Face-Slapping17 min read
The Lipstick That Listened
ButterPicks13 views
He sent the picture after a shower. A casual thing, he thought—an arm raised, chest bare, the mirror in the bathroom catching his grin.
"Look at you," the message read. "Miss me? —D."
I stared at the phone until the screen blurred. The grin in the mirror belonged to Dell Lucas. The bathroom belonged to our apartment. The picture should have settled the quick ache of homesickness; instead something else stabbed: a little bottle, my black serum, had shifted from the shelf above the sink to the lower shelf.
"Why would he move my little black bottle?" I said aloud to nobody in the hotel room, my voice small and surprised at how loud it sounded.
I remembered a dozen small things then. "Why would a grown man use a woman's skin serum? Why would he move my bottle?" I kept repeating it until repetition made a plan.
"I think you should fly back," Daisy had said when I told her over the phone. "Now."
"No," I said. "If I run in crazy, they'll cover it up, or they'll know I'm suspicious. If I'm wrong—"
"If you're wrong you come back to me and I slap you," she said, half joke, half promise. "But if you're right, Genesis, don't mess this up."
That night I stayed on the couch in an anonymous hotel, the photograph burned behind my eyes. The next morning, I did not go back to sleep.
When the plane landed in the city, I called the office. "There's an issue with a deadline," I lied. "Give me the morning, then I'll be in." I sounded like a worker, like someone with a boss to please. Inside, my pulse had a different boss: a need for proof.
At the bar, they were exactly where I had expected, if you'd asked me where liars liked to hide: the windowed corner of the place we used to flirt in, the one with the bottles like silent witnesses behind glass.
"Genesis?" Dell's voice was surprised when he saw me. "You came back early."
"Did you have a good time?" I asked. My voice was even, practiced. "You seemed very... relaxed last night."
"Work stuff. Drinks with the guys," he said. He smiled like a man who believed his own lies.
Chloe Lambert wrapped her arm through his. "We were just celebrating a friend finishing a project," she chirped. "Genesis, haven't you heard? She writes the best stocks tips now—our star."
"That's me," I said, and I let the room think what it wanted.
Daisy stood beside me, eyes splitting from suspicion into something like anger. "You should come," she said. "Pretend. See for yourself. If he's with her you know."
I stayed behind the shelf at the entrance like a shadow watching sunlit things. The bartender laughed; a group cheered. Dell and Chloe cuddled like they were daring the world.
"Look," I whispered into my phone later, my thumb quick, "they kissed." I sent the photo to myself and another to Daisy. Proof matters, statutory and social.
We left the bar in different cars. A cab took them home; I rode a few blocks behind. The taxi turned into the small residential lane where we lived—the one we'd chosen for quiet rather than prestige. The taxi in front of me stopped at our building. Chloe slipped out, hands wrapped around Dell's waist, and they went in like anyone would, like two people who had a right to a house.
I did not go up then. I sat in my car and rationed my breath. I thought of my wedding plans, the dress half-chosen, the lists still buried in my inbox, the wedding we were supposed to have after the Spring festival. I thought of how he'd said my name while asleep, and how those words now soured.
"Call the building manager," I said into the phone. "Tell them there's been a break-in on our floor. Ask to see the cameras."
Hope Barnett met me at the property office with an apologetic smile. "It's three months of footage," she said. "You'll have to sign for it."
"Do it," I said.
The monitor showed quiet doors and more quiet hallways, until the timestamp walked back to the night before. There they were: Dell and Chloe, hands all over each other. The door opened. The kisses continued in the stairwell like a rehearsal. And then—my heart slammed—the camera on our floor showed them stumbling into our unit, pulling the door closed behind them.
"Did they have a key?" I asked. My voice didn't sound like mine at all.
"They've got a key when they come through with you," Hope said gently. "You two are registered together." Her sympathy had its limits.
I copied the videos on a USB when no one watched, like a thief who knew how to take proofs. Then I went home.
Everything at home looked orderly, a clean war zone. He'd folded blankets, straightened cushions. My suitcase sat where I'd left it. My toothbrush still had toothpaste. The stranger's presence was a smear: a bottle moved, a scent that wasn't mine.
I opened my iPad and looked at our messages, at the times he left and arrived. My stomach knotted. Then I opened his accounts—he had left himself logged in to the trading app; I had created it four years ago for him, a kindness that now felt like a trap. I scrolled through payments from the last six months and found hotel charges at odd hours, purchases from an adult-shop website, gifts at floral and chocolate boutiques with his name on the ledger, a series of transfers to a name I didn't recognize.
I recorded the screen with my phone. Evidence begets evidence.
That night I barely slept. I could have taken a wrecking ball approach—roar, confront, throw things—but he was too agile at lies. I needed a net, not a club. I needed an irreversible unraveling, a public moment where their performance would crack under light.
"You're going to get a bug," Daisy said when I told her the plan. "Listen. Get everything. When you're ready, we make the reveal."
"I don't want illegal trouble," I said.
"You won't get in trouble if you don't distribute unlawfully," Daisy said. "You just present what you collected and your own accounts. Besides, you already have surveillance and receipts."
"Okay," I said. "But what about a listening device?"
"Buy a lip balm with a recorder inside," she said. "People love presents. Give Chloe something she thinks is safe."
She was right. People who trust make the best victims for truth.
At the hotpot restaurant we used to frequent, I handed Chloe a gift bag with a labeled box. "I made a small thing for you," I said, smiling like the woman with nothing to lose. "A hand-made lip balm. Try it."
"Oh Genesis, you're too sweet," Chloe replied. Her tone was syrupy. "You're talented. How did you learn to make these?"
"A little hobby on the road," I said.
Dell beamed. "See? I told you she was amazing."
I watched Chloe unzip the little tube of balm. She smeared it on her hand and inhaled the scent, unguarded, like a cat who had found warm sunlight. I had tucked a small listening device in the bottom of the tube, a tiny thing that recorded everything within earshot when activated.
"She'll love it," Dell said, dismissive in his comfort. I tucked my hands under the table and kept smiling.
That night, when they left the restaurant, they left with the balm in Chloe's purse and their laughter ringing like spoons on a metal bowl. I took the slip of paper the device came with and smiled with an accuracy that felt surgical. The bait was set.
Days became a harvest of audio. The balm recorded whispered plans, the small cruel jokes at my expense, the details of how they'd slip into my apartment and sleep in my bed like guests with no shame. I recorded Dell saying he loved me with a mouth full of betrayal, I recorded Chloe saying she loved his charm and would keep him until better offers came. The voice files multiplied. They built a map of their betrayals.
I also collected more: bank transfers he made directly to her accounts, invoices for flowers, an itemized receipt from a sex boutique, hotel check-ins that matched the times he claimed to be "out with the guys." Every record was an arrow pointing to the same target: they had been arranging a life around me and quietly carving me out.
Then the hardest piece: evidence that they had used my home. The security videos were the keystone. I had four timestamps where they arrived and walked straight into the unit. I had audio of their mouths plotting fines and excuses. I had a ledger that showed months of payments to her.
There are ways to turn pieces into spectacle. The world believes in narratives that end in spectacle. I would not give them the private humiliation they hated—no broken dishes thrown in a living room. I would give them a public unmasking, where their friends, coworkers, and the people who'd cheered them on could see their true colors.
"Where can we make people listen?" I asked Daisy.
"What about the industry gala? The one next month? Chloe will be there—she's gone from model to lifestyle rep, and Dell's in the program. Everyone will be there."
"They'll be surrounded by cameras," Marianne, my editor, said when I proposed it. "We'll be careful. We can use our press pass. We will be honest. We will show what you collected and talk about ethics."
"Do you promise?" I asked.
"I promise," she said and reached out to squeeze my hand. "This will be professional. Legal will help us. We'll present the facts."
We planned the reveal like a coordinated brief. I would speak, Marianne would corroborate with banking proof, Daisy would present the security footage, and a lawyer, Mason Cobb, would summarize the legal implications and the next steps for divorce protection. Everyone we needed would be there: friends, my editor, the press, the crowd who'd once admired their public smiles.
When the day came, the gala hall was gleaming, chandeliers like small suns above. Dell wore a suit cut to look effortless. Chloe had a dress that could swallow light. They moved through the room with the practiced grace of people who expected applause.
"Genesis?" Dell said when he spotted me by the press table. His smile was quick, like a man shifting into a disguise. "What are you doing here?"
"Working," I said. "And to watch an important talk." I had my phone in my hand and Daisy by my side like an extra heartbeat.
"You look beautiful," Chloe said, all teeth and practiced charm. "Did you submit to the awards?"
"No," I said. "I'm just presenting something tonight—something about trust."
"You always were dramatic," she laughed to the nearby table. "Drama sells."
"Then you should be quiet," I said. "You might find yourself in it."
The MC called us to a smaller side room where a private awards presentation was scheduled before the public show. We asked for five minutes. The crowd thinned and curiosity filled the air in its place.
"Everyone," I said when the microphone found my hand. My voice trembled only once. Then it steadied. "I'm Genesis Hernandez. I'm a reporter in finance. I am also a wife."
Whispers flurried like caged birds. Dell looked at me with a what-is-she-doing face that cracked into panic when Marianne wheeled in a screen and plugged in a USB.
"We're about to show some things," Marianne said. "We will let the audio and the video speak for themselves. This is not an accusation without proof."
"Turn it on," I said. "Please."
The first clip was a simple loop. The room filled with a sound that was intimate and dirty: Dell's voice in our kitchen, so close it sounded like breath, saying to Chloe, "We can sleep at her house, no one will know. She thinks I'm working late. She thinks I'm staying at the office."
An audible huff. Someone in the crowd made a small noise that could be pity or anger. I watched Dell's face go from easy confidence to unsettled.
"That's not fair," Chloe said quickly. "That's—taken out of context."
"Context?" I asked. "This one?" Marianne clicked. The screen filled with a timestamped clip from our building camera: Dell and Chloe entering our apartment, moving through rooms like occupants, collapsing into our bed, kissing and laughing. The footage was raw, undeniable, the kind of proof that makes lies dissolve.
"And there's more," Daisy said, and she held up her phone. She played another clip where Dell chuckled, "She calls me to check in, bless her, and I tell her I'm with the guys," and Chloe's voice layered above, "You need to remember, she thinks it's a gametime story."
A camera at the back lit up like an answering star. Phones rose, little lights like a swarm. The room breathed through its devices.
"Stop!" Dell said suddenly, voice rising. "You can't play that here."
"Why not?" I asked. "Why not if it's true?"
He tried to smile and failed. He walked forward, jaw clenched. "You're doing this for attention," he accused. "You're making a scene."
"Aren't you?" I asked. "You made the scene when you turned our life into your affair."
Faces around us hardened. A young man I recognized as one of Dell's business contacts stepped back, shock repainting his features. A woman from Chloe's PR team put a hand to her mouth. An influencer who had been chatting with Chloe took a quick video, lips compressed, eyes wide.
"Don't you see?" Chloe said, voice cracking through a performance that had never been honest. "He's married. He told me he was—"
"Liar," I said, and the room felt the word like an actual weight. "He told you he was single and you used our home when it suited you. Look at your messages. Look at the bank transfers."
Marianne clicked through evidence files we had printed: hotel receipts, itemized purchases, transfers from Dell's account to an account labeled with Chloe's name. Mason Cobb stood and spoke with calm clarity.
"These are recorded transactions," he said. "They demonstrate not just frequent meetings but a financial pattern consistent with support. That is not casual friendship." He allowed the legal meaning to land. "It also raises serious questions about misrepresentation and potential fraud regarding domestic arrangements."
"That's enough of this," Chloe blurted, voice gone thin. "You're making things up. You're a liar."
"Watch this," Daisy said, tapping her phone. A video played—Dell and Chloe stumbling out of a taxi and going up the stairs to our unit. The timestamp matched. The room exhaled with the sound of all the small masks falling.
I watched Dell's face go white then red then emphatic. "You're manufacturing evidence!" he shouted, the kind of claim that has always been a reflex for the guilty. "Those are edits. Those are stolen! You broke into my phone! You broke into the building!"
"You signed the video request," Hope said from the property office, loud enough that the facts were visible. "You signed for the footage. She requested it and we provided it."
Dell's eyes flicked to Hope and his mouth fell open. The room smelled like copper; I could feel everyone's attention settle on him.
"How could you—" he started.
"How could you?" I said, and this time the crowd answered me. A woman at a table said, "That's my sister. She had the same thing happen." A man recorded and nodded. A cluster of Twitter handles moved like a small storm.
The first stage of their collapse was denial. Dell denied; Chloe cried "set-up." Their PR team tried to say the footage had been manipulated. But then Marianne projected a clear sequence: security footage, bank statements, chat logs, and an audio file where Dell said, "She calls me her husband but she believes in me—it's convenient."
His face changed from furious to panicked. "You—you're lying," he said, voice shaking. "This is private. You can't—"
"We can," Mason said. "When someone's private actions harm another by deception, those actions are relevant. Also, the bank records show transfers you made to the account under Chloe's name on dates coinciding with the check-ins. We will present this to a family court if necessary."
Chloe's knees wobbled. She had been a practiced performer for showrooms and cameras, but nothing had prepared her for an audience that included the people she'd used as shields and the people she wanted to impress. Her smile was gone.
"I didn't know," she whispered. "He told me he was separated."
"She knew," I said. "You said 'we can sleep at her house' and you laughed about how harmless it was. You called me 'wife' in private—did you think I didn't hear it?"
Tension tightened into a silence that felt like the hint of a storm. Then the room erupted into chatter, some sympathetic, some vicious. Phones streamed the clips live. The gala's publicity machine that had once turned them into a polished couple snapped like thin plastic. Reporters clustered. Tweets appeared as if conjured.
Dell's friends turned their faces away, one by one. A voice from his table—someone who had hugged him earlier in the night—stood and said, "I can't—I'm sorry," and left. A producer who had scheduled future events with Chloe approached with a cold jaw and whispered, "We need to talk in private," and her team trailed behind.
"Please," Dell said, finally. His voice broke into something small. "Genesis—please don't ruin me. I have a job, people will—"
"You already ruined us," I said, soft as a closing door. "You did it with your own hands."
They began to plead. "It wasn't like that," Chloe sobbed. "I didn't know he was married—I would never—"
"You called me 'wife' last month," I said. "You called me 'sister' the other three times when you needed cover for dinner. You were not deceived—you participated."
Her eyes widened. "You don't—"
"Stop," Dell said. "Stop it. You're making it worse."
He tried to embrace Chloe. The crowd recoiled as if someone had pushed past a thin glass wall. People filmed. Someone laughed, cruel and bright. Someone else hissed, "Shame." It was a chorus of small condemnations, online and in the room.
Chloe's face crumpled into the exact expression we all hoped for when we imagine a villain collapsing: the slow deflation, the nozzle of performance running dry. She mouthed a word—"forgive"—and it was absurd, fragile.
"Forgive?" I said, astonished at how small the word sounded when used like that. "You want what exactly? Forgiveness or to be forgiven by those you used for social capital? You wanted my life."
Dell sank into a chair, hands over his face. For a moment he looked like a man watching his house burn from the curb—helpless and in disbelief as the world that validated him folded away.
The crowd watched their reactions and transformed them into judgment. Phones were out, recordings finished and uploaded. Someone called out, "Do we have a statement?" The PR team snapped into crisis mode, but their words were late. Reputation, once dented by the public, is hard to polish.
That night spread beyond the room. Videos were shared, articles written, messages exchanged. Chloe's phone filled with desperate DM requests from brands, "Do you deny the footage?" Brands were quick and cold in the face of scandal. A campaign pulled their contract. A booking agent texted that they were dropping her from a shoot.
Dell's partner at his investment firm sent a terse message: "We need to talk Monday morning." A fellow board member cancelled a dinner. His closest friend—Booker Smith—met his eyes across the room and walked away without meaning to. The friends who had been the warm smoke of his social proof shrank.
As the night emptied, the two of them sat side by side under lights that could not flatter. Chloe's mascara tracked her fall like black stalls. Dell rubbed his temples.
"This is a nightmare," he said, voice hollow.
"It's the dream you made," I said.
They both tried to bargain. "We can fix this," Dell whispered. "I'll tell people it was a mistake. We'll tell them we're sorry." He looked at me like the man who still thought apology resets trust like a button.
"No," I said. "You cannot fix this by words. You can choose to own it, to face consequences, to make amends to people—me—honestly. Or you can keep lying. But you'll be watched."
Chloe tried to stand and give a performance of regret. "I—I will step back from working," she said. "I'll—I'll apologize."
"Apologies are cheap," I said. "They are stock phrases you use because you know people want soundbites. We have receipts. We have footage. We have audio. We will use every one of them if you make this harder."
I left the gala while cameras still fed the story. The clip followed like a shadow, trending into the night. The next morning, the humiliation had fully matured into consequences. Chloe's bookings evaporated, brands unpublished photos. Dell's colleagues began to distance themselves under the safe light of professional concern. People who had called them friends sent guarded messages. Even their joint bank accounts were now questions screaming in digital silence.
The public punishments were varied like a mosaic. Chloe lost representation and several brand contracts within forty-eight hours. Her social feeds filled with messages, some cruel, some sympathetic, but her engagement numbers fell as sponsors pulled support. She issued a statement that read like paper caught in wind—words meant to dissolve rather than explain.
Dell experienced a different kind of public unraveling. His partner at the firm asked him to step away from client-facing work. An investor pulled funds from a project that bore his name. He found himself answering not only for moral wrongs but for business risk. Colleagues who had once invited him to exclusive dinners now offered only short, formal emails.
Worst of all for both was that their private performance refused to mend. People who had admired their couple-image now saw both as actors in a messy, selfish play. The crowd's verdict was not adjudicated by law but by a different court: social recognition.
In the weeks that followed, I focused on closing my own life from the wreckage. I talked to Mason Cobb about divorce. "Keep every record," he advised. "We will make sure assets are protected. We will use what you have gathered."
"Did I cross a line?" I asked him once, in a quiet office, the city like a slow heartbeat outside.
"You gathered evidence," he said carefully. "You protected yourself. The only line is if you distribute content designed to harass. We are not doing that; we are documenting a factual pattern."
We filed papers. The law took its course. Dell tried to bargain with me—money, a plea for privacy, promises. I listened, then packed the third of my life in boxes. He begged, he cried, he offered restitution in numbers that meant nothing after trust was lost.
Chloe did not wait for legal consequences; in the public square, she was already being judged. A brand manager told me later, "We could not risk the optics. We had pre-cancel clauses." She lost more than contracts—she lost the aura that had let her glide through rooms.
"Do you feel better?" Daisy asked me one night, when the papers felt like a bruise but also like a healing.
"Sometimes," I said. "Sometimes I wake and the chest is still heavy. Sometimes I laugh. Revenge is not sweetness; it's the measure between what you endured and how many people saw the truth."
In court, Dell tried to argue that our divorce should be private. "We can settle," he said. He sent flowers that withered untouched. In depositions, I presented the USB, the audio files, the bank transfers, the security footage. When the judge looked at the materials, his eyebrows tightened.
"There's sufficient evidence," the judge said. "We will proceed."
Outside the courtroom, their friends no longer clustered near. They parted like a crowd that avoids stepping in mud.
One morning, a video circulated of Chloe standing in a small café, her hair unmade, reading comments on her phone. A patron recognized her, stared, and then walked away. People who had once sought selfies now avoided the same street. The public punishment had not needed a gavel.
Dell's public humiliation was more procedural: a demotion at work pending an inquiry, social ostracism, invitations that cooled into silence. He had traded intimacy for a mirage, and the price was everything he'd built on trust.
Weeks later I stood in our living room, the home that had been both a bond and a battlefield. I opened my vanity drawer and found the lip balm tube—the bait that had listened. I spun it between my fingers like a small machine that had changed everything.
"Genesis?" Daisy's voice came from the doorway. "Are you okay?"
"I will be," I said. "One day at a time."
She nodded, knowing that answers like that are promises in progress. I set the lip balm back on the shelf, not as a trophy but as a tool I'd used and then retired.
"I don't want them to have any more of my life," I said. "Not even a memory."
"Then live better," Daisy said. "Live loud with honesty."
The iPad still had messages and the videos. The black serum bottle sat on the shelf in its original place. The planters on the balcony caught the winter sun. I brewed coffee and took the first sip in a silence that felt like the edge of something new rather than the end of an old ache.
"Do you regret it?" Marianne asked me when we walked out of the courthouse.
"No," I said. "I don't regret the truth for the same reason I don't regret breathing. It was mine to know. It was mine to show."
Chloe's last public apology was a sentence that fluttered and fell. Dell's attempts at repair were a mosaic of too-late gestures. The public had seen enough.
At night sometimes I find myself lifting the little black bottle and setting it back, as if that tiny act might steady everything. The lip balm—the little listening device—remains in a locked drawer, a small reminder of how far I went to be heard.
"I lost a husband," I told Daisy the night the divorce was final. "I gained a life where I am the one who decides the story."
"Then make it fierce," she said.
The last thing I did before the papers went final was to email a copy of the records to my lawyer and to Marianne. "Keep one," I said. "For the record, for the truth."
Mason replied with a one-line: "You did the right thing."
I closed the laptop and looked at the life that remained. The suitcases were gone, the wedding dress never altered. The house was finally mine to reimagine.
Outside, someone below laughed. A dog barked. The city made its usual noises. I opened the drawer, took out the lip balm for a moment, looked at its tiny seam, and then placed it into a small wooden box I had carved to keep things that belonged to the past.
"One day," Daisy said, when she came over to help me plant lavender on the balcony, "you'll look at this and it will be a story you tell and not a thing that lives inside you."
"Maybe," I said. "For now, it's a tool that listened. And I listened back."
The lavender caught light and the scent of cleaning soap and coffee filled the apartment. I set the wooden box on the shelf. The lip balm sat inside like a closed secret.
When people asked later how I survived, I told them simply, "I collected facts. I kept my wits. I let other people's words catch up with them." It wasn't a heroic line; it was factual.
Time, I learned, does not heal all things in tidy ways. But it allows facts to become notice, and notice to call consequences. Standing in my kitchen, with my black serum bottle back where it belonged, I felt the world tilt slightly toward a kind of justice that isn't always loud but is sometimes, finally, unavoidable.
The End
— Thank you for reading —