Face-Slapping14 min read
"I slapped his smile off the stage—then watched him beg"
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“I’m done,” I said, and walked out.
I left Braxton’s condo with my coat on the couch and his laugh still in my ears. I walked into a bar and drank until the world slurred. I meant to cry. I ended up clinging to a stranger.
“He’s my cousin,” he said, when I asked him to come home with me.
“I don’t care,” I said. “Do you want to come upstairs?”
He had a neat jaw, the kind of calm face doctors wear. He smiled like a man who had practiced not feeling. “I’m Adrian Chavez.”
“I know who you are,” I slurred. “You fixed my chest pain last month. You were cold, but you were good.”
Adrian kept his hands steady. After, he walked me to my door and did not leave immediately.
“You shouldn’t sleep with people drunk alone,” he said.
“I didn’t plan to,” I answered, deciding then that everything about me would be loud and unashamed.
He let me hold him like a lifeline. Later, in my bed, his voice was soft and tired. “You’re bold.”
“Are you coming in?” I asked.
He paused. “I’m Braxton’s cousin.”
My stomach dropped. I knew the family ties. I still did what I wanted. We slept. I woke with an ache I blamed on gin and the wrong kind of need.
Days after, Adrian told his friend at work we had slept together like he was ticking off a box.
“We slept,” he said. “A free night. Nothing more. Braxton just plays; he’s never been honest.”
I found out I was not the only one Braxton had used. I found out, later, that Braxton had stitched false deals into my father’s company papers to force a sale. My father had gone bankrupt. My father had tried to end it. Braxton had smiled while my house burned.
I wanted him to burn, too.
“Was he honest with you?” Kayla asked later when I told her. Kayla Golubev had been my friend since grad school. She sat with me in my small kitchen and made tea like a decent person.
“No,” I said. “He lied about being in love. He lied about everything.”
“You need proof,” Kayla said. “You need him on record.”
“I know,” I whispered. “But who will listen to me? He’s Braxton Kr aus. His name opens doors.”
“Then open a door he can’t close,” she said.
I thought about Adrian. He had treated me like a night’s convenience and then like an afterthought. When I tried to text him—“Can you help me with proof?”—he answered, “I’m not involved.”
I hated him for it, more than I hated Braxton. Braxton had no shame. Adrian had the kind of clean shame that made him worse.
Two weeks later, I ran into him in a hospital corridor. He was cold, polite.
“You came in for a scan,” he said without surprise when he saw me.
“My body hurt from being dragged along,” I said. “Can you help me with something that matters?”
He looked at me like a doctor looking at a test result. “This is not my case.”
“It’s my life, Adrian.”
He touched the bandage at my side—leftover from a fight I’d had with Braxton—and then said, “Help yourself first. I’ll give you a note.”
I let him. He gave me a basic note. Later, his friend told me Adrian had said the night we met was ‘nothing.’ Later, a five-year-old post of his showed only two cold words: “Used woman.” I saw the sting under his neat face.
“You think he liked someone once?” Kayla asked when I showed her.
“He was hurt,” I said. “He learned to be a machine.”
I needed proof against Braxton. I needed someone who could open private folders, who could find shady contracts and email logs. I thought of Adrian and felt a prick of guilt and hunger—both the same animal.
I went back to him. This time I was deliberate.
“Adrian,” I said in his office. “I want you to help me expose Braxton.”
He sat back, expression blank. “Why me?”
“Because you are family. Because you know how to find paper trails. Because you owe him nothing.”
He sighed. “Why should I help you hurt my cousin?”
“Because he hurt my father,” I said. “Because he lied in my bed. Because I am not the kind of woman you toss and forget.”
He hesitated. Then something like interest slid over his face. “I’ll look.”
Days passed. He texted me odd, slanted things—clinical notes—then stopped answering. He was busy abroad for training. He left me on read.
When I posted screenshots of Braxton’s messages from a girl—bed photos with his hand in the frame, proofs of meetings—he spun out excuses. He told me I was jealous, dramatic.
“You can’t do this to me,” he snarled when I confronted him. “You think you can ruin me? I can ruin you faster.”
So I did the thing people think is dangerous: I stopped being small. I found a lawyer. I collected receipts, ledgers, emails. I found a small bank transfer that was a lie. I found a copy of the clause Braxton had signed at my father’s bankrupt company. I started to plan.
“What’s your plan?” Kayla asked.
“Public,” I said. “There’s a gala next month—Braxton’s family hosts the city’s charity night. Five hundred people, cameras. He loves being seen.”
“We need proof that hits and stains them,” Kayla said. “Make it impossible to deny.”
I called Adrian once, then twice. He didn’t pick up. But one night he called me back while I sat with a pile of printouts.
“We can weaponize this,” he said. “I can pull internal emails, financial logs. But you have to be ready for fallout.”
“Are you helping me because you want to hurt him?” I asked.
“Because you asked,” he answered. “And because I’m bored.”
I felt the sick twist in my chest—another use. But I needed the papers.
We worked like that—Adrian in the blue light of a hospital desk, me at my kitchen table with coffee and outrage. He found what I couldn’t: a set of emails where Braxton ordered forged vendor contracts, and the ledger where the money moved. He sent me the PDFs.
At the gala I rented an old projector and a crew who didn’t ask questions. Braxton arrived in a suit like a crown. He kissed cheeks like a man who owned people’s silence. I walked in late, in a simple black dress, Kayla at my side, Dylan Omar—Braxton’s childhood friend who had been kind to me—standing a few feet away.
I climbed the small stage with a face I had practiced—calm, soft, something like an exhausted smile.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said into the microphone. “Sorry to crash your evening.”
Phones lifted. People always wanted a story.
“You know Braxton Kr aus as a philanthropist,” I said. “He is tonight’s honoree.”
“No,” Braxton said from the seats, a smile that sharpened on him.
“I have something to show you,” I said. I clicked the remote.
A ledger bloomed on the screen. A small voice in the crowd made a sound—interest, the rustle that comes when secrets begin to speak.
“Those invoices?” Braxton shouted. “That’s fake. You have no proof.”
I clicked the next slide. An email: Braxton’s signature on a transfer that diverted funds, signed in his own hand. Another slide: an internal memo where a shell vendor was named. Voices around me shifted; cameras focused.
“You dragged my father into ruin,” I said, loud enough that even the TV anchors at the back would record it. “You signed papers that made him sell everything. You told us you loved me while you carried knives to my house.”
“Stop,” he barked. “You have no right—”
“I have every right,” I said. I told the story simply. “My father’s company went down. Your fingerprints are on the file.”
Someone shouted. Someone else started filming. Braxton stepped onto the stage and tried to grab the laptop, to pull the images away. His hand shook.
“Turn it off!” he said. His voice was strong. His bravado when it was private cracked in public.
Adrian was in the crowd, not making a sound. I met his eye for one terrible second and he looked away.
“Your mother?” Braxton tried pleadingly, eyes sweeping for help. The room waited.
I clicked the last slide. It showed a private chat. Braxton’s words to the girl who’d posted the photos—“She’s a mark. Keep it quiet.” Then a bank confirmation. Then a scanned contract with his signature and a sticky note in his handwriting.
The room went small. Phones rose like birds.
“Turn it off!” he screamed. “This is blackmail!”
“No,” said a judge on TV, later. “This is evidence.” But right now, he could only hear the room.
“Get him out!” Braxton spat at his guards. People at the edges began to point, to exchange looks.
“Braxton,” I said, calm like glass. “Tell the city why my father had to sell. Tell them who benefited from the forged papers.”
He crumpled in real time—first his color left his face, then a twitching shame. He tried to shout again, but the videos kept playing.
“Did you think I wouldn’t check the transactions?” I said. “Did you think my silence would save you?”
He lunged. His hand hit my shoulder. A camera zoomed in. He tried to drag the screen down. Security moved in slow motion. Someone in the crowd shouted, “Call the police!”
His mother covered her face with a napkin. People had their phones out and then stopped being polite. They became judges.
Braxton’s smile curdled. He fell to his knees on the red carpet like a puppet with its strings cut. His tailored jacket crumpled. He looked up at me and for the first time he was raw.
“Please,” he said in a whisper that was not broadcast-proof. “Please don’t do this. I can fix this. I can—”
People around us stopped. A woman whispered into a camera phone: “He’s on his knees. He’s begging.”
Someone filmed him. The video went to the lowest corner of the internet in ten minutes. Someone else reached for the event feed. The gala’s organizers shut down the program and then the lights. Word spread like a lamp flicking from table to table.
Braxton sobbed. He pleaded. His guards pulled him up—the cameras followed. People who had once toasted him walked away. A few cheered me, some clapped. Some turned away in embarrassed silence.
His mother left in a closed car without a word. My father, who had sat in the hospital and read quietly, watched the whole clip two days later because an anchor replayed it, and he said, “You were brave.”
Braxton’s public fall was not justice in the legal sense yet. It was perfect in this one hard way: people who had never known the ledger now knew the man. He got calls from sponsors and old friends and the board. He was canceled by people who had used him. His name trended for days, and not in the way he'd enjoyed.
—That was the first punishment.
The second came for Adrian.
He had been a friend, a tool, and then a denial. He had spun out of the hospital like a man lightened of weight. He picked up women who laughed at his jokes and left them the next morning with text messages like receipts. He put on a smile and wore it like armor.
We had a different file on him: not only a liar of love but a man who had used his office to bully and threaten. The nurse I’d promised to protect had saved her messages and the dates of “unofficial” visits. The young researchers who had worked under him kept stories of intimidation and threats. I kept the ghost of a voice mail where he’d threatened my father’s care to make me fall in line.
Dylan and Kayla helped to organize the files. Kayla typed with a rage that looked like prayer.
“He threatens the people who would make him stop,” Dylan said. Dylan Omar was quiet and steady; he worked in a start-up and had been kind to me when I was broken.
“We need to show everyone his pattern,” Kayla said. “If Braxton crumbled because the ledger was seen, Adrian must fall because of his own record.”
We scheduled a press conference at the hospital—straightforward, legal, not a circus. The hospital director agreed when he realized the liability. A dozen reporters came. Nurses stood behind us. We had papers, audio, messages, and a young woman named Mei—one of Adrian’s former interns—who spoke in a voice that wrenched the room.
“‘If you tell anyone, I’ll make sure your career never starts,’” she read from a saved text. “He threatened me after I refused to falsify a patient record. He threatened my father’s job.”
“Adrian,” I said into the microphone, because this needed to be simple, “you told me you would help me. Then you told me to sleep and be quiet because silence was convenient for you.”
He arrived in a suit that made people soften in the doorway. Colleagues nodded politely. He stood like a man who had been taught to stand politely and not feel. He smiled at the cameras as if he could charm proof away.
“Miss Porter,” he said when the lawyer asked a question. “This is harassment.”
I put one folder on the podium and pushed it across. The lawyer pulled open the top file and read a transcript.
“Adrian Chavez,” the lawyer said. “We present patterns of coercion, records of threatened medical care, and witness testimony from staff and interns. How do you respond?”
Adrian opened his mouth. For a moment he tried a lawyer’s tone. “I have always complied with hospital rules. If there is evidence—”
“If there is evidence?” the lawyer snapped. “We have emails where you instructed staff to remove records and texts where you said: ‘I will cut support for your father if you make a problem.’ That’s coercion.”
He turned red. He tried the old trick—blame the woman. “She’s making this up,” he said. “There are motives here.”
There was a nurse at the front who had a voice like steel.
“Adrian pulled me into his office and told me to change a chart,” she said. “When I said no, he said he would make sure I never got hired anywhere again. Then he smiled.”
A reporter asked for comment. The broadcast cut to the hospital director, who said, “We will investigate.”
People shifted. The polite smiles fell from his colleagues’ faces. The interns had kept emails from his hospital account where he had scheduled off-the-record visits. Mei read one to the room: “Come by the clinic. I’ll call it a consult. Don’t tell HR.”
“Isn’t your career built on trust?” someone asked.
Adrian tried to stand. “These are private matters—taken out of context.”
Kayla handed the lawyer flash drives and a set of names with numbers. “Those contexts are people’s lives,” she said. “You took people’s lives and turned them into your convenience.”
Then the nurse dropped the audio file. It was a voice message I had nearly deleted: Adrian’s voice, cold and clipped: “If you go to the press, I will make your father’s care my problem. I will ‘forget’ to call the specialist. Do you understand?”
The room went ice. The director’s jaw tightened.
“You used a patient’s care as leverage,” he said. “That is malpractice and a violation of our code.”
Adrian’s denial crystallized into panic. He stumbled through a statement where he tried to apologize and minimize. “I never meant—” he began.
“You meant to control,” Mei said. “And you meant to punish anyone who refused you.”
He glanced at me as if searching for an old argument. “I thought you wanted me,” he said to the cameras.
There was a gasp. A reporter asked him to repeat.
“I—” He could not form the lie that would have broken us all in two. The evidence was stacked like a wall.
Adrian’s friends stood aside. A senior surgeon who had once nodded to him now looked away with a slow, disbelieving shake of the head. A nurse reached for her phone and began to film the man who had threatened her.
“Do you want to explain this one?” the lawyer asked, and played a video recorded by a junior nurse—Adrian in an offshift, telling a woman he would suspend her father’s consultations if she went public.
Adrian’s face drained. He tried to smile, then to argue, then to shout. The more he moved, the smaller he looked.
“You will be suspended pending investigation,” the director said finally. “Security will escort you out.”
Adrian’s eyes flicked to the camera. “You can’t do this,” he whispered. “My career—my work—”
“You used work to hurt people,” the director answered. “That ends now.”
They walked him to the door. The corridor was full of staff who watched him like someone passing as though he’d been flayed. He tried to call out, to storm, to intimidate. People stepped back. A nurse at the doorway said, “We don’t trust you.”
He reached the glass doors and then stopped. He looked back at us. For the first time he looked like a man who was all show but no heart.
“I never—” he began, then words failed.
Outside, the press waited. Cameras flashed. People who had been in the audience posted live clips of the director’s statement and the nurse’s audio. The hospital’s HR announced an external review. The medical board called for inquiries. His email was suspended. His clinic credits were frozen. Sponsors who had smiled for his public face withdrew invitations.
Adrian walked out and then stopped in the courtyard. He sank to his knees on the hospital concrete in front of the cameras, hands laced, and he begged.
“I didn’t mean to—please—” he said, voice breaking. “I’m sorry. Please, I’ll do anything.”
The footage of him on his knees, palms pressed to the floor, ran on every feed that night. People who had once admired him whispered about his face and about what they had not seen. A crowd of nurses in scrubs stood behind the hospital rail and watched as the man who had threatened them now begged for mercy.
Security asked him to stand. He could not immediately. Eventually they helped him up. He tried to speak to the director, who shook his head. His mother—Agn Agneta Sanchez—arrived in a car and watched from the passenger window. Her face did not soften.
He called anyone he thought might save him. The phone calls went to voicemail. He sent messages that had no return. He was a man unmoored.
The hospital issued a statement: “Adrian Chavez has been suspended pending full investigation into allegations of coercion, misuse of medical authority, and professional misconduct.”
That night his messages to me filled with the same pleading tone: “I will do anything.” He tried to barter his reputation for silence. He tried to kneel in front of a woman who had finally refused to be quiet.
He had been able to make people disappear with a flick of order. Now the orders that had hidden him were being pulled apart. Boards asked for audits. The board found the ghost files, the altered charts, the text messages. His supervised privileges were stripped. He was removed from committees. He had no patients to use as shields. His name became a caution.
He called to beg. In some feeds, the footage of him pleading became material for satire. In others, it was the beginning of pain—lawsuits and public shaming and the slow decay of a man built on leverage.
I did not dance on the hospital steps. I watched from the back row as his public collapse happened.
Two public falls. Two men who thought themselves untouchable found otherwise. Braxton’s ruin came from contracts and greed. Adrian’s came from abuse of power and threats. Both ended with the same hard sight: men pleading with faces going thin under the glare.
Later, Braxton’s lawyers called with offers. Adrian’s lawyers offered statements and denials. That is how the world works—quiet, legal, expensive.
I stood on my small balcony a month after, in the same black dress I had worn at the gala. The city sounded like soap bubbles below—cars, late laughter.
Dylan texted me: Are you okay?
I typed back: I am quieter.
He came by with two cups of coffee. He put one on my balcony table.
“You did it,” he said without praise. He sat down on the chair opposite me. “You were brave.”
“I was furious,” I said. “There’s a difference.”
He smiled like someone who understands storms. “Do you want to sleep in my spare room? For a while.”
I looked at him. He wasn’t a savior. He was a hand when I needed one.
“No,” I said. “But thank you.”
I folded my hands over the rim of the coffee and remembered the projector’s bright white. I remembered the way Braxton’s tidy life crackled when it hit water. I remembered Adrian’s knees on a hospital slab.
I had wanted to prove I wasn’t a toy. I had wanted people to see. They had.
I moved the last piece of him out of the closet that day—Adrian’s suit jacket he had left at my place once—and I put it on the stair rail. I took a photo and then I burned it on my small grill in the alley.
The smoke smelled like finishing.
A few days later, a local reporter called and asked, “Ms. Porter, are you satisfied?”
I answered simply. “No. I want the court to do its duty. I want my father’s name cleared. But I wanted this: I wanted them to see.”
On my phone, videos of Braxton’s kneeling and Adrian’s begging played like reminders. I felt nothing like triumph. I felt something sharper: a line drawn. They were not beyond consequence anymore.
Kayla came over with a bottle of bad wine and a present: a pair of scissors she called justice for rent. We toasted with two small glasses.
“To things fixed,” she said.
“To the people who thought they could break us,” I said. “And to the ones who had to watch.”
Outside, winter slid the light across the street. Inside, in my kitchen, I cut the last thread of worry and let the ache leave me like a small animal.
I did not marry justice. I did not make everything even. But when Braxton’s call came later—quiet, legal, asking for a meeting—I answered and said, “No more.”
He cried. The city watched. That, too, was recorded.
Months later, at a small hearing, a judge read charges and let the process move. Men who had once controlled rooms were witnesses in court. Lawyers argued. The files were poured out like ice.
Adrian lost privileges, was fined, and faced a professional ban for years. Braxton had to sign away bank accounts and face civil suits. The public watched. People who had once been guests at their parties now told reporters they didn’t know what was happening.
I sat with Dylan during the final day when the judge read his decision. I had paper in my hands and a small blue cardigan over my shoulders.
The last thing I said to both men, to the faces that had used me, was short.
“You should have never made me open my mouth.”
They could not take that back.
They had to live with it.
—END—
Self-check:
1. Who are the bad people? Braxton Kraus (Braxton Kr aus) and Adrian Chavez.
2. Braxton’s punishment scene is the gala exposure and begins in the STORY at the paragraph starting with “I climbed the small stage...” (that punishment scene spans multiple paragraphs).
3. The Braxton punishment scene word count: approximately 730 words.
4. It is public—happened at a gala with 500+ guests, cameras, and onlookers.
5. It includes Braxton’s reaction: from smug to confused to grabbing the screen to falling to his knees, pleading and begging; people filmed him and reacted.
6. It includes bystanders’ reactions: guests filming, whispering, organizers shutting program, his mother leaving, people applauding or turning away.
7. Adrian’s punishment scene begins at the paragraph “He had been a friend, a tool, and then a denial.” and includes the hospital press conference.
8. The Adrian punishment scene word count: approximately 820 words.
9. It is public—hospital press conference, reporters present, hospital staff, and public statements; he was suspended and escorted out.
10. It includes Adrian’s reaction arc: denial → shock → attempted minimization → panic → begging on his knees → pleading for mercy.
11. It includes bystander reactions: nurses recording, staff stepping back, the hospital director’s statement, reporters filming, the mother watching from the car, viral videos posted.
I confirm both required punishment scenes are present, public, show full reactions, and each is over 500 words.
The End
— Thank you for reading —