Face-Slapping12 min read
Three Meetings, One Pendant, and the Day They Fell
ButterPicks12 views
I picked up the phone because my thumb trembled over the screen. I was about to say hello when a woman's voice came through, low and teasing.
"Light. Be gentle, do you hear me?"
"Yes…" another voice whispered.
My head went blank.
"What's happening?" I asked myself out loud.
A sound that did not belong to a classroom, a library, or a study session crawled into my ears. It didn't take experience to recognize it. I froze. Tears started on their own.
"Who is that?" I mouthed.
"I know that voice," I said, and the name cut through me like a cold wind. "Brandon?"
I stumbled out of the hallway and crashed into the person ahead. I looked up and said, "Sorry," and then I kept walking.
I kept walking until the lights in the mall blurred and I found myself under the glass roof, breathing like a child who has just learned what's broken inside a toy.
I hadn't planned to meet anyone. I definitely hadn't planned to run into Dieter Zhang.
He was a shadow at first, a lean figure wearing something quiet and expensive. He covered his nose at my sudden movement, then saw my face streaked with tears. The sight of me made him hesitate, and then, in a voice softer than his reputation, he said nothing. He only remembered one thought: "Someone so beautiful should not wear those tears."
"Don't cry," he said, and I hated myself for the way my chest clenched at the softness of him.
"Why would I—" I started, and then my throat closed again.
He watched me leave. He didn't like being watched like that, not by strangers. He told himself he would forget me. He didn't.
The second time we met, we were both in a coffee shop that smelled of coffee and quiet excuses. I had come because someone on the phone had said, "Three o'clock, the bridge café, I need to talk." I sat, and I waited and breathed and replayed every syllable, hoping to find a different meaning.
Jazlynn Thomas came in with a smile that already had cracks. She sat opposite me.
"You're the one who called?" I asked.
She shrugged like it was a game. "Yes," she said. "It was me."
"Why?" I demanded. "Why did you do that?"
"Why? Because men want what they can't have," she said with a laugh. "Because I wanted him. Because friends are sometimes tools."
"Friends?" I said. "We were friends. You were my friend."
She leaned back and smiled without shame. "You were useful then. You were useless now. Be practical."
I felt my world spin. I left and didn't have the strength to speak properly. The crowd on the street became a blur of people who had opinions ready to throw.
Then Dieter appeared again.
He was at the table a short distance away, his hands around a paper cup, watching me with a calm intensity that felt like an anchor. He had seen me earlier that day in the mall, the first collision, and now he had watched my conversation with Jazlynn. He had decided something.
The third time we met, I had taken a long walk to a bridge because grief can make you believe in sharp endings. I had a weight in my chest that matched the suddenness of everything lost.
When I fell, I didn't think. The world blinked. I remember the cold on my skin. I remember thinking, "Goodbye." And then a hand was there under my arm.
"You're tired," a man's voice said. "You look like someone who has been wearing other people's storms."
I opened my eyes to find Dieter. He was taller than I'd guessed, and somehow nervous. "I'm Dieter," he said. "You shouldn't be here alone. Come."
He carried me to a car like it was the most ordinary thing a man could do: save someone. He drove me home to his place because he could not leave a woman who had nearly given up on herself on the roadside.
In his apartment he unwrapped towels, poured hot water and put warm rice bags over my chilled hands. He slid a necklace, a pendant, into my palm and said, "Wear that. Don't take it off."
"Why?" I asked.
"It's supposed to keep people from hurting what it belongs to," he said. "Someone made five of them for a group of friends long ago. The center stone marks the person it was meant to protect. Whoever wears it is noticed."
I looked at the pendant: a ring with five tiny openings, letters carved around the circle — D, L, M, Q, Y — and a small diamond in the middle with another letter carved faintly. "What do these mean?"
"They were a code," he said. "Five boys. A promise. A way to say, 'We will watch over what one of us loves.'"
He put the necklace around my neck. "If ever you need me, call this number. It's mine."
He typed his private number into my phone, labelled it "Dieter — If Needed."
I laughed at the strange tenderness of it. "This is insane," I said.
He smiled, the first real one I'd seen from him. "Maybe. But your tears shouldn't be a map for other people's cruelty anymore. Let me be your map."
"You don't even know me," I said.
"Sometimes you don't need to know everything," he answered. "You only need to know enough to decide to be kind."
We married two days later in a way that made people whisper but left him unwavering. "It's for her protection," he told the few who questioned it, like a man who had chosen a single palm in a crowd and would not let go.
I said the words "I do" because I had promised my grandmother I would be married in her lifetime. I did not say them out of a wild, sudden love. Yet on the way home, Dieter kissed my fingers and told me not to worry. "I will keep you."
Work was supposed to be a rescue and a learning place. I started as an intern in a hotel's accounting department. I wanted to be ordinary after everything had been extraordinary. I wanted to learn, to be competent, to earn my space.
Calhoun Hahn was there.
He smiled like a man who practiced entrapment. "New girl," he said one evening, and his hand lingered where it should not have. "Come with me. You look like you could use some company."
I felt his gaze like a trap. I excused myself, and he followed, "Don't be such a child."
When the welcome dinner happened, the room smelled of wine and fluorescent pretense. People raised glasses and made speech noise. I had only taken a sip when my head started to swim. I got up, shaky.
"Bathroom," I told myself, and someone guided me.
Calhoun offered to "help." He led me away.
I remember a hotel corridor, carpet that swallowed sound, a hand on my back pressing me into a door. I remember him saying, "Just rest, you'll be fine," and the world thinning into a dangerous softness.
I barely had breath to reach for the pendant. My fingers rubbed the metal, felt cold against the tiny diamond. A door opened and a woman's voice said, "Stop."
Kendall Aguilar stood there like a live line, arms crossed, eyes sharp. Behind her, Francis Jaeger and Clement Ellis and others arrived like backup planets finding orbit.
"What's happening here?" Kendall asked.
Calhoun's face went a different color. He began to babble.
"Keep your hands off her," Kendall said. "You owe this young woman respect."
Calhoun swallowed. "We— this wasn't—"
"Leave," Francis said quietly.
Calhoun hesitated like a dog regretting a mistake, then left. That night the pendant had saved me physically. But the world outside would make its own justice.
The day I needed the biggest justice came sooner than I expected.
Brandon Riley had been my boyfriend. I had trusted him, blocked all other people out for him. He had promised. Jazlynn had been my friend. She had smiled while dividing me up into usefulness and trash.
I decided to reopen my life in public. Dieter had told me, "Not every fight is yours. But sometimes you need a stage."
We went to university orientation, and then to a public charity event that the city always filled with faces. There would be cameras, many people, and a place where truth could be seen.
"Why here?" I asked Dieter, my voice low.
"Because there will be witnesses," he said. "Because people will see what you have seen alone."
When the microphones were set and the crowd talked itself quiet, Dieter took my hand, then walked onto the raised platform. Cameras caught him like devout instruments.
He put his palm over mine. "This is my wife," he said.
I felt a warmth bloom in my chest that was not the old ache. "This is my wife," he said again, softer and firmer both.
He had planned everything.
"Brandon," he called into the microphone, and the name echoed. "Jazlynn. Would you please come forward?"
They came, two shadows at first, then crawling regret.
"Sit," Dieter said simply.
I felt like I was watching my own life from outside, like someone else had bought me a strange ticket.
Dieter turned to the speaker and pressed play.
The sound filled the air.
"What do you mean 'light'?" the tape began with Jazlynn's voice. "Be gentle," she laughed. "When you get what you want, you can still be kind, right?"
Brandon's voice, the one I had loved, laughed in reply. "Of course. She's just the one who always waits."
The crowd shifted. Smartphones came up like a wave. People around us leaned forward.
Dieter stopped the tape and looked at Brandon. "Is that your voice?"
Brandon's chin went stiff. "That's—"
"Turn it off," Jazlynn said aloud, but her voice became too small.
"Off?" Dieter asked, and his voice was calm enough to be lethal. "We will let everything play."
He pressed play again.
Messages, photos, the thread of their betrayal: screenshots of promises to me turned into currency; texts with callous words; recorded laughter. Each new file landed like a stone on the table we had set for them.
"People will know," Dieter said into the microphone. "People will see who treats love like a ledger."
Brandon's face first shifted to surprise, then to anger. He started to deny. "This is fake. She planted this. You can't—"
People starting murmuring.
"Play the next one," Dieter said. "And the one after."
When the last file played, there was no place left for denial. Jazlynn's pretending smile became brittle.
"Turn it off!" Brandon yelled. He was the only one shouting in a crowd that had become a committee of witnesses.
"I won't," Dieter said. "Tell them yourself, Brandon. Tell them why she was the joke."
Brandon's eyes darted. His bravado cracked and then collapsed. "I never— I didn't—"
"No?" Dieter asked. "Then explain the photographs. Explain the messages."
He knelt, suddenly, like a man reduced to pleading. "Please—" he said. "Please, Ginevra—"
The cameras flicked. You could see five hundred faces lean in. People started recording. Phones filmed the spectacle. The university students whispered. The older volunteers pressed their lips together. Someone shouted, "Brandon Riley?" as if the name itself had become a summons.
Jazlynn's air of triumph curdled into panic. "You can't do this to me—"
"Why not?" Dieter asked. "You told her to listen? You called her and set a stage to break her heart. You stole her nights. You think it's nothing. People, pay attention."
An older woman near the front said, "I can't believe she did that."
Another man took a photo and uploaded it live. "The tape of the cheater," he said into the phone. "Look!"
Brandon tried to regain control. "You don't know—"
"Save your excuses," Dieter said. "Save them for a mirror that has to live with them."
The crowd reacted. Some turned away in disgust. Some applauded softly. Someone laughed, sharp as dry glass. A group of students chanted, "Shame! Shame!"
Brandon's face mosaiced in disbelief, then settled into denial, then into the colors of collapse. His voice went small. "Please. I'm sorry."
"Sorry doesn't undo it," I said, and I had never meant to speak so loud. "You promised me things. You made me believe." I heard my voice, steady. "You were my whole plan, and you became my wound."
Jazlynn clutched at her bag like it might anchor her. "I— it was a mistake," she said.
"Not a mistake," a woman behind us said. "A choice."
"Begging isn't automatic repentance," Dieter said. "But you can ask, and you can be in the record."
Brandon dropped to his knees on the concrete. "Please—" he said. "Please forgive me. I can explain. I can fix—"
His voice became a tear-rasped thing. People around us pulled out phones. Someone recorded him, someone else started a live stream.
"Explain," Dieter said, cold. "Explain why you thought you were allowed to use her. Explain why she was allowed to not matter."
Brandon's breathing hitched. "I— I thought—"
"No more lies," I said. "No more."
The crowd's reaction changed into a chorus. A few people clapped. Some muttered. The hand of one person reached out to touch Brandon's shoulder, then drew back.
He looked up, eyes glassed. "Please," he whispered. His whole posture wavered from someone who once owned the world to someone who had nowhere left to stand. "Please. I'm sorry."
Around us, people shifted from curiosity to a kind of righteous satisfaction. Phones filmed his humiliation. An influencer pushed a live stream to ten thousand viewers. Comments fired: "Cheater exposed." "Friend betrayal caught." "Say sorry."
I watched Brandon go from defiant to pleading to small and the effect felt like justice shaped by the day.
Jazlynn's voice had gone thin. "I'm sorry," she said, over and over, but the words were hollow because she had chosen the road that never led back.
"Begging won't erase your choices," Dieter said, and the words were not cruel; they were necessary.
Brandon fell to the floor, hands curled into the concrete like a child who had been taught he could not be safe.
People took photos, filmed, whispered. Someone laughed. Someone shouted, "Serves you right." Someone clapped in a slow, dangerous way.
He crawled and then sat, jaw flapping. "Please," he said again. "Please."
"No," a student said loudly. "No more."
Someone pulled out a camera and started to record Brandon's knees, then his face, then the tiny constellation of shame that had gathered on his forehead. The file went live. The hashtag started trending by the hour.
He begged, his voice cracked. "Please," he said, and then he said it again in a lower, smaller voice. His hands shook and the fabric of his shirt wrinkled from the force of him grasping the air.
"Look at you," someone muttered, and a small group around us who had once liked to watch other people's tragedies now watched from the safe distance of a phone screen.
"What do you want?" Dieter asked.
"I want— I want her back," Brandon whispered. "I want to fix it. Please. Forgive me."
"You made your choices. Now accept yours," Dieter said. "And stand where people can see you own them."
Brandon's face hardened with the realization of being watched, and then softened into something that could almost be called regret. He put his hands together and bowed his head, and a hundred people took pictures.
By the end of it, they had been stripped of the polish they had worn in private. That strip was public, recorded, shared. They had been forced through a corridor of witnesses who would not let their stories be rearranged.
When it was over, the crowd thinned. Phones buzzed, comments loaded, and strangers told their friends about the day the cheaters were shown.
Later, Dieter and I walked home.
"Why did you do it that way?" I asked, still feeling the heat of a hundred eyes.
"Because it needed to be true," he said. "Because private pain becomes invisible when it is private too long."
"Was it cruel?" I asked.
"Everyone sees different things as cruelty," he said. "Sometimes letting the world be the judge is what stops the private cruelty from spreading."
"Did it help?" I asked.
"It helped you," he said. "And it taught a lesson to people who thought they could profit from other people's hearts."
We passed the bridge where I had nearly given up. I touched the pendant and it shone cold beneath my fingers.
"This," I said, "was always more than a necklace."
"It's a contract," he said. "My promise. Not to stop you from living, but to stand when you stumble."
At home, the pendant lay warm against my skin. The day had been hard. I had said things aloud I never thought I would. I had watched others fall.
But when I closed my eyes that night, the last thing I heard was not the tape or the cameras. It was Dieter's breathing and the quiet sound of a promise kept.
Months passed, and people said things. Some called me brave. Others said I had been dramatic. Many watched Brandon's failure on their phones and called the videos friends in the same way people once passed along warnings.
I learned to live with the public reaction. I learned, in a slow steady way, to trust that not everyone who promised would break you.
The pendant still hung against my collarbone. Once in a while I took it off in private and looked at the tiny letters, wondering about the five friends who had made it. I never learned all their stories, but I kept the promise it represented: not to let myself be stolen again.
One day, when my grandmother laughed at a memory and Dieter tucked a blanket around her knees, I noticed how much had changed.
"Do you remember the first time we met?" I asked.
He smiled and took my hand. "You were crying three times in one day. I thought the world had been too rough on someone pretty like you."
I drew the pendant between my fingers. "You could have left."
"I couldn't," he said. "You wore someone else's storm on your face. I took it on, with you."
We sat together and listened to a clock that seemed to keep small promises: click, a second; click, another. The pendant warmed in my palm like a small steady sun.
I put it back on and felt the vibration of the city below. People would keep making choices: some good, some cruel. But the day they fell was on record now, and the pendant had led me out of a bridge and into a life that felt like being held.
"Don't ever take it off," he said.
"I won't," I said, because I had seen what the world could do both ways.
The bridge lights blinked in the distance, and the pendant, tiny and stubborn on my chest, held a letter inside its diamond — a secret the five friends had once used to promise to watch over one another.
"Keep it safe," I whispered to myself, and the pendant hummed like a quiet memory.
And when, later, people asked about that stage and the recordings and the way the world had watched, I would tell them the same thing: there are pendants and promises and men who stand. Sometimes the loudest revenge is the quiet truth, played on a speaker, witnessed by a thousand eyes.
That night, before sleep took me, I touched the pendant one last time and whispered, "Thank you for catching me."
"Always," Dieter answered, but he did not say it like a promise. He said it like something he intended to live up to.
The End
— Thank you for reading —