Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [112]
“I was being hypothetical!” I shouted over the laughter. Then I downed the rest of my nasty plastic jug vodka.
“Let's play a game!” Tanu suddenly proposed, much to my relief.
“POKER!” shouted ALF and Pepe simultaneously, which delighted them both to no end.
“I'm so sick of Hold 'Em,” Kazuko said, referring to the tournaments that have become a significant part of social life on campus. “Let's play a girl game.”
ALF and Pepe looked at each other for a split second before responding, again, in unison. “STRIP POKER!”
“Forget it,” replied all the females in the room.
“Beirut?” suggested ALF.
Kazuko yawned, then addressed the ladies. “You'd think these boys would've gotten beer pong out of their system in high school.”
“How about Shut Up and Drink!?” ALF suggested.
“How do you play that?” Bridget asked.
“You shuffle a deck of cards. You take one off the top. If you can read what it is, you do a shot.”
“I don't get it,” Bridget said.
“You keep taking cards and doing shots until you can't read the card anymore.”
“Or until you die of alcohol poisoning,” Pepe added.
“Or that,” ALF concurred.
“Let's play Truth or Dare!” Bridget offered.
Her suggestion was met with a chorus of excited oooooohs. Self-conscious regression is very popular among otherwise sophisticated college types. Nowhere is adultescence more popular than in Manhattan, where everyone's got the jihad jitters. This goes double when cheap alcohol is involved.
But I had another idea. A better idea. The best of all.
“Why don't we just cut to the chase and play Spin the Bottle?”
“What do you mean ‘cut to the chase'?” Bridget asked.
“Well, Truth or Dare is really all about kissing,” I said.
“Go on,” Pepe said.
“Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about.”
“We don't know what you're talking about,” the room said simultaneously (or at least it seemed so at the time).
“Okay. You start off with nonkissing-related Truths or Dares. Like, ‘Have you ever run outside naked?' Or, ‘I dare you to run outside naked.' But that's just so you don't seem too eager. Because all everyone is really thinking about is kissing. As in, ‘Who in the room do you want to kiss?' Or, ‘I dare you to kiss so-and-so.' It always goes that way. Always! So why don't we just skip over the preliminaries and just play Spin the Bottle, which is all about kissing.”
The room was silent.
“She's right, you know,” Pepe said.
“She really is,” Bridget said.
And then the room got quiet again and my body buzzed with anticipation.
“Well,” Kieran said.
He picked up an unopened bottle from the bag and pointed it in my direction. He flip-flopped toward me, framed my cheeks with his hands, and gave me a delicate kiss on the lips.
“How was that?” he asked, his lips lingering on mine, tickling me with his words.
It was a kiss that left me wanting more. But that's not what I told him.
“There was one thing I forgot to mention about Truth or Dare and kissing,” I said, still pressed against him.
“And what's that?”
I pulled away so I could whisper in his ear. “It's really about fucking.”
He reared back in astonishment before saying, “That's . . . so . . .”
“What?”
“True.”
I can't say I have any clue what the rest of the room was doing during this exchange, because I wasn't paying attention. I can only suspect that they were doing what I would have done in the same situation, which is make silent, immature, “OH MY GOD!” hand gestures behind our backs because I knew what was going to happen next—SEX!!!—just as Bridget had predicted. This automatically put us in an embarrassing situation because when everyone knows you're rushing off to hit it, there's a certain pressure to make it really hot because you already know that they will ask you for details the morning after, something they feel at liberty to do since you so publicly made your coital intentions known.
But this sex was not hot.
Oh no, it was not.
I'll spare you the inelegant in-the-act details. But here's a watershed moment:
Kieran slipped off his boxers.
“Oh my God!”
“What?”
“I've never seen one before!”
“You've never