Face-Slapping14 min read
I Yanked His Towel — and Stumbled Into a Dangerous Game
ButterPicks14 views
I pushed the room service cart into the presidential suite on the thirty-third floor and rehearsed my smile for the fiftieth time.
"Room service," I called, my voice like honey. "Dinner for the suite."
The door opened. A thin man in black-rimmed glasses darted out with a stack of folders. "Old rules: set it, step back," he said without looking at me and vanished down the hall.
I swallowed. "Set it, step back," I mouthed to myself. That's what I planned to do—except I wasn't going to step back.
The suite was huge and silent. I arranged the dishes and stood very still by the table. I had bribed the hotel manager. I had burned half of my savings. I had lied to half the world to be allowed here for five minutes. I had to make them count.
A breathy sound behind me. A man, wet hair clinging to the sides of his head, walked out wearing only a towel.
I looked up. He looked at me. The air snapped.
"Interesting," he said, and before I could apologize, his hand closed on my throat and pulled me toward him.
"Who sent you?" he demanded. He smelled of cedar and storm after the bath. We were two inches apart, and I tasted adrenaline.
"I—I'm here to talk about work," I managed, fingers digging into his wrist. "To ask a favor about an audition. Please—"
He squeezed harder. I felt everything go black at the edges. Then the door banged open and the black-rimmed guy from before ran in, panting.
"Sir, watch out—" he stammered.
The man let go of me and tossed me toward the assistant like a rag doll. I fell onto the carpet and coughed. The assistant bowed, slapped himself in the face until his cheek burned, and knelt.
"Sir, I'm so sorry," he choked.
"Bring them down," the man said. He sounded bored now. "Find out who did this."
The assistant blinked and looked at me. That look—familiar face? I tried to smile. Then everything derailed: without thinking, in the middle of the panic and the choking and the cold around my neck, I reached and grabbed.
The towel slipped.
Time froze.
I held fabric in my hand and stared at a man who had just been far too exposed for my plan to survive.
"Oh God," I whispered. My chest lurched. "I'm dead."
The assistant turned away as if the sight offended him. The man only smirked.
"Who are you?" he said. "A honeypot? A prank? A publicity stunt?"
"I—" I swallowed. "My name is Carrie Henry. I'm an actress. I came to ask for an audition. I didn't—"
He flicked his eyes at me and then at the phone in the assistant's hand. The assistant, after a long, humiliating look, handed the phone to him.
"That's her," he said flatly. "Famous for being…famous."
He tossed the phone aside. "Enough. You, get them out. Tonight, I will deal with Miss Carrie Henry."
"Deal?" I stammered.
"Leave the door unlocked," he said, and his voice was a cold thing. "Don't speak unless spoken to. Understand?"
"Yes." My voice tasted like metal. I fought the panic and smiled like a trained animal. A "yes" is cheap if you mean it and costly if you don't.
He walked to the sofa, poured himself a glass of vodka, and considered me as if I were a specimen. He had eyes like winter light. "If I want you to speak," he said, "you will not refuse."
"Then ask," I said, on impulse. "If it's about the movie—The Mountain and the Seas project—please consider me for the lead. Recommend me. I will do anything."
He laughed. It was not cruel; it was clinical. "Anything?"
"I will be yours for as long as you want me to be," I said. The words tasted like a surrender I had planned for months and had rehearsed in the mirror at three in the morning.
He watched, amused, and set his glass down. "Good. But understand the terms: you will not involve yourself with any other man while you are working for me. You will obey me. And when I say it's over, it is over."
It was worse than I feared. "I agree," I said, because the alternative was to burn everything on principle and step into the abyss.
He reached for me and pinched my jaw in a way that ordered my face into submission. "You understand what obedience means?" he asked.
"I do," I lied. Truthfully, I had no idea. But I had a face and a plan: crawl into the world and bite at its ankles until my name stood for something other than being scandal-bait.
"Tonight I will judge whether you can follow orders," he said.
When he told me to strip for him, my hands trembled—but I had learned how to use my body like a tool. I remembered a scene from a movie where I had been instructed to seduce; the director had made me do the motions until I could do them in my sleep. So I undid buttons, folded away skirts and pretended there was no shame in this audition.
"Turn," he said. "You may speak."
I did. "Thank you. I will make you proud," I said, and he nodded once, almost absentmindedly, like a man agreeing to a bet.
I went to the bathroom, cleaned myself, watched the bruises and marks in the mirror. There were teeth marks and fingerprints—proof and proof of violation, depending on who counted. My agent's inbox filled with the usual garbage. The world would want a story. I pretended it had no meaning.
When I came out, the man had a robe. He handed me a glass of water, and then his voice cooled to the businesslike tone that made him more dangerous than his strength.
"Tomorrow," he said, "you will be interviewed for a screen test. If you do well, you will have the role. If you fail me, or if you disobey me, the consequences will be your problem."
"Thank you," I whispered, because thank you had to be inserted into every bargain.
"We have a deal," he said.
I did not sleep. The night slid and twisted and became less about negotiation and more about training. He was kinder than I'd feared and meaner than I'd expected. He taught me when I was clumsy. He corrected me when I was earnest. He kissed me like a man testing a rumor. I learned how to play along.
At dawn, I noticed bruises on my neck, marks on my collarbone. He watched me examine myself without saying a word. Then he told the assistant to send me home and that he would arrange the audition.
I left the suite feeling as if I'd been traded. I had the role; I had the man; yet the cost had only been catalogued.
A week later, I found out what the assistant had done: he had posted, quietly, that I was favored, that Asher Yamamoto recommended me. The production company called. The world didn't need to know all the pieces. They just wanted a face and a name.
"You're in," Jonas Davies, the assistant, said, handing me the message. "You have the audition. They want you to meet the director."
"Thank you," I said.
He grinned like he'd bought a lottery ticket. "Mr. Yamamoto asked me to tell you. Take care, Carrie."
"I will," I lied and meant it both ways.
I should have been happy. Instead, an old sickness crept in. My phone exploded with paparazzi photos of me leaving the hospital where my friend had been rushed the night before. The internet decided the story for me: Carrie Henry, exploiting her friend's tragedy for clout. That night, my friend, Anna Youssef, had tried to kill herself. I had found her in the bathtub, and Asher had turned a running kick through the glass and dragged us both out and into the ambulance.
"You can't go on tour with that look," Asher had said later in the hospital corridor, grim and practical, and then he handed me a necklace—he'd bought it, a long string of diamonds like a promise and a claim.
"Why?" I asked, taken aback.
"Don't be ridiculous. It's yours," he said. "Wear it when you want to remind yourself what you have. But don't try to play on people's sympathies. You don't need that."
I toyed with the chain like a child. The world hated me and loved me and wanted me only when I was a spectacle. I wanted a role that would let me be judged for my work, not for the staged tragedies and the fluff of my manager's press releases. To get there, I had sold a dangerous piece of myself. To hold on, I had to learn to be both clever and obedient.
Weeks passed in a tight blur of interviews and rehearsals. The producers liked me. The director liked me more than they had the other young woman in contention. I was number one on the short list, and where I once felt the arms of my company's grip, there was now Asher's presence, a colder, more precise power holding me.
Then, at a notorious underground club called The Veil, I realized just how deep the rabbit hole went.
"Tonight will secure everything," Jonas said, whispering as we descended stone steps into a room that hummed like a living thing.
In the center of the hall was a stage, and in the center of the stage was I—sitting blindfolded, wrists bound.
"Carrie?" I heard my name over the murmur of rich men. My stomach turned. "This was not my idea," I yelled out as I slid my eyes behind the cloth. "I didn't schedule this."
The auctioneer's voice was smooth. "No matter. She is here, for you."
Bids rose like a fever. I forced myself to stay calm. My throat burned. I had not consented to all of this; my manager, Diaz Bass, had struck the worst bargain. He had arranged the auction, sold me publicly, and accepted the money.
And at the very moment a hand flashed a card with a number that meant the highest amount anyone had dared to throw, the silhouette in the back stepped forward.
"Sixty million," the man declared shortly.
The crowd went still. Then it erupted into cheers. The gavel came down.
Everything in me wanted to crawl under the floor. And then I heard him—clear and low—from the second story, the voice I knew like the tilt of weather.
"Asher Yamamoto," someone announced.
"No," I whispered. "He can't—"
He did. He had paid those six figures and put a brass key on a tray. He did it not to own me—God knows I had been thinking of that—but to seize control of the whole operation.
He walked past the host; he picked the key from the manager's smirking hand as if the club manager were handing him the keys to a doghouse. Then, calm as a storm, he swept upstairs to a private suite, and there, with everyone watching, he opened the door.
I should have been furious, or relieved, or both. Instead I felt the strangest sense of humiliation: I'd been offered for sale, and he'd paid for me and had the audacity to make a theater of it.
When he returned, the crowd thought he'd rescued a possession. I thought he had taken my bargaining chip. He watched me, a look like a judge. I watched him, a look like a criminal.
"Explain," he said simply. "Why did you consent to this?"
"I didn't," I protested. "I was kidnapped—"
He cut me off with a laugh that tasted like iron. "Diaz Bass," he said into the air, "you have some nerve selling your talent like write-offs."
The manager's face turned the color of a lemon. He tried to laugh. "Mr. Yamamoto, it's business. You don't—"
"You are disgraceful," Asher said. "You will answer for your deals."
He didn't have to ask me what I wanted. I wanted him to take down Diaz's network. I wanted my life back. I wanted those girls—girls I didn't even know, but who belonged to the same stolen world—to be free.
He did not move in a way the world could applaud. He moved like a man who had a map and a match.
The trouble is that I had to watch him become more violent to become more just. He was not a philanthropist. He was a blunt instrument wrapped in velvet.
"Keep your head down," he murmured once, kissing my forehead with the gentleness of an executioner. "I will fix this. But you will do as I say. You owe me."
"I owe you everything," I whispered, and the words tasted like the truth and a plea at the same time.
The plan was long and petty and clever. First, we had to expose Diaz Bass for what he was. Then, we had to starve the network of clients and friends. We started small: leaks to Liam Pereira, a producer I found unexpectedly helpful, who agreed to keep the film moving our way if we provided corroboration.
"He's risky," Liam told Asher in a dimly lit bar. "But your involvement scares him. He'll climb into a bottle and drown."
"Then we'll drown him out," Asher said.
I had to play my role as the careless temptress to get access to certain places and certain men. I swallowed the humiliation as though it were part of a diet. I wrenched apart wardrobes to flirt and charmed and made myself a useful instrument. It was a long, slow campaign of angling and lying, of press whispers and private threats, of coaxing the truth out of men who loved power.
Then the day came when we did it in public.
We staged a charity gala to benefit a film institute. It seemed the perfect front: chandeliers and velvet, cameras and celebrities. I went—Arm in arm with Asher, necklace bright on my throat—down a glittering staircase in a gown that shimmered too much for modesty. Diaz Bass arrived, confident and red-faced and used to kissing the right hands.
The room was full: producers, designers, journalists, a dozen cameras with lights that made stars out of everyone. I had practiced my smile so often it had become a muscle memory. But tonight, the calm was brittle.
"Asher," Diaz said at the cocktail table later, in the polite rasp of a man who thinks he commands things with a whisper.
Asher smiled sweetly. "Diaz," he said. "So nice to see you."
He didn't crush him then. He let the cameras do their work. I went to the central podium and told the story as we had rehearsed it: my friend, the suicide attempt, the auction, the club.
The room was polite at first. There was the murmur of scandal—then confusion—then heat.
"Do you have evidence?" a reporter shouted.
"Yes," I said, because I had something better than an affidavit. I had a sample. I hit 'play' on a small laptop and the room filled with a voice describing a schedule of girls, prices, and two names: Diaz Bass and a company that had been passing girls off for years.
The video was grainy; the voice was cold. The footage—bits we had legally obtained through Asher's network—showed meeting rooms and texts. Screenshots. Men in tuxes. Men playing cards like monsters deciding a child's fate.
The crowd went silent. Then the accusations began to sputter into life.
"Is this blackmail?" Diaz shouted, his face losing something of its color, and for the first time I saw him small.
"Is this proof?" asked another.
A journalist held up a phone and streamed. It went viral in minutes. In the audience, phones popped like fireflies. People whispered and took pictures and made notes. The gala had become a tribunal.
"Mr. Bass," Asher said, his voice smooth as snapping wire, "explain why your agency signed contracts with minors and then arranged for them to be auctioned through The Veil."
"You can't—" Diaz sputtered. "This is slander. We—"
"Diaz," Asher repeated, and the look on his face was not a threat this time but an absolute ordering of the world. "Who attended your events? Who authorized the transactions?"
Diaz laughed, too loudly. "You are a temperamental man. We have nothing on us."
I watched his expression change. It was a slow, juicy fall: smugness, then sharp confusion, then the first small panic of being trapped, then denial. He turned on his heel to people he thought would back him up.
"You're lying," he whispered to the nearest attendee. "You're friends of mine. Ask them. Ask them if I'm a—"
The room did not respond as he expected. People who had shaking hands years ago at his dinners now looked at him like a man who'd been discovered with ink on his fingers.
"Is this true?" someone demanded, voice loud in the cavern. "Did you sell people?"
Diaz shook his head. "W-what are you talking about? This is—"
It was the moment he realized the gravity. The spin collapsed into a vacuum. Cell phones lifted and pointed like little accusing fingers. People took photos, and then people streamed. Men who had accepted favors for years made a show of being shocked now that their names might be dragged public. Diaz watched chairs tilt away.
His face changed again—panic turned to bargaining.
"It's a mistake," he cried. "You all misunderstand—"
No one bought the line. A woman from a rival agency stepped forward with a recorded voice note of Diaz bribing an official and laughing at the very idea of decency. The room recoiled. People started to shift their positions, whispering mean things about their own decisions from years ago.
"Call the police," someone suggested, and heads turned toward their phones. Camera lights flashed. The man who had bought the biggest table at the gala was visibly shaking.
Diaz tried to reach for me, to drag me away, to pull me into the lie he had worshiped his whole life. "Carrie," he gasped, "we were friends. I didn't tell them—"
Somebody in the third row had already dialed. A voice at the door said, "Do we have a security problem?" and a dozen heads turned.
Then Diaz did the final thing in his act. He dropped to his knees—his suit creased, his cheeks wet—and he begged.
"Please," he said, voice cracking. "Please don't ruin me. I didn't mean—I'll pay anything. I'll—"
The crowd hissed like a rising tide. What had been curiosity and scandal hardened into contempt. People started to leave—some laughed, some filmed, some whispered "finally" like a benediction. A woman snapped photographs and posted them immediately.
"Don't touch me," Diaz cried out when an ex-employee raised a hand in anger.
He crawled; he looked around and found no friends who would lift him. Hands that once raised to salute him were now shielding faces. Men recorded his humiliation. He tried to stand, then fell back down, suit muddied and face smudged.
"Please," he begged again. "I'll resign. I'll sell the company. I'll do anything. Please, I have a family—"
"Save it," someone said flatly. "We don't need your stories."
He did not just lose the room. He lost his poise, his patrons, his reputation—everything that had made him a man of power in a room. Outside, cameras continued to point. A local reporter pushed a microphone into his face with the polite ferocity of someone giving a condemned man the final chance to speak his truth.
The recording—the footage—was played again on a loop on multiple networks. People who had once paid for his dinners now laughed; there was finger-pointing and scandal coverage. The world's hunger for a fall was ravenous.
I stood a few feet away in the midst of the whirl. I had to watch the man who had tried to sell me suffer, and I felt sick and oddly vindicated. This was not the revenge I had dreamt of: it was more public, more theatrical. The man was shaking, gasping, crawling on the marble steps of the gala hall like some small animal.
When he stumbled off in a limo hours later, the doors slamming like the end of a chapter, I felt hollow.
"You did well," Asher said in my ear later that night, when the noise had settled into the background of my life. "You were brave."
"Brave?" I echoed. "I was terrified."
"You survived," he said. "That has value."
I swallowed what that meant. He had meant it. He had paid a price, too. He had taken on enemies. He had pulled levers I couldn't see. He had made an ally out of my humiliation.
Dias's humiliation was not enough. We needed to dismantle the network. Over months, we leaked contracts, forced resignations, and quietly cut off clients. Men who had participated in the auctions found their names on blacklists. The Veil's doors eventually closed. We had victory, so slow and gory it left scars.
After the collapse, Diaz's fall was complete: investors pulled out, clients sued, actors left, cameras circled his house like vultures. He lost the agency. His calls went straight to voicemail. He wrote apology letters and then burned them when no one wanted to read.
One day, months later, there was a video that circulated of Diaz at an industry luncheon. He stood in front of a microphone, his face pale and raw.
"I was wrong," he said, voice shaky, as men in neat suits looked down at their plates. "I am sorry."
Some in the room clapped politely; others took photographs. He tried to smile. He opened his hands.
A few minutes later, a woman from the crowd stood and read a long statement—detailed, with dates and names, with a chill of truth. Cameras pivoted. Diaz's face collapsed. He started to shake. Someone called him names. He dropped to his knees again, this time not as an act but as a surrender.
"Please," he begged in that lunatic way of men who have nothing but arrogance left. "I will do anything. Please give me a job. Please—"
There were murmurs. People took pictures. Men with pressing smiles shook their heads. The cameras caught it all. He looked smaller than the suit he wore.
That night, Diaz slept in a cheap room at a motel. The world had thrown him out.
My life changed too. I took the role; the film became a beast of a production and my face was on a billboard across the city. But the movie was not my only prize. Asher stayed near—but not as a possessor. He edged closer like a storm that knew the shape of my bones.
"Carrie," he said once in the quiet of his villa after the film wrapped. "I didn't save you because I loved you."
"Then why?" I asked, so brittle and raw I didn't recognize my voice.
"Because I didn't like being lied to," he said. "And because I wanted to fix what hurt me when I was young."
We both knew the truth lay elsewhere: either we were too wounded to name the tender part, or we were scared to. We had both used love as a currency, paid for protection and power. But somehow, in the folds of those transactions, something like a truer feeling knitted between us.
Months later, when the press stopped speculating about our arrangement and started writing about my performance, I found a strange peace. The necklace still glinted on my throat. Asher still came in and out of my life like a tide. He remained a man who could be cruel as law and sweet as a secret.
He asked me once, months after the auction, when everything had calmed, "Do you regret earlier choices?"
I thought of Anna and the bathtub, of Diaz and his public collapse, of my sleepless nights arranging bribes and lines, and of the role that finally made my name mean work worth applause.
"No," I said quietly. "I don't."
He studied me for a long time and then kissed me. It wasn't a bargain. It wasn't a victory flag. It was a small, human thing: a clean pressure, a saying that maybe, if we stopped measuring ourselves as currency, we might learn to be people again.
I still say it out loud sometimes in my head: I yanked his towel and my life spun. I took a terrible path to get a chance at the one thing I had wanted since I was a little girl—to be judged for what I do, not how I sell.
That last night, before the premiere, I put my fingers to the diamond pendant and whispered to whoever listens that I would not be a commodity.
He stood in the doorway and said, "We both paid. We'll both keep paying."
"Okay," I replied. "But let's decide what we pay for next."
He smiled with something like a promise.
The End
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