Face-Slapping10 min read
My Model, My Gold, My Mess — A White Clock and a Wedding
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I am Kinley Barrett, owner of a small modeling agency that used to barely register on any map of the fashion world.
"Kinley, you sure about signing him?" Bonnie Arnold asked the first day Erik walked into my office wearing a flight jacket and an expression like he was boarding a plane out of bother.
"I am sure," I said, folding my hands. "He leaves the room different. We'll make him a star."
He was impossible, in the way saints are impossible: aloof, precise, always like someone who had his own weather. Erik Ali never followed the usual model rules. He trained at an aviation academy, not a fashion school. He moved like a man used to balancing instruments, not applause.
"I don't do underwear shows," he told me once in a cafe, eyes on his coffee like it was a map.
"Do you know how much brands pay for a face like yours?" I answered. "Do you know how much luck you are for a company of my size?"
Erik smiled, the kind that didn't reach the eyes. "Luck lasts as long as people keep need of it."
I fed him the best team, the glossiest photographers, the fiercest stylists. I paid. I planed. I kept him fed on opportunity and praise like a minor god. He walked like a man on a different continent, and still, the big contracts came to him.
He was my golden ticket, until he wasn't.
"Kinley, there's a company wanting me. I can stay until the end of this month," he said in my bed one morning after a night I barely remembered.
"No," I said too fast. "You don't get to leave without giving me something."
He snorted. "You bought me. How many times must we both play the ownership game?"
"Five million," I said, then a thousand reasons why I would be mortified to spend that much. "Fine. Six hundred sixty-six thousand—no, wait—six million? No. Six hundred sixty-six thousand? Fine. Take it and run."
He slid a card across the bedside table. "Three million. No password on the card. Consider it compensation."
"Compensation for what?" I asked, voice small.
"For choosing new skies," he said, voice gentle. "I can't stay."
"Don't leave me," I said. "Please."
He paused. "I'm tired, Kinley. Find another model."
He left.
I pretended not to care. I flew with him to Paris because he still had one more show to do. On the plane I opened an orange and waited like someone performing kindness.
"You only drink fresh-squeezed," he said, looking at the orange.
"Fine," I said, peeling it anyway. "I bought a watch last year. All diamonds."
"I don't need your gifts," he said.
"Buy a bag then," I tried, offering the only leverage I had.
He walked into the dressing room the night of the show wearing a shirt with zippers like armor, and I was, despite myself, ready to make him laugh.
"I thought your zipper would be stuck," I whispered in the dark.
He touched my hair by habit. "Kinley, are you nervous?"
"I always am," I said.
He breathed close. "Then stay near."
I was stupid enough to try to help him with his zipper before the show. The metal slipped easily; it gave me nothing to crow about. The sabotage I had paid for—an assistant's hands and a twenty-dollar bribe—failed.
"Did you do that on purpose?" Erik asked later, when the show was over and the city had gone colder.
"That assistant lied," I said. "And I lied along."
He laughed, low and distracted. "You are dramatic."
"You're the dramatic one," I said. "You sleep with one hand on my company and the other on my sanity."
I told myself it didn't matter. The next failure was larger.
We were in a hotel. I went to his room confident and drunk on a plan to make him jealous, to make him look foolish, to stop him from leaving with a showy humiliation.
There he was, shirt half-open in conversation with two French women. I walked in, threw a stack of euros on the table, and said perfectly in French, "Tonight, keep him company."
"Kinley," he said, and his hand was on my waist like it had been mapped there for years. "Those are the designers."
"Just kidding. I'm Japanese," I said, putting on a voice I thought would keep him from taking me seriously.
He shoved me out and I almost fell in my heels. Then his hand was suddenly at my neck in the dark, fingers gentle.
"Kinley," he murmured, "this is not the time."
"I am here to help," I said.
He pushed me away. "Out."
That night he didn't show up on the runway, and the story leaked like rain through fabric. He called me later.
"I lost the show," he said. "You look happy."
"I am, in a way," I lied. "Five minutes in television, and the rest of your time is mine."
He didn't like that. He tossed the money I had placed next to him back at me and waved something like a lie.
"You think this ticket buys silence?" he asked. "What if the press turns it romantic?"
I stared at him. "Then it is your fault."
He smiled. He leaned forward and kissed me full and deep, and in that moment the camera bells chimed.
We were photographed in a hotel car. A thousand flashes were a dozen versions of my life burning.
The next morning the world had chosen positions. I expected the knives. Instead, his fans made me a goddess—"fortunate woman" they called me—and the press wanted more. It was worse because the man who mattered most to my future, the man who had been buying my agency's breathing room with a devotion bordering on worship, had one rule.
"You cannot be seen with any man—or woman—in this industry," his assistant had told me, when he first appeared in my messages as an anonymous benefactor. "He insists on pure, distant, curated intimacy. No entanglement."
I had promised him loyalty over and over. He had been a ghost who dropped resources into my bank and left me notes like a lover who never knocked on my door.
Then the day came I had to meet him: Alaric Morris, aged but charming, composed like a man who’d been waiting for everything to unfold properly.
"Kinley," he said softly, hands clasping mine. "You have done wonderful things. I have kept a promise."
"Mr. Morris," I stammered. "You are too kind."
He smiled. "I suppose I have been very selfish. I wanted you to succeed because you saved a boy's life."
"A boy's life?" I asked.
He laughed. "Erik is mine."
Wait. My mind rewired. Erik was the son of my gold-giver. The man who had asked me never to get involved with anyone in the business had been Erik's father all along. That explained the favors, the contracts, the quiet funds.
"You knew?" I said, incredulous.
Alaric chuckled. "Of course. You are not the only person who is clever."
My hands tightened around the white porcelain of the teacup he had given me. The world was suddenly a chessboard, and I'd been a pawn that had fallen for a knight.
Then the other shoe fell. I found Erik in the shower at the estate—alone and casual, a towel wrapped so carelessly—and he looked up at me with a sort of soft triumph.
"He knows you," he said when I blurted about Alaric. "He trusts you."
"Does he?" I snapped.
"You used to tutor him," Erik said. "You used to be his Fat Tiger's friend. You don't remember little things."
"So he grew up training to be my model?" I scoffed.
"He grew up training to be for me," he corrected.
I tried to be proud. I tried to resist. But when the old watch Alaric had cherished ticked, I felt like an impostor.
Then the world revolted.
Dolores Winter—the woman who ruled certain circles of the industry like a winter wind—disliked me like mold in champagne. She preferred to strand young men and watch them drift.
"Kinley," Dolores commanded when I entered a lavish room a week later, "you came uninvited."
"Uninvited, no. Unprepared, yes," I said.
She had a protégé in her lap, Jaxon Curry, a former model I had once signed and then cut loose when he tried to blackmail me. He had a new swagger, courtesy of Dolores.
"Your taste in jewelry is interesting," Dolores said, pointing to the pale white clock I had brought to Alaric as a token. "You bought a clock for a man who buys islands?"
"White is his favorite," I said. "And he likes sweet things."
Dolores laughed too loud. "Sweet? Many of us live on salt. You do well to remember."
Jaxon, who had been the son of a small town and hungry for a city, stepped forward and said, "Kinley, don't pretend you are innocent. You and your toys—how many brides have your models left us for?"
"Your models left because you taught them to leave," I answered.
"I thought you didn't care," he said with a grin. "But your face says otherwise."
"Floor it with respect."
He moved like a man who had nothing left to lose. He shoved me once, and then again. It wasn't hard; I wasn't that big. My heel caught, and I almost fell.
"You will not lay a hand on me for this," he sneered.
"I installed a camera," I said, voice low. "You are a recorded man, Jaxon."
"You lie!" Dolores shrieked.
"Check the live feed," I said. "The whole world can watch how you behave when you think there are no consequences. Or we can make them watch how you behave when there are."
Dolores flushed, and Jaxon laughed. He reached for me as if to humiliate me again.
Then Erik entered like a winter wind.
He made no noise. He only looked. He walked to Jaxon, who had never known what to do with fear, and touched him with words like silk knives.
"Jaxon," he said softly, "you are making a mistake."
"Make me a mistake that earns me a living," Jaxon spat.
Erik's hand went to Jaxon's face, and then to the whole room.
"You come to my house and touch my person," he said. "You come to my wife"—those three syllables landed like a bell—"and you believe you can do whatever you like."
"You're not married to her," Dolores cried.
"I will be if I choose," Erik said. "And if I choose, this is what happens when you violate someone in my circle."
He called his people. It is a strange comfort to me that Erik's public gentleness is matched by his private ferocity.
They forced Dolores and Jaxon to stand in the grand hall with all of the industry there—photographers, critics, the very people who once applauded them.
"You're making a scene," Dolores whimpered as a hundred phones lifted, as if to take the temperature of her soul.
This is the part no contract could cover: revenge like an audience. I watched, heart hollow and full both, as Erik conducted the punishment.
"We are not going to let this die in whispers," he announced. "If you two think it is clever to drag a small company into mud, then the mud will be up close and personal."
He read out the evidence from a playlist I had let him keep: recorded messages, emails sent to me like small bombs, bribes, offers, threats—every one digital, every one precise. He had me read the messages to the crowd.
"This man," he said, addressing Jaxon, "threatened to release private images and to sell false stories about Kinley. This woman"—he turned to Dolores—"used company contacts to blacklist companies that bought models from Kinley's agency. They called for boycotts and tried to bankrupt a business for sport."
"That is not true!" Dolores wailed.
"Prove it," Erik said. "Look at this spreadsheet." He lit the room with truth like a spotlight. He showed bank transfers, wire confirmations, contract timestamps. He showed names and dates.
The crowd changed as if they were a field of wildflowers blown by someone else’s hand.
"Do you see yourselves?" Erik asked. "You used to be the powerful ones. Now you are just small people with mean methods."
That is when the awful, delightful part began.
He asked them to stand, one by one, and apologize on camera not to me but to their victims; not to me but to each person whose life they had tried to ruin: assistants, stylists, a dozen models who had been coached into humiliation.
"Say their names," Erik ordered.
They stammered. They scowled. When Dolores named them, the crowd hissed.
Journalists started clapping. It was an ugly, moral applause, but applause nonetheless.
"One more thing," Erik said. "You will sign a restitution agreement. You will publicly acknowledge the harm. You will step down from the boards you control and resign any seat that gives you leverage over people for the next five years."
Dolores began to cry. "You can't force me—"
"I can and I will," Erik said. "We have evidence. The world is watching. You can either stand up and mean what you say, or we will make sure every one of these records is handed to regulators and to the networks. We will do the work to make your companies unfit for board membership. We will make sure you are not hired for a decade."
He had the power. He used it. The lights of shame rose slowly and did not burn out.
They signed. The cameras filmed. The whispers turned to public notations. Those who had once stood above the small businesses we all fought for were now filing documents and reading prepared statements, heads bowed, makeup streaking.
I kept my hands folded. I felt the weight of a thousand business meetings. My stomach turned and then steadied.
When it was over, when Dolores and Jaxon left with statements and broken pride, the crowd turned like weather.
"You did it," Bonnie said later, voice small beside me.
Erik took my hand. He pressed the white clock Alaric had liked into my palm. It clicked softly.
"For what it's worth," he said, "I wanted people to see the version of you I always had in private."
"Which is?" I asked.
"Capable, tenacious, and terrible when crossed."
"Thanks," I said.
We made deals. Erik used his connections to bring me the contracts Alaric had arranged—television projects, management positions at companies I had only dreamed of. We signed papers in Alaric's study, then in a conference room, then under a tree by an artificial lake.
"Will you stay?" I asked once, after a long dinner when lights hung low over a garden.
"I will stay," he said. "But not for the contract."
"Why then?"
He smiled, small and dangerous. "Because sometimes you meet someone who used to be your Fat Tiger, who once rode a blue bike with mud on his shoes, and you see that he is bigger now—not because the world made him so, but because he decided to be."
We toured a private chapel and then an island. We announced our union with a photograph—a simple shot, us by the sea, holding hands. The press called it a whirlwind. They called me a lucky woman. They called him a saint or a sin, depending on which column they wrote.
Alaric gave me a drawer of deeds and the key to more than one future. "I'm proud," he said once, voice unsteady. "It was always more than money. You kept him alive."
At our wedding there was a white clock set on a small table. I wound it before vows, feeling the tiny mechanism gathering a thousand small times into a single day.
When the priest asked if any impediment stood between us, Dolores's old men and the ruined manager Jaxon were not there to answer. They had been forgiven reluctantly by paperwork and the law of attention.
Erik kissed my fingers, then my lips, then my forehead. The white clock ticked and ticked, patient as a clock that has weathered storms.
I remember thinking, as the second hand moved, that time is a small favor: it tells us what is true if we stop shouting long enough to listen.
When people asked me years later about that press night, I always said the same thing.
"We climbed out of mud," I said. "We did not stay there."
At night, the clock on our mantle ticks like a secret. It sings the same soft song it did the first evening Erik held me: small, steady, and utterly indifferent to gossip.
When I wind it now, I sometimes smile and say, "Keep time for us." Then I set it down and look at the man who once would fly away and now keeps landing at my door.
The End
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