Face-Slapping16 min read
The Only Ex I Couldn't Forget
ButterPicks11 views
"I where are you?!" Deacon's voice cut through my morning haze like an alarm I had forgotten to set.
"I'm on my way," I lied. "I overslept."
"You've got three minutes—three—and then I'll hang up."
He hung up.
I put the phone down and breathed out. Deacon Schumacher shouted so often that silence felt like a betrayal. He was my agent, my guardian of chaos, and the only man who had ever called me "brat" and meant it like a benediction.
"I know, I'm coming," I told the empty room. I was Janessa Cooley, twenty-four, supposedly past the petals of youth and into something thornier. I was here to play the heroine's older sister in a drama called Tiptoe to Kiss You. I signed on because the role was short and because I liked being paid to look pretty on someone else's schedule.
Deacon always yelled. He always worried. He had done more for me than my own family ever had. He pretended to scold because he was afraid. I pretended not to need him because that was easier.
I arrived ten minutes late. The makeup room was quiet except for two people: Deacon on a sofa like a thundercloud, and Faith Eriksson, my assistant, who smiled like a woman with no idea what wrath could do.
"Three minutes," Deacon said as if he'd counted them on his fingernails.
"I forgot my alarm," I confessed.
"That's the oldest excuse in the book," he snorted.
"Deacon, is there a makeup team?" I asked.
"There's no one—well, we brought someone in from outside," Faith said quickly. "Don't worry. He should be here."
Someone knocked. The door opened and he walked in like a photograph come to life.
He had black hair falling across his forehead, T-shirt, black trousers, and a face I would never forget.
"You must be the makeup artist," Faith said.
He nodded. "Yes."
I didn't breathe. My chest felt like someone had put their palm over it.
A woman barged in—Juniper Denis—prancing and sharp. "Janessa? Why are you still here? You have your next scene."
I didn't answer. I watched him. He didn't notice me, not at first. He glanced, and then he looked again with that odd, cold attention that made my heart trip.
"Who called you?" I asked.
"A lady," he said like a polite fact. "I was booked by a woman."
"Which woman?" I asked, stupidly, like an accusation.
His lips curved the tiniest bit. "I can't disclose client info."
We stood there like people at the edge of a cliff, saying nothing useful.
Faith broke the silence. "He must be here by mistake. Come on, let me show you out."
He smiled and left. My chest ached as if someone had reached in and turned me inside out.
He returned later—Caspian Hughes—owning his name like it was carved into the air. He carried himself as if the world were arranged to make him look right.
"Are you okay?" Faith asked, eyes like soft questions.
"I'm fine," I lied.
I had been used to headlines and hashtags for a while now. Once I was beloved, then scandal stripped me of my pedestal. Deacon had protected me until he was weary. Now company resources thinned and rumors grew like mold.
"Deacon, go back to the office," I told him. "I'll be fine."
He almost argued. He never stopped.
At my station, I looked down at my hands. They were not as steady as they had been when I was twenty. They trembled now when I thought about him.
A boy ran up to me later carrying a box of lunch. "Janessa, sorry I'm late. Traffic—"
He was the man Deacon had actually booked, a polite, eager kid named Emil Grant. He waved shyly and accepted my wet wipe and the smallest thank you I had felt like giving.
Caspian stood near someone else—Nathalie Dunn—smiling that practiced world-weary smile. They were close. Not touching the way an old couple might be, but close like two people who shared a private language.
I didn't even mean to go over. My feet moved by muscle memory from a life I remembered in fragments. I heard my voice, small as apology. "You don't like the original flavor? You used to always get the original."
He looked at me hard then—hard enough to bruise—and said, "I don't remember."
Those words were a kind of cold knife. Two years prior, a car had taken his memory for a walk and never came back. He had woken up and asked "Who are you?" like it was the gentlest way to amputate a life. I brought friends, proofs, photographs—an entire museum of us—and he listened as if he were reading about someone else's summer.
"I thought you might come to your senses," he said once in a hospital room, voice even, eyes empty. "I thought maybe time would fix it. I'm sorry. I'm not the man who loved you."
We broke there. He left. I folded myself into the smallest shape I could find and called it survival.
Now, standing at the edge of a set, watching him move, something that had already been bruised broke again.
"He came for work," Faith told me.
He came because Nathalie had hired him. Or maybe because his studio did. Either way, he was back in my orbit like an orbit I didn't want but couldn't leave.
"Are you okay?" I asked Emil, light as a feather question.
He smiled in the only brave way he had, and my mouth went dry.
When dusk fell and the crew ate takeout, someone bumped my box. Nathalie had the nerve to brush past with losing charm and her own practiced scorn.
"Sorry," she said, with no sorry in it.
"Eat it," I said, and watched as she ordered someone to clean up, then fled.
I am not the quiet type by accident.
"Save your breath for your next scene," she said later, loud enough for everyone to hear. "Who do you think you are, pretending like you've never slept with half the town? You're a replacement, Janessa. No status, no name."
There were phones out. There were cheap little recordings of the moment when she called me a name that was meant to destroy me. Some people laughed. Others recorded the spectacle, thumbs twitching.
I told her what she knew. "If I post that video, sear the footage deep into the public's mind, the internet will eat you alive."
She laughed, head cocked like a queen amused. She didn't know what I had planned.
That night, at a table of four, the new makeup assistant—Clay Evans—texted something and the internet momentarily shifted under our feet.
"Someone just took your side," Faith said.
"Who?" I asked.
"An eager kid in my feed—'Support Janessa! Not what they make her out to be.' He signed it Clay."
People sent messages from empty places. Deacon swore. He called the office and swore some more. Then something changed. The angry posts evaporated, as if the web itself had been turned and the words swept away.
"Who helped?" Deacon asked.
"I don't know," I said.
I didn't want to know. I still didn't have Caspian's number. I had an old string of digits I had once called every night. When they went dead, I kept dialing until dial tone replaced him.
After the day of chaos, we shot again. I learned that being a woman the public forgives is not the same as being who you are. I learned that having supporters, fake or true, could matter.
During a break, Emil came up to me. "Are you sure you're okay?"
"Yes," I lied. "I'm always okay."
Then I heard my name called from the other side of the set. "Janessa!"
Juniper—Juniper Denis—had coordinated for Deacon; she was a walking storm and a sincere friend. She waved me over to see the footage she had scavenged on her phone.
"What do you want?" I asked even before looking.
"Just—watch," she said.
We watched a clip of last night: a dim street, two people kissing, me clearly in frame. The caption called me brazen and the clip thrummed in people's ears like a bell.
"It makes me look like—" I started.
"Like something you are not," Juniper finished. "You're framed."
"I don't have his number," I said, and then added, almost to myself, "And I can't ask him to be my alibi. He already told me he doesn't remember."
"He came to work today," Juniper said. "He gave you a countdown of patience, didn't he?"
"Yeah."
"And?"
"He apologized. He keeps apologizing," I said, hating the sound of truth in my own voice.
Caspian was polite. He was always polite. After a day on set, he did something astonishing. At the food stand, he pulled me into an embrace and kissed me.
I was not supposed to be kissed. I had been kissed by him before, in a life he couldn't find in his head. This time, the world tilted like a child on a seesaw.
"Don't make a scene," he murmured when we broke apart.
"I didn't," I said. "But people filmed it."
The internet roared. The headlines called me shameless and worse. They wanted me to be a monster of desire and not a woman to be respected.
Clay Evans—who was, by the way, the small studio's earnest boy—posted a single defense. He wrote, "My senior doesn't deserve this. Stand up for her." Faith called him reckless and Deacon called him a child.
Deacon called me at midnight. "You stirred a hornet nest."
"I didn't start it."
"Okay, maybe not directly, but those vultures are circling. Why did you let him kiss you?"
"Because he kissed me."
"You're impossible," Deacon said. "This is going to explode."
The next afternoon a swarm of reporters arrived at set. The director, Ezekiel Burgess, leaned forward and told me to be ready.
"You don't have a script?" I asked.
"No," he said. "We will film you answering questions."
A man with a notepad started with the standard: "Is the man in the video your boyfriend?"
"This is my private life," I said. "Not your business."
"Would you go public if you were in love?" a different reporter asked.
"Of course," I said.
An idiotic man pushed a seed of venom. "But some say that women like you exist to sell something and that it's not love—"
"Say that again?" I snapped.
He smirked and said it louder. "You're a—"
"One more word," I warned.
He laughed belligerently. "What? Did I hurt you, honey? You should be grateful for the attention."
Something in me unfastened.
I swung the microphone. It hit his face with a wet smack. The world turned into a carnival of noise: someone screamed, someone yelled "murder," a man fell, and the camera kept rolling like a living thing thirsty for more.
Later, Deacon thundered at me in his office. "You can't go around punching journalists, Janessa. You are going to ruin everything I—"
"I have been ruined," I said softly. "And I am not the only thing in this room with a fresh wound."
Deacon sat back, tired. "Who set this up?"
"I don't know," I said honestly. "But someone is pulling strings."
That night the newsroom frenzy splintered into pieces. Someone—Ismael Harper, Caspian's friend and a mercenary of code—had wiped out the video from the internet.
Ismael sent a text to Caspian: I deleted them all. Don't thank me publicly.
We all loved the smell of silence after a campaign of slander scathed.
Still, the man who had the power to make things vanish didn't want his name known. I didn't have his number. So Deacon told me to sleep and not to read my phone. He knew that reading a thousand judgments in the dark would sink the best of us.
When I finally slept, my head weighed like a stone.
I woke because my assistant knocked gently and said, "Deacon wants you to come to the office."
We came back to a quieter world. The hashtags had been silenced. The reports had been suppressed. My PR looked like a battlefield healed.
"Who did this?" Deacon demanded.
"Who do you think would have motivation?" I asked.
He looked at me like I had handed him a live grenade and asked him to dance.
"Could it have been Zaid Hawkins? He has resources," he said.
"Or Caspian," I said.
"Don't be romantic," Deacon snapped. "If Caspian did it, he would have given you the courtesy of saying so."
"Maybe he didn't want me to know," I whispered.
A rough young man called Eli Sherman came to pick up props. He complimented me on a scene. He was honest. He was good.
That evening, I called a young assistant, Clay Evans, and told him I wanted to thank his boss. He blushed. He had come to set because he liked being close to people, and his boss had made things right in a small, steady way.
"You two are kind to me," I told him.
"You saved me lunch the other day," he said.
"Don't be an idiot," Faith told him. "Live well and let people do good."
On set I worked. We shot. In the green light of the makeup room Caspian would bring me a small spray of water, or a cup of red sugar water in the middle of the hottest day. He had a way of doing small kindnesses like a person binding a wound with silk thread.
He avoided saying anything about our past. He said, "I helped because you are part of the crew now." He held onto a script of polite obligation. He was not cruel; he simply had turned the page to a different book.
Yet when he touched my face to apply lipstick I felt as if we were both on the edge of an argument neither of us wanted to win.
"Close your eyes," he said.
"Do I have to?" I teased, smiling despite myself.
"Yes," he said.
The makeup felt like a small ritual. He steadied my jaw and said, "Don't get in trouble."
"I'm a grown woman," I said.
"You are reckless," he said.
"And you," I said, "are impossible."
When Nathalie came and saw him touching me—gentle, precise—she flared. "What are you doing?"
"Working," he replied.
She tried to tug at his sleeve, half in need and half in performance, but he stepped away like a man with rules about closeness.
"You're my makeup artist," I said to him later. "Thank you."
"You're welcome," he said and washed his hands in a sound that belonged to a man who had learned distance like a craft.
Time pressed. We wrapped one scene after another. Sometimes I felt like I was walking through a corridor of glass doors, each one slamming closed somewhere behind me.
One night, a planned scene—the one where my character's sister pushes me and I fall out of a staged mat—ended ugly. Nathalie pushed me farther than she was supposed to. I fell on a patch of stone. The small grit dug into the skin—little knives of the world.
"I didn't mean to," she said afterward picking little pebbles from my elbow.
"You looked like you meant to," I told her.
The world watched. A tabloid found a photo of me leaving the hospital. It wrote that I had faked the injury to get attention. People chose sides.
At the hospital a kindly older doctor named Blas Edwards—no relation to the sleazy producer with the same first name—muttered about romance and marriage and told Caspian, "Boy, hold on to the good one."
He lectured Caspian about being a man. Caspian listened like a man learning a language he had once spoken fluently.
"You are not my boyfriend," Caspian told me in the hall. "We don't have that."
"One day you will understand what you threw away," I whispered, and he said, "I can't unforget."
Days passed. The crew slowed. The producers shuffled. The tasteless man—Blas Edwards, the producer—smiled his sleaze into the corners like a predator. He had been the one who whispered to an influencer, "A little rumor keeps the dishes spinning." He liked to own people.
I hated him the way a person hates a stain that will not come out.
And then I found what he had done, piece by piece.
At a golden charity gala where the industry elbowed itself into relevance, I decided to use the only advantage left to me: truth in public. Deacon and Faith and Juniper sat near me like sentries.
"Who told you?" I asked quietly. "Who fed them the footage?"
I had a plan. It wasn't glory. It wasn't revenge for revenge's sake. It was to show the worms the light, to let a rotten man see his own hands in the mirror.
Blas Edwards was there. He wore his usual silk smile. He had contributed to the foundation and therefore had the right to own the photograph moments at the gala. His seat overlooked the stage.
I took the microphone.
"Good evening," my voice landed like a coin, clear. "Before we begin, I'd like to tell a story about how easy it is to make a rumor."
He bristled. The camera found him. People in the room shifted.
I talked about the rise and fall of people in our industry, about how a single clip could be "built" like a house of cards. I told the room that sometimes the house collapses on purpose.
"There's a man who thought he could control my past," I said. "He thought he could buy away my dignity. He thought that money could buy silence."
Blas Edwards smiled, because the world rewards men who are unashamed. He lifted his glass like a man poised toasting his own skill.
"I'd like to show you how gullible we all can be," I said.
The big screen behind me flickered to life. It played a ribbon of messages, the contracts in which a sleazy agent paid a smear account, a production schedule shadowing a false narrative, and a chain of transfers to a half-dozen marketing wallets.
Blas’s smile slackened. He moved like a man who suddenly feels a cold room and realizes he's leaving the oven on at home.
"That's impossible," he said, feigning surprise. "They fabricated it—didn't they?"
"No," I said. "They paid you. They paid your account. They paid the bot. It's all here."
The room went quiet. A woman gasped, another man pulled out his phone. A dozen cameras panned to Blas.
His face changed in a filmic arc: smug to puzzled, puzzled to angry, angry to denial, denial to collapse.
"This is a lie," he said. "This is forged. Someone is trying to frame me."
A reporter started filming. "Blas Edwards, can you explain these transactions?"
"You can't do this!" he barked, slamming his glass on the table.
"I can," I said, walking to the edge of the stage, the microphone steady in my hand. "You sold me people to destroy me. You made a campaign. You called it "marketing." You thought no one would follow the money."
He laughed, thin and brittle. "Are you accusing me publicly?"
"I am," I said.
His voice broke on the next words. "You have no proof. This is—all of this is circumstantial!"
"Proof is the audit that that woman over there will present," I said, and Juniper walked forward with a folder of bank statements that glowed with ugly truth in the light.
"Look," Juniper said plainly. "There are signed invoices and transfers. There is a schedule. There is a text message from your assistant."
Blas's face, used to power, shrank into panic. He turned to the crowd, pleading: "You must believe me. I would never—"
A server had placed a plate nearby. A cameraman had been live-streaming the event for a side channel. The room filled with phones, bright and hungry.
The arc of his reactions unfolded as the rules demanded: first smugness—he had always believed his money could make him untouchable. Then shock, as he saw the ledger. Then furious denial, shouting that documents were fake. Then collapse, when an auditor named Deacon presented a wire transfer with his signature on the memo. Then, finally, begging.
"Please—please—this is a misunderstanding," Blas sputtered. "I have a family. I didn't know—please, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
People stood. Some clapped—not polite applause, but the sound of justice being served. Someone recorded his forehead sweating. Someone else filmed the way his voice collapsed into a plea. Out in the foyer, someone posted a short clip and within minutes the internet had a new narrative: the smear-maker unmasked.
He fell to his knees on the red carpet, his tuxedo betraying him by smudging grime where knees had touched. His assistant cried and backed away. Blas pressed his hands together to beg and to no avail. Phones flashed. People whispered into them like witnesses to an exact thing happening for all to see.
"Please," he begged, voice ragged and small. "I didn't mean—"
"Save it," I said coldly. "This is for everyone you've hurt."
No one moved to help him up. The crowd recorded. Someone started a chant. A woman near me shouted, "Shame!" and others joined in.
He pleaded more. He tried to accuse the documents of being fake. He pointed at Juniper. He begged to be believed. The theater had transformed into a jury. People filmed him with their phones. People took notes. People clapped. Someone posted the video and it hit trending in ten minutes.
His face changed from predator to supplicant and then to wreck. He wept. The room's faces were a mirror: shock, then smirks, then pity, then digital triumph. Men and women lifted their phones as if to take back the narrative he'd sold them for years.
When he finally crawled away from the stage, people hissed at him and a lone security guard shepherded him through a corridor of cameras.
I stood there and felt nothing and everything. I had not wanted cruelty, but I had wanted the truth to stand in a bright place where accountability could find it.
People called it spectacle. Others called it long-overdue.
Cameras kept recording his begging: "Please, I'm sorry—"
Someone laughed. Someone else recorded. A woman smacked his hands away and said, "Get up. Leave."
He did.
The aftermath left a crater. His endorsements evaporated like morning fog. He apologized on every channel. He begged fans for mercy. People debated whether the punishment fit the crime. I had wanted enough humiliation that a man who weaponized a woman's life into content for profit would never sit comfortably at another gala.
That night the internet gave me a second kind of attention. People who had been ready to condemn me were now asking different questions. Deacon breathed. Faith hugged me like I was the last toy left in a window.
Caspian did not speak to me that night. He sat across the room, phone in hand, eyes cold.
"You did the right thing," he said finally. His voice was tired, but there was something like relief there.
"Did I?" I asked.
"You exposed a machine," he said. "But you also lit a match in a dry barn."
I smiled. It felt like a small, dangerous thing.
Weeks passed. The series finished. The director praised me for commitment. The tabloid cycle moved on. Blas Edwards's public humiliation was the clap of thunder that diurnally cleared the air.
Through it all, C
aspian and I talked awkwardly. Some evenings he would help me with small things: hand me a bottle of red sugar water when my stomach crumpled in summer heat, adjust a collar, rest his hand on my shoulder for the length of an answer. He was kind in the quiet ways men were who had once loved someone and then decided they were different.
"Do you ever wonder why I'm still here?" I asked him once in a twilight parking lot.
He looked at me, absolutely still. "I wonder why you are still here," he said. "I can't explain the absence and then the return."
"Do you hate me?" I asked.
"No," he said. "I don't hate you."
"You don't remember us," I said.
"I remember fragments," he admitted. "I remember tastes, favors, certain songs. But not the shape of what we were."
I wanted to tell him about the nights I waited by his door. I wanted to say I had slept with his sweater between my hands for months after he left. I wanted to say that even now a half-eaten cone of original flavor still felt like a home he'd once built.
"I'm Janessa," I said then, clumsy and honest. "I'm the girl you used to love. I'm the one who still eats original flavor ice cream when I'm sad."
He offered me a small, crooked smile. "I know someone who likes that. I don't know if I knew her name before. I know the flavor."
Once, after we had both been sober of scandal and confession, Clay Evans and Emil Grant and Faith came over for dumplings and burned garlic. We laughed like people who had been through a storm and come out smelling of smoke.
"I'll take care of your public channels for a while," Deacon promised, gruff like a grandfather. "But you have to promise something: no more public altercations."
"Deal," I said, but the corners of my mouth were dangerous with humor.
A little later, when the dust had settled, I met Caspian for ice cream at the old shop—the place with the original flavor he always chose.
"You remembered," I said, watching him.
He looked at me, then at the scoop of plain creamy ice, and then at me again.
"You said you didn't remember," I said.
"I remember the small things," he said. "The way original flavor tasted, the way you laughed when you tried to teach me how to whistle, the time you wore my scarf and looked like someone who'd already survived winter."
We sat facing the city and feeding each other stupid jokes and ice cream. The night hummed with the sound of flies and traffic, and in that simple syrup and cream, we found something like a truce.
"I can't be the man I used to be," he told me, finally, voice low. "But I can be present."
"I don't want you to be the man you used to be," I said. "I want you to be the man who knows I'm here, who sees me in line at the ice cream counter, who brings a jacket when I complain of the cold."
He smiled and reached out to tuck a stray hair behind my ear like he used to. It was small. It was everything.
Later, when someone asked me if I had gotten my life back, I told them, "I've got my dignity and a dish of original flavor ice cream on a Tuesday night. It's enough."
It was true. Enough was a dangerous word and a generous one.
I never found out who paid Ismael to scrub the internet clean that night. Maybe it had been him. Maybe someone else. Maybe a kind wind.
What I know is this: there are men who throw stones and men who patch walls. There are people who smell of sugar and people who sell that smell for a living.
I stopped looking for the man who had vanished into a coma years ago. I stopped looking for the life that had been before.
And one evening, when the summer sun was fading and the ice cream melted around our spoons, Caspian licked his original flavor clean and said, "Do you remember when you told me you'd never leave a single cone unfinished?"
"I remember," I said.
"Well," he said, "I won't let you finish it alone."
I reached for my spoon and for his hand.
The streets smelled of sugar and hot asphalt. The ice cream dripped a little on my wrist like a small sweet betrayal, and I laughed.
"Don't let me eat it all," I teased.
He did not say "Always."
He said, "Janessa."
And that night, while the city kept its many stories, I kept mine: a scar, a laugh, a cup of original flavor, and the knowledge that justice can be a messy, public thing—particularly when a man who built a story out of lies had to watch his own lies broadcast under the bright light of a gala.
I put the last bite of ice cream on my tongue and tasted simple, honest flavor. It was, for once, mine.
The End
— Thank you for reading —