Face-Slapping11 min read
Rain, Rings, and the Night the Truth Came Up
ButterPicks14 views
Chapter One — The Orange Warning
It was raining so hard the city felt underwater. The weather app flashed an orange storm warning and my phone filled up with messages I didn’t want.
“How much do you charge?” one said.
“Where are you tonight?” another.
“Your place? Mine? Or the cheap hotel?”
I stared at the screen until a little panic rose like steam in my chest. My fingers tightened around the phone, the skin near my knuckles white.
“Leila, you okay?” Angela from the next desk came over and touched my shoulder.
“Just tired,” I lied. “I’ll take the bus home.”
Outside, the wind pushed fat drops against the glass. My ring felt heavy on my finger. I had kept it on since the divorce — old habits die slow.
On the sidewalk I saw him. Raphael Evans, in a black suit, his umbrella a dark island in the colorless flood. He looked at me the way people look at paintings: for a long moment and without moving.
He didn’t speak. I shoved my umbrella down, ducked into the bus, and told myself he had not seen me.
“You distracted,” Angela teased.
“I’m fine.” I was not fine.
Chapter Two — The Call to Shoot
My job at the magazine started at ten. I changed my number the next day. It felt like ripping a bandage off slowly, in public, with people watching.
“Leila, your resume says you know photography,” Journi Castaneda said before I could sit. She handed me a camera like she was handing me a grenade.
“You’re on next Monday,” she said, and left.
“Who are we shooting?” I asked after she’d gone.
“He is Raphael Evans,” someone breathed like a secret.
The office filled with whispers. I tried to breathe through them and failed.
That weekend I dressed like a normal person and walked into a restaurant. I told myself I would be polite, and I meant it, right up until the man across the room said, “Sorry I’m late,” and I found that my heart had already decided to be rude.
His name was Connor De Luca, pleasant and bland, the kind of man whose life fit a neat brochure. I told him the truth.
“Connor, I’m divorced. I can’t—”
“I don’t mind,” he said, and I was honest.
“I don’t want to see someone who treats me like a last resort.” I left before dessert.
Then everything changed.
Chapter Three — The Moment
Raphael walked in with the sort of quiet attention that made the room rearrange itself. A table of his friends made some joke about a woman they had once known. I thought he hadn’t seen me until he was striding toward my table and grasping my wrist, pulling me up.
“Leila,” he said. “When did you come back?”
“Six months,” I said, which was the truth the sky let me carry.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” His voice was small, like a child trying to hide a bruise.
“Because I can’t.”
He looked at the ring on my finger as if trying to bend its metal with his eyes. When he grabbed my hand my breath went away.
“You married?” he asked.
I lied for a second because lying is easier than telling the exact way your heart breaks. Then I let him find out on his own.
Chapter Four — The First Bruise
He pushed and I cried and he accused me of leaving him without reason. He called me names like they were facts and then his hands were on my face.
“Tell me the truth,” he demanded.
“Three years ago you asked me to try,” I said. “I tried. I left.”
He shoved me toward the stairs and I slipped. A shadow grabbed my hair and dragged me into the street. Rolf Santos — my ex — was there like a bad season no one had warned me about.
“You owe me money!” he hissed. “You owe me everything!”
“I gave you the house,” I said. “I gave you my quiet. I gave you the end of us.”
He hit me. Hard. I tasted copper and the world turned thin. I thought, for a second, this will be it. This will be the last.
Then Raphael came from nowhere and hit him like he was made of glass.
“Get off her!”
Someone shouted and the crowd circled like vultures looking for a story. Rolf went from swagger to confusion to anger to terror in one brutal arc.
“You—” Rolf stammered, daubing his mouth with blood, “you ruined everything.”
“You hit her,” Raphael said quietly. “You hit her like a man with no shame.”
Rolf sneered, “She left. She took everything. She’s a—”
The word broke. Raphael didn't say another. He didn’t have to. He pushed and Rolf stumbled and stumbled and then collapsed like a puppet whose last string had been cut. The crowd recorded everything; phones rose like tiny lighthouses.
Chapter Five — The Days After
The next morning I woke with an alarm I did not set. My face was swollen. I took pictures for the police and the hospital and I put them away like evidence you don’t want to reread.
I went to the magazine and pretended to be ordinary. Raphael sat at the far end of the table during our elevator ride up and said, “I taught you how to shoot, didn’t I?”
“You taught me a lot,” I answered. “Don’t make it mean more.”
He smiled like someone trying to be kinder than he felt.
“You will shoot me well or you will shoot me at all?” he asked.
“You think I can make you look good?” I said.
“You always made things better,” he said.
That week was a blur of lights and cameras and a cold that settled in my bones. The city watched. I put on the camera and framed him until the shutter was just the sound of air leaving the room.
Chapter Six — The Mess
Two fights changed everything. The first was private and bloody. The second was loud and poisonous.
My phone, which I had found later under a table at the restaurant, had messages that made a story. Rolf had not been acting alone. Someone had given him the idea of making trouble.
A woman named Aiko Fernandez — who smiled like she owned a city — had texted him about me. She had sat next to him at a bar and plotted how to make me disappear. Her messages were polite at first and then cold.
“She’s nobody,” one text read. “If you need to scare her, do it in public. Make it a story. Make it run in their papers.”
I took copies to Journi. I thought she would protect me. Instead the office became a house of mirrors. Somebody leaked my idea and I was called into a room with a big desk and a small smile.
“Leila,” Journi said, and her voice was practiced, “we have to think about the company.”
“You mean I have to think about your shareholders,” I said.
“Just go to the finance office. Three months pay. We’ll write you a lovely letter,” she said.
“How many people did you hurt so you could say that?” I asked.
She looked away. She would not say.
That day I quit and they pushed me out like a slat from a fence.
Chapter Seven — The Banquet
The annual dinner at the magazine was a shining thing of people and plates and cameras. I had not planned to go. I wanted to be invisible. But something in me had a stubbornness that could not be explained; I wanted to see the people who had made my life a stage.
I arrived late. It felt like a mistake every step of the way.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Aiko said with the kind of sweetness that has teeth.
“You planned it,” I said.
A crowd gathered for a performance onstage. I was hunched under my coat when Rolf pushed me toward the center of the hall like a farmer pushing a chestnut onto a bonfire.
“You should be quiet,” he barked. “You should know your place.”
Then he struck me in front of five hundred people.
There was a sound like a book dropping. My face filled with heat and cold and the room smelled like wine and rain. People gasped. Forks paused like commas.
He laughed then. At first he was triumphant. “She’s a liar,” he said. “She stole from me. She stole everything.”
Phones rose. Someone said, “Call security.” Someone else said, “Is that the same woman from the photos?”
Raphael was at the edge of the stage, watching. For a sick second I thought he would look away.
Then he moved.
He did more than defend me. He turned the lamp of that banquet into a spotlight and pointed it straight at the people who had set the trap.
He walked to the edge of the stage, his suit like a dark promise. He said, “Stop.”
He turned his hands to the event manager and said, “Bring up the footage.”
A screen lit. It began to show messages, audio clips, photographs — everything Aiko had arranged with Rolf. The room felt like it tilted.
At first Rolf sat with the weight of triumph still filling his chest. He looked like a man who had guessed he had won the whole world.
Then the screen showed him texting: “Hit her harder.”
Then a video of Aiko and him laughing in a corner of a bar, saying exactly how to make the magazine print bad things about me. Her voice was silk, and then it was mechanical.
Someone in the crowd began to film. Another whispered, “They did it together.”
For the first time in months I felt the world tilt the other way.
Rolf’s face changed. He went from smug to startled, mouth open like a fish out of water.
“No, that wasn’t me!” he cried.
He looked to Aiko, who had the best actress’s face: sweet, shocked, now feigning disbelief.
“Someone edited that!” Aiko shouted, her composure discovering cracks. “You can’t play people like that!”
The room’s air was thick with disbelief. People who had smiled minutes before now looked like jurors.
“Who gave you those messages?” a man called from the crowd.
She faltered. “You can’t prove it!” she said.
The footage rolled on. A two-hour conversation, unscripted, full of plans, played in ten minutes. People watched as Aiko told Rolf which photographers would be in the room, which editor could be bribed, how to leak the invitation so it would be in the press.
Rolf’s face bled color. His voice came out like a small animal.
“Please,” he said. “Please, I— I didn’t mean—”
A hush. A thousand whispers.
“Didn’t mean?” someone shouted. “He beat her in the lobby; he beat her here.”
Rolf backed away as if the light itself was hot. He tried to pull himself together, to find a story that would absolve him, but his mouth kept cutting off in protest.
“It’s a setup! She set this up!” he shouted at me, desperately trying to flip the story. “She wanted attention!”
“Stop,” Raphael said. His voice was calm and sharp like glass. “You plotted this. You bought lies.”
Rolf’s eyes flicked to Aiko again. She had stopped acting. She had become a woman whose script had been taken away.
“Don’t film me!” Rolf begged. He dropped to his knees on the thick carpet in the hotel ballroom. The sound of his voice was a child’s wail: “Please, please, you have to forgive me, I can’t—”
People recorded him begging. Phones blurred into a thousand little courts. Someone in the crowd laughed and then started clapping. It was slow at first, then more, a merciless cadence. A clapping that was not approval, but the sound the world makes when it pulls a curtain to reveal a fraud.
Aiko’s face drained. She tried to deny again.
“This is—this is—” she stilled, then voice breaking, “I’m sorry.”
She looked around the room for a face that would show her mercy. No one did. They filmed. They whispered. An older woman shoved her phone into a friend’s hand and said, “Post it. Post it now.”
Rolf curled in on himself like a man who had been struck by a storm. He went from shrewd to shattered to frantic. He dropped his head into his hands and whispered, “Please, I’ll do anything. I didn’t think—”
He asked for forgiveness in the kind of voice that asks the sky not to fall. He begged the people who had watched him beat another person for what felt like a lifetime to be kind.
“No,” I heard myself say. My voice was small but steady. “No, you don’t get to beg my forgiveness in front of five hundred people. You hurt me in private and now you want to ask for mercy in public.”
He looked up at me, face wet, and I saw it then — the thing I had been afraid of all along: his need to be seen as a hero even as he played the villain.
The crowd’s reactions were everything the rulebook of public shaming needs. Phones clattered. A woman in a red dress recorded with shaking hands. Someone made a video that would go viral within the hour. Some people walked away in disgust. Others stayed, mouths open like witnesses.
Aiko tried to speak again. She mouthed, “I can explain.”
“You can’t,” Raphael said. “You planned a crime and made a show of it. You used people for your gossip. You watched a man harm a woman and still rewarded him.”
“That’s enough,” the director of the magazine said, suddenly part of the real world again. Security came and took Rolf away, but the image had been fixed in the room. The laughter, the cameras, the hush. It was all recorded into the night.
When the men with badges escorted him out, his knees scraped on the carpet. He was small then, and abject. For a long time his face showed remorse and panic and shame all tangled together.
Aiko stood alone on the stage. She put her hand over her mouth and sobbed. When she walked out she left her heels behind like a sign.
Chapter Eight — Aftermath
Word went through the city like wildfire. People who had barely noticed me before wanted a front-row seat to the downfall. My inbox filled with messages of sympathy and a few obscene questions.
“Are you okay?” Kaia asked on the phone.
“I am,” I said. I was and I wasn’t. My face swelled for days and then the bruise changed colors like a bruise has to do to keep a calendar.
Raphael kept his distance like a man trying not to break a vase and I tried not to ask why he had stayed away when I most needed him. He had been there. That was all I could hold.
I lost my job but I also lost something else I hadn’t named: the belief that the world will not notice cruelty unless someone puts it on a screen. People wanted drama. They wanted spectacle.
I wanted peace.
Chapter Nine — The Reckoning at Work
Work didn’t end for everyone. Aiko was escorted from the building before her apology could become a press release. The ones who had sat quietly and taken their selfies were quieter now. They could not look at my face without seeing the lights that had lit my humiliation.
I went back — once. I needed to collect what was mine: a laptop, some drawings, a piece of myself that could not be replaced.
“Take this,” Angela said, holding a jacket up like she was giving me armor.
“Thank you,” I said.
At the elevator I saw Aiko. She looked smaller than her reputation. I walked to her desk and slapped the stack of papers on it.
“You cost me everything,” I said.
She swallowed. “I’m sorry,” she said and it came out thin. “I didn’t think—”
“You didn’t think,” I repeated. “That’s what people like you always say.”
I left with the things that mattered — the hard drives, the camera, the drawings — and I left the rest to the city that eats scandals for breakfast.
Chapter Ten — A Quiet Night
There are nights when the city feels like a giant animal breathing. The heater hums. My kettle whistles. Raphael left a cat at my door one night — or rather, he did not leave it there; he carried it to the building and held it out like a treaty.
“Take it,” he said. “It will keep you awake with something better than thoughts.”
“I can’t take more favors,” I told him.
“You can take this,” he said. “It doesn’t ask for anything but food.”
I took the cat. I named her Yumi.
We made a small life out of leftover noodles and borrowed blankets. He would appear at my door at odd hours with groceries and, sometimes, just a borrowed silence that fit like a glove.
“You should come to the studio,” he said once. “I want you to shoot again.”
“I don’t know if I still want to work for people who watch for the worst parts of life,” I said.
“Then come for yourself,” he said.
So I did. Slowly.
Chapter Eleven — The Thing in the Drawer
There is a small metal lighter on my desk now. It belonged to an old film camera owner I used to know — a friend. He had once told me that small things keep the world in balance.
I keep that lighter in a drawer with the ring I cannot bear to throw away. Some nights I sit with both of them and feel the way the city breathes through a keyhole.
One winter night Raphael came and sat on the floor and we talked until the sun turned the frost into glass.
“Do you still hate me?” he asked.
“I never hated you,” I said.
“Then why did you leave?”
“Because I was scared to stay,” I said.
He put his hand over mine without asking and for a while our hands said what our mouths would not.
Chapter Twelve — The Last Note
After the banquet, after the police, after the cameras, people tried to put me in boxes: victim, temptress, martyr. I refused their neat labels. I am messy and ordinary, and I keep a cat who sleeps like she owns the world.
“Will you try again?” Raphael asked once, in a voice that was almost a whisper.
“I don’t know,” I told him, and I meant both of us.
What I know is this: when people plan to hurt someone, they usually want attention more than they want power. We gave them that attention and they were revealed as paper soldiers. That did not fix everything, but it put one thing right: for a moment, the room saw what I had seen.
The lighter sits in the drawer. The ring sits beside it. Sometimes I hold the ring and imagine throwing it away. Sometimes I imagine keeping it to remember that I survived.
“Keep it,” Raphael said one night when he saw me staring. “Put it somewhere safe.”
“I will,” I said.
He smiled. “Good. Because I’m tired of people who hurt you.”
“Then be tired with me,” I said, and he was.
We did things slowly after that. We breathed. The cat batted at our shoelaces. The city spun on.
On a quiet morning when the rain had finally stopped and the air smelled like dust and soap, I took the lighter out and clicked it once. The tiny flame was brave and brief. It touched nothing but the air.
I closed the drawer and went to work.
The End
— Thank you for reading —