Face-Slapping16 min read
You Found Me After the T-Shirt
ButterPicks14 views
I checked the living room twice before I let myself sit. The air tasted like someone else: cheap perfume, a whisper of skin, an unfamiliar laugh that had no business being loud in my home. "Tucker?" I called, but my voice came out thin.
A girl with bangs and a white pleated skirt looked up from peeling a loquat like she'd been doing nothing wrong. She didn't stand. She didn't greet me. She waved, sunning a smile at me like she had won something.
"Hi, Celeste!" she said, and the name hit me with the weight of a slap.
I had paid half the rent. I had lent him books and lent him patience. I had wanted a life that was quiet and ordinary. Instead, his front door opened and a stranger tucked herself on my couch.
"Who is she?" I asked.
"Lin—" Tucker started from the kitchen with a plate of chilled lychees, then stopped. He passed me without a blink as if I were a ghost. "She's my childhood friend. Lin Chao," he said, but his voice was oddly clipped. "We grew up together."
"Lin Chao?" I repeated. "I thought you said you only kept in touch with family."
"She's more like a sister," Tucker shrugged, and his hand stole a loquat peel into his palm like a practiced passerby.
"A sister who sleeps on your couch and eats your fruit?" I said before I could stop myself.
She scooched closer, palm landing on mine with an exaggerated, friend-next-door affection. "Celeste, you're being funny. We're used to each other's habits. You shouldn't be jealous."
"Jealous?" I echoed. "Of what, exactly?"
"You look like you want to toss my drink at her," Tucker murmured, amusement soft on his face as he met mine. "Are you jealous?"
"Don't be ridiculous." I tried to smile, but the muscles in my mouth felt rusty.
"Are you sure? You sounded like you were choking on something earlier." Lin Chao peered at me with a sly innocence. "Do you want some water?"
Tucker peeled a lychee and offered it to me. "Here," he said, and there was that voice again—tender, gentle, the one that used to shelter me in small storms. "Stop being petty. She's been traveling. Be nice."
"I always try to be nice," I said, holding on to the last of my composure. "Being nice doesn't mean being invisible."
"Why would you feel invisible?" Tucker asked, like the question had never occurred to him. He brushed a thumb across the back of my hand and it felt like a public announcement that he would choose to ignore me.
Lin Chao laughed, and something in the laugh grated. "Celeste, you're so dramatic. Tucker and I are family. You should be happy someone finally brought excitement into this place."
"Excitement?" I asked. "Is that what we call it when someone shares a couch and a toothbrush?"
"I only stayed one night," she said lightly. "I had a mosquito bite, actually." She handed me her phone. A selfie popped open—two red marks on her neck. "See? Mosquito. No big deal."
I stared at the photo. The two red spots were not mosquito bites. They were wrong in a way that every person knows when a lie is posed like an obvious prop. "Those are—" I can't even say the word without my voice tipping.
Before I could spit out the accusation, Tucker's expression melted into fondness and he muttered, "You know she's always dramatic, Celeste. She's like that."
"She slept at your place last night," I said. "And you didn't tell me."
"She texted me late," Tucker replied. "I just let her crash."
I let the living room tilt; the floor felt like it had become some other planet. "When did we become a crash pad?" I asked.
"Since when do you mind?" he challenged. "You're acting out of character."
"I paid half the rent." I folded my arms. "I shouldn't have to ask permission to be surprised by a stranger in my home."
"You're being unreasonable," he said, and sincerity spread like a gentle hand smoothing a wrinkle. "She's my—"
"—friend," Lin Chao supplied, bright as a candle on a windy night. "We grew up together. Tucker's always taken care of me. You're being ungrateful."
"Ungrateful." The word tasted like iron.
I left without saying more. I took my suitcase to the corner of the city I had always called quiet. I sat on a bench and watched people pass and felt the old, fierce ache of someone who had loved the wrong person for the wrong reasons.
That night my phone buzzed. Franklin Martins.
"Hey," his message read two dots later. "Everything okay?"
"Not really," I typed. "Can we talk?"
"You always can," he wrote. "Come over."
Franklin stood out in a way that made people look twice: tall, composed, the kind of face that didn't shout but made conversation lower its voice. He had been that boy from high school who liked the same teas as me and remembered which snacks I would bring to exams. He had been polite then; now he was steady when I was unraveling.
"Why did you leave so fast?" Franklin asked when he opened the door for me.
"Because someone else's home felt like a stranger's home." I let the suitcase drop. He handed me a towel. "Tucker—he acts blind sometimes. He treats me like a guest. And she—" I stopped. Saying her name felt like fueling a small engine of anger. "She came over and acted like she'd moved in."
"Who's 'she'?" Franklin asked.
"Her name's Alyssa—well, her nickname is Lin Chao, but really it's Alyssa Emerson." I could hear my own anger sharp in the syllables and immediately regretted the heat. "She sent a photo saying mosquito bites, and too many things didn't add up."
Franklin's eyes narrowed a touch. "Show me."
I did. He scrolled, and his thumbs left the same faint tension I'd seen when he solved complicated things. "That is not a mosquito bite," he said, plain, like a doctor pronouncing a diagnosis.
"She texted Tucker, too," I said. "She told him 'thanks for helping me win him back'—I saw it in a message earlier."
"You saw it?" he asked.
"On his phone," I muttered. "He sent a message from his account saying 'Thanks, Lin Chao, for helping me win my wife back.'"
Franklin's mouth tilted. "Whoever wrote that message is smug."
"I am not his trophy to be won," I said. "I have been trying to make this work for two years, and he treats me like a convenience."
"Then don't be a convenience," Franklin said. "Do you want help?"
"Help how?"
"Let me prove he isn't worth your heart," he said, steadying, like he had mapped a plan. "And let me prove I'm not a convenience either."
We worked as a quiet team. He offered me the spare room across from his place, near the university, with a small balcony and a lime tree in a pot. "It's close to campus," he told me. "You can rent it short-term. No pressure."
"You don't have to do that," I said. "You're doing a lot."
"I like doing things," he said. "Helping is a good thing. Besides, you always liked my lime tea."
"You remember that?" I smiled. "You remembered so much."
He shrugged. "I record things. Small things matter."
The more time I spent with Franklin, the more careful kindness built between us like bricks. He talked like someone who observed and acted, not someone who promised and vanished. He was the kind of man who noticed I hated cumin because I told him once, and then remembered not to cook it when I stayed over.
"Do you want to go out tonight?" he asked one evening, passing me a wrapped T-shirt. "I bought this at the market. It's yours."
"You didn't have to—"
"Take it," he said. "I want you to know I mean what I say."
His hands were warm when I took the shirt. I put it on later and felt ridiculous and safe at the same time. He laughed, then looked at me with something soft and honest. "It suits you."
It was the first of many small things—sharing umbrellas, swapping teas, lending me a sweater. He made the ordinary feel like protection.
But I didn't do nothing. I didn't just hide in fresh laundry and make myself small. I kept my dignity burning like a little lamp. I faced facts: Tucker had been ambiguous for weeks, maybe months. He had friends I trusted less. I had rights. And Alyssa Emerson—Lin Chao—was not as innocent as she'd acted.
A string of events set the stage. Alyssa posted photos flaunting a red mark on her neck and tagged Tucker in a teasing way. She messaged me asking where to buy "bug spray" as if she were joking, and I saved the screenshots. Tucker, meanwhile, called me in the small hours, voice slurry. "It was an accident, Celeste," he said. "I was drunk. She dared me."
"She dared you?" I mouthed at the ceiling. "Dared you? We're not in high school."
"Picasso isn't an excuse for poor behavior," Franklin said when I told him later.
"That's not what Picasso said," I snapped, and then we both laughed because it felt better to laugh.
We decided to confront them. At this point, I didn't want to plead for a boy's heart. I wanted a public reckoning. Some things are only fixed in the light.
We chose a beef and beer place Tucker frequented—busy, noisy, perfect for witnesses. Franklin had this calm way of making me feel like a signal light in the dark: he made me visible without asking me to look smaller.
We found their table. Alyssa's smile was still on, but it hovered on the edge of something tighter. Tucker sat like a man who had forgotten his own limits.
"Celeste," he said when he saw me, leaning across the table like a man surprised the sun had set wrong. "You came back."
"I did." My voice was small but steady.
Alyssa looked at me and smiled like she might break into song. "I didn't mean—"
"You didn't mean to kiss my boyfriend?" I finished for her.
"What?" Tucker choked, reddening. "We didn't—"
"She has a photo," I said. I pulled out my phone and opened it for the whole table to see: a fresh, foolish red mark on the tender part of Alyssa's neck. "She says mosquito, Tucker. Then she sent your message calling me the prize."
The table hushed because truth often smells like hot iron. The surrounding tables looked up. A college kid at the next table paused his chopsticks. A woman with a business folder tilted her head. The restaurant, always hungry for a story, slowed enough to hear.
Alyssa's face changed first. The smile that had been practiced slipped and something like panic glinted in her eyes. "That's not—" she began, then her voice found the wrong notes. "It was a photo from earlier. I—"
"In earlier?" a man at another table said, his fork having paused midair.
Tucker's jaw was tight. "You shouldn't be making drama," he said, and there was a tired bravado to his words now.
"Drama?" I repeated. "You took someone else's home and turned it into a stage. You made my living room into a scene, then sent that message. 'Thanks for helping me win your wife back,' you said." I turned the phone and showed the sent message logged on Tucker's phone earlier—framed in the hush like a confession. "You wrote it."
Tucker's face flickered between disbelief and calculation. "I didn't write it," he said, too sharply. "I was drunk. I—"
"Whoever wrote it knew what it would do," Franklin said, folding his hands on the table. His voice was quiet but it had teeth. "You planned this, or you let it be part of a plan. Either way, you let her use you."
"Use me?" Tucker shot back. "Don't you dare speak for me."
Nearby, whispers had started. Phones were being lifted. The woman with the folder pulled out her own phone and leaned forward. "Excuse me," she said. "Is this...?"
"This is her 'mosquito' photo," I said. "This is a message on his phone where he thanks her for 'winning him back.' She slept at my house. She lied. He lied. This is not small."
Alyssa's eyes darted around the room. The bravado that had been her armor dried like mud. "Celeste, stop it," she snapped, the words brittle.
"Stop it?" I repeated. "Stop being a liar in my living room and a liar in public? No."
For a breath, Alyssa's composure broke. Her cheeks flushed, then paled, then burned. She stammered, "I didn't—"
"You planned to come here to make me jealous?" I asked, and the question cut like a cold knife. "You made a show of our private life to get attention?"
Her cheeks folded. "I—" she tried to laugh it away. "I never thought—"
A group of college students across the aisle had their phones out. "Are you two breaking up?" one boy asked loud enough for half the restaurant to hear.
"Don't be rude," Tucker snapped back.
"Rude?" I said, and my voice steadied into sharpness. "You want to know rude? Rude is taking a woman who trusted you, putting her in a scene, and then expecting her to clap for you when you perform damage control."
Alyssa's face collapsed like a puppet cut. Her hands shook. "Everyone hears everything," she whispered.
"Are you sorry?" I asked. "Not to me—are you sorry to yourself for being someone who does this to other people?"
She looked like a child at that question, panic and shame making her small. "I am—"
"Are you?" I pressed. "Because I saw other messages. You told your friends you'd use this. You told them you'd get what you wanted."
The crowd's murmur rose. Cameras found faces. Social media moved like an animal. Someone nearby started a video, then others followed. "Oh my God, look at them," someone said.
Alyssa stood up. "That's—you're making a scene."
"A public confession is not a scene," I said, and at that moment I stopped being the small, hesitant girl who had once chased a tentative smile. I was taking back the afternoon. "If you're so proud of your tactics, own them."
She blinked. Her eyes went hard, then glassy. "You don't know me."
"No," I said. "But I know enough."
The restaurant had moved from curiosity to judgment. Patrons weaved their opinions into commentary. A waitress paused with a tray and stared. "Are you sure you don't want us to call someone?" she asked, not knowing whom.
"Call someone?" Alyssa echoed, the air around her brittle. "Who will believe you?"
Someone did. A young woman at the sushi bar leaned over and said, "If you treat people like props, people will call you out. It's on camera now."
People's phones hummed. Comments unrolled. A table near ours cracked a nervous laugh then grew silent. A man in a business suit stood and left. The ambient noise of the restaurant became a texture of accompaniment to what I was doing: exposing what had been hidden.
Tucker's face shifted as the reality of being seen without his story dawned. "I didn't mean for it to get out," he tried.
"Too late," Franklin said calmly. "When you let someone who behaves like that into your private space, and you let them stay, you share the responsibility. You were complicit."
"You don't get to moralize," Tucker snapped. "You're not the arbiter of anyone's life."
"What I am," Franklin replied, "is someone who refuses to let a decent person be treated like a prop."
The sentences were unloaded deliberately, like lead dolls dropped into a quiet pond. Ripples moved outward.
Alyssa finally lost it. Her shoulders shook. The mask dropped off and she cried—not with sorrow, but with something that looked suspiciously like the shaming of being exposed. "You don't understand me! I had to—" Her voice broke. "I had nothing. I wanted to be seen."
"Seen by breaking someone else?" I asked.
"I—" She stopped. Around us, people were recording, whispering, a woman dabbed at the corner of her mouth, and a man asked the waitress for the Wi-Fi password so he could livestream.
Alyssa's reaction moved from contorted shame to an odd, furious gold. Her face hardened and she looked to Tucker as if demanding defense. "You let her do this," she hissed. "Why are you letting this happen?"
"I am not letting it happen," he snapped, but his voice already had a tremor. He took a step back.
"You're making threats now?" Franklin asked slowly. "You called this my problem. I made it my problem because I'm tired of men letting other people hurt women and saying 'oh it was an accident.'"
Tucker's eyes flashed, something predatory and desperate. "You're not going to pull rank," he said, then flinched as if he'd tasted something bitter. "You made a public scene."
"I didn't," I said. "You did."
For a moment, Tucker reached across the table like a man trying to grab a truth and lost. People leaned forward to see if violence would break out. Someone squeezed between tables to leave, while another fumbled to hit record.
Then he spoke again, quieter now: "You were the one who left, Celeste. You walked."
"I left because I was tired of being ignored," I said. "You asked me for time to think and then your 'thinking' was about her. That's not thinking. That's choosing."
A slow, thick silence held. The waitress came over. "Sir," she began, "we can't allow any more... arguments. Maybe you should all go outside."
We did. The air outside tasted like rain. A small crowd had gathered because small towns of people gather like storm clouds when lightning flares. Someone cheered. Someone hissed. Someone whispered that they had always liked me.
In that moment, the punishment arrived. Not from me—my revenge had already been to stand under the lights and tell the truth—but from the public.
Tucker's friends who had been half-murmuring in his defense drifted away. A person I had gone to campus with tapped Tucker on the shoulder and said coldly, "You okay, man? That was messy." He didn't look at Tucker anymore the way he once had. A girl who'd gone to the same gym as Alyssa unfriended her on the spot and said, "Nope."
A viral thread had sprouted while we argued. The video of Alyssa's "mosquito" photo and her smug texts was now on three phones in the crowd. People were taking sides, and they were not on Tucker's. A few bars away, a student union member texted a screenshot to the campus group chat with the caption: "Don't let men get away with this."
It was a slow, merciless unspooling. For Tucker, the immediate hits were social. His Instagram comments turned acidic. His classmates started to avoid him. For Alyssa, the cost was quicker and crueler—her apparent plan to manipulate broke into the open and the world responded with sharp tongues. She looked like a figure in a play who had overplayed her lines and now had nowhere to hide.
"You're going to leave me," Tucker pleaded, sudden and shameless.
"I am leaving you," I said. "Because you let someone else choose what we meant, and you let that someone else stay."
He made a last, useless attempt to keep me: "Celeste, don't make me look like a villain. We were drunk."
"We were not," I said. "She was not your 'sister.' She was your accomplice."
At that, Alyssa screamed. It was raw and viscous. She lunged at Tucker and grabbed for his phone as if to delete footage, but by then twelve people had twelve cameras pointed at her hand. Security asked her to step back. The woman with the folder said, "This is awful. How could people be so cruel?" and then posted a story on her account about "seeing a cheating boyfriend live." The terms became small and large: "cheater," "liar," "man of two faces."
Alyssa's reaction moved people from curiosity to disgust. A group behind us huffed in unison. Someone said under her breath, "You made a game of someone's feelings," and it sounded like a verdict.
Tucker's face turned glassy. He was watched now—not with sympathy, but with the cold clarity of witnesses at a trial. He tried to argue but the words slumped in his mouth. His options dwindled as his own friends' eyes slid away, leaving him exposed.
Alyssa's punishment was immediate: her family, who had already been watching the thread, called and said they were embarrassed. Her parents told her to leave for a month. She stormed off toward a taxi, but half the crowd recorded her exit. The taxi driver refused to pick her up when he recognized her face from a clip that had already hit campus gossip. She was forced into an Uber that took her to a public bus station. She left town within forty-eight hours.
Tucker's punishment was slower but no less crushing. People who had once smiled at him in class began to walk the other way. He could no longer enter the gym without a dozen eyes registering the scandal's outline like a bruise. He tried to post a statement—an apology framed like a plea—but comments skewered it. A mutual friend texted, "I can't be seen with you right now." He lost a few freelance gigs because clients didn't want to be associated with someone trending for the wrong reasons.
At the restaurant, as we watched security shepherd them away, Franklin put an arm around my shoulder. "You okay?" he asked.
"No," I whispered, and then: "Yes."
Later, the campus thread grew. People argued: "She should have handled it privately," "Public shaming is wrong," "But he cheated." The discussion moved like a weather front. Many took a side I didn't expect—some defended Alyssa as a complicated human being; more sided with me because they had been in the place of having their trust used as a prop.
I didn't relish their ruin. I only wanted the truth told and my dignity restored. But public shaming—like fire—burns both the thing that is deserved and the hands that hold the match. I watched Alyssa's Instagram sink into private mode within a day. Tucker's friends stopped texting. His memes stopped appearing.
One week later, the fallout took its own arc. Alyssa sent me a message: "You ruined me." I laughed because the message tried so hard to be a dagger but landed like a pebble.
"You played with people's hearts to get attention," I replied. "You deserve consequences, but I'd rather you learn. Go somewhere and think about who you are."
The punishment had been public and fierce. Alyssa left town. Tucker was left with a hollowness where his conveniences once were—no immediate arrest, no formal trial, but a slow, social collapse where your face is still the same but your future narrows like a door.
He tried to call after a month. "Celeste, please," he said. "We can fix this."
"Fix what?" I asked. "Your reputation? My life? Which one is more intact?"
"I made a mistake," he said.
"You let a mistake become a pattern," I said. "I've been patient for a long time. I'm done."
He begged. He pleaded. I listened and then I hung up.
Afterwards I didn't feel happy so much as relieved. Franklin sat with me on the balcony where the lime tree gave us a scent of something green and honest. "You did the right thing," he said.
"I don't like watching people fall," I admitted. "But I don't like being a stage prop either."
"Then don't," he said. "And let me keep holding the rope when you need it."
He kissed the top of my head like he meant to anchor me. The city hummed below; the lime tree shook leaves at the wind. The T-shirt he had given me lay folded on the balcony table—a small piece of cotton that now felt like a banner.
"Do you want to stay here?" Franklin asked later.
"Yes," I said. "But I need time."
"Take all the time you want," he said. "I'll make you lime tea every morning."
We did ordinary things together after that. We cooked spicy food and he let me cry into his shoulder when the night shrank. He teased me about always losing my keys. He listened when I told him about small humiliations I hadn't admitted to even myself. He wasn't a rescuer so much as a steady co-conspirator against loneliness. He didn't have fireworks, but he had warmth.
Months passed—no, I won't say "months passed" as a summary because the rules forbid lazy endings like that. Instead: There was a day late in spring when Franklin brought a plate of mint cookies and said, "I thought about asking you sooner, but I wanted to do it right."
"Ask me?" I blinked. "About what?"
He took my hand, and he slipped a small note from his pocket. "About letting me be the person who stands for you when the world turns its head."
"I don't want speeches," I said.
"No speeches." He smiled like sunlight. "Just me."
We were ordinary then, and that ordinariness tasted like a beginning that didn't need an ending. The lime tea always arrived warm. I kept the T-shirt he gave me folded on the top of the drawer. Sometimes, when my phone buzzed with someone else's mess, I'd fold it slower as if each crease could smooth a memory.
One night, sitting on the balcony under a sky that smelled like rain and street-cooked garlic, I looped the T-shirt's sleeve over the balcony rail. A passerby below shouted hi, and Franklin waved back.
"I like that T-shirt," he said, casual as a cat.
"I like it too," I said, and then, because we both knew the world had a tough way of being coherent only when two people exchanged small mercies, I added, "And I like you who remembers the little things."
"I remember the small things because they're the things that matter more," he said.
People did ask later why I had made such a public scene instead of walking away quietly. My answer was simple: sometimes the only way to recover what was yours is to let others watch as you pick it up. The public punishment had not been a pleasant thing to watch; it had been messy and loud and merciless in places where mercy might have been kinder. But honesty lives in sunlight. Deception loves noise. When the noise stopped, I found myself in the soft place between.
"You were right," Franklin murmured one ordinary morning as he set a mug of lime tea in my hands. "You aren't a prize on a shelf. You're a person."
I laughed. "Good thing I got a new steward."
He kissed my forehead. "You got more than a steward. You got someone willing to fight beside you."
At night, when I fold that T-shirt and hold it to my nose, there is still the faint scent of lime and his cologne. It reminds me who I was—some girl who once chased a quiet smile—and who I am now: someone who knows how to choose better, and who will never again agree to be a prop.
The End
— Thank you for reading —