Cake

by Tara Isabel Zambrano

To make some extra money, my boyfriend uploaded our video on the porn site. The next day the admin sent us more requests—they wanted to see me in six-inch heels and a bowtie, him in a bandana and a pair of gold rimmed goggles. Background of a train compartment, bodies banging side to side with the movement or inside an airplane cockpit with oxygen masks. Silly shit, all around.

In the next roleplay, we were a high school teacher and a student—hips bobbing, nipples flattening against each other the way I’d imagine pizza dough slapped around. The apartment walls were paper-thin, so we tried to be quiet but sometimes a moan let itself out or a long series of sighs got caught in my throat. Tangled as old necklaces in my mother’s jewelry box.

Twice we threesomed with a plastic resin fuck doll that my boyfriend loaned from his friend Ray who built those in his basement and sold them to adult stores. There’s a huge profit in these, he told my boyfriend, you should join me once you are done with the videos, his eyes on my chest, hot like branding irons.

My boyfriend claimed that I felt jealous when the doll was around. Bullshit, I said. I swear, he pinched his throat, you are wilder, more creative. I shook my head in disapproval.

After my boyfriend uploaded the latest video, I kissed him and whispered, someday I want to do this just for us. He shrugged. This is all we need to keep doing to get more views before the previous link expires. With his shirt buttoned up, he looked like someone else, his arms—a pair of tongs itching to grab all our time together and mint it into money and I kept staring at him. What? He said sharply, it’s just good business, that’s all.

In the kitchen, his mother commented on my long, pointed nails and fake eyelashes, while making hot chocolate for us. Islands of whipped cream floated in different sized souvenir cups. We sipped together in the breakfast area. She said she trimmed my boyfriend’s nails until he was thirteen. He smiled but didn’t look at me, perhaps trying to be chaste or impatient to get out. Then she asked if my mother helped with homework, cut my hair. She died when I was six, I replied. We went quiet except for the sound of slurps and gulps until I brought up the weather and she brought up TV shows, being a single mother. I asked her if she had ever been jealous. She paused, the sunlight through the windows drowning her face in an orange glow. Umm…, think of your competition as a cake you’d like to eat, she winked a pink lady laugh—not a mournful someone cutting through the daily chores I thought her to be, but more like a kinky queen in lace and a crown, full of bang and grind. Locked and loaded.

In the next video my legs were splayed on the bed, my boyfriend was wearing a green, itchy wig. Synthetic fibers spilled from him as if he was a stuff ed animal, ripping stitch by stitch. From the half-open closet, the doll peeped, her lingerie like a layer of red velvet cake over her pale translucent skin. I licked my lips. As I kept looking at her, she appeared more and more delectable. I imagined myself falling on her with a pillowed thud, biting her cheeks, licking her ears, pulling her hair until she was drained like an open vein, and I was filled with emptiness again. After that, I didn’t remember much except the weight of my boyfriend’s head on my shoulders, his breath blowing cool on my neck forking the silence in the walls, crashing into their slinky tiny deaths like ours.

Tara Isabel Zambrano is an award-winning writer of South Asian descent whose multi-genre writing has appeared in Tin House Online, Electric Literature, Southeast Review, Post Road, and other notable venues. She is also the author of a short story collection, Ruined A Little When We Are Born (Dzanc Books 2024). More at taraisabelzambrano.com and @tizambrano on Instagram.