Face-Slapping12 min read
Tell Me to Leave, and I'll Stay
ButterPicks12 views
"I am not leaving," I said the moment I opened the door.
Everest Carlson stopped on the threshold like a statue cut out of winter. "Saga," he said, and his voice was flat. "Sit."
I did not sit. My suitcase thudded on the floor. I kept my feet planted, eyes on him, heart banging like a fist on a locked gate. The house smelled the same—coffee, lemon cleaner, the faint smoke of his late-night work—but the quiet between us had teeth.
"You are eighteen," he said. "You have your life."
"I want my life with you," I said.
He made a small, unhappy sound and then turned away like a man who had closed the door on an animal he once fed. "You are mine in that way you were a child. That ends."
It was the clearest trimming of any rope. It cut me, and then it cut him.
"You are cruel," I said.
"Don't be childish," he said. "You deserve to be treated like an adult. Go. Study abroad. Live."
"I won't," I said. "I won't go. I will not let you hand me away."
He laughed then, sharp and cold. "You are not mine, Saga. You are my ward. This is impossible."
I found my courage fast, stupidly. "Then make it possible," I whispered. "Marry me."
He froze. "No," he said. "I told you."
A minute later he was gone, and I stood on the carpet that had seen my childhood and felt like it had been taken from under me.
The nights after were worse. I learned how to wait like a patient animal. I learned the pattern of his absence. He called sometimes and left me a few words—cold, careful—and that was all. The house was full of people who watched me with the caution of caretakers: Morgan Hernandez did the cooking, Karin Yamaguchi kept the rooms spotless, and sometimes they glanced at me like at a fragile thing that might shatter. Hadlee Luna, my friend, told me to leave. "Go with me," she said. "Get away from him. He will not be yours."
"I can't," I told her. "He made this my home."
Then I did something wild and desperate. One night I went to his study after he drove home late. I pressed myself to him with the hungry recklessness of a child who has only ever had a hand to hold and decides to take the whole arm.
"Please," I said, my voice small. "Let me be yours."
Everest's face froze. He pushed me away with a cold, sudden force. "This is wrong," he said. "You are a child in my mind. I won't do this."
I didn't listen. I leaned in to kiss him because the thing I wanted most in the world was the thing that was forbidden. He slapped me—hard—and then, when I would not stop, there was a night I cannot unsee.
After that night, everything shifted. He left for days. I called. He did not answer. His people came and told me about study plans, passports stamped for distant countries, admissions letters printed and waiting. He wanted me gone. His eyes were quieter every time I looked at him.
"He thinks it's healthier," Morgan told me softly. "He thinks space will make this right."
Space killed me. I took the plane he paid for because what other school would accept someone with my grades, my history, my name? I left with a bag and a small stuffed bear a man named Everest had once given me.
In London, I tried to be invisible. I took a cheap course, worked long shifts, learned how to make coffee that tasted better than sleep. I tasted a different kind of loneliness: one with city noise instead of a wealthy home.
I got pregnant the first winter. I was scared, furious, small and strange, and I kept it to myself. I told no one. Then the baby was gone—gone in a way that made the world tilt. I stayed numb for months. I told myself the world had taken something it had no business taking, and I told myself I would grow back like an old scar.
After a year, I came home for Hadlee's wedding. I planned to be polite and brief. I did not plan to see him walk into the hotel with another woman on his arm—Caitlin Cunningham with a ring title glinting on a finger.
The room tilted. I swallowed and stood. "Everest," I said.
"Saga," he said. He saw me and his face registered nothing for the space of a breath, then a flicker of annoyance. "You returned."
A week later, I was sitting in the family dining room. Everyone else had smiles they had arranged to last for a performance. Caitlin sat like a queen in a new crown. Ursula Delgado—Everest's mother—watched me with a wariness I had never seen from her before.
"Sit," Caitlin said when I sat where she expected me to. Her voice was sugar. "You're back early. How are you? Are you jet-lagged?"
"Fine," I said. I kept my hands steady under the table as she flicked her long finger, showing a diamond too loud to be modest.
Floyd Girard, who had been doing the hospitable braying for Caitlin's family, started telling that old story—loud and greasy—about my mother, about my father's fate, about the pity. Everyone laughed. My throat clenched.
"Do you think he'll defend you?" Hadlee asked in a low voice.
"He will not," I heard him tell me first.
I stood up. I spilled my wine on Floyd's jacket.
"Apologize," Everest said.
"No," I said.
"You owe an apology," he said. "This is family harm."
I left. People judged me. The house judged me. The town judged me.
Then the police came one night because Desmond Farrell—my boyfriend from the small life I had left—had called. He accused Everest of when I was trapped upstairs. The house filled with policemen. Caitlin moved like a woman who had practiced her innocence. Ursula clutched pearls. Desmond's face was desperate and fierce. He wanted to protect me. I waved him away because every wave left an ache.
In private, Everest's voice was hard and low. "You cannot make me the villain in public," he said.
"I was the one in your house," I said.
He did something then that cracked me open. He admitted to me, quietly, that he had made a mistake, that night had been a ruin of temper and duty and violence he was ashamed of. He promised to end the engagement. Then he told me to go to bed.
I was used to promises that were shelter. I was used to them being holed like nets. But this time, when the news hit—the papers, the feeds—Everest Carlson had canceled the wedding he had announced months before.
"Why?" journalists shouted. "Who are you protecting?"
"It is my choice," he said at the press conference. He was cold and calm and terrible. "I will not marry a woman who allows this house to be a battlefield." He did not say my name, but the world connected the dots.
Caitlin's face shrank. I watched her from the third row and felt no joy. She ran to Ursula and cried into her shoulder like the hurt was only hers. But the world is a hungry animal. People dug and shouted. The story spread like a stain.
Caitlin started to move in circles of damage. She texted, she emailed, she whispered rumors into anyone who would listen. "She's a liar," she told people. "She sleeps around. She is dangerous." Floyd called local reporters and told them about my mother's life like it was public record.
I did not answer them. I had learned the cost of silence. Instead, I planned.
Hadlee and I made a list of people who had seen Caitlin and who would back us. Morgan and Karin wrote down what they remembered, weddings they had seen, things they had overheard. Desmond found a man who had worked overseas and had kept messages from Caitlin—messages that bent stories into lies. It was a small net. We extended it carefully.
There was to be a charity gala—a big, polished event where society put on its best faces. Caitlin expected to be celebrated there in the wake of the canceled wedding as the wronged fiancée. The hall was glittering. Everest sat at a long table that looked empty without him. The city had come to see him and to whisk gossip home.
"She will stand there and say I am the villain, and I will sit and keep silent," I told Hadlee.
"You can't let her," Hadlee said. "If she lies in public, she will control this."
"I will make a choice," I said.
I walked onto the stage during a point of the gala when the lights were soft and music gentle. People turned at my sudden, small figure moving through the crowd. Whispered questions floated like paper planes.
"Who is that?" a woman asked.
"That's Everest's ward," another answered.
I walked to the microphone that stood empty. The sound guy looked at me, confused. I lifted the microphone.
"Good evening," I said. My voice trembled like something newly built but strong. "My name is Saga. I was brought into the Carlson home when I was six. I was—" I swallowed. "I was loved, and then I was asked to leave."
Voices murmured. Everest looked up.
"I am not here to beg," I said. "I am here to tell the truth."
Caitlin's smile faltered. She stood at the far end of the hall. "Honey, let's go," she mouthed. Floyd glared.
"Last year," I continued, "people sent me private messages. People sent me photos. I have proof that false stories about me were created and sold."
Someone laughed. "You have receipts?" a man called.
"I have receipts," I said. "I have chat logs sent to reporters. I have original photos and their edited versions. I have the woman who paid house staff to spy, on record." I pointed to the table where Morgan sat and then at a small, trembling figure in the back—Caitlin. "I will show everything."
Everest's face did something like folding in. Caitlin's cheeks went dead white.
I told the room to look at the screen. The projection behind the stage flickered, and chat windows bloomed like windows opening. There were messages Caitlin had sent to a gossip account: "Make his ward look bad," "Post these pictures, change the background," "Say she is promiscuous." Then came the edited photos—side-by-side with originals. The originals showed me alone, smiling in public places. The altered ones had hands added, fake faces pasted, contexts twisted. The staff messages were there too—Morgan's voice recorded admitting how she had been bribed to take certain shots by Caitlin's man. The screen showed bank transfers.
The room grew thick as a held breath.
Caitlin's lips trembled. "This is a lie," she hissed. "You can't—"
"Why don't you explain these?" I said, and clicked another slide. A text thread showed Caitlin instructing a maid to plant a story. "Why did you tell reporters that I sold stories about myself? Why did you write 'she's dangerous' as if it were a fact?"
She laughed then, a little edge broken. "You—what good will this do? You think exposing me will make him marry you? He walked away."
"Maybe not," I said. "Maybe I do this because I'm tired of being erased. Maybe I do this because every lie you made took breath from the room for me."
People at the tables were standing now. Someone shouted, "Shame!" Someone snapped a photo. Phones went up, recording. The gala became a theater of reaction.
Caitlin's face moved from pale to red. She stepped forward like a trapped animal. "You—how dare you—"
"Sit," Everest said, and the word fell like an order.
She did not sit.
"You've made me look insane," she cried. "You have ruined my life."
Now the room turned wholly on her. "Her pill box?" someone demanded. "Her doctored emails?"
"I was protecting my family!" she blurted.
"By lying," I said. "By paying people to make me less than I am."
Her hands trembled. "You shouldn't be able to stand here and do this—"
"Stand here," I said. "Everyone, look at her. She sent those messages. She paid for those photos. She has been feeding this rumor mill for months."
A woman at a table started to speak up, a reporter's voice. "Miss Cunningham, your messages to Mr. Floyd—"
She staggered back. Her smile was gone. She dropped to her knees on the polished floor like a broken doll.
"No!" she began. "No, please. I didn't mean—"
People took out phones. The crowd ringed her, faces tightening into a thousand small verdicts. Someone filmed her on the marble, the camera panning over the cracked armor of her composed life. "Get up," someone shouted. "Explain."
She pressed both palms to the floor and turned toward Everest, toward Ursula, toward the cameras. Her voice shook. "Everest, I am sorry," she sobbed. "I didn't mean to—"
"How much did you pay Morgan?" I asked.
Her face crumpled. "Five thousand—ten thousand—"
"Give us the name of the account," the reporter said. "Tell us who you paid."
Caitlin began to babble numbers, explanations, and then begged. "Please, please don't ruin me. I need this. I have a child. I can't have this. Please!"
Her cry was high and raw. Her mother and father hovered, stunned. Floyd's face went a shade grayer.
"You're asking for mercy," someone said. "You put someone else's life on the line."
"Please," she repeated, and then she looked at me pleadingly. "Saga—please. I didn't think—"
"Get up," Everest said quietly. "If you can't stand, get out."
She dragged herself to her feet. Her makeup had streaked, her ring looked small. She stumbled toward the door. People followed. Phones recorded. Someone shouted, "Kneel and apologize!"
Caitlin fell to her knees again under the chandeliers and begged into the carpet like a woman trying to restart a life after burning it. "I am sorry," she said, "I am sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please."
Ursula Delgado watched, hands on her face. "Shame," she whispered, not to conceal the satisfaction.
The footage went viral within the hour. There were comments, retweets, outrage and pity braided together. People called her a liar, a schemer. People recorded the entire fall, the big, expensive kiss of her disgrace. The city watched the woman who had attempted to erase me knelt and wept under light.
I left the gala an hour later with Hadlee at my side. Everest drove us, silent and grim. The world bled into my phone—messages supportive, bitter, kind. Desmond texted a string of expletives and then a simple two words: "I'm proud."
Everest finally spoke as the car rolled under the low clouds. "You did well tonight."
"I did," I said. "I told the truth."
He reached across and took my hand. The motion startled me because it felt like an ancient tether being rewired. "I should have been on your side," he said. "I was blind in ways I cannot claim."
"You hurt me," I said.
"I know," he said. "I will not pretend that doesn't matter."
The days after, Caitlin's family tried to pick up the pieces. Floyd grumbled to reporters about reputations and money. Ursula made all the right social calls to keep her own station. But the wound had been seen. People with phones had seen her fall.
Caitlin called me three days later, voice thin and fragile. "Saga," she said, "I need to… I need to talk."
"Do you have something to say to me?" I asked.
"Please—please don't make this worse," she said.
"I already did," I said. "You made it worse."
The punishment worked like a cut. It healed only when the infection stopped. People stopped calling me the ward with a rumor. People called me the woman who had stood up.
Weeks later, when the company's board shifted and when Everest stepped down from the old plan, when headlines spoke of impossible choices and moral wreckage—he told me he had resigned the engagement because of what he could not accept and because he would accept me, if I would allow him. He asked me for something different than before.
"I cannot fix the past," he said one night in the dark of my old room. "I can try to be better."
"I am not sure I want the same place anymore," I said. "I want my life."
"Then take it," he said.
We built terms. I would train at the agency, learn how to sing and be on my own way. He would stop pretending power was a blanket. He would also, in the end, make one public choice. At a small lunch with the board and the family, he announced he would cancel the traditional marriage plan with social favors and would instead support a cause for women who had been lied about and abused by rumor—an odd, small, ceremonial surrender of status for a purpose.
Caitlin's punishment did not take everything. She tried to fight back with lawyers. She begged for privacy. She filed charges against Morgan for breach of privacy until Morgan came forward and turned the whole thing into a confession. Caitlin lost clients, and sponsors pulled out. She went on live television months later to apologize—formal and shaky. She said the words "I was wrong" and looked like a woman who had been hollowed.
The public punishment had been long, messy, and loud. It had made her kneel and pray on a carpet under lights and cameras. It had made her bite the air for mercy. It had given people what they wanted: to watch the proud be humbled when falsehoods were used as weapons.
Two years later, I stood in a tiny recording studio in the city. I sang into a microphone. Hadlee sat in the control room and cried, small and bright. Everest waited by the door and did not come in until I had finished. When I stepped out, he clapped like a person who finally had permission to be joyful.
"Sing it again," he said.
"I will," I said. "But this time, for me."
He took my hand. He had changed. He had paid in public ways for private sins. He had made the world a little smaller for me and a little kinder in ways I had not expected.
"You don't owe me an answer," he said. "You owe yourself your life."
"I know," I said.
And I chose it. I chose to stay because I wanted to, not because the house had been where my life started. I stayed because I was no longer a child asking to be taken. I stayed because the man beside me had been forced to look at what he had done and had tried, clumsy and late, to fix it. That is different than love without cost; it is the kind of clean, hard thing that might become love.
Months later, there was a small ceremony—no gala, no rings that cost a fortune. We announced a foundation, a program that offered legal help and public counters to orchestrated lies. Caitlin never regained the social place she aimed for. She moved away for a while. She sent a formal letter apologizing to me that read like an attempt at a life reclaimed.
At the foundation launch, a reporter asked me if I forgave her. I said, "Forgiveness takes time. What I will never do is let others use my silence to destroy me again."
Everest squeezed my hand. The cameras blinked on and off. People watched. Some were still cruel. Some were kind.
At night, when the house is quiet and the old bear sits on the bookshelf, I still think of a child who once wanted to be held forever. I think of the world that tried to tear me apart and the woman who tried to undo me.
"I will keep singing," I tell Everest sometimes, in the dark.
"I will keep listening," he answers.
We are careful. We are imperfect. We are, if nothing else, solid in our mistakes and our attempts to repair them.
The End
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