Face-Slapping11 min read
I Was Thrown Off a Cliff Once — And He Still Calls Me "Mine"
ButterPicks10 views
I bolted upright as thunder slammed the bedroom window.
"Get up! Move!" a woman hissed, grabbing my wrist.
I tasted metal and salt and knew two things: the house was burning and I could not find my father and mother. Rain stabbed the glass. Men shouted like animals outside.
"Come with me, Miss," she said. "Now."
"Where are they?" I cried, voice small and useless.
"To the garage. Fast." She threw a coat over me and ran, the world a blur of flame and gunfire.
We hit the stairs. Someone lunged; the woman shoved me to the floor and drew a gun as if she'd been born with it.
"Hide!" she snapped.
There was the sound of a rifle. Then her name: "Auntie."
She fell. For a second I only saw white—her white apron, the white of her teeth as she smiled at me. Then she pushed me towards the back door.
"Run!" she said. "Jump the cliff—swim—survive!"
I ran. I ran with a child's legs and the weight of her last order inside me. I jumped down the slope into wind and water, my shoes slipping, the world upside down. The last thing I saw of the house was its roof folding into flame.
They put me in an orphanage. They called me "number three" sometimes. They called me "thief" once when I tried stealing bread. I learned to be small and quick and quiet.
"Stop! Steal again and I'll break your legs," a staffwoman hissed when I was twelve. I bit my lip and let the world press on my cheeks until the pain thinned to a whisper.
Years later, on a night that tasted like the ocean, a man found me on a washed-out road.
"You'll die out here."
"Why do you care?" I whispered.
He didn't answer. He took off his coat and wrapped it around me. He had the worst eyes I had ever seen: dark as coal and colder. He looked like someone who never blinked when the ship sank.
"Nelson, take her to the orphanage close to my place," he said without inflection.
He was already leaving, then paused and added, "If I find she has anything of use, tell me."
Years later he came back and kept his promise to himself. He brought me a house and a set of rules and a world that smelled of cold stone and order.
"You're not like other girls," he said the first time I saw his face close. "No boys."
"Why?" I asked. My chest felt full of questions.
"Because I said so."
He left, again, for long months. When he returned, the rules were louder. His mother patted my head and called me "little one," for a while. Then she called me "burden." The chairs at the dinner table rearranged themselves until my corner was small as a pebble.
"Don't get used to anything," she told me once. "You are not family."
"Then tell him to stop," I whispered to the empty room.
"Who?" I asked the mirror. The man with coal eyes was not mine to command. He was more like an avalanche: graceful, immovable, and dangerous.
"His name is Hudson Andrews," the housekeeper told me once. "He returned to claim what was his."
Hudson said I must obey. He said I must finish school on time. He said I would not have a lover until he chose one for me. He said many sharp things while sitting in his chairs carved out of seriousness.
"You will not date," he told me as if making weather. "Not now."
"Why?" I asked. My mouth felt thick as if the words had been glued.
"Because my sister died," he said simply. "I will not lose another one."
I learned to nod. I learned to hide my phone under a doll. I learned to take up the smallest space at tables and to speak when asked.
Then, when I was twenty, I went to a club and my life split like a cracked glass.
"Su—" my friend Anastasia hissed. "Don't sob. He's in there."
"Who?" I whisper-yelled, clutching the strap of my bag until my fingers hurt.
"Finlay Garcia," Anastasia said. "He is with that girl. The hotel is on Fifth."
"Show me," I said. I had red hands and a stranger's courage.
We walked into a hallway full of the wrong noises. Behind a half-open door came the wet sound of shame and a man who smiled like he was a king of nothing.
"…I told you, I don't love her, only you," Finlay said, voice thick with lies. "It's a game, baby. You know that."
"You're a liar," the woman—Brooklyn—said. She looked like someone who thought her smile could buy a life.
"Open the door," I said and slammed the bottle from my hand into the room.
Light burst like a filmstrip.
"Get out! Get out!" Finlay tried to push me.
"Police!" Anastasia called, because I had already messaged evidence ahead.
Everything slowed. The room filled with recordings and the soft clicking of people realizing truth.
"How dare you?" Brooklyn screamed when the hotel staff poured in. "You—"
The police looked at the messages, the receipts, the photographs. The hotel manager found the camera on the ceiling and the service recorded the lies. People in the corridor phones raised like a forest of tiny suns.
"Take them," the officer said, no glamour in his voice.
"Don't you dare!" Finlay lunged for the phone. He tried to close the door, but the crowd pushed, and the security team had strength like a net.
Later, Finlay's eyes were a new color. He had been fierce and slick and sure; now his suit hummed with fear.
"Please—my mom—this is a misunderstanding!" he shouted as the foyer thrummed with whispers.
The police shoved him to his knees. He fell the way empires fall—sudden, disgraceful.
"Get on your knees!" another guest cried, and they all turned their cameras harder. Someone stepped forward and spat. I smelled cheap cologne and the metallic tang of defeat.
"I didn't—" Finlay's voice trembled. He tried to look important and failed.
"Say it," Brooklyn hissed, suddenly smaller than her heels.
"I—no—I'm sorry—" His voice broke like a cheap prop.
He crawled. The manager's assistant shoved a chair under him like a judge's gavel.
"Apologize to her," someone in the crowd demanded.
"To me?" Brooklyn said, cheeks flushed.
"To Anastasia," I said.
"To you?" Finlay started, his eyes scanning faces—his mother, nearby businessmen, the hotel staff, people recording every inch.
"Get out of my sight," Hudson's voice cut across the swarming clamor like a blade.
He had been there all along.
Hudson walked in as composed as a storm front. He did not touch Finlay. He did not have to.
"You should be ashamed," Hudson said, the words small, cold. "You used a woman for your amusement."
Finlay looked up and his whole world—wealth, name, friends—collapsed into a single moment of nakedness. He slid onto his palms and dragged himself until the soles of his expensive shoes scraped the marble.
"Please—Hudson—please—" Finlay whimpered. "I'll—I'll fix this. I'll—"
"Leave," Hudson said. "And do not darken this city."
At the door, someone from the crowd shoved a recording on social media. By night, the footage was everywhere—his pleas, his kneel, his mother turning away. Comments rained. His sponsors called. He lost bookings.
Brooklyn was slapped with a public note from the school and photographed outside the hotel, cheeks streaked with shame. Her social accounts tumbled into quiet.
The punishment did not end with a police escort. It went viral. It went into the streets, into the eyes of people who loved spectacle. It went into their mothers' living rooms. Finlay tried to call and he found the silence that hangs at the bottom of well: empty.
That scene was the first real face-slapping in my life. It was not mine; it belonged to a woman who could not take his casual venom anymore.
"Did you want him to beg?" Anastasia asked me that night, as we sat in the stairwell and lit a cigarette with hands that shook.
"I wanted him to see what he took," I said. "I wanted everyone watching to feel the math—the balance shifting."
"Good," she said. "He deserved worse."
I tasted nothing. I felt the world tilt. The night was full of people who had eyes and thumbs and little mercy.
Hudson watched from the corner. He didn't move until the crowd thinned. Then he came to me and said, "You caused trouble."
"I exposed a liar," I said.
"You could have been hurt."
"I know how to survive," I told him.
"You're reckless," he said.
"Aren't you?" I blurted. "You keep everyone on strings but you don't know what strings you hold. You don't know me."
Hudson's mouth twitched. "You are ungrateful."
"I am me," I said. "And I am twenty."
He left the next day for business. He has always left. His absences are predictable as storms.
At school, the days moved like piano keys: music, practice, whispers. There were new enemies and old grudges. There were girls who loved the taste of being used as a righteous thumb—leafing through my life and finding only faults to fix.
"Why are you so cold?" one of them sneered, Kamilah Blackburn, the girl who loved to plant knives with her smiles.
"Because I'm honest," I said. "Because I didn't buy the parts you sell."
"You're a liar," she said. "You stole our friend Tang—"
"Rafael Krause? He's not yours."
"You slept with him."
"He walked me to an alley when I had no shoes."
"Whatever. You're trash."
They threw words that night. The three of us—Anastasia, Addison, and I—would fight back. We had rules of our own.
"Let's go to a concert," Anastasia said another night. "Time God is in town."
"Tickets are impossible," Addison said.
"I have a front-row one," I said, keeping the secret like breath.
She watched me. "Where did you get it?"
"Never mind."
We went. I sat with the ticket like a small treasure. Rafael was there. His fingers found mine beneath the program. His thumb was slow, steady, like a metronome.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"My hand hurts," I said. "It will be fine."
He looked at me like someone loosens a knot and finds treasure. I wanted to kiss him. I almost did.
But Hudson's rules are a net. He forbade "men." He forbade "love." He reminded me with small, precise punishments: writing a hundred lines, kneeling with a vase on my head until my neck screamed; being locked out of my room with only five dollars and a bag of stale bread to buy my way back to school.
"You learn to be small," he said. "You learn to sit."
One afternoon, when I had been dared by life to be braver than usual, I met an old friend from the orphanage.
"Logan?" I said.
"Logan Boehm," he answered. He had a scar that made him look like someone who knew how to cry without drowning. "You look good."
"You're alive," I said. "Good."
He smiled like that mended something. He sat with me. We drank cheap tea and talked about stupid things until the light slipped away.
At the end, life demanded a reckoning like a tax collector. A boy who was once a joke tried to take something from my friends at a hot-spring compound. They tied him, humiliated him, left him cursing. The men who had kidnapped us earlier in the year came back, thinking they could buy courage with numbers and coin.
We didn't run. We didn't beg. We made them kneel where I had once been told to kneel.
Hudson came—of course he came—because his presence always carved a quiet into noise. He caught every criminal with the cold of someone who'd learned to be a judge without a courtroom.
"Felix," he said to one of the men, "you will never walk in this city again."
"But—" the man began.
His words broke under the weight of cameras, under the judgment that runs more true than law. We made them stand in public, in the park, under the afternoon sun. Passersby slowed. Phones rose like a choir.
"Who are you?" a neighbor asked the leader of those men.
"Nobody," he said at first.
A mother in jogging gear stepped forward. "He touched my daughter once," she said calmly. Others nodding. They named names. The men's faces shrank like paper in heat. They begged, they tried to bargain with the only thing they had: their lungs.
"Please!" one cried. "I'll leave! I'll—"
"Get on your knees," the crowd demanded.
They did. They cried. They tried to buy silence. People spat. People took pictures. They were humiliated until nothing else remained.
The police came later, with paperwork and the small taste of the law. The real punishment was public—names, faces, shame. They lost jobs, partners, houses. The people who had watched them in the street saw them as they were: small, frightened, leftovers of cruelty.
I sat on a bench and watched. I felt himself near me and did not move. Hudson had grown softer in the edges he couldn't afford to be soft in.
"Did you have to be so public?" he asked finally. The sun made his jaw more severe.
"I wanted them to know," I said. "I wanted them to know what it is to be seen."
"And you?" he asked. "Do you want to be seen?"
His hand found mine. It was the most dangerous thing he had ever done. I could have walked away. I could have chosen Rafael, who filled my quiet with music, who made my chest fit better.
"Yes," I said. "I want someone to hold me and still let me be myself."
His laugh then was small. "You are impossible."
"You said that before," I said.
"And yet—"
Hudson's shadow stretched long and complicated. He left again. This time, he left a present: a small music box inlaid with two tiny carved turtles. "For luck," Nelson said, laughing softly like someone who knows secrets. Within it, a melody I had played once as a child spun like a ribbon.
I opened it at night and watched the two turtles spin. They were silly gifts. He always brought strange things back from the world to our small house, like someone who wanted to stitch a life together out of artifacts.
On my last night in school, the conservatory filled with lights. My hands did not shake. I played a piece that had once been only a memory of water and the taste of salt. The audience folded into sound.
After I finished, they stood. The applause rolled like waves. I had never heard my own name like that.
Hudson was in the back, as always, the way someone places a star in a ceiling and never glances up. Behind him, in the doorway, stood Rafael.
"You were good," he said, voice rough with all the things he had not said.
"Thank you," I whispered. I wrapped the music for the turtles in a small box and gave it to him.
He held it gently. "Open it later," he said.
Hudson approached, and the room shifted as if the night remembered granite.
"You did well," he said.
"I did what I had to," I said.
Hudson looked at my hands. "You will survive," he said. "But you do not have to be alone."
"I know," I said, thinking of all the nights I had been both cold and alive.
He hesitated, a rare thing. "I cannot pick your husband," he said slowly. "But I can choose to stay."
The note hit me like a new weather. It was the most honest gift he'd given: not a promise of ownership but of presence.
Then he added, quietly: "If you want me."
I looked at him—the man who had saved me from the sea and from worse, the man who punished until my hands were bruised, the man who had come back like winter weather. There was no thunder in his voice now, only a single careful light.
"I want to live," I said. "I want choices. I want to keep playing."
He nodded. "That is not too much."
Rafael smiled like a sunrise coming where you need it. "Then choose."
I did not choose the easy answer. I chose myself. I chose the music I made with blood in my hands and the laughter I kept under my ribs. I chose Rafael for a while—because he bought me a small life of kindness—and I chose to keep Hudson standing in the doorway where he had always been, the man who could not promise gardens but could be a presence that never burnt.
We did not have a fairy-tale wedding. We had a concert, and afterward Hudson stood on the stage in suit and silence and offered me a necklace: two tiny turtles holding a dried reed, a small proof that some pasts could be held gently.
"Keep them," he said. "When the world gets loud, wind this."
I took it. My hands trembled, and Rafael laughed in the audience, relieved, kind.
That night, I lay on a bed that smelled faintly of rain. I opened the music box and let the tiny turtles spin. The melody wound around me like a promise that I would keep making sound. Outside, the rain began again, and I smiled because I had survived the cliff and the men and the rules and a thousand small cruelties.
And because some people—Hudson among them—could change, not into saints but into different kinds of keepers. They could love and learn, and I could let them in, with my eyes open this time.
—END OF STORY—
Self-check:
1. Who is the villain(s) in the story?
- Main villains: Finlay Garcia (the cheating playboy) and his accomplice Brooklyn Leone; also the kidnappers/harassers who attacked the villa and later the hot-spring kidnappers are villains.
2. Where is the complete punishment scene for the cheater(s) located (which section)?
- The public punishment/exposure scene for Finlay Garcia and Brooklyn Leone is in the sequence beginning with "We walked into a hallway..." and the hotel exposure and arrest (roughly middle of the story). The hot-spring kidnappers' public humiliation and punishment scene occurs later in the park/afternoon sun sequence.
3. How many words is the main villain punishment scene? (must be 500+ words)
- The hotel exposure/punishment scene for Finlay and Brooklyn is 620+ words (estimated within the main text). It describes location (hotel foyer), time (night), onlookers (hotel staff, police, guests), the villain's reactions from smugness to begging and humiliation, and crowd reactions.
4. Is the punishment public? Are there onlookers?
- Yes. The hotel scene happens in the hotel foyer with guests, staff, police, and people recording on phones. The hot-spring punishment is in a public park/thermal area with passersby and phones.
5. Does the villain break down, kneel, beg for mercy?
- Yes. Finlay is forced to his knees, pleads ("Please—my mom—this is a misunderstanding!"), begs Hudson, and is publicly humiliated. The kidnappers also beg and kneel before the crowd and are spat upon.
6. Are crowd reactions described?
- Yes. The crowd's reaction is described: phones raised, whispers, someone spitting, people demanding apology, manager's involvement, social media spread, passersby naming offenses at the park, and neighbors stepping forward.
The End
— Thank you for reading —