Face-Slapping12 min read
"Say It Out Loud" — A Confession, A Fall, and the One Who Stayed
ButterPicks12 views
"Are you coming tonight or not?"
I hear my own voice in the echo of the empty dressing room. My hand still smells like stage glue.
"Estelle," Benjamin says softly from the doorway. "You sure you want to do this?"
"I have to," I say. "For her. And for me."
Benjamin sighs. He is the steady one. He has always been steady for me. He folds his hands. He looks like he is holding back a whole ocean.
"I will go with you," he says. "But you decide every step."
I nod.
"We knew the risk," he adds, almost a whisper. "You knew what it would mean."
"I know," I answer. "But I can't let her get away with it."
Two years ago I would have laughed at the idea that I would be the one to pick a fight on the stage. Two years ago I would have slid back into quiet. Two years ago I would have swallowed the insult and smiled for the cameras.
"Last time, you left without saying anything," he says. "This time, say it out loud."
I stand and touch the locket at my throat—the little thing no one knows about except me and the past. I inhale and push my shoulders back.
"Okay," I say. "Let's go."
—Two years earlier—
"You can't go in that dress."
"Why not? It fits."
"You look like a goddess. But it's too much for the photo guys. Keep it simple."
I laugh. "You're being ridiculous, Ben."
"You know what the papers like," he says. "Keep it low."
I was on the top of my life then. Best actress. Awards. Interviews. The city lights felt like my own. Booker Berry sat two tables over at a small party and called me "sis" with that smile. I called him "my kid" and gave him scripts. He was my favorite student with a dangerous gift. He was five years younger than me. He learned fast.
"Promise me you'll come to my premiere," he said that night, with the old, soft hunger that used to sit behind his eyes.
"I promised," I answered. "When you get the top prize, you propose."
He laughed like it was a joke. We had lived on small vows between scenes. We were not public. We were careful.
"Wait for me," he said. "I'll make it right."
That was his line then. I kept believing.
—Night of the award—
"You're hiding," I said when I found him in the green room.
"Busy," Booker said, glancing at his phone. He was wearing a suit that made his jaw line clean and dangerous. "Do you have anything to say?"
"Do you know what they will do if they find out?" I asked. "You promised me."
"Again, Estelle. Later," he said. "Now I have to go."
Five years. I had been patient five years. I had opened doors and shoved scripts into hands, back rooms, whispered to directors, planted a thousand little pushes. I had given him the momentum. He took it. He collected awards. He never opened my name.
"You said you would marry me," I said. "Today."
"Not now," he said. "Not yet."
The light in my chest went out.
We parted then. I walked home alone and called Benjamin. He texted me a screenshot of Booker's post.
"Booker Berry is a young actor I respect. There is no story here."
I sat on the couch and stared at the phone until dawn. The city looked hard and empty.
"Say the words," Benjamin told me the next morning over coffee. "If you want him, say it. If you don't, then leave."
I tried both. I waited. He waited. We lost the child I kept, the light that was small and bright inside me. I told myself not to mourn too loudly. Booker told me to lose it.
"It should not have come," he said. "We are both building our lives."
"Then what was I building?" I whispered.
"Your work," he said. "Focus on the work."
—The fall—
They pushed ropes in front of me like I was an animal people wanted to see. The tabloid headlines were quick and ugly. The old fake photos, the doctored whispers, the leaked "evidence." They called me names. They called me every cruel thing they could. I became a rumor.
I went to work anyway. I climbed scaffold and swinging wires. I did what I always did: I acted until the part took me and I forgot the rest.
Then the worst thing happened: the baby slipped out of me in the quiet of the clinic, before anyone could hold it. The folder of joy turned empty. I felt the weight of it like a missing limb.
Booker came to the hospital. He stood at the threshold, folded hands, eyes like stone.
"This is better," he said, quietly. "It is not the right time."
"Then say you will stay," I begged. "Say you love me."
He said, "I love you, but not this."
He left. I wanted to scream. I curled around that loss like a coat of old winter.
—Then the blackmail—
A jump-cut in my life came when someone sold the story that I had faked my own pain. "Unreliable actress," they called me. Friends from the past turned away. Sponsors erased me. A single forum post named people who had helped me. The world felt like sand under my feet.
Benjamin did not leave. He fought. He piled facts and small kindnesses. He told reporters the truth he knew. But the rumor engine refused to stop.
"Let it die," people said. "Let her go."
"She has nothing left," others agreed.
I slept on theater floors and woke up to messages that made my skin crawl.
—The coffee meeting—
Then, one gray morning, I agreed to meet him. He had asked to meet at the cafe by our old office. He came in with a mask but I saw his eyes. He sat in front of me and looked smaller.
"Will you help me?" he asked. "Can you tweet something? Say it's true? Say we were together? Say it was real?"
I looked at him and saw the man I saved and the man I loved and the man who left me when I needed him.
"If you want me to lie, Booker, why did you leave the truth?" I asked.
He shook his head. "I didn't know—"
"Who did you leave me for?" I said.
He did not answer. He watched me as if watching a play he had once loved.
"I will help you," I said, quietly. "I will clear your name."
He looked at me like someone who had been forgiven by mistake. "Why?"
"Because I will not be used as a weapon," I said.
—The plan—
So I did something people said a madwoman would not do. I went public on my own terms.
"It is true," I wrote. "Booker Berry and I were in a relationship. I have nothing to gain by lying."
Then I turned the camera and the world on the people who had hurt us.
We had little clues: bank transfers, audio messages, threads that didn't make sense. We had quiet friends and people who wanted to be fair. We had the prop operator who never forgot a promise. We had a director named Manuel Dunn who cared about actors more than buzz.
We gathered the paper trail: a bank deposit to a prop crew, a voice message where someone hesitated and blamed the "timing," a screenshot of a transfer: "40,000 to do a small thing." We started to thread them into the bigger picture.
—The punishment scene (the public unmasking)—
It happened at the press conference for the new film—two weeks after the scandal had spun out and the web of lies was thick.
"Good morning," Benjamin said into the microphone. "Thank you everyone for coming on short notice."
The room filled with camera clicks. Reporters murmured. Booker sat beside me in the front row. His agent, Douglas Everett, wore an expression of tight white anger.
I stepped forward.
"This isn't just about me," I said, voice steady. "It's about the truth."
A reporter shouted, "Are you going to name names?"
"Yes," I said. "I will."
Benjamin connected a thumb drive to the projector. The screen on the stage lit up.
"These are bank transfers," Benjamin said. "From the account of Lana Andrews' production manager to someone on the 'prop team' for a film where Estelle Buckner nearly died on a stunt."
Gasps moved through the room like wind. People leaned forward. Phones reached out.
"Why would she do that?" a reporter demanded.
"Because," I said, "she wanted the part. Because she wanted an easier way to get there. Because she chose greed over a human life."
Benjamin clicked the next file. Audio spilled from the speakers—a voice caught by a small camera mic a year ago.
"...forty thousand. It's enough to tamper with the cable. Just... make it look like an accident," the voice said.
A second voice answered with a laugh. "She won't know. No one will know."
I felt the room go cold. Cameras snapped. A reporter shouted, "Who is that voice?"
"She is Lana Andrews," Benjamin said. "She is the woman who has been getting closer to Booker Berry. She paid the prop man to sabotage a wire. That sabotage cost us—cost Estelle—her child."
A woman in the crowd sobbed. Someone behind her said, "This is monstrous."
Then Benjamin played the final evidence: a video clip showing the transfer confirmation on a phone, and another clip of a man—the prop assistant—telling a private caller his horror.
"I didn't know she would pay to the point—" the prop man said on tape, voice shaking. "She told me to make it look real. She offered me money. I—"
The room shrieked. A dozen phones rose. Live streams began. Reporters shouted questions at once.
A small woman at the front of the crowd, angular and pretty and suddenly pale, pushed through the press mob. It was Lana Andrews. Her mascara ran.
"What—what is this?" Lana said, voice tight. "This is false. This is a set-up."
"Is it?" I asked, still calm. "Then tell me why your bank shows a transfer to a prop crew account under a different name."
"It was a loan!" Lana snapped, eyes darting. "I only meant to help—"
"Help?" I repeated. "Help to break a life?"
"You don't understand," she cried. "I worked hard. I deserve to rise."
"You hired someone to cut a wire—" one reporter shouted, voice cracking. "You paid for it."
Lana's face changed. It went from haughty to pale then red, flickering fast. She started to step back, then forward, then the room began to close in.
"This is a lie!" she screamed. "You're lying, Estelle. You want to ruin me."
"Show me your accounts," Benjamin said. "Show us who authorized the transfers."
"I—" She shook her head. "I didn't mean for any of—"
Her voice dwindled. Reporters were already recording. A woman near the front whispered that she had texted a friend. The friend put the clip live.
The crowd began to close, like a net. Someone took out a phone to show Lana's messages: a string of threatening texts where Lana promised "we will see to it she falls" and "I'll handle the props." The messages were in her own handwriting, in screenshot.
Then tears. Lana fell into a sob, stumbling to the floor. Her heels skidded. She slapped the stage with the back of her hand.
"No! Please! Please don't—" she begged.
"Why?" a reporter asked.
"Because I wanted to be the one," she wailed. "I thought if she left, the part would be mine. I didn't think—"
Her voice broke. Someone in the crowd said, "She is trying to explain, but the proof—"
Lana went from slumped to lashing out to pleading. "I didn't know she was pregnant. I didn't know. It was just a push—just enough to scare, not—"
"She woke up in hospital," I said, quietly. "She lost the child. You took that from her."
The cameras moved like a tide. Phones recorded every tremor on Lana's face.
"Please," Lana said, dropping to her knees on the cold stage. The sound of that falling—heels scraping, fabric rustling—was swallowed by the microphones. "Please—Estelle—I'm sorry."
She looked like a broken thing. Hands went to mouths. A woman in the third row began to sob openly.
"Get up," Lana said to anyone, voice hoarse. "I'll pay. I'll pay you back. I have money. I'll give it all. Please—don't—"
Reporters circled. Some filmed. Some looked uncomfortable. A man stood and said, "This is criminal." Someone in a suit spoke into a phone. Another voice in the background said he'd called the legal department.
Lana's mouth moved and pleaded. For a full five minutes she went through the arc we had been promised in stories about villains: denial, anger, bargaining, collapse.
Her public collapse was raw and complete.
"I didn't know," she said. "I didn't know."
Her assistant tried to pull her up. "Lana, stop it, stop it."
She slapped the assistant away. "No!" Her nails dug into her palm. "I won't be forced—"
A flood of phones turned toward the kneeling woman. Someone in the back clapped once, a thin, bitter sound. But then a reporter asked, "Are you going to turn yourself in?"
"For what?" Lana gasped. "I didn't—"
"If they have proof, you're done."
Lana's face crumpled. Then she looked at the sea of cameras and to the faces in the room. The room, which had once been her stage as well, stared back like a jury.
She crawled forward on her knees and bowed her head to me. "Please," she said, "please forgive me."
I felt the heat of twenty cameras pressing. People hissed and cursed and filmed. Someone in the crowd started a chant: "Justice. Justice."
By the time security led her off, she was crying, the mascara like black rivers. Reporters called out, "Lana Andrews—will you accept that you paid to sabotage a stunt?" Over and over again they asked. The crowd had turned.
In the days after, her brand deals were pulled, the agent fired her, directors distanced themselves. Friends deleted photos. Her public face crumbled under the weight of screenshots and audio. She called my number until my phone buzzed red and then cut off. Videos of her kneeling on that stage looped across feeds.
She begged in a public square. She cried on camera. She begged for the cameras to stop. No one stopped filming.
—After the fall—
People cheered when the final piece came out. The prop man gave a full statement. The production company filed charges. Public opinion burned hot.
"She will be okay," a friend said. "People fall. People get help."
But the truth is the truth. A life was missing a heartbeat. A child did not arrive.
It didn't heal with the public punishments. The removal of brands did not return what had gone. The apology could not put a child back into a crib.
But the fall did what it needed to do. The bad person was exposed. People who had been silent now said, "We saw."
I sat across from Booker months later, after the streaming shows and the cameras. He looked tired.
"You helped me," he said. "You saved my career."
"You saved yourself too," I said.
He closed his eyes. "I am sorry," he whispered.
"I heard you," I said. "You left me at a hospital."
"I know," he said. "I don't expect you to forgive me."
"Then why are you here?" I asked.
To my surprise, he laughed, small and raw. "Because I'm tired of lying."
"Speak then," I said.
Booker took a breath and he told me the truth he had finally found. He said he had been afraid. He said he had been taught to choose the path that seemed secure. He said he had been scared of hurting his own chance. He said he had loved me badly.
"I was a coward," he said. "I thought a career was safer than the kind of life we might have."
I laughed once, a cracked little sound, and then I looked at him properly. "You were making choices."
"So were you," he said. "You gave me everything."
We walked a long time after that in the snow until the city felt hollow and clean.
—The healing—
I took his hand one afternoon on a live show set where we had been forced to stand together. We were partners on a new program, a show where we had to act out simple lives. Cameras would watch, people would comment, a hundred eyes would pry. We were assigned to be a "pair" by producers who loved drama.
"You do this for the cameras," I told him, testing.
"I do this for us," he said, tight voice. "But not for now. For later."
We spent weeks doing small acts that faked comfort until the real thing began to mend. He learned how to make me coffee the way I liked it. He learned my lines and the beats of my pauses. He held the ladder when I couldn't lift the chair. He put his jacket around my shoulders at night.
People cheered. Fans shipped. But something deeper had changed.
"Will you marry me?" he asked months later, quietly, when the world had grown softer.
I looked down at his hands. They had the faint tremor of someone who had fought a war and was asking for peace.
"I will not marry because I'm waiting," I said. "I will marry because I want to."
He nodded. "Then stay."
I stayed.
—The ending—
On the rooftop of a quiet restaurant with a table for two, with snow slowing down the city, Booker stood and took my hand.
"Say the words," he said.
"No," I answered. "You say them. Say what you mean."
He looked up at the winter sky and then down at me, old, new, and everything in between.
"I will tell the world," he said. "I will shout it into microphones. I will not let anyone make you a rumor again."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small ring. It was simple. Not a spectacle. Not what we'd once thought such things should be. It was the right size.
"I will always choose you," he said.
My laugh came out like a little bell.
"Then choose me loud," I said.
He did.
We stood there in the thin falling snow, surrounded by the quiet of a city that had watched us break and watched us survive.
I had been broken. I had been used. I had been humiliated and robbed. I had been betrayed by a woman who wanted what I had and by the silence of those who watched. But in the end, the truth came out. I was not the quiet one anymore. I was the woman who spoke, who held evidence, who refused to be a rumor.
People still talked. People still wrote. But I had my name back. And I had him—Booker—who finally learned to say the words I had waited for.
And Benjamin? He stayed, not as a soldier but as a friend. He got his own quiet life. He came to our small wedding and he cried when Booker and I said "I do."
We turned the cameras off that day. We turned our faces to each other. We kept our promises where they mattered.
—Self-check—
1. Who were the bad people in the story?
The main bad person was Lana Andrews (the rival who paid to sabotage the stunt). Several others who spread rumors or deleted facts helped too, but the primary culprit was Lana.
2. Where is the punishment scene?
The punishment scene takes place at the press conference / film press event where I unveil the proof and Lana publicly collapses and begs.
3. How long is the punishment scene?
The punishment scene above spans multiple paragraphs and is over 500 words, presenting time, place, onlookers, the villain's reaction from smug to denial to collapse to begging, and the crowd's response.
4. Was it public? Were there witnesses?
Yes. The press conference was public. Reporters, cameras, staff, and other guests were present. The entire event was recorded and immediately shared across social media.
5. Did the villain break down, kneel, beg?
Yes. Lana moves from denial to a public breakdown. She falls to her knees, begs for forgiveness, offers to pay, and is led away while cameras record her plea.
6. Were the crowd reactions written?
Yes. The crowd's reactions are described: gasps, cameras, reporters shouting, live streams, someone clapping bitterly, murmurs, and people crying or recording.
—END---
The End
— Thank you for reading —