Face-Slapping15 min read
If You’re Afraid, Don’t Come — A Messy Little Trade
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I never thought my first sentence to him would be, "Wanna?" and that the question would change so much.
He was leaning against the elevator wall like he owned the air, like his height rented space and his dark eyes collected light. I leaned my hip to the corridor tile, lit a cigarette, and let it blur my face into someone dangerous for a couple of hours. The bar upstairs smelled like cheap perfume and bravado. He grinned when I said it.
"Upstairs or next door?" he asked, like he already had the keys to the evening.
"Upstairs," I said, and stepped into the sightline of the lift. He followed. I tucked the little card into my clutch—the exact kind of card that makes men move faster—and walked toward the hotel door with hips that might as well have had their own schedule.
He smelled like good scotch and a little winter. He kissed like he was taking notes.
"I came after you," he said when the elevator hiccuped us into private.
"You did," I answered, because he had—there's a difference between a run-of-the-night pick-up and someone who reads the room and decides they like the paragraph.
We were careless, or maybe we were brazen, because the city had a name for streets like that. People went there with an agenda most nights. This was one of mine: a petty, hot revenge I told myself I could carry like a feather.
Afterwards, shower steam and a towel, I watched his face as he dressed. He buttoned his shirt without looking at me, turning back into that cool social portrait I'd first seen in the elevator.
"You leaving?" I asked, because I had nowhere else to feel purple bruises, nowhere else to count them like fortunes.
"Yes," he said. He said it like it was a fact, and then he turned, and something in his mouth softened. "Wait."
He stepped back into the doorway. For a second his shadow took up the hall. "Know me?"
I smirked. "The heir of a city that doesn't sleep. Hard not to."
"Then what do you want?" His tone was a knife wrapped in velvet.
"I already got what I wanted," I said, "I won't drag you."
He laughed thinly. "You were prepared."
"Afraid? Then don't come."
I meant it—teeth and bravado and that little card I slid from my bag, the exact plan I'd laid. He didn't leave immediately. He watched as I picked at my hair, sulky and satisfied. There was, I suppose, a tiny seam of pride in my chest for carrying out a little justice on a man who kept another woman on the side.
Later, in the traffic of the night, he moved on. Men like him had legs the size of cities; they could walk a dozen women into a dozen bedrooms and forget the names by morning. That was the truth I told myself when my shower looked back at me like a body in quarters. The marks on my skin felt like a ledger that one night could not erase.
Then I found out who he was.
My boss called that Monday and announced, like some godly curtain was about to fall, that the very group my own company had pitched to—the big writing-office complex—would be coming for a visit. "They want to come by," said Salvador, his voice pressed like a coin. "You should host them."
They did not walk in wearing halos. They walked in with cigarettes of confidence and an assistant with a set of names. He strode in tall and calm and placed his cold dark eyes on my face for the first time since the elevator, and something like winter pressed the room into a stiff picture.
"You came to see them," Salvador whispered to me, and I could feel the slave-market weight in his breath. "Don't embarrass us."
I tried to keep the meeting small. I tried to be kind. He watched me like a man who cataloged people into two boxes: useful and disposable.
"You're the lead for our bid," he said. His voice was cool. "Walk me through your plan."
I spoke. I painted lines and glass and sun from the floorplan inside me. He nodded. The other men took notes. He didn't. His eyes wandered along my throat and then down to a faint faded bruise at my collarbone. He saw what I had told the wall to keep, the choice of a night, and it became a quiet, private accusation.
"Tell the truth," he said later, after the taste of the bid had left the room. "Did I interest you at the bar?"
"Interest? Maybe," I said, because 'interest' was small and tidy. "I'm not your business, Mr. Lombardi."
"Egan," he corrected. "And what do you want from me?"
"I want the contract," I said. "TCC's works are healthier than your usual shortlist. Or at least the bonus will feed my family for a while."
He looked at me, and for a moment—one impossible fragile second—something like amusement flashed. "Work," he said. "Then work."
But the mornings are not kind to flings. Men like him carry names lined in gold, and I had the slow, stupid conviction I could trade a night for a ladder. I thought I could use him. It was simpler, at least, than the alternative of eating shame for breakfast.
After he left that first week, he became a problem because he was Egan Lombardi and because the city was small enough that a rumor is just a rumor away from being anything. My small company had a name and a hope. He had money and a face.
"We're being considered," Salvador told our team. "Egan has taken an interest in our proposal, but we need to clue him into what we're doing. Blythe, take him through it."
That three-word demand felt like a noose. But money tightens better than pride.
So I met him again. He watched me speak with that same patient cold. "You look familiar," he said quietly.
"I'm always familiar," I shot back. "I'm your client's most accessible fixture."
"And the bruise?" he asked, because some men are little detectives and some men are just cruel. He reached out for my jaw like I was a petition he could fold and keep.
"You think because you touched me you own a map of my life?" I snapped. I was tired of getting small for big men.
He answered nothing. He did not need to. His silence told me more than his words could: that he had the appetite to test my boundaries and the boredom to rearrange my days.
Weeks folded. A rumor spread: Egan had slept with someone from our company. A thousand small mouths in a thousand small rooms tried to place a face on rumor. I tried to keep my head down and my pens together.
Things broke the night of the banquet. The room smelled like candied oranges and applause. My scarlet cheongsam clung to me in a way that made men swallow. Hendrix—my boyfriend, if we could call him that—sat across and pretended like I belonged to only him. He pretended like he could own the night.
He was a boy with dangerous hands; he liked the way a woman’s fear sounded. That night he drank until his words were rough shells and his friends made a party of me. They sang like vultures. One of them left to fetch something and returned with a tray no decent woman trusted.
It was my last night at the banquet.
"Drink," they said, smiling like wolves in a well-lit cave. The glass hit the table, and my reflex was no stronger than my need not to explode.
"You're not making me drunk," I said to Hendrix when he leaned too close. "You made me. You can take responsibility."
"Shut up," he laughed. "You owe me."
I had had enough. I threw the glass. It broke. The room flashed. My legs felt the cut of a shard. The cheongsam offered a strip of skin to pain and wind. Everything blurred into that stupid barroom film where men became roars and women became the weather.
"Hendrix, don't," a voice said.
He read danger like a child reads fire. He grabbed my hair and I grabbed around his fingers. The world tilted. People screamed. He punished like a man whose only language was violence. He hit me until the taste of copper sat behind my teeth and lights popped behind my eyes.
"Stop!" a new voice bellowed, and suddenly the room cleared like the sea at a whistle. Egan stood in the doorway, clean suit, cold eyes, a man whose presence rearranged the crowd.
"What are you doing?" he asked Hendrix, and his voice was a cliff. People noticed. Cameras turned. Phones lifted. Someone recorded. A noblewoman smacked a champagne flute into a tray in outrage.
Hendrix's overconfidence fractured. "She—" he began, but Egan moved with a certainty that belonged to men who never had to argue. He stepped forward, a long stride into shame, and struck the boy's face hard. Not an elegant slap but a piece of geography, and with it the air’s temperature dropped.
"Leave her," Egan said. He handed me his jacket with a precision that felt like a trade. "Someone get her an ambulance."
I didn't want to go to the hospital with the man who'd touched me like a currency, but Hendrix's fists had turned my night into something more fragile than dignity. Egan picked me up then, carried me like a thing he had collected by accident, and the world blurred into the back of a car.
Hendrix, humiliated in the public eye, was dragged away like a savage. His friends, shamed by the presence of a nobleman who'd just stormed a party, tried to pretend nothing had happened. The cameras, merciless, framed him: the drunk, the hand rising, the face. He was not arrested that night—no red lights, no cuffs—but the record of his violence was already spreading in the kind of echoes that swallowed reputations whole.
Later I woke in a bed that smelled of his cologne and antiseptic. The room was quiet. My legs were stitches and pain. I should have been grateful Egan had carried me. Gratitude is the currency small girls learn to spend early.
"Did you mean what you said?" I asked skin-softly, remembering the way he had scrubbed our arrangement into something transactional.
"About what?" he asked, sitting on the edge of the bed with a gentleness that contradicted the man who had stormed the banquet.
"About us being done," I said. "About taking the money and leaving."
He looked at me, and for the first time I saw a person older than "Egan Lombardi"—a man who knew how to arrange people like chess. "You can take the money," he said. "One hundred thousand each time, three times, and we'll be done."
It felt like a punch and an offer. Three hundred thousand could balance a ledger. It could buy my mother's meds or pay an overdue afternoon's rent somewhere my mother wouldn't see. I remembered the debt numbers like teeth. Pride and pocket fought. I took the phone, and the transfer pinged into my account before I could think about the consequences.
When men label you 'transactional' you learn quickly to account for the cost.
I went back to work. I drew plans like a woman who has learned the weight of blueprints. I was professional, and I was furious. When I asked Egan about the specifications for a building he wanted, he told me we were no longer suitable. "Find someone else," he said, and his voice was as gentle and dangerous as a closing door.
I was stubborn. I wanted the job partly because I needed to prove my own skill, and partly because the office needed the money. When I pushed, he made the map harder: I was blocked, iced out, blacklisted on his end. My boss, Salvador, who'd been my advocate, now said, "You pushed him."
I did. I pushed the man who'd taken my night and offered me a price. It felt like retribution—stupid, dangerous, emotional—and it cost the very thing I'd wanted: a way out.
"But if I do this," I said to Brooklyn, my stubborn friend, "what if I lose the only chance left for us?"
She laughed, because laughter is cheaper than advice. "Then you earn it somehow else. But you, Blythe, you get under his skin. Men like that don't like being looked in the eye."
"They're all the same," I told her. "They eat. They leave."
We worked like menacing bees. We redrew floors with a precision that felt like revenge. Then one day, Egan walked into our office and his smile was a trap.
"You're still trying," he said.
"Yes," I said. "We made changes."
He leaned in close and whispered, "Come to my room at the hotel tonight and I'll show you what I'm willing to let you have."
I should have run. Instead I went, because men like him have a gravity that makes me misread danger as possibility. He had a way of making propositions sound like offers of safety.
That night, the arrangement came with a new line: "Make the design exactly how I want it and deliver it to my office. No changes. No surprises."
"You're specific," I said, and he smiled like a calendar.
I did what he asked. I rewrote the plans. I washed the edges of my pride until they shone. He called back and said the plans were acceptable and asked me to meet him in his office to finalize.
Instead of a normal meeting, he invited his social group: mothers, friends, journalists, a frenzied audience of the kind of people who watch scandals like they are theater. I walked into his building like a supplicant. They applauded me as a vendor. He watched from the back like a man who had pulled on a curtain and waited for the curtain to reveal the stage.
"Take the stage," he said, with the casual cruelty of someone who knows the echo a room gives.
I spoke about glass and light. I explained atriums and code. They listened like a kind of mercy, but my word was not the prize they wanted. The prize was drama.
At the end, with all the cameras open and the audience intoxicated on gossip, Egan took the microphone.
"This," he said, and I felt the room narrow like a fist. "Is the woman who runs TCC's design team. She did a good job. But we didn't do this to be kind."
The lights clicked brighter.
"Everyone loves a good story," he continued. "They love the hero, the villain, the casualty. But tonight I want to correct a rumor."
He told the room that he'd been involved with someone from our office, that we'd had a mutual agreement for services, and that the arrangement had been consensual and mutually beneficial. The audience didn't know which way to look, but the cameras did.
"What you didn't know," he said, and then there was air like glass, "is that this same woman stood in the center of a very small tragedy. Her boyfriend—Hendrix—decided to make a scene that risked ruining a guest. I happened to be there. He beat another woman in a hotel thinking it was her, inflamed a party, and we had to call medics. This city hates scandal. I won't let carelessness break it."
Phones hummed. People recorded. A thousand small devices picked up his words and sent them out to hungry places.
"Hendrix?" someone from the floor snapped. "You saw him attack someone else?"
"I did," Egan said. "And I called the services. I saved someone else, and I will not tolerate men who injure women."
The crowd murmured. Some applauded. The ladies who had spied me earlier with their thin knives of annoyance now had an expression like discovery—some of them even smiled. I stood still, my throat a tight fist. The room loved the spectacle; I hated being the centerpiece.
Hendrix walked in like a man who had rehearsed his arrogance. He was pale under the banquet lights. "You set me up?" he hissed at me. His hands trembled. His eyes were wet and furious.
Egan stepped forward and put a finger to the microphone like a talisman. "If you're going to accuse anyone, do it in front of witnesses."
People circled. Phones rose. Someone in the back shouted, "Show us! Show us the proof!"
Egan clicked a remote. A screen lit up behind us. It was grainy footage from the party—the glass flying, Hendrix's hand raised, the woman's face twisted with pain. The room fell into a silence that was all the more savage for being legal.
Hendrix's smile cracked. It was like watching a porcelain doll fall. "It wasn't her," he said. "It was—"
"—a mistake," Egan supplied, implacable. "A grave mistake."
The screen rolled on. The footage ended with Hendrix stumbling, his friends circling like crabs. People in the room wanted to be righteous and weren't sure which side to pick. The phone cameras ate every movement. The room tasted like a clockwork of judgement.
Egan walked up the steps and looked right into Hendrix's face. "You think hitting a woman is something to be proud of?" he asked. His voice didn't shout; it was a flat accusation.
Hendrix's bravado flicked and died. He tried to smile and found only a raw, small shape. "I—" he began, lips dry.
"Say what you will in front of everyone," Egan said. "Tell them the truth."
Hendrix—who had always been loud and dangerous—shrank as if a room had teeth.
"This is my woman," he blurted, "and I—"
"Stop," Egan said. "Explain why you struck another woman, thinking she was hers."
"I was angry," Hendrix said, voice breaking. "I thought she—"
"You thought wrong," Egan said, and then he did the worst thing he had saved; he spoke with a cruelty that cut clean. "You thought you were the hero. You were the villain. You act like a man who never learned how shame looks under a microscope."
Then Egan had the cameras bring up a second feed: a voice recording Hendrix's drunken claims, a message that named names and plotted traps. The room listened as his own words betrayed him. The public turned on him like moths to a window after a storm.
Hendrix hissed at me, "You set me up. You set me up—"
"Sit down," Egan ordered. "And answer."
He fell to his knees. That is a picture I cannot unsee. The richest man in a room had just asked the boy who'd hit women to bargain for his dignity in public, and he chose to crumble.
"I didn't mean—" Hendrix cried. He knelt in the center of the banquet like a surrendered thing.
"Get up," Egan said. "Beg her forgiveness."
People laughed first, incredulous. Then phones buzzed louder. Someone in the crowd had already posted the scene and the video had started to take on a life of its own. People began to chant, in that nasty way that lets the crowd pretend it has justice.
"Beg for forgiveness," Egan insisted.
Hendrix's face went from red to gray to a pale that looked like water. "Blythe," he croaked. "I'm sorry. I'm—please, I'm sorry."
"No," I said. "Get up."
He remained on his knees, like a man pinned by his own hands. He crawled forward toward me as if gravity had turned personal. "Please," he said. "Please."
The room pressed close. Women who had once smirked now looked at him like a bad loan. A dozen people recorded. A little girl in the corner watched with the puzzled piety of someone who still believes grownups know how to be kind. An elderly woman clucked. Someone whispered, "Kneeling is weak. Kneeling is theater."
He reached out. I pulled back as if I could be scratched by his need. He tried to stand, wobbling, and a dozen small pitying hands didn't help him. The cameras kept rolling.
As his pleas grew more frantic, first miserable then shameless, the audience changed critter-like. Some clapped. Some jeered. A woman near the buffet slapped him. A man in a suit took a picture and then, with the lack of mercy the internet affords, uploaded it.
Hendrix's reaction had been the arc I'd been promised in these small-town dramas: arrogance, pride, denial, shock, shame, and then supplication. He had gone from a man with a hand ready to punish, to a smaller person whose chest collapsed under the weight of spectacle.
When the cameras finally left—when the night cooled—the event became a lesson I didn't ask for. People filed out, still talking about what had happened, some with disgust, some with relish. The clips trended for days. The justice was messy. The public was not a court; it was a watch with a sharp tooth.
That was not the end of Hendrix's fall. The hospital bill from the other woman, the rumor that followed him into the boardroom, the whispers in the family, the way his mother's neighbors started to look at him—those things are a slow erosion. But what I remember is the moment he knelt and the room's eyes ate him alive. He went from predator to spectacle. He begged. He shook. He was humiliated in front of the almost-rich and the almost-famous. He wanted to stand tall; instead, he was a pleading child with a scar.
After, when the lights were off and the banquets were over, I sat across a table from Egan as the city exhaled.
"You did that," I said.
He gave no apology. "I wanted him to stop being a danger," he said. "You didn't deserve that."
"So you fixed him with shame," I said.
"I fixed the immediate problem," he answered. "Long-term? That is a separate ledger."
The ledger of men is a cruel book. People judge me for taking money, for bargaining nights against bills. They judge him for orchestrating scenes. We both played a part. But the truth is I needed something he could give, and he needed a reason to be involved.
"You still owe us a design brief," I told him, because I am practical and a little persistent.
"Do it my way or don't do it at all," he said. "I can't stop you, but I can make it harder."
So I did the job his way—for a time—because sometimes making a roof that will stand in a windstorm is a trade for other storms. I designed what he wanted, and he paid what he promised, but not without making sure everyone who mattered to him knew where their leverage lay: he could buy plans and he could reorganize people's lives.
The weeks after Hendrix's public collapse were a strange blur. People who clung to me suddenly moved more carefully. Salvador thanked me with surgical kindness. Brooklyn called me less and sent me more practical texts: "Cash more important than drama." My mother was safe for a month on the money he sent.
But Egan and I never found comfortable footing. He'd give, then pull back. He'd watch me with an intensity I found exhausting and occasionally tender. He'd make a show of disdain and then quietly remove my name from his block list so he could be the one to decide how and when to reach me.
Work continued in the way of work: we argued, we revised, we fought over light wells and the angle of a lobby. He was exacting and impatient and lavish in the only currency he still cared about—control. Once, when I pushed a design he didn't like, he walked across the conference room with a purposeful, smooth stride and stood close enough that I could smell the citrus of his cologne.
"Do it my way, Blythe," he said, and there was no threat in his voice, only a quiet request from a man who expected obedience.
"Do it your way and leave my life out of it," I answered.
He smiled, but it was a small thing. "We both know that's impossible."
So I learned to keep two lists—one of design notes, one of men. The city taught me rules: don't beg, don't break, and don't expect men to fix the parts of your life they break. But when the dust settled, when cameras cooled, and when the crowd's appetite moved to the next thing, Hendrix's public undoing remained a spectacle that changed the course of a few lives.
I kept my promises to myself and to others, and I kept my bloody leg to remind me what it cost to bargain with men who wear names like armor. For a while the world seemed a little quieter, the rumor mills slowed, and I could breathe.
Then one morning, Egan called with an offer that smelled less like deal and more like threat. "Come to my penthouse and finalize the elevator shafts," he said, and my heart did the tired twitch of someone who knows too well that a meeting in his flat is rarely only about blueprints.
I went, because I always go when I have a choice between making money and making nonsense.
We sat across from each other under skylights, and he looked at the plans, then at me. "You did well." A sentence, short and cold.
"Then pay," I said.
He did. He paid. He apologized in currency.
But money does not apologize for the way men behave.
He didn't ask to be forgiven, and I wasn't in the business of giving absolution. Instead, I kept the ledger straight: work delivered, check cashed, debts paid.
And while he arranged and rearranged people, I did what I always do—I built things that could stand.
The End
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