Face-Slapping12 min read
I learned to play for myself
ButterPicks18 views
I remember the rain that night like a cold fingernail tracing my spine.
"Be quiet around Yue. Don't make her angry," Daniel said, his voice low and steady, like the cello he sometimes pretended not to hear but always felt.
"I know," I said, and I fastened the last button of his shirt. My hands trembled, but I smiled. "I remember."
"Good girl," he said, and he pinched my cheek like I was something soft he could keep. He put on his coat and left without staying the night, like he never stayed the night — always gone as soon as dawn still smelled like rain.
I stood in the window and smoked until the smoke blurred me into a softer version. I had known from the beginning that to Daniel I was useful and cheap. I had chosen him when my mother's bills piled up; I had seduced him with the clumsy courage of someone who believed a miracle might be practical.
He gave me a job, a place to live, and one rule: listen and obey. I kept believing it would be enough.
Until Freya came back.
"Your secretary's pretty," Freya said casually the first morning she walked into Daniel's office, her voice smooth as silk, her eyes sharp as a hook.
I froze behind the door, my hands on the tray of coffee. Daniel turned and only shrugged.
"Is she?" he said. His shrug was small and cold.
Freya laughed lightly. "No way she could ever be... serious."
"Please get my bag," Freya commanded later. I reached for it. The bag slipped. Jade spilled out and struck the floor with a crystalline sound, then shattered into pieces.
"Watch it," Freya snapped. She slapped me so hard I tasted blood. I hit the floor on my knees. The office smelled of disaster.
Daniel picked the broken pieces up, pressed them into Freya's hands, and said to me, "Apologize."
"I'm sorry," I said. My apology was a thin thread. He smiled at Freya and said, "Feeling better?"
"Very," she purred. They left arm in arm.
People talked. "She hooked him," they whispered. "She only got in because she seduced him." Their voices felt like needles.
I limped to the bathroom and found that few people even cared. When Ike came to the lift and said, "Mr. Daniel asked me to send you home," I nodded. I trusted him to look calm. He didn't touch me.
At home, I slept badly. Daniel came that night and sat at the edge of the bed with ice and wine and gentleness he seemed to keep for himself.
"You're hurt," he said.
"I’m fine," I lied, but he wrapped an ice pack around my cheek and dabbed my knee with wine and a bandage as if I were breakable glass he intended to mend.
"Don't go to work for a few days," he said. I did as I was told.
He stayed overnight once, and in the morning he left a card and a string of money. "Two million," his assistant had told me later. I transferred a chunk to the bank for my mother's hospital bills. Good, I thought. He had fixed the practical problem.
Only, Freya came and I disappeared.
When I returned, Freya had been present the whole week. She sat by his side and drew him like tide to moon. I kept the tea and pretended my heartbeat was not loud enough to be heard. Then she tugged my collar and said, "Who did you sleep with last night?"
"I—" I covered the purple that td the thin skin of my throat, and she yanked my hair, laughing, "You tramp."
Tobias showed up then, not with his usual reckless flirt, but steady. "Leave her alone," he said. He was stubborn and honest and he smelled like coffee and long trains.
"Thank you," I whispered to Tobias after he left.
At night, I found a place at a smoky club and learned how to pour drinks and how to sell an evening. I learned how to make men laugh and make them forget I had a mother's face in a hospital bed. Freya's laugh haunted me like a charm I couldn't remove.
One night, a man at my table—Esau—decided I belonged to his wicked appetite. He grabbed me and called me names. I slid my heel into his foot and escaped to the bathroom where I cried until the mirror steamed. Tobias nearly knocked the bastard out when he found him.
"Get away from her," Tobias said, furious, strong and red in the face.
Daniel watched it all as if he had been sent to study the map of me—the parts I could give and the parts I could not. He didn't move.
He told me later, cold as the rain that used to lull me, "Quit that job."
"Are you going to support me?" I dared to ask.
"Are you asking me to?" he said and walked out.
I went anyway. The club earned daily wages. When the money dried, I did what panic taught me: I sold myself in small, sharp ways and lost a name every time I surrendered a piece of dignity.
One day, Colton, my violin senior from university, came back into my life. "Elliot," he said kindly, "I can get you into a place to play."
He took me into a band where the leader, Tyler, told me, "You play piano? Come try." My fingers found keys like old allies. For one night, I played and felt the music close its arms around me. It was like a prayer.
I worked. I learned to teach children. A little boy in a silk suit, Yuki, called me "Auntie" one day and pulled me into warmth; he made me forget the hellish rooms where men judged my worth by how fast I caused them applause.
Daniel kept visiting, sometimes like frost, sometimes like a suffocating blanket. He asked me in the night, "Will you have my child?"
I froze. "What?"
He looked at me with an appetite I could not translate into love. "You can bear one. Your family needs it."
"You're asking me—?" My voice shook.
"Do you fear it?" he said. His mouth was soft. "Are you afraid I'll leave?"
I could not answer. He pressed ice to my eyes and left. The next morning he donated again, and it bought me a few quiet days.
When I finally stopped sleeping with hunger in my blood and I began to play and teach during the day, my videos tripped into an audience. Colton brought me a chance to sit in a rehearsal with the big orchestra. I left my audition trembling and flying.
"You're good," the conductor said. He was kind. Keiko, a director from overseas, approached me backstage. "Would you go to Germany?" she asked. My throat closed. My mother was dying and my debts were a wall. I said no and then I thought: what have I made of my life?
The story I was living had small and large humiliations. Freya continued to smile like a blade. Esau, the man who had once cornered me, pretended to be my ex-fiancé in front of patrons at a club to get a spectacle from me. People who wore their contempt like custom thought I was nothing. Men I had never loved thought I could be bought and sold with the blink of a luxury card. It was cheap and it cut.
Then came the competition.
I entered a fashion design contest with the remnants of my mother's sketches. My hands moved with memory, cutting and sewing through the long nights until I had a dress that was a promise. I wrote my statement, poured my grief and hope into a silhouette, and shipped my work.
On the day of the preliminaries the venue smelled of perfume and hot lights. I was number thirty-eight. The room buzzed with jealousy, with people who had never loved, only collected titles.
Freya approached me then, nose like a knife. "You show up here like you belong," she said. "You took my brother's husband's attention and he left me in a bind, but you—"
"Tobias is not yours to use," I said. My voice was small but I pressed the words out.
"You're nothing," Lexi from the judging committee sneered. She had spread rumors. Lexi liked to think she was a queen. Her words landed like stones.
I kept quiet. I had learned when to bite my lips. But the day took a turn I did not choose.
Daniel watched from the second row, expression closed like a shut window. Freya sat beside him and laughed like a bell that always falls on the wrong side. Esau and his cronies hovered near the back, smug and predatory.
When my turn finally came, I watched my model step into the light. The music I had chosen swelled and I felt every inch of my life unbraid into melody and fabric. The piece spoke of a seamstress's daughter who sewed pages of her life into clothes and mended a heart that a city broke. The crowd quieted, and for a breath the world became only cloth and rhythm.
After the applause, a man I thought I could trust produced a phone and, with Daniel on stage beside him, began to play a video.
"It's footage that explains everything," he said. "Pay attention."
The screen lit up. It showed a hidden call between Esau and Lexi. At first the crowd laughed, thinking it a trick. Then the words became clear—voices plotting to smear my name, to feed the press lies that I had slept with patrons for money and that my design had been ghosted. The video described how Freya had ordered a public humiliation the morning my bag broke, and how Lexi had been bribed to publish a slander piece to bury me.
"You're lying!" Freya gasped at first, hands fluttering out like a bird that had just hit glass.
Esau's smile froze. He had been smug mere seconds before.
Daniel's voice cut the hum: "I didn't like how you were treating her."
Freya's face ran through color. "You said—"
Esau laughed thinly. "What is this, Daniel? A trap?"
Lexi's mouth opened and closed. The crowd shifted. Phones came up. Someone shouted, "Play it again!"
I stood where I was, my chest so tight I thought I would faint. Tobias appeared beside me and put a hand to my shoulder like a brace.
"How dare you," Freya stammered. Her eyes, once sharp, were now round with panic. The camera zoomed on her face; someone in the crowd muttered, "She ordered the hit."
Esau's expression slid: from casual to confused to a brittle anger that could not hold. "This is doctored," he said. "This is fake—"
"No, it's not," Daniel said. He had given the file to Ike. Ike had always had a way with small truths.
The video continued. It had bank transfers and messages—a cold, small litany of greed. The sound of typing, the words: "Make sure she looks like a tart," "The club will do the rest," "Twenty thousand. Stop the article." The crowd drank it in. The air became electric.
People around me began to react.
"What the hell?" someone said, voice sharp with righteous anger.
"I knew something was off," another whispered, and then moved to the front for a clearer view.
Freya sank into her chair, her mask of superiority flickering, then gone. She tried to stand, then steadied herself against the armrest. "You can't—" she said, loud but unsteady. "You can't show that! That was private!"
"Private?" Daniel repeated, cold. "You paid someone to ruin her. Public now. Own it."
Esau was turning red. "You have no proof."
I watched him fold. His jaw clenched. "This is entrapment," he said, and the words sounded small and pleading.
People started filming. The sound of clicking grew, a chorus of witnesses.
"Esau Cobb has been recorded conspiring to ruin Elliot for money," Daniel said, each word a small hammer in a tall glass house. "Do you want to deny the wire transfers?"
The crowd began to clap—slow, incredulous at first, then louder. A woman cried out, "Finally. She deserved someone to stand up for her."
"Stop it!" Esau shouted, losing his composure. He lunged for his phone, then realized it was useless. Cameras were on him from every angle. He had always been the kind of man who had thought money could hide him, and now money echoed back his shame.
He staggered back, then dropped to his knees, his expensive suit creasing into a ruin. "Please!" he begged, voice cracking. "I can explain! It wasn't like— I—"
Around him, jaws dropped, whispers sharpened into a knife.
"Shame on you," a woman hissed. Someone spat near his shoes. A man took a picture and uploaded it live. A teenage girl screamed, "Gross!" and people laughed. The laughter wanted blood.
Esau looked from face to face, eyes pleading, then slid to the floor like a puppet with snapped strings.
"You can't do this!" Lexi wailed, scrambling to her feet, then froze as the camera turned to her. "You're all monsters!"
"No," Daniel said softly. "Just honest about what we see."
The once-calm banquet room had become a storm. Phones recorded, people streamed. A ring of cameras closed like a net.
They could not deny anymore. The chain of evidence was a rope around their necks.
Esau's expression crumpled like paper left in rain. "Please," he whispered. "I can pay—I'll pay—"
Someone in the crowd—the club manager who had lost money on Esau's schemes—stepped forward and slapped the phone from Esau's hand. It smashed on the floor.
"Pay me?" the manager sneered. "You paid to ruin a woman. You paid to destroy a girl's career."
"Take him away," someone said.
Esau's denial turned to wild pleading. He knelt, palms up, the exact posture people made in dramas when they wanted mercy to soften the world. "I didn't know—It was just a job—I didn't think—"
"Silence," Freya snapped, trying to gain footing, but she was shaking, and the public had found a story and was hungry.
People shoved closer. Camera lights flashed. Someone began to chant, half mocking, half vindictive: "Shame! Shame! Shame!"
Esau's high collar soaked with sweat. He begged, the voice of a man who had never needed one before. "Please, please, it'll ruin me—"
No one in the crowd seemed to care about ruin. They wanted witness. They wanted the theater of justice. Some applauded Daniel. Some cried. Someone held up a sign—"No more lies."
Lexi crumpled to her knees too, as if the room's weight had pushed her down. Her fingers trembled. "I'm sorry," she whispered, but sorry had been cheap when she had typed that slander.
Esau tried to bargain. "I'll pay you to take it down! I will—"
A chorus of phones recorded the pleading. "Do you think we care what you pay now?" someone shouted.
A man from the audience, a small-time reporter, stepped forward and said into his phone, "This is live. Esau Cobb and Freya Vorobyov are implicated in a smear campaign. Stay tuned."
The crowd roared, and from the roar a new sound rose—the sound of people recording truth.
I stood there, hands clenched so tight my knuckles hurt, and I watched the bad people crumble aloud, their faces go from smug to shell-shocked, to furious, to broken. The arc of emotion I had been promised in stories—smug, then shock, then denial, then pleading—played out before me like a cruel, satisfying symphony.
They crawled, they begged, they tried to rewrite their story in the air. The crowd refused to let them. Someone took a picture of Esau on his knees and sent it to every gossip channel. The photos trended within an hour.
Later, as the room thinned and the lights threw long shadows, Freya walked past me. She didn't look like a winner; she looked like a woman who had been stripped of the soft armor of privilege.
"You—" she started.
"Don't," I said simply.
She flinched as if I'd slapped her. "You ruined me."
"No," I said, and this time my voice did not tremble. "You did."
Daniel touched my hair as the crowd dispersed. Tobias came up and offered me his arm. His face was steady. Colton smiled in a small way, proud.
That night, I slept my first long sleep without being afraid of someone else's laugh.
But the world doesn't mend with a single shout. Taxes and bills remained, debt collectors still had numbers to bite. I still owed a million favors and ten years of shame. Yet public justice had a way of cutting loose the worst ropes. The video circulated for days, and the slander died a slow, noisy death.
After the storm, my life returned to the careful work of living.
"You're still mine for now," Daniel said once, voice small and dark and honest in its own way.
"Am I?" I asked.
"You said you'd repay me someday," he said. "You said you'd pay."
The debt mattered less to me after the public had watched men fall, but the quieter debt of being used lingered in my bones.
I taught children. I built my channel with Natalia and Haylee, poor editing and bright hearts. We streamed our first full concert when Tyler's band joined us. Colton came by and said, "You belong to music," like it was a verdict. I thought maybe he was right.
A fashion house invited me in the second round of the contest. I studied my mother's sketches like a map. I sewed at dawn, cried threads at midnight, and learned to stitch sorrow into seams that did not show.
One rainy afternoon Daniel came in wet and silent and left me a card with one line: "Come to the mansion. Tonight."
I went because old patterns die slowly. At the table he slid a bowl of noodle soup across to me like it was a peace offering.
"Eat," he said. "You work too hard."
I ate, and the slurps sounded like forgiveness.
"Will you marry me?" he asked once later when his face was close and the world small.
"No," I said, surprising myself. "I won't be a notch on anyone's family's ladder. I won't be a bargaining chip."
He looked at me, and for once vulnerability cracked his armor. "Then what do you want?" he murmured.
"I want to be free to make my own mistakes," I said. "I want to buy my mother's medicine with my work."
He touched my cheek. "Do that. And I will still be here. As long as you need me."
His words were promises and chains braided together.
I refused him a ring. I refused the title. Instead I took a piano, and a sewing machine, and a small rented room that smelled of old wood and glue, and we taught children and we streamed and our fans counted like small stars.
People still whispered. They always would. Some nights I would catch my reflection and see a woman shaped by bruises and music and the fact that she had not died under the weight of other people's judgments.
And when my designs went to the final round and the judges asked me about the story behind my piece, I told them.
"This was made so my mother could sleep easier and my brother could hold his head high again," I said. "It's made of things we couldn't speak about, but we sewed them anyway."
A woman in the front row—Eleanor—stood up and said, "You saved us from our lies."
I smiled. There was a music in that night, not quite victory, not quite confession, but a clean, bright sound that belonged to me.
When people ask me now whether I forgave Daniel for everything, I say this:
"I didn't ask to be forgiven. I asked to be seen."
He still calls me "my girl" sometimes. He still buys me strange gifts midnights. But the thing he misread for ownership is, in small and stubborn ways, slipping from his hands.
My life changed because I learned to take back a voice I had traded for medicine and security. I kept the piano. I practiced till my fingers hurt. I took on students who would trust me. I sewed dresses that made people stand straighter. I held my mother's hand the day the doctor said she would recover.
And once, when Daniel tried to order me out of a performance, an auditorium full of people shouted my name louder than his.
"Play," they cried. "Play for yourself."
I lifted my hands to the keys and I played, and for the first time the sound that came was mine alone.
The End
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