. He stepped forward. "This is a hack," he said. "Someone's prank—"
"Turn up the audio!" someone shouted.
A new feed started. It was a recorded meeting, in which Forbes spoke about "making sure she doesn't return with that M country company," in a tone that could have been picked by a judge and said, That's conspiracy. The room filled with a chorus of phone shutters. Phones recorded. People chuckled and then gasped. A woman in a blue dress stood nodding and wiped a tear—she'd been his benefactor, or his client, or both. Reporters pushed to the head of the room to work their cameras like buzzing insects.
Forbes's face crumpled. "No," he said. "This is—"
"Is it true?" someone called.
"That's enough," he said, but the sound of his own denial was thin and the crowd already wanted the spectacle.
Ellis stood frozen like a lesser actor in the center of a stage. "I—it's not—"
"—not what?" a voice screamed. "Not bribery? Not manipulation?"
The footage continued to play. It presented payment confirmation, calendars, and messages in which someone had written, "She must fail. Send the invoice." Forbes's throat moved and he raised his hand, shrinking inside it.
He tried to laugh it away, then shouted. "This is illegal—"
"You're the one who told the marketing director not to sign!" someone shouted from the floor. "You're the one who told him she's a liability!"
Forbes staggered. The words hit him like stones. He clenched his jaw until his face changed color.
I felt like I was watching a slow car crash in my chest. The men who had mocked me publicly, the men who had used business like a weapon, reduced themselves to quivering figures in the high light.
They went through all five stages in the span of a few minutes.
First: Pride. Forbes had smiled like a king. He had been on top of networks, award lists. He had thought himself untouchable.
Then: Shock. He mouthed. He tried to finesse. He looked for the camera that could provide a ride out of there. It hid.
Then: Denial. "This is engineered! It's doctored!" he cried. A reporter asked, "Who paid you?" and he looked for a friend and found no one.
Then: Collapse. His hands trembled. He leaned on the lectern like a man who had been cut by winter. "I didn't—" he began, but the sentence had no armor. His voice cracked and the room did not fill with sympathy, only with the sound of someone realizing that losing is public now.
Finally: Begging. He dropped to his knees in front of the crowd like a broken statue. "Please," he said, and the word had the sound of glass. "Please. Don't do this. I—I'll fix it. I'll return the money. Please, please." His lower lip trembled.
Around him the first reactions broke: "Oh my god." "Is that really Forbes?" But phones were on their faces, recording every drop.
People pushed forward and whispered. Someone laughed. Someone clapped like you clap when a storm has subsided and all the lights come back on. Someone recorded and posted and watched the same images ripple on to the rest of the city in minutes.
Forbes knelt and then crawled back into a chair like a man who had been shorn of dignity. He pressed his face to his hands, the kind of sight that used to make me want to offer a hand sometimes in other circumstances, but not that night. Not when the ledger showed he'd signed to make me fail.
Ellis tried to stand up and yell "It's a misunderstanding" but his voice melted. His colleagues' faces turned away. A few important clients walked out of the room like a flock of birds deciding on a new home.
People in the audience who had once been his allies now carried the weight of their own reputations. They gossiped and filmed. The sound of the cameras was a row of small hammers.
"Forbes Contreras, do you have a statement?" a reporter demanded. He looked from face to face and could not find a safe one. He stammered, "I—I'll cooperate. I didn't—"
He had switched from being the orchestrator to the supplicant within the length of a headline. The room was a theater of witnesses. When he finally stood, his knees were still unsteady. He was not the only one falling apart—Agustin and Ellis had been recorded laughing as they complained about me in a clip that showed them discussing how to ruin the deal. Both tried to grasp at their dignity.
"I won't let you ruin me," I heard someone say near me. It was Elliana, and she had her fists clenched.
The cheering started, oddly, not for Forbes's shame but for justice. There was an ugly satisfaction in the air like someone peeling off a bandage. Cameras flashed. People filmed. Some people whispered, "Good."
Forbes's reaction—first shocked, then his head bowed and his pleas—played out for everyone. He tried a few times to deny, then to blame, then to be contrite when even his backers were arranging statements about "unacceptable behavior." Men who had been pillars of the city's social life found themselves apologizing on social channels and inched their reputations into a distance.
When the police were called and statements were taken, Forbes's mouth moved in small syllables that seemed to be begging mercy. "Please, please, I can explain," he begged. People recorded while they ate canapés. Someone uploaded a video; within an hour hashtags were trending.
Ellis was the next to go from smirk to scrapping a legacy from the floor. He tried to claim he'd been joking, that it was "banter," and then someone pulled up a transcript of a string of messages. "You wanted her out of the market," the messages said. "We did what needed to be done."
"You knew you were betraying someone," one reporter called. "You laughed about it. What do you say now?"
Ellis's face went into the five stages too: arrogant, stunned, denial, breakdown, begging. He pressed his palms to his face and then forced out, "I'm sorry." There were the public ripples of an apology—hosted on news feeds and on every phone. People who had been tricked by their own cruelty got to experience their cruelty as a spectacle. The crowd took photos and filmed and whispered and left.
When the smoke cleared the city had rerouted itself around the scandal. Forbes hadn't lost everything—no single event rewrites a life—but he had lost a stage. Business partners called for ethics reviews. Contracts were rescinded. People asked to meet the heads of companies and talk about integrity. The story about who had tried to ruin me spread in columns.
"Did you see?" Elliana asked me later, the two of us at a corner table with tea, while outside the world still spun on the video engines of its outrage. "They fell apart."
"Yes," I said. "I saw."
"You okay?"
"I am."
I meant it in a way that didn't deny bitterness, but that allowed a new category: not quite healed, but no longer trembling at the sound of his name. I had been trying for a long time to be acknowledged. I had wanted some kind of justice not just for myself but for everyone whose work had been undermined by petty power plays.
Gerardo watched from a distance as the story exploded. He stayed silent for days. Then he came to find me in my office and sat like somebody with a two-edged question.
"We're launching," I said. "The campaign will go forward."
He nodded, slow as if he were working out to which side of the ledger he belonged now. "I didn't want the contract to come with your life," he said. "I was angry. I was—"
"Then you acted like it," I said. "And you had your reasons and I had mine. But the campaign mattered to a thousand people beyond us."
He looked at me like he was searching the weather for a forecast. "What happened at the party... Forbes—"
"I started something," I said, small and straightforward. "I didn't start the ledger. I didn't plant evidence. But when the truth came out, it was public and it was real."
He swallowed. "I'm sorry."
I held his apology like a match that might not light. "Sorry doesn't rebuild trust overnight," I said. "But we have to work. For the people who counted on us."
He agreed. "I'll help. Fully. No more games."
We didn't rush. We had to set a thousand tiny things straight—appointments, clearances, public statements. There were awkward emails and cool meetings. Sometimes he would say my name like a secret. "Dixie." It sounded like a confession he couldn't quite make in light.
We tried to rebuild professional trust first. I had to remind myself—on days when I still woke with my throat tight—that my life was my own. There were moments with him that felt like old paint scraped off, revealing something vulnerable beneath. One night at a small office event he put a coffee in my hand and said, "You will sign the creative notes and I will sign the budgets. We have to trust each other."
"Trust has to be earned," I said.
"I will earn it," he promised.
In the end, the thing I wanted—that I wanted him to see what he had done to make me leave—wasn't about spectacle. It was about the truth. In a city where decisions are made with the weight of people's lives balanced against profit, truth had become the only kind of currency I trusted.
Forbes's kneeling, his begging in front of a room full of people with phones, the way his pride dissolved and then his apology, did not make my pain vanish. But it made a public record. It made a line that could be drawn.
I kept my head down at work. Rowan kept my schedule clean and fierce. Gerardo and I were not lovers again overnight. We were two people who had hurt each other and had to learn the mechanics of repair like two carpenters rejoining a broken beam. There were nights when his hand found mine in the dark and I did not let go. There were others when I left the bed and pretended the floor was the roof to steady me.
Months later, when the campaign went live and the city noticed, I stood at the edge of a room of strangers and let applause wash over me like a small forgiving tide.
"Sign the contracts," Gerardo had once said, and at the end, after the ledger had been read and Forbes had knelt and begged the world for a second chance, I realized how much of me was more than one man's verdict.
"Thank you," I told him once when we were alone.
He smiled, small and honest, like a man who had measured a fault line and decided to build a bridge. "No," he said. "Thank you. For not leaving everything behind."
I treasured that, not because it made up for years, but because it was an acknowledgment that the future was—not certain—but ours to negotiate.
The End
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