CAKE
At the end of summer house party, the game is called "Cake is Pussy." The contestants are whoever was chosen by Cheap Rick, the porn producer. It's mostly guys, mostly in their thirties or forties, a few in their 20s, but those guys look like they could be forty already. Everybody looks a little unshaven, a little bit like they woke up hungover yesterday and have not fully gotten it out of their system today. The youngest person there is Dennis, a nineteen-year-old incoming sophomore at college in Carbondale. He's dressed like a half-cliché of cultural appropriation; backwards baseball cap, crew cut, gold necklace. The other half of his attire is a little unusual for his age - a shiny felt vest, a white dress shirt, a black pair of pants with an expensive belt, Doc Martins. These are all items he bought on credit, since he's stopped making videos for Cheap Rick - who they don't call cheap for no reason. He faces the cake with a smirk on his face. He knows he will be a contestant because Rick already told him.
Dennis thought it would be a chocolate cake but it's actually a carrot cake (which is a little pervy, somehow). Rick sprays whipped cream on top. This has got to be as over the top as possible. On the other side of the cake is some balding dude with glasses. The dude takes off his glasses, hands them to his twenty-something African American girlfriend beside him. She drops them. She pretends that it's an accident, but Dennis can see from the gloominess of her face that it certainly was not. He smiles at her. She sees that he's on to her and her eyes widen, and she turns away. Dennis knows who the winner will be.
"All right, all right," says Rick, as if he's Matthew McConaughey. Everybody else in the room starts to quiet down. "Dennis versus George, everybody. Man the best pussy-eater win. Three, two, one. Eat it!"
The two men go to the cake. George dives in, moving his head side to side, pushing the whipped cream out to each side in balloons. Dennis just sticks out his tongue and flicks it around the surface of the whipped cream. He laps it up quickly but fairly carefully, until he's made a path to the frosting. He flicks his tongue across the frosting. George pulls away for a moment, spitting out multiple pieces of cake. He sees what Dennis is doing and tries to backtrack. Eases up on his attack a little. His girlfriend takes two calculated steps back. Laughs with a nervous expression grin, and some of the guys laugh along with her.
Dennis does a long tongue-lap across the frosting and pushes his forehead through the whipped cream. He clears the frosting from the top of the cake's body, creating an area of pure carrot-flavored filling about the size of a large slice. He keeps licking and chunks of cake spit out around him. He's pushing further towards the center of the cake. So it George, with his nose.
"Yo George, let me get my book on female anatomy for you," Dennis says, looking up. He smiles and the crowd goes oooohhhhh and laughter ensues.
George looks genuinely destroyed. His girlfriend does not quite know what to do except glance at Dennis, whose face is back in the cake. But his eyeballs are curling upwards, glancing back at her.
A male voice mutters,
"Who the fuck is this kid?"
The cake begins to tilt and collapse. Dennis shifts to the left and laps up more frosting, whipped cream, and filling. George whips his head in the other direction. The problem is, he pivots his body, too. George falls over. Face stuffed with white cream and brown crumbs, to the floor. Dennis lurches forward to the center of the cake and gobbles up quite a bit more. The applause has already begun. Dennis spears out of the center of the cake, whipped cream and frosting flaking off his buzzcut dome, face puffed up in a tangled mass of brown, off-white and snow white. He stands triumphant. Rick holds one of his arms up.
"We have a winner!' Rick announces. Grins beneath his silly mustache.
George wipes his face. Opens his eyes and sees Dennis and Rick standing over him. Rick leans in and mutters,
"Sorry, George."
Dennis wipes a delectable combination from both his eyes. Looks around and finds the face of George's girlfriend. Extends his fingers to her.
"Want some?" He asks.
She shakes her head at first. Reconsiders. Leans in like she's pecking someone on the cheek and sucks the cream off.
Her name, by the way, is Karissa. She is twenty-seven years old. She's a paralegal.
Hours later, her lips are not pursed around Dennis' fingers, but open, two of his fingers pulling back at her lower lip as she arches back on her flower-patterned pillow and lets out a sound somewhere between a gasp of surprise and an animal yelp.
Her thighs flutter and buck around Dennis' head. He clamps his hands on the other side of both her thighs and holds them right there as he rotates his head in swirls, giving himself a lava-paced tour. Karissa's ankles bounce off his flexed shoulders.
Dennis at last withdraws and sits up. He takes his bowl of pot and his lighter from the bedside table and lights a toke. The burning ember is the only color Karissa can see in the dark of the room. Dennis offers her the weed.
"No thanks," she says and closes her eyes.
Dennis rests his head on her breasts. She can feel the wetness on his cheek dampen her skin. They lie like that for a bit. Then Dennis moves upward and kisses her cheek. She smells herself on him and wishes he'd wash his face. He murmurs in her ear,
"After we have sex, will you give me a ride back to my dorm?"
