Sweet Romance15 min read
My Life on Borrowed Hours (and a Very Useful Villain)
ButterPicks14 views
"I slapped her."
"I saw."
"Why would you—"
"I didn't mean—"
"I meant to. I meant every word and every sound of it."
The room went quiet the way a stage goes quiet when the curtain drops. Makeup brushes stopped midair. A phone on the vanity table kept recording, its red light steady and small like a defeated star.
"I'm Leia," I said then, like it explained everything and nothing.
Sara grabbed my arm and pulled me aside. "Leia, what the hell? You can't—"
"I already did it," I said. My right cheek still tingled. The sting felt clearer than the glass-mirror version of me. "She needed a lesson."
Sara's mouth flattened. "Lesson? Do you know what this will do? Do you know what a single photo will do?"
"Show me." I let go of her hand. The makeup room smelled like hairspray and solvents and nerves. I wanted to laugh and cry and go back to sleep, all at once.
She showed me, like she knew I'd want to see the damage done as if my life were a movie I could pause and rewind. Her tablet held a dozen screenshots and, on top, a screaming headline.
Entertainment Now: Leia Schaefer Slaps Newcomer Juliana Leone — Star vs. Star on Set! (Photo Attached)
"Delete it. Make them delete it," I said, stupidly, like words could seal a leak.
"It's already gone to trending," Sara said. She flicked through comments. "They're saying you're a diva. They're saying you're a 'money girl.' People are calling for you to leave the industry."
I watched my face on the screen. It looked like my face, and it didn't. The reflected me was a version the book already knew: sharp, cruel, necessary to the plot.
"Do you remember how the book ends?" Sara whispered suddenly, leaning closer than necessary. "You become the villain who dies in Chapter Sixty. They—"
"Shut up," I told her. My voice came out softer than I'd have liked. I did remember. I had finished that old melodrama the night before, stupidly, and I'd fallen asleep halfway through the last chapter. My thumb had betrayed me and scrolled to the end.
I remembered the rabbit, too.
"Alert," a small chirping voice said inside my head.
"—I am System 438," the voice sang, annoyingly cute despite everything. "Welcome, Host. You are now Lin Ruoci. Please perform the villain model behaviors. Life hours initialized: six."
I blinked at the mirror. The rabbit's voice continued: "Your prior actions registered. Life hours +2. Total life hours: 6."
"I bought this book for the cursing lines, not for the afterlife," I muttered aloud, which made Sara snort.
"You heard it." The rabbit's tone was annoyingly chipper again. "Perform villain. Or die."
"Fine." I smoothed my skirt and let the role droop over me like a costume I hadn't ordered. "Fine. Let's perform."
Outside the makeup room, I found Juliana waiting with an ice pack on her cheek. She looked like a cast-iron teacup about to be crushed. Her humility was almost theatrical.
"Leia," she said, voice small, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"
"You didn't mean to..." I finished for her, even though my palm still burned. "No explanation needed."
She bowed like she thought apology was a posture that could hold a conversation together. I wanted to push her into that posture and then sit back and enjoy the scene's applause. Instead I stayed, because the rabbit kept whispering: Walk the part. Win minutes.
Armando Khan came in like a script cue. The air changed when he walked in; people leaned away or leaned forward. If a character had a halo, his would crackle—CEO, heir, the favorite in every publishing company's margins. He approached Juliana first and cupped her face like he could stop her skin splitting right up.
"Are you all right?" he asked. The actor's voice softened into real worry.
"She's fine," I said. "She tripped. It happens."
Armando's eyes sharpened on me. "She has a swelling, Leia. You know what you look like. Do that again in front of a camera and you'll be ruined."
I rolled my eyes. "Go ahead. Try to ruin me." I heard the system ping.
OOC warning, it said in its tinny way. OOC warning. Act villain. Act now.
I flung myself into the role like a practiced actor and threw in the lines the story expected. The story loved such things. It was small, fatal joys.
"I'll make sure no one 'ruins' you, Armando. It seems like a waste of good talent if you lose a face like that to ignorance." I let the words drip, poisonous as sugar.
The camera phones blinked like insects. A plate had been broken and everyone wanted a piece of it. The director barked for action, half-excited, half-terrified, but the story's cogs turned beyond him. I could feel the system's tally as if someone else were counting the hours on an unseen clock.
Later, alone in the bathroom, I cupped my face and saw the stranger in the mirror. My name, printed by the story I'd devoured last night, blinked like a warning in the back of my skull.
System 438: You are Lin Ruoci. Do your part. Or end.
I closed my eyes and thought about quitting. About folding the piece of fiction back into its place and going home. Sara's voice came back, pragmatic and soft.
"Retire, Leia. Walk away. Heiress, remember? Your family owns the world."
I almost did. But then I checked the life hours. They were a small bright thing: five, then eight, then ten. The numbers felt like promise.
"Okay," I told myself. "Okay. Play."
A man with a soft uniform and easier lines slipped an invitation under the door of our set: The investor is coming tonight. Armando Khan is attending a dinner at Clearwater Club. The director's assistant's face lit up. "Armando likes to look after his people."
"Armando likes to look after his own," I said. We both watched the word 'own' leave the air like smoke.
I thought about running. Instead, I did something the story found delightfully villainous. I let myself be photographed in a black-and-white light with my head held high, leaning in a way that looked expensive. I smoked a paper-thin cigarette I didn't inhale and I smiled like someone who owned a secret.
You learn quickly on set—your face is economics. Your look is a press release. "Can you believe they'd let you film in a place like that?" the makeup girl asked.
"They let me because I've learned how to make people look at me," I said, and I meant it.
We filmed. We finished. The day's labor pressed like a hand on my back. I left early, because I was tired of people pretending that fiction couldn't pull their hearts like puppets.
My phone buzzed with "Brother" on the screen. Mateo's voice was the kind that comfortably carried wealth: steady, polished, always the right timbre.
"You're at Clearwater," he said. "Come taste a real evening. I'm here."
"Why is the CEO of Picard Investments prompting my social calendar?" I asked.
"Because I miss you," he said simply.
His invitation felt like a safe harbor. I took it. I wanted someone who would see me, not the villain my book praised so heartlessly.
Clearwater Club was quieter than the hotel's lobby; it was a private world where faces mattered as little as shadows. Mateo led me to a quiet box. I lowered into the leather and told him the day's story.
"You're not going to quit," he said.
"No," I admitted. "Not yet. I have a system breathing down my neck."
"System?"
"It's complicated." I tried to say it like a lie.
We were not alone long. A man entered the room who made the air click. He was not the long-suffering Armando Khan; he was new—Jagger Sherman.
He had the sort of dark polish you read about in bad novels—handsome, steep, dangerous. My rabbit in the head shrieked.
Warning: Antagonist present. Immediate proximity reduces system volume.
"Dinner?" Jagger said, seeing me look like a deer caught in his headlights.
"Too bold," I said, quietly.
He smiled. "I prefer it blunt."
We sat. Jagger's conversation was like being offered rare wine: at first only aroma, then a warm burn that rolled over your bones. He asked me things no one else did: Did I ever want to change the script? Did I believe in happy endings? He spoke of companies and chess pieces and of how scenery is always chosen by the man who pays.
"Are you here because of your brother?" he asked, after a silence that tasted like silver.
"Because I like olives," I replied.
He laughed, and for a second, something like peace spread through me. The rabbit in my head hummed and then, out of nowhere, squealed.
System 438: Host contacted Antagonist. +10 hours.
"You're an odd girl," Jagger said, the tilt of his mouth more interest than scorn. "Where did you learn to speak like that?"
"Old habits," I said.
That night the life hours climbed in numbers too absurd to trust. Jagger's presence had done more than make me feel safer; it bought me minutes like one buys umbrellas in a mild rain. The system—my ridiculous, insistent ally—brightened. For a stupid, thrilling moment I considered staying attached to him like a small parasite.
"Don't be naive," a voice in my chest said. "He's the villain of the page."
"Then let's upgrade our villain status," I said, and smiled. The voice of the rabbit flittered happily.
Two nights later the set blew up—literally. Lights flared, then a controlled explosion for the chase sequence was late. Ten seconds too late. A piece of scenery caught Juliana. She was taken away in an ambulance with lacerations and a concussion. The director's hair stood on end. Cameras flashed. Fans screamed online like flocks of startled gulls.
"You were nowhere near it," Armando said, in my face like he'd just been given my portrait to burn.
"It wasn't me," I said, bewildered, because it wasn't.
"Who else?" he snarled. "Who would want to hurt her?"
"You'd know," I said, "if you bothered to think."
The internet decided it loved a simple story. My hand fit neatly into it. The comments turned into a slow, sour waterfall.
"Money girl," someone wrote.
"Plant," wrote another. "She planned it."
"Leia did it," trended a thousand angry mouths.
The director tried to do his job and started asking questions about the pyrotechnics team. The pyrotechnics found a small, trembling assistant who confessed, under pressure, that someone had offered him money to delay the detonation by a matter of seconds.
"Who?" the producer demanded, slapping the table.
"It was a woman—small—name I didn't get—she said to make sure the hero had a moment," he mumbled. "She said it was to 'teach the other actress a lesson.'"
The director looked at me as if the world had a single shape and I filled it.
I went to the hospital because the book's plot said I would. I went because the rabbit reminded me that if I could salvage the protagonist's reputation, I got a coin on the clock. I went because I could not possibly afford to die entirely.
At the hospital I stood in the doorway of Juliana's room, because that's what villainesses do, purportedly. Armando walked in behind me, furious as a thunderhead.
"She was injured," he told the nurses. "That's my fault. Someone must be punished."
"You think it was me?" I asked once, when the nurses were busy with stitches and the air smelled like antiseptic and fear.
"Yes," he said. "You are the jealous face. You always were."
"You always were the captain of 'I will be right,'" I said. "And today the book's script might love to see you right."
I showed Juliana a video Jagger had given me: a shaky recording of a prop assistant explaining that someone named Kamryn had paid him. It was not proof which the law would accept, but it was a small spark.
"Kamryn?" Juliana whispered, reading the name like a question.
"Kamryn Haas?" Armando said. The letters in his mouth were like a vow.
"Yes," I said. "She was marginal until she had access."
"Hypocrite," Armando said. "You are nothing but a hypocrite on set."
"Maybe," I said. "But the truth is the truth."
We handed the clip to the director. The director passed it to police. The police moved suffocatedly through their formalities. The public watched, breath waiting.
Someone filmed it all. Someone uploaded. The feed split into millions of tiny windows, and each window had my face, then Armando's, then Kamryn's.
Kamryn was taken away. Her expression was of a trapped thing, belligerent and suddenly small. She shouted that she had been paid by someone else. She named no names. The story, like a child with a new toy, wanted more gore.
Outside the hospital that day, Armando found me waiting. We stood under a fluorescent sky and he snapped like a sealed flower.
"Why did you bring him that tape?" he demanded. "Why would you—"
"I'm not your enemy, Armando," I said. "I am only attending to myself."
"You always play the martyr," he said. "You always play the villain and think you'll profit. You're a parasite."
I laughed then. "You say parasite like a debt. I say it's advantage."
"You think you'll outlive me in the public eye? They'll eat you."
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe they'll eat you first."
He stepped closer, the actor there again, all scorn. "You think you can throw dirt at me and not have it stick? You think you can sabotage a man of my station and not lose?"
"I don't think," I answered. "I know."
He lunged forward and shoved his chest into mine. The movement was cinematic, trope-riddled, and utterly stupid. People circled the scene like sharks. Phones came forward. Armando's expression broke on the camera—smug, then shocked, then inching toward something like panic.
"You're mine," he said, as if the world could be owned with such a sentence.
"Prove it," I said.
He moved like someone who'd rehearsed a thousand times. He pushed me further, harder. I lost my balance but not my mouth.
The crowd hissed. Someone recorded loud. Someone else laughed like a small animal. Armando's face took on a shade I recognized as the prelude to ruin: confusion, raw worry, then loud denial.
"It was Leia," he shouted at the director. "It was Leia who told the prop man. She likes to make trouble. Fire her."
"We need facts," the director said, but his words were small under the earthquake of social media.
Armando's denials lasted three seconds. Then I opened my long-saved folder. I had proof. There were emails. There were messages. There were receipts for transfers made to one of Kamryn's accounts, traced to a shell company that connected to Armando's office. The documents had been expensive to collect and painful to keep—someone had to dig into ledgers and find ghosts.
"Do you really think this will end me?" he asked, a voice half-plead, half-sneer.
"Do you think I care?" I asked, and then I pressed "send" to a public account and watched as the world received the file.
The world was hungry for spectacle. The file spread like spilled honey. Phones in the crowd were raised like lit torches. Reporters' microphones became thorns.
He curled from smug to incredulous to denial in the span of minutes. "This is falsified," he said.
"Explain the bank transfers," I said.
"I didn't—" he choked. "I didn't authorize anything. It was—"
"Lies," someone in the crowd cried. "This is a setup."
The director stammered as if trying to patch a ship with paper. Armando's public image was an engineered cathedral; I had lit a candle and watched the wind flirt with it.
"Explain," I said again. "You pay to delay a prop. Someone gets hurt. You get your scapegoat. Or you tried to make one. Which is it?"
"It wasn't me," he said, but the word shook like a leaf in wind.
The crowd's mood shifted from hunger to expectation. Phones recorded. Cameras rolled. The director's assistant repeated names, tweaked the narrative. A reporter shoved a microphone in Armando's face.
"Is it true you transferred funds to Kamryn Haas' account?" she asked.
"Not—" He spluttered.
"Show your bank," I told him, voice cold. "Show the transfers. Tell the police you did not authorize them. Tell your board why your name is on invoices. Or kneel."
A silence like winter's breath fell. There is a particular cruelty when a man of power is offered the script he used to write for others. He looked at me and then at the ring of faces.
"Prove it," he said. "Prove it's real."
"It is real," I said. "And if you don't prove your innocence I will hand this presentation to every reporter in the city. I will name you. I will lay out the receipts. I will show the motion of your hand."
Phones zoomed closer. The camera caught him, human as any man, and the light did him no favors.
He staggered. The crowd's noise grew. Someone said, "Arrest him," and even that sounded like theatre. He shook his head as if shaking loose an affliction. "You can't—"
"Can't what?" I asked, and I meant it.
The press ripped at him like dogs at a bone he had believed was his. His face advanced through the oldest of stages: indignation, denial, bargaining, then that long slow collapse when the house of cards loses its one brave card and falls.
"You're insane," he said finally. "You're making this up."
"Tell that to the paper trail," I said. "Tell that to the accountant's call logs and the IP addresses. And tell that to everyone who saw you at the night you wired the money."
The crowd's murmur coalesced into a sound I had never expected to enjoy: righteous roar. Phones recorded. A woman clapped. Someone laughed harshly. "About time," someone else said.
He took one step backward, then two, and then he fell to his knees on the pavement like a man who'd been struck with the knowledge he could lose everything.
"Arms—" he gasped, "I—"
"Beg," I said.
He did not look at me. He looked at the phones, at the cameras, at every face that had turned toward him with the taste of a story in their mouths. Tears came raw and grand. He dropped like a martyr pretending to be wrong.
"Please," he whimpered. "Please, I didn't—"
"Everyone," I called, the words meant to be the world's. "This is what arrogance tastes like when chewed up. This is what betrayal sounds like."
Phones recorded his supplication. A child in the crowd laughed. A woman filmed him and then started a live feed. People in suits quieted, watching the public unravel. Someone pulled up the boardroom feed and broadcast it in a loop. His board called. His PR team tried to spin. His world, once polished, fractured.
"Get up," I said finally, because I did not want to be a ruler of ruin; I wanted to be a mirror. "Own it. Or lose the rest of your dignity on the pavement."
He crawled on the stone like an animal. His suit jacket had been rumpled. His knees kissed concrete. He lifted his head and met mine. For the first time, he asked me not for forgiveness, but for a story in which he did not receive the ending I had read.
"Please," he said, again smaller.
The circle of onlookers murmured. They wanted to watch him fall, but they also wanted a spectacle of mercy. Phones recorded. A dozen different feeds reached tens of thousands in minutes. People took sides like flags.
Armando Khan's collapse lasted long enough to be absolutely final. He begged. He denied. He accused. He begged again. People recorded. People posted. People cheered when the next article gave the names for the shell companies and traced the wires. The press asked him to step aside. His own words turned against him.
Afterward, when the sirens faded and the crowd thinned and the directors and lawyers and cameras took their own pieces, I stepped away. My hands were shaking, but the rabbit in my head flashed: Life hours +50.
"You used me," Jagger's text read, delivered like a question.
"You used me first," I typed back. "And then I used the chance."
He replied, with a single emoji of a fox.
The world kept being the world. The book's old lines scattered, like confetti. People argued online that I had no right to do such a thing. People argued I had all the right. The rabbit giggled, and the clock on my phone counted hours like a satisfied accountant.
The system kept counting and I kept playing. I signed with a new agency—one attached to Jagger's business-leaned group—and I tried, surreal and exhausted, to be an actress again. Things changed: cameras warmed to me, then turned cold, then warmed again. I slept with ambiguity at my throat and a ledger of hours under my pillow.
"I don't want a trophy," Jagger said once, when we'd both had too much wine on the roof of his building and the city looked like a bowl of shaken stars.
"You've been good for my life hours," I told him, which was the sentence of pure truth.
"I was always good to you," he said, but the softness was a cartoon that did not erase the edges.
"I know," I said. "But they call you a villain. Do villains get a choice?"
"Villains choose," he said.
That night my phone chimed with new numbers: life hours, system pings, offers, threats. The novel's architecture kept pushing me forward and I kept answering, one performance at a time. I moved from patient to beast to prophet in the gossip columns. I turned away from the man who had once been a villain in my head and toward the only person who had given me anything like certainty.
The city whispered. The rabbit chirped with the satisfaction of a clock that loves being wound.
Months later, Armando's fall became a case study in ruin. At a public council meeting where shareholders had gathered, the board forced him out with a vote that was almost ritual. Cameras were there. Reporters were there. A thousand comments called it theatre. A thousand more called it justice.
I watched the tape of the meeting on a midnight when lights fell like catcalls.
He walked in tall and left bent. They asked him to resign in front of a room full of witnesses. He refused first in that thin, keening way. Then they put it to a vote. His friends sat on their hands. His cavern of power had been emptied one screw at a time.
"Leia, you did this," a woman told me at a press conference months afterward, as if I'd performed a miracle.
"I did what I had to," I said. "I played my role and then I rewrote it."
The story would have ended then, if I let it. But I kept breathing the rabbit's soft numbers like an incense stick, and Jagger kept smiling like someone who had won more than his dues. I kept meeting him for coffee, for late dinners. We talked about numbers and plays and damned songs. Once, at a small private show, he leaned across a table and said, "I like you. Not the book version, the living version."
"Is the living version simple to love?" I asked.
"Only to those who keep the receipts," he said.
Those receipts, the hours the system tallied, the public punishments—none of it felt simple. It felt like a ledger I had to keep balanced. But in the quiet after the applause and the sharp sound of headlines, I would walk to my window, pull open a drawer, and watch a small pocket watch tick like a heart.
System 438: Host alive. Life hours: plenty. Performance rating: A-.
"Do you still hate me?" Armando asked once, months later, when he was a footnote in other people's stories.
"I don't hate you," I said. "I pity you."
He spat the word "pity" like it hurt him, and I'm not sure he was wrong. To be pitied is to be left in a room with the truth and no makeover. I turned my face to the glass and the city bent, indifferent, beautiful, and merciless.
"Do you regret anything?"
I thought about my life's hours like candles. I thought about the rabbit voice and the hours it gifted me, about the man who had almost succeeded in making my character into a corpse, about the man who'd given me hours like jewels.
"I regret only one thing," I said. "That the book's ending is so terribly final."
Jagger sat forward. "Then what's your ending going to be?"
I opened the watch. The second hand moved. It was not a prophecy—but it was mine.
"I plan to live," I said.
And the watch ticked, an honest, mechanical sound.
The End
— Thank you for reading —