Page 1 of Desserts for Stressed People

Chapter1

The Beginning of the End

I read somewherethat successful people adjust their perspective when life throws them a curveball, and I generally think of myself as a pretty successful person. But I guess, just this once, I’m okay with being acompletefailure.

The skin of my face throbs between my hands, like a million needles are poking through each pore. Clutching my chest, I try to get my heart to slow down, or else I’ll seriously feel sick. Actually, I’ll probably vomit anyway.

Bringing a hand to cup my mouth, I inhale and exhale deeply. Uneaten food sits on my tray and people are eating all around me, the smells of beef, tomato sauce, and garlic mixing until my nausea hits a new peak.

“Drink some water,” Emma says as she slides my glass closer. Though I grab it, I don’t think I can force anything down right now, solid or liquid.

“Are you—are you sure?” I ask. If I had the strength to hold my head up to look at her, I know what I’d find. A reprimanding stare with a hint of derision and just as much hurt. Emma is my best friend, after all. Whatever hurts me tears her to shreds too.

“You saw it yourself, Heaven,” she whispers.

The softness in her voice pushes me to meet her baby-blue eyes, and as soon as I do, tears threaten to fall down my cheeks with violence. I’m one wrong movement away from bursting into a sobbing mess in the office cafeteria.

She’s right. I saw it. It was as clear as day in the screenshot she just showed me. Still, my brain struggles to make sense of it all, to put into focus my new reality. To accept that something happened—something far out of my control—and now, my life will never be the same again. All the plans, the future I envisioned. It’s all gone down the drain.

“Don’t do that,” she mumbles, tucking strands of sunset blonde hair behind her ears.

“Do what?”

She rolls her round eyes, then her lips tense and become such thin lines that I struggle to reconcile it with how full they usually are. “That. Wonder where it all went wrong. Whatever you did to turn your boyfriend into a jackass.” She scoffs, looking around. “He was always a jackass. You just never noticed.”

Maybe she’s right. Maybe Alex was always scum, and I refused to see it. Maybe I was too blindly in love to acknowledge it. And maybe, at some point, that blind love turned into blind trust. Trust that was obviously misplaced.

“What do I do...” I whisper.

“You dump his sorry ass,” she says. I could have seen it coming. “Then you run him over. Splat him like a bug over the crosswalk. Then you take his corpse and—”

“Em.” I raise my hand to shush her. She’s already in the anger stage, because she had last night to process it. But I’m still at the grieving stage. At the part of this in which all our moments together play in front of my eyes like a sad sepia-toned slideshow with sappy music in the background.

It just doesn’t make any sense. Why would he do this? Except...except maybe it does make sense. Maybe it’s what makes the most sense.

Alex is cheating on me.

The more I think about it, the more I realize I’ve been oblivious to what was right in front of me. How I’ve seen him pick up his phone and bring it with him, even if he was moving from the couch to the fridge, chuckling with a streak of blush emerging across his cheeks. All the late meetings he’s been to, football that always lasted way too long on Friday nights, the lack of any physical contact between us over the last few months.

I glance at the screenshot on Emma’s phone, still turned to me on the table. The piercing dark blue eyes looking back at me are the same I turned to last night in bed, when I wished my boyfriend sweet dreams.

Alex D., looking for one-time-only hookups.

That’s what my boyfriend wrote on the internet. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what girls see when they swipe right on my boyfriend.

Apparently, that’s how you express interest on this app. Swiping right. My dating life has been exclusively off the internet, and most of it, with Alex himself, but Emma briefly explained it to me. RadaR is some revolutionary app for hookups she downloaded a couple of days back.

“Heaven?” Emma calls. It sounds far away, white noise in the background, and everything in my line of sight is blurred but her phone. Alex’s oval face, his shapely brows, the short sandy blond hair. The tiny scar over his left temple from his hockey years, the playfulness in his smile. They’re all reminders of memories, moments, of a person who no longer exists. He’s different now. Someone I don’t know.

“Heaven? Shit, maybe I shouldn’t have told you at work.”

When I meet Emma’s gaze again, she points at the glass of water. After I’ve taken a long sip, I’m even queasier, but at least my throat isn’t raspy anymore—it doesn’t feel like I’m chewing sand. “How could he do this?” I mumble. “Why would he?”

“Because you two have been unhappy for years.” She holds her manicured hand over mine, and with a sigh, sets her right fist on the table. “And he’s too much of a coward to just come out and say that he doesn’t love you anymore. So...” She shrugs.

So, he went behind my back and has been cheating on me. Who knows how long this has been going on for. Six months? A year? Was he cheating on me on our last anniversary, when we spent a weekend at that romantic spa? Had he already betrayed me when we went to his parents’ place a couple of months ago, and I withstood hours of his mom talking about babies?

For sure, it’s been going on for at least a month, because that’s when Emma told me she saw him come out of a hotel with a blonde woman. “Do you think that’s where he found that woman you saw him with? On RadaR?”

---