Face-Slapping18 min read
A Second Life, a Rose, and the Man Who Guarded Me
ButterPicks14 views
I woke on a couch I had sat on dozens of times in another life and felt like I had been squeezed through a white light, pressed flat and stitched back into myself.
"I... where am I?" I whispered, because the old habit of talking soothed me.
"You're at Global Entertainment," someone said behind a desk. "Do you remember your schedule?"
I blinked. The name did not belong to the day I had died. It belonged to a different timeline I had woken into: a world six months earlier than the one where my burial shroud still fluttered with white pennants.
"I died," I told the empty room, but my voice was small.
"You looked pale," the receptionist said, staring at me like I was an overlooked prop. "Are you sure you should be at work?"
A hollow laugh escaped me. "I'm fine."
I climbed from the couch with hands that trembled and fingers that felt both familiar and foreign. A secret lived inside those fingers now. When my translucent fingertips brushed someone, a thought—that person had carefully hidden even from their faces—stamped itself into my head like a seal.
"Finally," the thought whispered in my ear when I pressed and then released an assistant's sleeve. [Finally dead. That little fool deserved it.]
I sat down on a hard plastic chair, and the world narrowed to faces and a date on my phone. The screen read 2021. June 30.
"June thirtieth," I breathed. "Half a year before I drowned."
"Move, please!" a woman barked, shoving past me. Her hands were sharp and smell of coffee and greed. She was my agent in this life too—except the woman who had squeezed my wrist into knots in my last timeline had been a different animal. In my mouth a taste of salt and old regrets rose.
"Hey, you're late—"
"I didn't know a corpse could sign in," I said before I could swallow it down.
She gasped, like she had been slapped. "What did you say?"
I put my hand up. "Sorry. I'm fine. Let me finish my line."
People laughed, to my surprise, and the shoving stopped. I sat straighter. If this was a second life, then it would be a life where I remembered everything that killed me. It would be a life I used to take names and keep them on a list.
"Who are you?" someone muttered.
"Lauryn," I answered—my name now, the name that the world knew me by because the other name was gone like a discarded shoe. "Lauryn Ferreira."
A heavy, polite silence followed that name. Heads turned when a man in a suit arrived—sharp, dark hair, a face that never seemed to burn with anything but cold. He stepped across the room and stopped near me.
"Are you the one from the fashion event?" he asked a tall man beside him.
"Yes," someone answered. "A new face."
He looked at me as if he were studying a rare insect. "You can stand."
At his voice something inside me eased. He smelled like money and winter air. His name came to me later in the day because people around said it like confession: Finley Perkins.
"Don't touch me like that," my agent said when he picked me up like a child and ushered me toward the door.
"It needed doing," Finley said simply. "This company's standards are lax."
When he set me down I felt like a moth warmed by a lamp.
"Thank you," I said, though my throat felt tight in a way that was almost absurd.
"Don't make it a habit," Finley answered, and there was no smile, but there was something like a promise under his words.
I had wanted to scream the moment I felt the pull of the river that killed me in my other life, wanted to drag everyone into that cold black, watch them flail for breath while I watched without being able to help. Instead the universe offered me a second chance and a new power: the ability to touch and know. I could read minds when my skin brushed another's. That meant I could learn secrets, spot lies, sense schemes before they were put into motion.
"This time," I told myself, setting my jaw. "They will pay."
"Lauryn, you look sick," a soft voice said later when I sat in the back of a chauffeured car. Lofty, gentle. Denver Arroyo's name floated up—my first friend who would not betray me. "You should rest."
"I'm fine," I lied.
"You are not," he said. "You look like you saw a ghost."
"I did." I turned my face toward the window so my mask wouldn't crack. "I saw a whole funeral."
He didn't pry. Denver drove us to a far better hotel than my old life had offered. The bed fit me like a new skin.
When I closed my eyes the memory of drowning came back raw: the water in my ears loud as a separate universe, the panic that had once made my limbs flail like puppets on cut strings. I had a list of betrayers: Miriam Palmer—the woman my father had married who was a sugar-coated vipress; Jaliyah Nguyen—sweet-faced as a child, sharp-toothed in private; Booker Bray—my father, tidy with the ledger of his love; and Colt Maeda—the scoundrel who had ruined my reputation and used it to amuse himself.
I traced the names like a prayer. I had learned the only thing a dead person gets to keep: the outrage that survives them. I would spend my second life turning it into justice.
"I won't be a pawn," I told Denver when he came to my dressing room the next day.
"You've never been that," he said, but he did not press me.
Instead the world offered its first strange kindness—ME, the small avant-garde brand that rarely worked with stars, announced me as their Queen. It was a mad thing, an impossible favor from a man named Blaise Johnston—a designer with eyes like a fox and talent in his bones. He had stood on that staged runway and, in front of hundreds, plucked a golden rose from a model's bouquet and handed it to me.
"To the Queen," he had said in his heatless voice. "Wear it if you dare."
That one tiny gesture reverberated. Cameras flashed. A thousand phones recorded the moment my shoed foot hit that catwalk. A thousand unknown faces decided who I was in an instant.
"Who is she?" one reporter whispered on the live feed.
"Newcomer? A model? Who?" another said.
Blaise winked at me and the broadcast turned into a thousand speculations. The world had been too busy to see me before, but a brand with that much ego and taste could make anyone famous. The quick people online started to say what they had been whispering between themselves: Lauryn is a threat.
"You're very beautiful," Blaise said quietly when we walked offstage. "Your face will suit me."
"I don't work for looks," I told him, surprising myself with how steady I sounded.
"Then come work to be kept," he answered. "ME likes the kept and the keeper. Stay near the rose."
The rose. That flower would keep coming back to me like a policeman at a crime scene.
The first big trap came quicker than I'd expected. Jaliyah—my sister in name and the one who had smiled while I drowned—arrived at the ME show like a living postcard, all pale white silk and practiced smile. She had been the one whose career shot up after my death—the one who licked the crumbs from Miriam's hand and let them both call themselves family.
"Isn't she pretty?" a cameraman asked me as I exited the show.
"You're asking the wrong woman," I said and watched the camera's lens point at Jaliyah. She posed with teeth too bright and a photo op to drown in.
When the brand's founder shut down Jaliyah's rumor in front of everyone—ME publicly declared that they had never planned to work with her—the space around Jaliyah condensed into panic. Her face went from pink to grey, like an autumn leaf in sudden wind.
"How dare he?" she hissed at the cameras as she fled. "This is disgusting."
That would have been enough humiliation in a lifetime. But I had a different show planned.
"Lauryn," Denver said later, holding my elbow like one does in a movie, "you want to make them pay, don't you?"
"I want them to stop pretending I was the monster. I want them to feel a fraction of the burn I felt."
"Do you have proof?"
"I will make them give it to me," I said. "And I will make sure everyone watches them break."
What followed was the first of many scenes where the world watched a villain lose her costume and find only result.
I called Finley Perkins and found him as cool as ice on a winter morning.
"Tell your assistant to pull the footage from the ME show—security cams, backstage mics," I said, touching him as our palms brushed when I handed him a script. I had to slow my heartbeat with the thought that I risked looking needy. "And also the footage from the banquet at the Perkins estate."
Finley did not hesitate. "I'll have my team deliver what you need." He glanced at me once. "You're dangerous in a good way."
I had an actor's talent for timing. On a night arranged by me and Finley—a charity gala hosted by the press where both Booker Bray and Miriam Palmer would sit in the front row—we turned the lights to theater.
"Sit down," I told Denver when we walked into the hall. "And smile."
We walked in as if we belonged, and the hum of conversation threaded upward like a net. Hundreds of people threaded the chairs: socialites, reporters, the kind of audience that eats other people's disgrace with dessert.
"Good evening," the host said from the podium. "We have a special presentation tonight."
The video started—clean, unornamented, a candid from the Perkins estate and the Global Entertainment garden intercut with the banquet's backstage.
On the screen, Miriam's refined hand reached into a glass and stirred something like sugar into a drink. Jaliyah stood nearby, her smile a knife that the camera framed with cruel precision. A shaky, muffled voice said, "Make sure it looks like accident. Make sure she slips."
Murmurs rose like waves.
"Who filmed this?" one voice demanded.
"Where did this come from?" hissed another.
The screen flipped to the banquet feed: Jaliyah's step—her hand guiding a server's arm toward a glass. A white powder slunk into an orange-hued drink like snow melting.
Miriam's voice, captured on a poor backstage mic, was unmistakable. [Don't worry, the girl will get the blame. It's always the oversight.]
My palm went numb where it had rested on Denver's sleeve. He squeezed back to let me know we still breathed.
Miriam had been many things in my life: a confessor to Booker, a friend to the right people, and a practiced manipulator. On the screen she was an actress without lines, and the world watched. Her face, once lit by pearls and flattering makeup, slowly lost its lacquer. At first there was a flash of entitlement—an expression that said the world belonged to her—and then, as the video spelled out the whole chain of messages and recorded frivolous comments, she stiffened.
"That's… that's a mistake," Miriam managed, voice thin and measured. "There are edits."
People who had once applauded her began to swivel their chairs.
"Look at this," someone whispered in a stunned tone. "My God."
"Is that her?" another asked.
The hall had become an amphitheater of judgement. Camera phones rose, little glowing mirrors in a forest of hands. Someone laughed; someone else cried; someone already live-streamed. I watched the faces morph—surprise to confusion to hot, hungry interest. The taste of exposure does something to people: it makes them wolves and journalists.
Miriam's hand clutched Booker Bray's sleeve as if for balance. "This is a setup," she said, and at first her voice kept a practiced calm. "I will sue. This is illegal."
"We have the originals," Finley said from the front row like some calm judge. He pressed his phone and more footage rolled: messages between Miriam and an assistant where she called me "that parasite" and "a bargaining chip," where she outlined a plan to sully my name and make me disappear.
Miriam's face flushed. "That's doctored!" she screamed, and then her voice broke. The room tasted of secondhand shock.
"Doctor it." A man clapped from the back, half in derision and half in the old way people clapped at a dog that had turned on them. "Doctor it, Miriam. Make us a magician."
She stumbled toward the stage, the movement unsteady and desperate. "It's not true. I would never—"
"Then explain," someone shouted. "Explain why your fingerprints are on the decanter."
She looked around her, jaws working. For a brutal, impossible second she was the queen of the room—so used to the music stopping for her that she could not bear the silence. Then the silence turned into a chorus. A woman in pearls rose like a sword. "You told me to keep my mouth shut about 'that girl' so our families wouldn't lose face," she said. "How noble."
"You're lying!" Miriam shrieked, a sound scrambled into raw edges.
"You're the liar," Booker said. His voice, so often measured, cracked and shifted into something I had never heard before: sharp, indecisive, and fearful. "Miriam—what have you done?"
At that the room began to close in on her. People took out phones, faces alit, recording, narrating in streams. The first wave of chorus hardened into anger.
"Shame," someone said simply.
"Shame on you," another echoed.
Miriam's eyes were enormous. The first stage in the pattern of a fall—confidence—crumbled into incredulous silence. Then came denial in a voice that reached for every old advantage.
"This was framed!" she cried. "Who would do this? Why would I—Booker, tell them it's untrue."
Booker looked at her as if he could not reconcile the woman beside him with evidence piled like stones at her feet. The cameras leaned in like vultures.
"She was your wife for appearances," a journalist said into a microphone. "Is this how you keep appearances?"
The second act of a public spectacle is always denial—refusal, treaties with the air. But then shock reached her; she staggered, eyes glassy, and the room watched her knuckles whiten. The crowd shifted to the second movement: curiosity towards contempt.
"Film it, film it," a cruel voice whispered. "Watch them fall."
And fall she did.
Her posture crumpled. Miriam went from aristocratic composure to a cowering animal in a heartbeat. She reached for the hand of Booker as if he could anchor her back into the world. He flinched.
"Please," Miriam said, voice gone very small. "Please, listen to me. We can fix this. We'll call lawyers. We'll—"
"Fix it?" someone laughed. "Fix the life you ruined?"
The tenor changed. People began to pull their phones closer, fingers hovering over record buttons. They filmed the slow unspooling of a woman who had always expected the world to buy her seams. Her face drained of makeup like ice melting from a statue. She who had given advice to mothers on how to keep a husband now sounded like a child begging not to be sent away.
"You're a liar! A schemer!" a woman in the aisle cried out. "You put poison in drinks? How could you—"
Miriam's lips trembled. She turned to the crowd, eyes like the last embers of a fire. "No—no—please—" The words scraped out.
People had been at first stunned, then interested, and now they moved to viciousness. A man stood and yelled, "Arrest her! How can you sleep with a conscience like that?"
Someone near us started to clap—sharp, sudden, not polite at all. Others joined. It was not applause for her, nor for justice; it was a sound of a pack deciding what man they would punish.
Jaliyah watched from the wings—face white. For a long time she had been bagged in the same web of schemes, but now the net pulled her. Her cunning fled like a tide. She tossed a lie at the room—"I didn't—"—and it cracked apart on the sea of evidence. People who made careers on gossip turned to her like hyenas smell blood.
"She put pressure on me," Jaliyah said, voice thin. "She said if I didn't—"
"Is that what you'd call it?" someone hissed. "You helped her. You smiled while she did it."
She tried again, denial too flaccid to hold any more. The faces around her broke into their own variation of triumph and disgust.
"Don't touch me," she pleaded to no one.
Then she collapsed. Not made to, or staged, but simply out of sheer, hot, human collapse: the pain of being watched being sharper than any physical harm.
People began to take pictures. A wave of phones rose, like a flock of black birds. Someone recorded her kneeling, head in her hands and wailing, "Please—please—" People filmed. People whispered. People sent the first clips to those who had been on the fence. The phrase "Miriam Palmer confession" trended within minutes.
She drooped on the floor, a terrible, human thing. Her mask had been torn. She pleaded, then begged, then crawled. I watched as the faces that once smiled on her—tea ladies, business partners, the men who had found her useful—turned away like they'd been offered rotten meat.
"Please," the world heard, then the world lost interest. Some still filmed. Some scoffed. Some cheered. A few clapped with savage relish.
She looked up, eyes wet and frantic. "Booker—" she croaked.
He walked away.
"Stop," she cried, rising to her knees. "Stop filming—please!"
No one stopped. The spectator had become the executioner. The sound of phones—clicks and shouts and the murmur of a thousand small verdicts—became the choir accompanying her downfall.
"Beg," a voice in the forward rows called, cold as glass. "Beg him."
She dropped to her knees, her palms scraping the carpet. "Please," she begged, her voice a small thing. "Please forgive me—forgive me—I will do anything—"
The progression was textbook: triumph, then the blink of disbelief, spinning into denial, the raw collapse, and the final plea. The voices in the room reacted in stages as well: first shock, then gossip, then phones, then applause from some corners, then the cold, dry applause of those who tasted the sight of a predator trapped.
We all watched. The cameras recorded. The internet devoured it.
"You're done," someone said to Miriam as the security escorted her away, and the sentence landed like a verdict from a jury of the globe.
She cried. She begged. She sought an ally in the crowd and found only the clicking of shutters and the white heat of judgment.
By the time Miriam left, the floor still hummed with the aftertaste of spectacle. People whispered about laws and trials, as if the cameras had already done the work of prosecutors. They posted. They photographed. They debated. They recorded. The sound of her collapse would live forever online.
I stood a little further back and watched the woman who had played mother to me like a game stumble through her collapse. My revenge was not blood; it was the exposure of a lie, a truth the world could not unsee. I felt no jump of triumph—nothing like the burning satisfaction I had imagined. There was only a quietness that filled the space left by the removal of a mask.
"You wanted them to feel a fraction of your pain," Denver said softly beside me.
"I wanted them to stop," I said, and the words sounded small. "I wanted them to stop pretending they were innocent."
Finley stepped closer and placed that fox-quiet hand on my shoulder. "Good work," he said. "We kept them honest."
"Do they stop?" I asked.
"For some," Finley answered. "For others—habits die hard. But the world knows now."
Miriam's wail still trembled on the stream of a million phones. Jaliyah's face had gone blank, and for the first time she tasted the very kind of humiliation she had practiced on others.
We had started a chain reaction. The video bit like frost. It left scars.
The next weeks blurred into work—attending more shows, doing early press, acting in a film that gave me the chance to be more than just a pretty face. Director Ambrosio White—cynical, brilliant—hired me because I had substance the camera loved. He said I had "natural light" that didn't need fixtures.
"You have something," he told me at my first read-through. "Don't let them convince you otherwise."
"I won't," I said.
"Good." He smiled then, a small dangerous upward tilt. "Just be honest with yourself. Your real strength will be doing your own work."
And the work was where I began to breathe again. The film, called "Zhiying" under the clear, precise light of Ambrosio's direction, asked me to be a girl left out in the snow and found by a saint. I learned the women in his scripts were often offered as mirrors of what men thought themselves to be. I learned how to stand a camera and pull the corner of a scene into truth.
On nights when I could not sleep, I would read the list of things I wanted. I would press my fingertips against the cold glass and wonder whether Finley—who had once carried me like a secret—wanted me only to be safe or had built some ladder of possessiveness in his chest.
"You're developing into someone I like keeping near," he said to me one evening, quiet in the hall outside a theater where we'd both come to watch other people's rehearsals.
"I know you're more comfortable with a plan," I said. "So here is one: I get better at my craft, I don't let them crush me, and I don't drown again."
He stared past me like a man cataloging both a map and a possibility. "Then let's make sure you have no reason to drown."
"I like the way that sounds."
We built a strange life: rehearsals, late-night scripts, public appearances. My read-touch helped. It cut through the roses and the rot. I learned who wanted to use me and who wanted to carry me. I learned that a man who saved me in public would sometimes be ruthless in private—but the private was the part that saved me.
"Lauryn," Finley said once late at night, after a day when a tabloid tried to pin a scandal on my co-star. "If you ever want to stop—stop working, stop pretending—you can be honest with me."
I thought of drowning again and the finality of that black water. I thought of every necklace Miriam had ever clasped on me as though it were a shackle. I thought of the rose's gold.
"I plan to win," I said.
He watched me with an odd tenderness that frightened and brightened me. "Then I'll keep you."
Months passed like tightrope acts—often public, always observed. I learned to keep my mouth small and my fingers smaller still. I learned to use my sense like a scalpel, cut away the rot until the thing left was lean and true.
The more I rose, the more determined they were to cut me back down—Miriam's family, men who had previously laughed at me, the gossip that fed off gossip. I read those men like dog-eared pages. I learned who would stab me in the back and who would throw a shield between me and the knife.
One night, at an awards ceremony, calamity again came like a thief. A woman once hired by Jaliyah and Miriam to make trouble—her hands too quick and mouth too eager—stalked into the center of the hall and tried to throw a cup toward me. The world slowed.
"What is this?" someone shouted.
Finley moved like an animal. He vaulted and intercepted the bowl before it hit me. Liquid hissed; the burnt chemical smell of it stung the air.
"Who did that?" the host screamed.
The woman tried to flee. Cameras circled. Her face was brazen at first—an act gone bad. Then it fell apart like old wallpaper. People taped it. Phones turned her collapse into a thousand frames.
"She was caught with an 'oops' in her handbag," someone recorded. "Poison, you say? Maybe. We'll find out."
They called the police. They called my name, over and over, but it wasn't my time to die.
Later, when Jaliyah tried to come to me with staged concern, I played the part of the generous sister. I smiled and patted her shoulder like a queen giving alms.
"You're lucky," I said in a voice that held both honey and steel. "You made a big mess."
Jaliyah's eyes flicked toward the cameras. I thought of the day I had learned to use other people's tongues and the taste of vinegar that rose in my mouth.
"You will get what you deserved," I said quietly, but in a public enough whisper that those nearest could hear.
She flinched. I saw the truth in her mind when my fingertips brushed her arm: she had been planning another, worse thing. She thought she would use my kindness as a curtain to set me on fire.
I put down my hand and stepped away.
That was when I realized a second life is less about revenge and more about recognition: of who you are, what you can be, and who will stand in front of you when someone tries to push you into the water.
Finley stood in front of me more than once. His scars of the peroxide attack left a pale line on his cheek, a promise one could not erase. He wore it like a map to the place where he had almost lost me. He forbade tabloids from printing my name beside slurs. He had friends in the right places.
"You are my responsibility," he said once, blunt as a door. "Not because I owe you. Because in a world that throws knives at you, I want to be the shield."
"Then be," I said.
Later, when ballads and scandals settled down into the steady noise of a life that had been hacked and then planted, I went to a tiny shop on a quiet street and bought a ring. Not for him, not then. For me. It was small, a token of the woman who had learned how to stand in daylight.
"Don't waste it," Finley said when I showed it to him.
"I won't," I promised. "I won't waste this life."
There were more combats: lawsuits, smear campaigns, a relentless little war of tweets and anonymous posts. I learned who would stand by me. Denver would come with hot soup when I was away from the set. Ambrosio would tell me to breathe. Blaise sent roses on quiet days—golden ones that looked like miniature suns in a vase.
"Why do you give me flowers?" I asked Blaise once after a show.
"Because you showed up," he said. "You wore my clothes like the damn throne was made for you."
I laughed then—light and real.
And sometimes, in the quiet, when I sat on a balcony and watched the lights of the city blur into stars, Finley would come and stand so near my shoulder that I could feel the map of the things he would do to keep me safe. He had learned to say little. When he said, "You are mine," it was not ownership. It was a confession: he would protect me like a person guards a truth.
The world had taught me to be cruel, but I kept a ledger of kindness too. I learned how to punish and when to forgive. The punishments were public and raw—one of the main parts of the life I had chosen. Miriam's fall had set a lecture on what the world might do to conspirators. Jaliyah's smaller, repeated failures left her adrift as sponsors dropped her, as agents turned away, as cameras stopped focusing and found a new face to feed their hunger.
When I got the last message that mattered—when an investigator told me that Colt Maeda would face charges because of his footage and his lies—I felt a cool lightness in my chest. Colt had been the one who traded pictures and private hours like debt. He came to a public hearing thinking he was untouchable. We made sure he wasn't.
You have to understand—public disgrace is not the same as justice. But it does something to people who thought of others as playthings. It makes them small. It makes them careful.
The final piece of the life I had been building was not even mine to take. On a cold autumn night Finley walked me onto a small stage at a private benefit.
"The world knows her as Lauryn Ferreira," he said into the microphone. "She had a hard year."
He did not need to say more. He set his hand in mine in a gesture that no one filmed. He put a small golden rose in my palm—the same kind that Blaise had once offered on the runway.
"Keep it," Blaise said from the wings, smiling like someone who had started a fire and had already warmed himself.
I kept the rose.
Years from the night I woke up on that couch, years after Miriam's prison, after Colt's arrest, after Booker Bray learned the difference between a ledger and a life, people would still ask how I had done it.
I would tell them this: I was given a second chance. I learned to read people with the slightest touch. I learned which hands to accept and which to close into fists. I accepted love when it came steady, not flashy; I accepted help when it was quiet and real. I kept a list only to remind me of what I had lost and what I would not lose again.
"Do you still hate them?" someone asked me once.
"I don't hate," I said. "I remember. Justice is not a story of cruelty. It's the quiet settling of rights."
Finley squeezed my hand. His scarred cheek caught the light that came off the golden petal in my palm.
"You're stubborn," he said, like a compliment.
"Someone had to be," I answered.
On the last page of my second life I pinned the rose in a small chest beside my scripts and call sheets. It is not a trophy. It is proof: that a hand can choose to give and a life can choose to go on.
Tonight, when the city sleeps under a mesh of neon and rain, I close my fingers around that rose and—because I can—touch my own palm.
"I am your person," I once sent to him in a text by mistake, and he answered simply: "Good."
I look at the golden petal and let that small miracle of words rest there.
It is a quiet, private ending, marked by a single object: the rose that Finley once handed me when the lights were hot and the world watched. It is mine—kept where I can see it in the dark, and know that I was brave enough to pick it up.
The End
— Thank you for reading —