Face-Slapping10 min read
The Lighter, the Liar, and the Wedding I Planned
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I never thought I would say this out loud: I loved him like he was the moon I could never reach. My name is Jazmine Wilson. He was Eliot Wallace. We were young and messy and cruel in the way we loved.
"You really came," I said the first time I saw him again at an airport lounge.
"Of course I did," Eliot said, not looking around. "You look tired."
"You mean like a ruin?" I answered. "Like a book everyone skimmed and then shelved."
He smiled the way he always did, slow like a tide. "You always have such lines."
"You used to love my lines," I said. "You used to perform them with me."
He put a coat around my shoulders. "Come home," he said.
I thought then that home was a place he could hold open for me. I was wrong.
"You don't have to hide," I told him once, when his lighter with the little shark was in his palm. "Not from me."
He flicked the lighter and watched the tiny flame. "I only ever hid from myself," he said.
We stayed together because I believed him, because I wanted to believe him. I left everything at his feet: the startup I founded, the cards with my number, the calls I answered at three a.m. "Take the company," I told him when he said he couldn't eat and needed money to study and train, "take what you need."
"Are you serious?" Eliot asked. "You know I can't take your whole life."
"Then take half," I said. "I will sign."
So I signed. I watched him take the keys and the small shark lighter and a whole lot of my brave mistakes, and I believed he would build a life that included me.
"I will be different," he promised in the dark. "I won't leave."
Months passed and I stopped answering his calls because I was tired — tired of being the obvious option, tired of being the hand he used when he was cold. "Why didn't you call?" I asked him one night.
"I did," he said. "You didn't pick up."
"I did," I said. "I didn't want to anymore."
"You are overdramatic," he said. "Stop being dramatic."
"You were the one who used me," I said. "You were the one who called me your 'tool.'"
He went very still. "I never—"
"Stop lying," I said. "Don't lie to me, Eliot."
I remember how he looked: the light on his jaw like a blade, his laughter like a coin dropped in the dark. He held me and he hurt me and then he walked away.
I married Manuel Frank because the calendar said now or never and because the world knows how to make one brave decision feel like everything. Manuel was kind in the clean, businessman way, patient and sensible and exactly what my board and my family wanted. "Are you sure?" Manuel asked on our wedding rehearsal night.
"I am," I said, and I meant that this is the life I could build without being hollowed out by waiting.
But Eliot is not an easy story to bury.
Weeks before the island wedding, my assistant—Kinsley Morris—found a message on my company's shared inbox. It was a forwarded thread Eliot had sent to someone: not exactly a mistress, but a plan. "She is good," the message read, plain and surgical. "Use the warmth, take the leverage. When the time to leave comes, I will leave with no guilt."
"How can I be up for this?" I said, feeling each word break a little as I touched the printed page in my hands.
Kinsley and I decided then. There are some betrayals that are private, and some that become a public mirror. I would not be the one reflected as the gullible one. I would make the mirror show him.
The island wedding was bright and ridiculous—flowers trimmed to perfection, a sea that forgot to be anything but blue, photographers cataloging smiles like trophies. Manuel and I stood under a white arch. Manuel squeezed my hand and mouthed, "Are you okay?" I nodded.
"Do you take Manuel Frank…" the priest intoned.
"I do," I said.
No one expected anything like the moment that followed.
Halfway through the reception, with the sound of waves and laughter in the background, the projector—an extra arranged by Kinsley—flicked on.
"Is this a slideshow?" someone asked.
The string of photos began politely: friends, shared memories. Then the screen shifted.
"Wait," Eliot said from the doorway, in the moment his name was being mentioned on people's lips. He had come; he was always dramatic like that. He walked in with a half-smile. "Jazmine—"
The first message scrolled across the screen. It was not a photograph but a chat log, words like ice. "She is perfect for now," the message read. "Her name is Jazmine, she will do anything if I say it with enough tenderness. She is useful."
People at the reception froze. A glass fell and made a sound too loud.
"What is that?" Manuel said, already pale.
Eliot's face changed. The smile fell off like a leaf. He moved toward the projector as people turned their phones toward the screen.
"Who sent that?" he asked, and his voice went sharp.
"It came from your account," Kinsley said into the microphone, calmly, clinically. "It was forwarded to our legal team last week."
Eliot laughed at first, a small, dismissive sound. "Fake. Photoshopped. You planned this."
"Is it?" I asked, voice steady despite the way my hands were shaking. "Then explain this."
I clicked the next file. It was a screenshot of a bank transfer, a timeline, the text messages in which he instructed someone to "play along until the right moment." The guests murmured. Phones flashed. Someone started recording.
"What is this?" Eliot said, eyes wide. Ego and fear wrestling across his face.
"You told her you loved her," I said, and the screen brightened. "You told me you would never leave. You told me everything I'd ever wanted to hear. Then you planned."
He took a step forward; then another. "You—" he began.
"You called me 'tool,'" I said. "You told your friends you would use me for money, for a company, for the perfect story idea."
"I never—" Eliot's voice cracked.
"Don't," I said. "Stop."
A woman in a sequined dress whispered, "Is he going to deny it?"
Eliot's posture shifted from something like anger to disbelief. He tried to laugh it off. "This is a stunt," he said. "She's staging her own drama to ruin me."
People around started pulling out phones. Murmurs turned into a chorus. A man leaned forward, "Is that true, Eliot? Did you say that?"
Eliot's hands began to tremble. He reached for a glass, knocked it over; red wine painted a careless arc on the white tablecloth.
"You're lying," I said. "You told me you were different."
Eliot's face shifted again: from denial to shock, a slow, brittle slide.
"No, I—" His mouth twisted. "I didn't mean—"
"Then explain this," Kinsley said, and played an audio file. Eliot's voice, older, recorded saying the line: "She'll open the contract. We'll smile. She'll hand it over." The room grew cold.
Eliot's expression turned frantic. "Stop! Stop this. This is not—this is out of context. You can't—this is set up."
"You used me," I said, my voice not a whisper but a clear bell. "You used my nights and my mornings and my company. You lied."
He staggered, fingers pressed to his temples as his composure cracked. "You don't understand—"
"No," I said. I felt the sharpness in me, the exact place where I'll never be gullible again. "You used people."
He looked out across the crowd; I could see phones pointed at him like small accusatory suns. "This is unfair. You can't do this. Microphone off. It's harassment!"
A woman near the buffet yelled, "Record it! Record him!"
People had already pulled up their social accounts. Someone was streaming. Someone else laughed with that cruel half-smile the public so often wears. A child stared at Eliot as if he were a wild animal. The guests pressed around like a tide.
At first Eliot tried to fight the narrative. "You set me up," he snarled. "You made this."
"Prove it," I said.
He made a step toward me, dangerous and unmeasured. "You are humiliating me," he said.
"Humiliating?" I repeated. "After what you did? You decide I'm the one to humiliate? Look around." I gestured. "People are looking at you now because you chose the lie."
He swore. The first real sound of breaking came from inside him—a small, animal sound. Then he went entirely still.
"Please," he said. "Please, Jazmine. You don't have to do this here."
"Why not?" I asked. "What is dignity for people like you?"
He crumpled in anger and confusion. He tried to pull himself together and then, as if some internal valve had finally given out, he sank to his knees on the polished floor.
"No—no, please—" he begged, hands reaching toward me, to the projector, to anyone. "I'll explain, I'll—"
People were silent for a beat, then a ripple of reactions: shocked whispers, a stifled sob, some voices saying "Finally." A woman began to clap slowly, first one sound, then two. Others raised their phones higher. "He's begging," someone said.
He looked up at me with raw, naked panic in his eyes. His expression moved from arrogance to shock, then to denial ("It's a lie!"), then collapse ("No, no, please—"), and then pleading. "Jazmine, please. Please, I'm sorry. Please—" His voice broke apart like thin glass.
"Get up," I said.
He didn't move. Around us, some people chuckled; others stared as if watching a slow fall from grace.
"Get up," I repeated. "Not for me. For yourself."
He lifted his head. His eyes were wet. "I—I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean—"
"Who didn't mean?" I asked. "You didn't mean to call me a tool? You didn't mean to plan?"
He covered his face with his hands. People around began to record in earnest. A woman clapped slowly again, small and measured. "This is the sort of thing that ends careers," she murmured to her friend. Someone else whispered, "He used her like a project."
Eliot's knees sank into the cold marble. "Please," he said. "Please, Jazmine. Please forgive me. Please. Everyone—please listen—"
"No," I said. "No. You don't get to beg when you've been calculating."
He sobbed. It sounded thin and small. Then, sliding further into the ground, his shoulders trembled. His face went white and old. "Don't—don't make me—" He tried to crawl toward me. A waiter stepped forward and gently placed an arm behind him, not to hurt him but to stop him collapsing entirely.
Phones were everywhere. A child leaned forward, wide-eyed, and someone in the crowd said, "He's like a villain in a movie." More whispers. Some people cheered. A few clapped. A man muttered that he should be arrested. Another guest took a photo and posted it with a laughing emoji.
Eliot's voice rose in pleading: "Microphone, turn off the audio! Please, don't—"
Someone in the crowd recorded the kneeling, the pleading, the denial; the camera captured the moment he moved from swagger to a broken boy. People around stamped their feet in a small chorus. "Get out of here," one guest called. "How could you?"
He dragged himself to the edge of the group and then out into the night, still murmuring apologies that no one wanted to hear. "I'm sorry," he repeated. "I'm sorry."
No one tried to stop him with compassion; the scene had become a public reckoning. Cameras whirred. The footage would go online within minutes. Someone clapped as he left. The sound of his name was a question now, not an honor.
Manuel put a hand to my wrist and squeezed it tight. He had watched the whole scene like a man trying to understand a storm. "Are you okay?" he asked.
"I am," I said. "I am because I finally told the truth where everyone could hear it."
Later, in the hush after people had left in little knots of gossip, Eliot's knees left an oval of dust on the marble floor. That imprint stayed, like a shallow grave, for hours.
He was punished in public. He went from warmth to cold. From arrogance to shock to denial to collapse to begging. Cameras recorded every breath. Strangers whispered and took pictures and clapped. I watched him fold like paper and felt a strange, slow unpeeling inside me.
People called him names the next day. Videos trended. For three days, the city talked about the man who used a girl's love as a ladder.
But punishments, once done, never erase the rest. They do not mend broken things. They only mark them.
After the wedding, the story did not end in a single dramatic moment. Manuel and I tried to find a life that was honest. He stayed because he wanted to build something with me, whether or not I could ever be entirely rid of the ghosts Eliot left in my pockets. Manuel called little things to my attention: "You left your umbrella at the restaurant." "Did you eat breakfast?" He asked as if I were a fragile instrument.
"Eliot gave me back the contract," I told Manuel a month later, voice small. "He signed a clause transferring the team and the shares back. He said he couldn't be part of this life."
Manuel's hand went tight around mine. "You did right," he said. "You deserve someone who doesn't plan you like an investment."
I didn't say it then, but I had loved Eliot in a way that didn't allow such language. Love is not a ledger, and yet here we were, learning to erect fences around the parts of our hearts that were tender.
Eliot tried to come back after the disgrace. He knocked on my office door with the shark lighter in his hand, as if the lighter could burn away his mistakes.
"Why are you here?" I asked.
"I need you to know I am sorry," he said. "I really am."
"You're sorry because you were exposed," I answered. "You're sorry because you were caught. That is not the same as repenting."
He knelt in the doorway, this time not in public but like a man in a private confession. "Please," he said. "I'll give the shares back. I'll do anything."
"I don't want to be used," I said. "I don't want to be your project."
He looked at his hands, the little lighter with the shark engraved on its side reflecting the office light. "I know," he whispered. "I know."
The thing about punishment is that it changes the punished as much as the punisher. Eliot's face had been peeled of pride; there was rawness there that I had never seen before. He no longer wanted to be loud or seen. He wanted small, safe things: a shared coffee, to be forgiven. I could forgive, but forgiveness is not forgetting. It is a different kind of ownership.
"You will live with what you've done," I told him finally. "You will live with the knowledge of what you preferred. You will do better only if you understand why you did it."
He nodded. "I will," he said. "I will learn."
We walked away from each other like two people carrying the edges of a broken map, both trying to find the same city by different routes.
Months later, when Kinsley brought me the last of the legal paperwork Eliot had insisted on signing, I saw the shark lighter on my desk—Eliot had left it there like an apology note. It was small, simple, and rudely familiar.
I lifted the lighter and flicked it. A thin flame crawled to life and then bowed out.
I kept the lighter in a drawer under my desk. Some mornings I would open the drawer and run my thumb over the shark engraving and feel the old ache like a thin stone tucked inside the pocket of a coat I no longer wore.
"Will you ever be happy?" Manuel asked me once when we sat on the terrace, watching the city breathe.
"I don't know," I said. "Happiness isn't a single thing. It's a version of mornings."
He put his hand in mine and didn't speak. He didn't have to. He was there.
When I look back, I see the lighter, the lighter that burned briefly and exposed his shadow. I see a kneeling man who begged in front of my wedding and a city that watched. I see Manuel, patient and steady. I see my own hands signing and un-signing contracts like a person walking the edge of a cliff.
I also see evidence of a truth: sometimes love is a map with missing pieces. Sometimes you find the person you wanted and they're not the person you needed. Sometimes the moon you long for is someone else's.
I learned to hold my breath differently. I learned to speak my name to myself first. I let Manuel hold my fragile mornings and Eliot hold his shame, and I kept the little shark lighter in a drawer like a fossil of an old grief.
One night, when I felt brave, I opened the drawer and I let the lighter click once, twice. The flame flickered. For a second it lit the shark and then vanished.
I put it back. The lighter could no longer start fires for me. It could, however, remind me that a small thing—an engraved shark on a little silver lighter—had been the hinge of a very public fall.
That hinge closed a door; it also taught me where to draw the next line in my life.
The End
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