Sara & Lara 2 (Patreon)

She reached back into the backseat and brought up her wine bottle and cake. “This cake costs four thousand dollars,” the bride said, opening it up almost under Sara’s nose.

“Oh, is that what they’re charging to have a pro-gay slogan on it now?” It was the only thing Sara could think to say.

The bride ripped open the plastic wrap on the spork with her teeth. “It has little flakes of gold decorating it. You see? It’s supposed to go in the middle of a proper wedding cake—the white one, you know, it was the size of a bouncy castle—they baked it so it was a little hollow.”

“Oh, like when there’s a stripper inside,” Sara said, then briefly thought of driving into oncoming traffic to get out of having to live with having said that.

“Yes,” the bride said, “but this is a nice little cake that’s just for the bride and groom. They take it with them on their honeymoon. Isn’t that sweet?”

She jammed the spork into the middle of the cake like she was performing an autopsy on a hated rival, trying to find out which medical condition she should thank.

“Have you considered calling a hotline?” Sara asked. “You know, for people… people just…”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” the bride said, and partially disemboweled the cake. “No, if I was going to start killing people, there’s a long list of people who I would kill before I did me.”

“Maybe you could call a radio show,” Sara suggested. “You could tell them about your day… maybe request a song?”

The bride stuffed the fork into her mouth and chewed messily on chocolate that seemed as dense as a neutron star. Sara glanced at her and saw delight at the taste and continued anguish warring on her face.

“I didn’t even want to get married,” she said, liquid chocolate running down her chin. Sara automatically picked up a napkin and wiped her mouth for her. She continued her speech. “It all seemed so asinine to me. Outmoded. Monogamy, homemaking, white picket fences. I didn’t want any part of it. Why would I? I’d die before I aged into it. ‘But then Lara, Lara—” She was talking to herself. “’If you’re so big and bad and bold, then why are you so scared of matrimony? Give it a chance, won’t you? You love us, don’t you? Do it for us! We loooove you!’”

She jammed the fork back into the cake like a stake into a vampire. One that’d kicked her dog.

Trying out another voice seemed to have jarred Lara (Lara Croft, that’s who that is, Sara thought) from her halting breaths and struggles against crying. Now she spoke in a refined, cut-glass accent that seemed quite unlike her, but very in keeping with the aristocratic face underneath the runny mascara.

“I’m being beastly again. Do you want some?”

“Want som—” Before Sara could even ask, Croft shoved a forkful of chocolate into her mouth.

“See? I can share.” And Croft went back to vivisecting the cake. “So I meet this guy. A blueblood, of course. Slimy, rotten gits, the lot of us. But he seemed okay. And it’s nice to have a little company once in a while. I’m not lonely, you know, but often times I am alone, so there’s some variety in a spot of tea with someone who isn’t in the game. You don’t have to worry about him trying to kill you or seducing you only to get his hands on your treasure map or being an absolute magnificent fuck and then getting killed by a caiman after you’d just decided you could have him up your arse! How’s the cake?”

“It’s good!” Sara was quick to assure her, mouth full, because the cake was so rich she had to chew it into compliance before swallowing.

Croft dug up another forkful. “Where was I?”

“Anal sex.”

Croft popped another helping of cake into Sara’s mouth. “No, that was another fellow. I can’t tell you about him. He was MI-6. No, this was Jeffrey. He was just an aristo. You know the type. Etonian. Overeducated. A fop, really. But nice. He made me laugh. And I knew where I stood with him. We’d merge our estates and go riding together and I’d pop out little Britons for him to carry on both our lineages. I’m not saying he got me, Lord no, but he made an effort. He said he wouldn’t even mind if I kept going on expeditions. He encouraged it, actually. He’d accompany me to the closest four-star hotel to my destination and wait there for me. That was going to be our honeymoon. I would go looking for the fourth of the Seven Cities of Gold and he would wait up for me, doing a piece on the Indigenous weavers in the area. He was a journalist, you know. Well, he had a blog. I need some wine.”

She shoved the cake box into Sara’s lap. Sara struggled to secure it while also needing to hit her turn signal, so she drove with one hand on the wheel and the other going cake box, turn signal, cake box, turning the steering wheel, cake box again, hitting the turn signal off because it wasn’t enough of a turn to make her shitty old car eighty-six the turn signal automatically.

Then Croft had the wine bottle up in the front seat with them. She grabbed the cork between her teeth and actually wrenched it right out of the bottleneck.

Sorry about your husband, Sara thought, but at least you don’t have to worry about your dentist.

Croft offered the wine bottle to her.

“I’m driving,” Sara said.

“Too right. You stick with the cake,” Croft said, and slashed at the cake with her fork.

It was in Sara’s lap at present. It wasn’t the first time a woman had swung at her there with a length of plastic, but it was the first time Sara had feared a clitoridectomy.

Croft put in the cake ball gag and continued her story while Sara tried in vain to chew. “Not so bad, is it? Just a big slumber party when you think about it. And the sex was decent. Nothing spectacular, but it’s not like I’d ever cared enough about that to really put in the effort to snare a great lover. He went down on me. That’s a lot to ask for an Eton man. So fuck it, let’s get married. Maybe we’ll even do the kiddie thing. How bad can it be, right? It’s the way of things, the culture. All that bloody time spent studying the cultures of polly-woggies living in wig-wams, why shouldn’t I pay a little homage to my own culture? What am I, anyway? Some sort of xenophile? No! No! I’m going to do my duty! Just like all my mothers and my fathers did before me… my forefathers… there’ve been more than four, don’t get me wrong…”

She socked back a long pull from the bottle.

“And hey! Long as you’re getting married, why not make a top bloody show of it? Let everyone show off how much they love you! International woman of mystery! St. Patrick’s Cathedral! Have the 9/11 bishop perform the ceremony! Listen to a hymn from the National Children’s Chorus! Wear a wedding dress that got its own supplement in the New York Times! You know the underwear I have on under this? It’s insured for half a million pounds. Jeffrey had to sign a contract not to rip any of it of me! And you know what he tells me right before the ceremony?”

Sara sighed. She knew where this was going. “He cheated on you.”

Croft shook her head. “He’s having an operation to cut his penis off.”

Sara had not known where this was going.