Face-Slapping15 min read
You Were My Safe Place — Until You Weren't
ButterPicks13 views
I smelled it before I saw anything: smoke, cheap cologne, and the faint rubber of leather. It woke me in a half-dream, a bad recipe of scents that made my stomach drop.
"You're awake."
Cole Finch backed up like he'd seen a ghost when he saw me on the couch, and the movement snapped me fully into being. He muttered, "I'm going to take a shower."
He moved toward the bathroom without looking at me. He always showered first thing when he came home. He always did it because he knew I had a sensitive nose — "because of work," he'd call it, as if my job as a fragrance developer made me some fragile creature.
I watched his back. Water started, the shower door sighed closed, then his phone buzzed on the floorboards. The screen lit up with a short notification: "Special Follow just posted!"
"Special Follow?"
I frowned; I didn't even use that social app. Curiosity pricked me like a tiny wire. I picked up his phone — something I'd never done before. I typed his name on the old phone keypad by memory and cracked the lock.
When I saw the feed, something heavy slid into my chest.
"Look at this," I whispered to myself, though the room only held the sound of the shower.
There he was, Cole, arm around a woman in photos at a claw machine. They toasted drinks together in another, then walked a dim stairwell, his hand casually at her back in a way that used to mean something for us and now meant nothing.
It was Freyja Henderson in every shot. Laughing, leaning into him, a scent of gardenia that I could almost smell through pixels.
My fingers trembled as I scrolled. I found messages: "X thinks I should stop hanging with you so much because of his girlfriend." "Tell them it's just bros and girls, chill." "Say it's a work thing. He told me not to breathe a word."
My throat tightened. My hand went to the jade rabbit pendant at my throat — a gift someone had once given me in a different life.
When Cole stepped out of the shower and dried his hair, I slid the phone back into the pile of his clothes. He paused, saw me on the couch, and flinched.
"You smell like barbecue," I said. I couldn't keep the smallness under my voice.
"Sorry. I didn't notice," he said, too quick.
I didn't say anything about the posts. That night I pretended anything was normal. I told myself I trusted him because he had always been, what, open? Confident? Blunt? "We have nothing to hide between us," he'd said the first year, and I believed him.
A week later, my dad called: "Come home. Grandpa is in ICU." I packed like a machine. Cole helped with the tickets. He held my shoulders and tried to steady me.
"We'll go together," he said.
But the plane left with only one text: "I can't make it. You go with your family." The message came from a number I'd seen on his social feed. I called him. Freyja's slurred voice answered the phone like a recorded joke.
"You trying to wake up the king?" she teased into the line.
I sat on a cold hospital bench and felt the walls closing.
Two weeks later, after the funeral, I returned to the city, to the airport, to the place we'd used a hundred times. I saw a cluster of people and then him — Cole, his friends, and, of course, Freyja, clinging to his arm, smiling bright as if she hadn't broken anything.
"Hey, you're back," he said, voice rough. "Why did you go alone?"
"I didn't," I said. "You didn't come."
He looked guilty, then annoyed. "You don't have to make everything an ordeal. I had work."
"You had a drink and didn't answer my call."
He shrugged as if shrugging could rewrite the past. "It wasn't like that."
That day, in the middle of arrivals, he and Freyja celebrated someone else. They cheered louder than the rest. Freyja shouted, "Come on, everyone, another round!" and some new face — a man with a shy smile — stepped into the center of their excitement. He looked at me, then at Cole, then at Freyja.
"Do you know him?" Freyja clasped Cole's hand and laughed.
I watched the whole scene like someone viewing a play I hadn't been cast in. Cole's brothers — his friends — made jokes. They looked at me as if I were a minor inconvenience in his life, as if the thing I'd called love was someone's casual weekend.
I left. I remember walking away thinking, This is the end.
The arguments came after. I shoved his phone at him and asked, "Is she just a friend?"
"Of course," Cole said. "Men and women can be friends."
"Then why did you hide her? Why post her photos late at night? Why not tell me?"
"It was nothing!" He pushed his hair back, exasperated. "You always make a mountain out of molehills."
That phrase — "molehills" — was the last straw. By the time I said, "We should break up," his look wasn't shock. It was annoyance, as if I were an overdue bill.
"Fine," he said. "Fine. If that's what you want."
I walked out with my suitcase and the jade rabbit at my throat. When I think back, the moment I left the apartment was a relief that felt like a fresh wound closing. I had been expecting to be heartbroken. Instead, I felt—oddly—liberated.
It wasn't clean, though. Cole came to my office twice that week. Once, he waited outside until I left. "Please, Jazlynn," he said to me in the stairwell. "We can fix this."
"No," I said. "There's nothing left to fix."
"Just give me a week. Let me show you I'm serious."
I looked at him and thought of all the small betrayals, of the dinners missed, of the silent messages, of Freyja's photos. "I'm done," I said. "I've given you everything."
He fell to his knees in front of me in the stairwell, hands pressed to the tiles, and for a second, he looked like a boy who'd lost a game he didn't understand. Around us, people stared. Someone filmed it. Someone laughed.
That last public humiliation was petty and didn't satisfy me. Grief and anger make a bad cocktail; I wanted something colder, something with a hard edge. I wanted him to feel the same rawness I'd been doing alone.
A month later, the city got a new note: Leo Cantu was back. I read the message on my quiet workbench. Leo was the white-haired child that had followed me since we were six, the one I'd pulled out of a pond once and then carried the memory of for ten years. He'd disappeared from my life when he left for school abroad; now he was back and working in our part of town.
He found me at the studio with a shy grin. "You haven't changed," he said.
"Neither have you," I said, then smiled because that was true and because it was pleasant and because it didn't hurt.
Leo was different from Cole from the first day. He was careful where Cole was careless. He spoke softly where Cole shouted. When I told him about Grandpa, he didn't try to reason it away. He handed me a sugar pill because I complained I felt faint once. He'd brought it himself, as if he'd read the line in my face.
"You're impossible," I said to him one evening when he sat on the floor of my small studio apartment, sorting photographs for me. "You smile with your whole face like some people do when they're two."
"Maybe I'm a child," he said. "Maybe I never learned to be different."
"You're too steady," I said.
"I like being steady." He looked up, and there was a sincerity in him that felt like warm sunlight — not trumpeting fireworks, but the kind of light that finds a way through cracks. It made me breathless in a new, safer way.
Leo helped me move my life away from the old apartment where Freyja had slept in my bed. He came with boxes, some awkward jokes, and that small, protective attention. He walked me through packing things into my new studio. When my hands shook sorting old keepsakes, he didn't ask questions. He only passed me a tissue and watched me finish.
On New Year's Eve, still raw, we texted like distant friends: light, careful. He asked about my shop. He told me about a job possibility: his company was opening a branch in my town and wanted local partners. I laughed because the idea of work and romance mixing again felt like walking a tightrope.
"Do you still have Grandpa's rabbit pendant?" he asked one night.
"Always," I replied.
"Good."
A week later, Leo came to the studio with paperwork and a cup of tea. "Our firm needs someone who knows the market here," he said. "It could be you."
"Why me?" I asked.
"Because you think in fragrances and in people," he said. "And you don't scare easy."
We laughed, and I felt something like hope gear into place.
Meanwhile, Cole's life unravelled in a different way. Word follows selfishness like smoke follows fire. My quiet break with him didn't stay private. He started to look weaker, more desperate in public, as if he'd lost an invisible currency that everything else had relied on. Colleagues stopped including him in projects. Old friends mentioned him with a quick, awkward sympathy on their lips.
That was not enough. I wanted him to feel the public weight of what he'd done: the betrayal, the excuses, the nights I waited while he celebrated with Freyja in pictures. I wanted Freyja's smugness hauled out into light, too. But I wasn't going to drag them into cruelty. I wanted truth. I wanted people to know exactly what he'd done.
So I planned.
"You're serious," Leo said when I told him I wanted a public confrontation. "Are you sure you want that?"
"Yes," I said. "There are too many loose threads."
"Okay." He shaved his face that night with steady hands. "I'll help."
The first stage was gathering evidence. I had screenshots; I had saved posts; I had a copy of the chat where Cole joked about how to tell friends he'd been 'saving' someone for the right moment. I had receipts from dates that didn't match his stories, a record of nights he said he was at work but was on photos with Freyja. I made a packet. I made copies. Leo helped me arrange everything into an album — a precise, calm dossier that read like a timeline.
"Don't make it ugly," he said. "Make it clear."
"Clear," I repeated.
The night came when their company hosted a charity gala — a gathering where the whole city showed up, framed in etiquette and the soft chime of silverware. Cole was on the guest list. Freyja would be there, glittering. Their friends — his "brothers" — would be present too. My plan was simple: present the facts where witnesses could see, and let the truth do the rest.
"You're sure?" Leo asked again as we stood in the shadows of the ballroom's anteroom, our outfits not matching the flamboyant noise of the event. I held the dossier like a fragile object.
"I am," I said. "I want people to know. Not for revenge with me crushed by it — I want them to know what he did."
He looked at me with a softness that steadied me. "I'll stand by you."
We stepped into the light.
The ballroom glittered with chandeliers and laughter. Waiters glided with trays; a small orchestra played a thin waltz. Cole and Freyja were near the center, hand in hand, laughing in a way that tried to be intimate and landed as performance. People took photos. I kept my face neutral and sat at an edge table where I could see them both clearly.
"Can I have your attention?" I asked into the microphone after I'd been introduced as someone who'd come to give a small speech for charity. My voice didn't tremble. Leo's hand was at my back like an anchor.
"You don't have to—" Leo whispered.
"I do."
I told a short story — about my grandfather, about small mercies, about how the charity meant to help families who've lost someone had stuck to me because of my own loss. I spoke about how troubles make people show who they really are. Then I put the dossier on the podium.
"It's hard to trust when you have to," I said. "Sometimes trust becomes a currency. We spend it, sometimes poorly. Tonight I bought back mine."
The murmurs began. Cole's smile flickered. Freyja's fingers dug into his palm.
I opened the binder. Photos, dates, screenshots — a clear line from the early stage of our relationship to the nights he spent elsewhere. I read aloud messages where he joked about lying to me, telling me he couldn't come home because he had "work." I read the message where Freyja said, "Don't tell her anything. Keep the story tight."
"Is this really necessary?" Cole whispered, eyes sharp.
"It is," I said.
The room leaned in like a mammal smelling prey. People felt the tremor of scandal in the air. Cole's friends shuffled, some looking away, others curious. Smartphones rose like a field of insects.
Freyja's face went from bright to a peculiar quality of wash-out. The applause that had been planned for the charity slowly trickled into silence. Someone gasped. Then someone else — a woman from Cole's company — stood up.
"What are you doing?" she hissed across the room.
"This concerns all of us," I said. "It concerns honesty."
"You're showing private messages," she snapped. "Where's respect?"
"There is respect for truth," Leo said, calm as river stone. He stepped forward and handed the dossier to an event organizer. "Please make a copy of this for the records."
"You're making a scene," someone muttered.
"Excuse me," I said. "I asked for the truth to be seen."
A hush fell. A journalist in the back clicked on his recorder. Cole's expression shifted. For the first time since all this started, he looked cornered. Freyja's cheeks flushed; she reached for his hand and found him unmoving.
"How could you?" Freyja's voice cracked, then hardened. "You made this about me."
"It is about both of you," I said. "It's about what hiding does. It's about how actions bruise people."
"You're being dramatic," Cole said, and in that tone I heard the arrogance that had gotten him to where he was. "This is private."
"Then why is it online?" I asked.
He opened his mouth. For a moment he tried the old tactic: deny, minimize, stonewall. He chose denial.
"This is a setup," he said, eyes darting like someone searching for a script.
"Am I?" I asked. "I told you I would leave. You made that easier."
People whispered. A couple of his colleagues exchanged looks; a woman near him held a hand to her mouth. The manager of the gala approached. "Sir, let's step outside," he said to Cole.
I stepped down from the dais. Cameras were out. People recorded. I could feel the whole ballroom watching as an eruption brewed at the edge of etiquette.
Cole grew louder. "You're making things up to embarrass me," he thundered.
"Be honest," I said, and then I read a private message aloud — a private joke he'd sent where he made light of me, where he called me "clingy" and joked about telling me he was at work while he was in photos with Freyja. I didn't embellish. I presented what I had.
The room shifted. A woman near me—one of the volunteers—started to cry quietly. The charity director, a solemn man, took the binder from the organizer with shaking hands. "We cannot have this kind of behavior," he said. "This event is for families. We will remove this couple."
Freyja's eyes were wide. "You can't do this," she said. "You're overreacting."
"No," Leo said softly, and then more sharply, "That's not overreacting. That's accountability."
People stepped up. "You left her in a hospital," a man said from the crowd. "My cousin would never get that kind of excuse." A woman snapped, "You used your image for sympathy and lied."
Cole's brother-squad clustered, but like paper in a rainstorm, they didn't have hillside weight. Someone unbuttoned a jacket; someone turned away. The manager spoke with security. Freyja tried to pull Cole aside. A few of Cole's prominent friends looked embarrassed and left the room in quick, small steps.
The punishment wasn't a jail cell. It was worse for Cole: the room witnessed his pattern. For Freyja, it was damning social exposure. Men and women who'd once smiled at them both now watched with a new, colder face. The journalist in the back typed rapidly. Phones hummed. People recorded the moment that their image of someone they knew changed.
Cole went through reactions fast. First, he tried anger: "This is fake!" Then denial: "You planned this to hurt me." When neither worked, he tried to minimize: "It's not that serious." Then, when the room's opinion solidified and people reached for their coats, he slid into alarm. His face went pale, and then — for the first time I saw — he begged.
"Please," he said, voice small and cracking. "Please. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you. I meant—"
"Stop," Freyja said sharply, eyes burning. "Don't. We're leaving."
They left, shoulders pressed together like a fortress collapsing inward. People outside the hall had gathered in small clumps, whispering. Cameras were already live on an online feed. By the time they stepped into the night, a dozen messages had come to my phone: 'Are you okay?' 'Wow.' 'I saw.' 'I'm so sorry.'
It wasn't theatrics. The punishment was in their being stripped of the private mythology they'd created. It was their brothers and friends looking at them differently, the awkwardness of workplace dinners after the news, the charity sponsor rescinding a small contract because "we need to be careful." Cole's promotions paused; Freyja's influencer collaborations cooled.
They both reacted through the sequence people like them always do: smugness, then shock, then denial, then a brittle kind of comeback that looked like bravado; finally, when their social currency drained, they crumbled. Cole sat across from me three days after the event in a café and tried to explain.
"Why did you do it like that?" he asked. "You didn't have to shame us."
"You left me alone during my grandfather's last day," I said. "You lied."
He hung his head. He asked forgiveness like an exam he'd missed. "Please, Jazlynn. I'll fix this."
"You can't fix how I felt," I said. "Actions don't become apologies unless they're followed by change."
He begged. Freyja texted me that night: "You ruined me." She posted a public statement where she apologized but also called the whole thing an "overreaction." The public barely bought it; the tone was too defensive. Some of her past collaborators wrote cold responses.
Over the next month, the city watched them lose tiny nothings that once seemed important: invitations no longer came for the premiere; friends stopped asking to borrow things; people who believed their curated persona started to look away. For Cole, work meetings grew fewer. He found people who'd smiled at him at the gala now hesitating to include him in plans. For Freyja, a brand dropped her collaboration because they didn't want association with her "scandal." The reactions were different: Cole lost status; Freyja lost monetized attention and the warm smiles of shallow partners.
They reacted in scenes I lived through like watching storms on television. Cole tried to contact me to beg publicly; I refused. Freyja tried to approach me in a grocery store and was frozen by my coolness. At a small birthday party for a mutual friend, when Freyja tried to approach the cake in a flirtatious manner, everyone turned away — their eyes said, We know now.
"You're cruel," Cole whispered to me once, eyes rimmed red. "This wouldn't have happened if you'd have just stayed quiet."
"This wouldn't have happened if you'd been honest." I put my hand on his for a second, then left. That touch wasn't forgiveness. It was closure.
Life, curiously, leaned toward softness after the storm. People who had watched told me later they admired the calm in how I handled it, though inside I didn't feel calm. Leo stayed with me. He held little kindnesses like keys and unlocked days I didn't think to open. He loved the pendant at my throat and respected the story behind it.
Work came. The branch Leo worked with reached out. He recommended me. "You belong here," he said, and his voice held no entitlement, only belief. We started small projects together, and then larger ones. We learned minutes of each other's rhythms and habits. He was present in ways I could stake my life on — not loudly, but in work calls at midnight, in a hot soup brought to me after a long day, in quiet texts when I felt small. He wasn't perfect. He was himself. I learned his awkward laugh and his fingers that fidgeted when he was nervous.
We had small, soft moments: the sugar he shoved into my mouth when I felt faint; his single, earnest kiss on my hand; the way he would press a palm to my forehead if I had a fever. He said little things to me — "You did right by yourself" — that felt like gentle stitches on old wounds.
Months passed, and the city's memory did what it always does: some shifted away; some returned. Cole's name occasionally flared in gossip, but not the way it once had. Freyja tried a new image campaign; she learned the cost of playing hot and personal. The punishment had been public; the consequences lingered in the small things they lost — trust, warmth, easy invitations — bigger than a post or an article.
One evening, Leo and I walked along a river near the studio. He stopped and looked at me, his hand holding mine like a small, steady claim.
"Do you ever regret making it public?" he asked.
"No," I said. "I regret the pain that pushed me there, not the consequence."
He smiled, and it was a slow, bright thing. He leaned in and brushed his forehead against mine. "Good," he said. "Because I'm not walking away."
I felt it then: a lightness like a door unbolting. The fear was still there in the shape of a shadow, but it no longer dominated the room.
We worked together. We argued about design and fonts, and he taught me that steady patience could be brave in its own way. Once, in the middle of a busy week, I spilled coffee all over a contract. I panicked and he said, "Stop. Breathe." He handed me a napkin and then laughed at my expression.
"You're easy to annoy," he teased.
"You're easy to admire," I said.
He kissed my knuckles like it meant something true. "You saved me when I was a kid," he said. "I owe you a few more rescue missions."
"Then don't be dramatic," I replied.
Settling in with him felt like a soft victory. Not a showy win, but a gradual building of home. People who had known me in the past saw the change and asked. "Is he the one?" they'd say.
"Maybe," I'd answer. "Maybe I'm just learning the shape of what I want."
One day, months after the charity drama, Cole texted. "Can we talk?" it said.
I saved the message. I never replied.
Toward a year after everything, we held a small launch for a product line Leo's company and I developed for the town. The ribbon was a thin red thread. People from the city came, and the aunties who used to scold me about being single came to congratulate me. At the end, as we posed for a photo, Leo squeezed my hand and lifted our faces to the camera.
There were people in the crowd who had watched the ballroom scene unfold. Some came up to me and said, "You were brave." Others said, "Good for you." A few said nothing, and I didn't mind. The world makes its judgments in small increments, and I'd chosen a road that was rough, honest, and mine.
That night, after the crowd died down, Leo and I sat on the small balcony of the new shop. The town lighted like a necklace below us.
"You never told me how you felt at the airport that day," he said suddenly.
"I felt small and furious," I said.
He studied my profile, then shrugged. "I thought you looked brave."
"Do you always know what to say?"
"No," he admitted. "I just try to be there."
"That's enough," I said.
He kissed the side of my head. "I used to call you 'sister' when I was small," he said quietly. "I always felt safe near you."
"You did rescue me from a pond once," I reminded him.
He smiled. "I plan to rescue you from nothing now. I want to be your partner."
"That sounds dangerously permanent," I said.
He laughed. "Good."
We didn't promise fairy-tale things. We promised small, serviceable ones: coffee in the mornings, texts in the nights, help when needed, truth when asked. We promised to excavate the honest parts of ourselves.
And when the memory of Cole and Freyja surfaced in town gossip, people would look and see a woman who had stood for herself. That, more than revenge, felt like justice.
On the balcony, the pendant at my throat warmed to my skin. I fingered the tiny jade rabbit and breathed in the cold air. Leo put his hand over mine. "Will you keep staying?" he asked.
I looked at the town below, at the studio that hummed with life, at the little cats I had adopted, at the grandfather's memory that had pulled me home when I needed it.
"Yes," I said. "I will keep staying."
He smiled, and his hand tightened. The city moved on around us — lights soft as a lullaby. I closed my eyes and let the night hold me like a promise.
The End
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