Page 64 of Revenge Cake

“Why are you laughing?” I ask, my voice unsteady.

She leans forward, pursing her lips as if to hold back laughter. With the pads of her index fingers, she wipes invisible tears from the corners of her eyes. “I shouldn’t find it funny,” she says, her words strained from laughter. “But I’m hearing my future.” Her voice becomes hushed, almost wistful. “Someday Logan, you’ll be fighting with a girlfriend and you’ll bring up ‘crazy as fuck Leilani,’ the Ativan addict with panic disorder. I can hear it now.” She ends her speech with a soft chuckle, shaking her head.

“Who the fuck are you?” I shout. “How can you say things like that and laugh about it?”

She doesn’t answer, but continues to shake her head wistfully.

Panic seizes my chest so tight that it takes effort to breathe. I finally understand why her behavior seems so strange. She should be crying. The idea of breaking up with me should devastate her. It should be like that night when she begged me not to leave her. She should be telling me she’d crumble without me. Not this.

“Have you ever seen The Stepford Wives?” I ask, my voice strained. “That old seventies horror movie? That’s exactly what this feels like right now. It feels like someone killed the real Leilani and replaced her with a robot.” After I say it, I wince inwardly. Though the comparison is on point, it still sounded stupid. For the millionth time since I met Lani, I envy her confidence in her opinions. I need it right now if I have a prayer in convincing her to stop this madness.

“Speaking of horror!” She lifts excited hands. “Did you see Us? Jordan Peele’s new movie? It’s about doppelgängers, not robots, but it’s…” She smiles wide. “Excellent. Brenna and I watched it last week, and I thought of you. It’s so your horror jam.”

I stare at her incredulously, my breath coming in pants. “Did I give you the impression that I want to talk about horror movies right now? That I feel like chatting about fucking Jordan Peele and his new fucking movie?” She averts her eyes from mine. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you really breaking up with me or is this a joke?”

“I’m sorry if it seems like I’m making light of it. It’s just that I made this decision a while ago and I’m already at peace with it.”

Suddenly, the oppressively yellow walls of the kitchen start closing in on me. My vision blurs. “A while ago? How could you have made it a while ago?” I gesture behind her. “We just had sex on the counter. Were you planning on breaking up with me then?”

She at least has the grace to look a little guilty when she says, “Yes.”

I expel a shaky breath. Feeling almost detached from my body, my eyes dart around the kitchen. “What the fuck is going on here?” I mumble to myself.

“It was goodbye sex. Closure sex.” Again that emotionless, clinical voice.

My eyes dart back to hers. “Was that Closure Cake too?” I spit out, hoping the reminder of the night we met will summon some kind of emotion in her. Something… Anything.

“Yes,” she says right away. “I didn’t get a chance to write your name on it. You got here too quickly.”

I scan her face, searching for some sign that she’s joking, but I come up short. Her eye contact is as direct and unflinching as ever. “Are you honestly telling me that that,” I point to the defiled cake on the counter, “is my Closure Cake? That’s the Logan Henderson Closure Cake and you made me eat it?”

Her eyes grow hesitant. “I didn’t make you eat it…”

“No, but you didn’t stop me either. You didn’t stop me from smashing it into your pussy and licking it off.”

Her eyes soften minutely, but she holds my stare. “I’ll admit that in retrospect it seems…sadistic.”

“Lani, Closure Cake…” I break off, shaking my head. “That was our thing! Our little joke. Our story about the night we met. The one Armaan or Brenna would have told in their wedding toast.” I look away from her as memories of the night we met come flooding back. I knew in my gut that my life would change after meeting her. Unable to stand the memory, I push it away. I meet her eyes, my own narrowing. “It was one of your many quirks that made me fall in love with you, and you took it and made me lick it off of your pussy.”

She flinches. Thank god she’s finally showing some kind of emotion. “I just happened to be baking the cake when you texted me. I wasn’t planning on having you lick it off of my pussy.”

“What the fuck were you planning? I feel like I walked into a trap.”

She holds my stare for a moment before she answers. “It was sort of a trap,” she says softly. “Almost as soon as you told me you needed time apart, I set out to lure you back. It was all stupid. I regret it now.” After taking a deep breath, she exhales slowly, meeting my eyes with that intense gaze that caught me on the night we met. “I haven’t taken responsibility for everything I put you through during those months when I was taking so much Ativan—”

I wave a hand. “Let’s not even worry about that right now. I can forget—”

“No, let me finish. I want to make amends for it. Don’t feel like you have to stick around because you’re worried about me, like you did with Brittani. I’ll be fine. Let me set you free.”

“I don’t want to be set free!” I shout.

“Yes, you do. You’ve been checked out of our relationship for months, long before our break. This is what you wanted two weeks ago, but you felt too guilty to ask for it, so you gave me a chance to ‘get my shit together.’ But you didn’t really want me to. You wanted this.”

“I did not want this!”

Her expression softens in sympathy, and it makes me want to shout even louder. She pities me for my loss of control, because she made this decision long before now. She’s already “at peace” with it. How could she be at peace about losing her soulmate?

“Logan,” she starts in a lowered voice, “I say this out of love—” When I flinch at her use of the word “love,” she pauses for a second. Her voice is more stern when she resumes her condescending lecture. “I think it might be hard for you to remember how you felt two weeks ago—”

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