Death By Chocolate

Cole lurches awake in his kitchen with a skull-pounding headache. Gone was the peaceful dream of his mother pulling out a chocolate birthday cake from the oven. It feels like a thousand needles are jamming his eyes as he peels them open, still smelling chocolate cake. As his eyes adjusted to the bright lights, the outline of a petite girl standing by the oven emerged.

“Someone drugged me,” he said, dry lips cracking on each word.

“What makes you think that?” She asks, her nails drumming on the counter as he tries to remember what happened after he answered the knock to his one-bedroom apartment. The petite girl materializes as if it’s a picture gaining focus, and his stomach drops. Bianca, wearing all black, barefaced with a tight ponytail. The young woman he violated.

“You used my stash?” he said, fear slithering along his spine.

“I didn’t use someone else’s stash,” Bianca said, tapping a spoon in a mixing bowl. “Why would you have a stash of drugs YOU don’t feel comfortable taking?” She steps in front of him, her brown eyes void of empathy.

Cole’s throat feels like a canyon that hasn’t seen water in over a million years. Every inch of his body is throbbing or aching. Waves of nausea roll in his stomach each time the light pierces his eyes. The truth is, he has never taken the drug; he suspects he is influencing his system. Living in a college town, he sells to the frat boys. And oh hell, if honesty is a must, he’s used it on a few females who have rebuffed him, like Bianca.

“Now, you know what it’s like to have no control over what enters your body. Even now, aren’t we, buddy?”

He shivers and hears a chain rattle against the chair’s wood. Startled, he sees a chain coiled around his stomach like a snake, and when he jerks, the chains snaked around his ankles pull him back. His hands are free, and they brush against the lock sitting on his lap, keeping the chains fastened to him.

“What the hell is going on?” he said; she smiled back when she heard the tremble in his voice. Last week, he told one of the cooks, she was cute and sweet, a girl next door. Now, she looks like a viper waiting to pounce. Ready to sink her fangs into his neck. Terror spreads like cracking ice. He’s getting punished.

“You’re going to eat chocolate cake,” Bianca said, managing to look adorable and terrifying at the same. Her smile was homespun sweet, but her eyes shone like golden daggers, ready to rip his flesh from his bone.

“Chocolate cake?” He said, sounding idiotic in the apartment kitchen, the scent of chocolate cake wafting to him as the word revenge flashed in his mind.

“Why did you do it?” Bianca asks the million-dollar question.

“I don’t know,” he said, hanging his head, waiting for her to speak. The thick silence hung until its weight forced his jaws open.

“Did you know I trusted you when you offered to drive me home?”

“Yeah”

He jumps when the spoon lands in the bowl, and he feels the heat on his bare arms when she opens the oven to pull out the cake.

“Why did you offer to give me a lift? Is this how you hunt for prey?” she says, sarcasm dripping like ice.

“I thought you were flirting with me. The big smiles, you know? And you once asked me if I had a girlfriend,” he said, gulping at the glacier stare.

“People smile when happy that doesn’t mean an invitation to hand me a drugged soda.”

He hates the dense fog shrouding his brain. His arms are limp by his side, the muscles useless. For a moment, he thinks he’s paralyzed, but he sees his fingers wiggle.

“When I offered the ride,” he said, each word unrolling from his tongue. “My plan wasn’t to take advantage but to, uh, relax your mind, take away the social stigma.”

The spoon snaps on the table next to him. “Answer not accepted.”

He curses, he is over a foot taller than her, and he weighs over 100lbs more, but she’s the one with the advantage.

“Tsk-Tsk, no name-calling” She walks behind him, where the rest of the apartment lays.

“Cake is cooling. It’s to die for.” She said, placing icy hands on his shoulders, pressing into his neck.

“Is cyanide in the recipe?”

She laughed, hands curling on his shoulders, her nails digging in. “It’s called Death by Chocolate cake.”

“Dramatic,” he said, looking at the chocolate cake cooling on the oven top, looking innocent but liquefying his bowels.

“Delightful,” she said, releasing her hands from his shoulders. She pulls a knife from the block at the kitchen counter, smiling at her reflection in the blade. Plunging the knife into the cake, she pulls out a birthday boy-sized piece. What a hell of a drug, he thinks, fighting against the disorientation. Amazing, he thinks, watching her slice the second piece. To his drug-addled brain, her every movement fascinates him like a primetime drama. She puts his mother’s plates in front of him, the ones his mother used only for special occasions. His mother only baked for birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, and Easter. Memories play like warped film until Bianca snaps her fingers.

“Earth to Cole,” she said, his dazed stare now locked on her.

“Yes. You said yes.” The word spins out, landing like a top, spinning between them.

“Yes?” Cole eyes the cake knife in Bianca’s fist as she hisses the fatal word.

“Yes to the-” his eyes close, and he shakes himself to focus. “Car ride.”

Her laugh. It’s a cold, cruel thing ripping through Cole like arctic winds slapping the truth awake. Death has arrived for him. All because he was-

“Wrong. I was an as-” Cole said, with a pause. “I assumed your consent; I didn’t ask. Yeah, trust me, I can’t make shit up with my brain in la-la- land. All those times, I thought you were flirting. I let myself think I had a chance.”

“And I assumed you weren’t a perverted pedophile.”

“No, no,” he said, words slurring as he shook his redhead.

“Your worthless life has been ticking along for 24 years, and I’m legally a child. My ID is a learner’s permit, and I still have another year of high school before getting a diploma. You’ve been out, what, six years?” She said, pulling out a seat and sitting down, folding her hands as if in prayer.

“Now it’s time for you to choose your slice of cake.”

“Slice of cake?” he says, sputtering the tricky words out.

“Left or right?”

He looks at her and sees the way she’s looking at him. Her eyes are stony regarding him as if he’s a bug to squash.

“Why do you want me to eat cake?” he said, exposing his fear in every word.

“Unlike you, I’m giving you a choice. I had no consent on what went inside my body, but for you, a choice. One slice has poison, and one does not.”

“Bianca, I’m sorry,” he said, tears glistening in his eyes.

“Saying words without meaning them does you no favors,” She said, picking up a fork and placing it in his hand.

He remembers the night that brought them to this point. Bianca, bustling in out of the kitchen, sunny smile in place as her brown ponytail bounced. She joked with the cooks as she grabbed her orders. He watched from the sink, scrubbing dish after dish. Later, she stood talking on a phone, her cheery tone at odds with her troubled expression. After lighting his cigarette, he casually started a conversation with her, learning that her boyfriend couldn’t pick her up; he was covering for someone and working later. Seeing his chance, he offered the ride, hope brimming when she smiled and said thanks, that would be great. He created his demise in a cola cocktail.

She remembers feeling helpless, her limbs betraying her as her flight instinct wouldn’t activate. Her body was moving, but her nerves weren’t firing; everything was frozen. She was waking up the next morning, in her familiar bed, feeling like a stranger and wondering if her life would ever be the same. Would she always feel this useless? Could she ever trust someone again? How long does it take for your body to feel like yours again? In the shower, lava hot water burning away where fingertips touched, the disgust turning itself into a void expanding inside of her. Tired of flinching when her boyfriend touched her and nightmares visiting her nightly brought Bianca to this moment of baked death.

“I don’t want to die,” he said, the smell of urine mingling with the scent of baked cake.

“That’s a shame. I don’t care if you live or die; you won’t find sympathy in this cheerleader,” she said, smiling cold enough to freeze a lake.

“Only one has poison?”

“Yup”

“What if I choose the one without poison?” he said, minuscule hope rising.

“You eat a slice of cake,” she said, huffing as she picked hair off her sweatshirt.

He thinks of the Bianca he knows. Her kindness, her generosity, how she tried to stop the gossip spreading that Tiffany was sleeping with the assistant manager. Going over the facts in his mind, he realizes Bianca is a good person and must be doing this to scare the piss out of him. Retribution for his coarse actions. That’s all, she’s pulling his leg, and it’s a good one. If she were this angry, she would have gone to the police first, right?

He picks up the fork with shaking hands, effortlessly digging it into the left slice. Eyes averted as he took his first bite, tasting an ordinary chocolate cake. It’s moist and rich in flavor. After a few bites, he leans back, the chains pulling around his waist, and looks at the baker across the table, eyes glowing.

“Did I choose the right slice?” he asks, exhausted and brain-fried.

This time, her smile is the bright, cheery thing he recalls walking into the kitchen.

“It doesn’t matter. I poisoned the whole damn cake.”