Truth or Dare

  Truth or Dare

  It’s a long weekend among six friends whose lives have intertwined through years of U-Hauls and regrets, almosts and what-ifs. As that poorly timed snowstorm whirls into town, it threatens to kick pent-up desires and tightly held secrets over the edge—especially for Jessie, who can’t stop thinking about her best friend Hadley.

  Meanwhile Brie’s past overshadows her present-day, and the Lasleys just hope to enjoy their much-anticipated wedding anniversary. If everyone would just keep it together for the next few days, and if this snow would taper off, they just might pull off Sunday’s celebration. Drama free.

  Truth or Dare

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  Truth or Dare

  © 2018 By C. Spencer. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13:978-1-63555-147-1

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, NY 12185

  First Edition: March 2018

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Ruth Sternglantz

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Design by Tammy Seidick

  Acknowledgments

  I began writing fiction assuming not a soul would read it. In fact, I’m not sure if I wanted anyone to. I just hoped to tell a story about a bunch of friends I wished I had topped with romance and regrets and that good kind of angst that comes along for the ride. And that story somehow made it to you. The fact that you chose to pick up this book means more than you’ll ever know.

  The truth is, though, this book represents the culmination of talent, hard work, and advice offered by so many amazing people. First, I am exceedingly grateful for Ruth Sternglantz, an editor extraordinaire, for all of the time, brilliance, and creativity she put into this. Her ideas were essential to making Truth or Dare extra better in every single way. I’m also grateful for established authors for welcoming me, along with Bold Strokes Books and the entire team for saying yes and offering this amazing venue specifically for LGBT publication. And I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my daughter, who cannot read this but offered so much encouragement—not to mention tips on how to use a mobile phone since I don’t own one.

  A special debt of gratitude goes to my wife for reading and suggesting and (even) disagreeing—and always saying yes, you can if I dare say I can’t. I love you.

  To all of life’s perfectly imperfect mishaps.

  Thursday

  Chapter One: Jessie

  Catholic girls are easy to pin. They’re either buttoned to the chin (translation: don’t bother) or they have a regular booty call programmed into their phones and visit confessional to repent every Sunday, religiously. I prefer the latter.

  That’s what brought me to this campus. Her building’s just ahead past another group of stressed-out undergraduates lugging North Face backpacks and travel mugs. The snow has just started to come down, and it’s crunching with each step I take. It’s a decent beat given I’m still humming that tune I heard two days ago and wishing I could replace it with something better.

  The main doors ask for a badge after hours, but they’re unlocked now. I pass the elevator and take the wide stairs, which impress me with their marble, exiting into a hall that echoes. Door after door touts a new name, each engraved in brown plastic and ending in PhD. I’m surprised I fit in. I expected this place to be all corduroy; it’s not.

  I hear her in someone’s office and they’re talking about a mass spectrometer. I go unnoticed and wait outside, wandering. Across the hall is a lecture, and it’s brash like a loudspeaker.

  The airs of academia: that idealism and disappointment.

  As soon as her conversation enters the doorway and hallway, I get that lingering look. It means I’m glad to see you. It means I’ll be right with you. She looks amazing. Her hair’s inelegant at the collarbone, and freckles flush that nude complexion left over from her stay in Barcelona. I’m picturing her in a bikini under a beach umbrella, feet tucked in heated sand. It’s a nice fantasy right now in twenty-eight degree weather.

  As I admire her small build, we share too many distracted glances. Finally I catch their good-byes and I can’t help but notice how soft her tone is when she greets me. “Jessie Miles.” It’s not the same as the voice I heard a minute ago. “Your hair.”

  “I know. It’s a mess,” I tell her. “It’s really starting to come down out there.”

  She takes me down a hall with walls covered in posters and ads for graduate programs. She’s walking like we don’t know each other. Eventually we reach her name plaque. She keys the door, and I follow her in. She shuts it.

  Inside shades are wide open letting overcast shine its way through. Snow tries to cloak her mountain view.

  “Early day?” I want to know. With every other school in town canceled, I’m surprised higher education isn’t as well.

  She tugs the cord on a green lamp. That unusable desk squeezes into a corner.

  “Class is canceled tomorrow. It screws up my entire lab schedule.” It’s more than uptight—she’s bordering on irate. “I’ll get my things.”

  The office has no floor space. It’s clean but paper littered with books and binders towering above us. I’m thinking it beats her bedroom with that crucifix staring down over the door frame.

  She does this thing where she stands on tiptoe to reach for something. I’m watching the muscles in her calves flex. It’s up there with that librarian…When was that? She’s kind of a contradiction like that, which is what I get into. I push into her, and she sinks down into my arms. Determination’s written all over her face.

  “Why do you do this to me?” I ask. She’s just giving me this look of indifference. But this kiss is shameless, which is why I’m beginning to imagine that taste between her legs. I’d rather be there. That’s where my hand goes.

  “You’re hot, you know that?”

  And this look is why she’s naturally mistaken for pious, haughty. It doesn’t matter to me. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s why I’m drawn to her. Besides, her touch is quite the opposite. It’s more timid, sensual. I don’t have to understand her, do I?

  She’s exhaling thick and heavy between my lips as we make our way to that door and I back her up against it. I slide my hand up her blouse.

  “I’ll get fired,” I hear.

  “The perks of tenure,” I mumble. I love when she feigns virtue.

  She seems torn or trapped but more overindulgent than anything else. She tends to do everything in excess. Drinking. Learning. This. That’s how she’s always been with me.

  When I hike her skirt, she’s not resisting anymore.

  “I don’t quite have tenure yet,” she tries to say.

  The hem of this blouse untucks too easily and the arch of her back makes everything that much more accessible. I’m pinching around her back and thinking, Who wears this to work? It’s sheer, this mesh, and I let it fall aside and off her shoulder.

  And I’m tracing tan lines.

  The next time I kiss her, it’s weaker but feverish. I move past the hem of her skirt and glide a palm under and behind elastic
. She’s too driven without me, too pent up, and I’m thinking it’s been far too long (at least that’s how she feels) when I slip two fingers inside her. She’s slick.

  It’s always that first moan, isn’t it, when she gets what she wants. It’s merciless. It’s the loudest one. Someone’s going to hear in the hallway, but she’s forgotten already.

  Instead she glides against my fingers—rigid, unyielding, oblivious. I like when she gets like this, warm and throbbing, legs parted, swelling and tightening around my knuckles. I’m using hips to push my fingers deeper. When I look over again, her cheeks are flushed, and I watch as she fades into soft, to serene, and then to absolutely uninhibited. Her breath like steam on my cheek and I need more and so does she. I want trembling. Shuddering. Disheveled. I want painfully spent and hunched over. Clinging to me. I want to bolster her up so she doesn’t fall down. And I’m thinking about that small desk over there, but the wall’s fine once I can get this off her.

  By the time I head out, before I even hit the lot, I get a text. Make that two. I file both under maybe next month if I’m lucky. Because it’s five at night and I need a bite before heading home. My cooking skills are, to put it mildly, sub-amateur. That’s not to say I’m amateur everywhere. Trust me on that. It’s just that food prep was never a zone I could master. I do appreciate good food, though. Home cooked, take-out, gourmet, grill. I’m not all that discriminating. As long as it’s a meal that someone else has prepared.

  In fact, I have this nostalgic peculiarity about me. I recall people by the way they cook, what they cook, why they cook, how they cook. Sometimes I remember the food and not her name.

  Take Elaine for instance. We lasted a pretty long time—four weeks. Elaine was a bona fide vegetarian, which conjures images of tofu to some. But she never used tofu. Ever. Despised people who automatically assumed she ate tofu just because she was vegetarian, so she stopped talking about it altogether. If you ask me, she was a culinary artist, her spices and sauces. She made a mad black-bean burger with sweet potato fries and, once in a while, I’m tempted to ring her up just for one of those meals. At least my stomach is. Her current girlfriend might not appreciate that. For anyone to convert a meat lover like myself into a proud bean-burger eater is extraordinary. She did that.

  That breakup was tough. I mean, it was cruel enough losing the conversations, the Friday nights, and the sex. But I also lost her cuisine, and no two women cook quite alike.

  And who doesn’t like watching a woman cook? The flex of her forearm as that blade comes down. When the back of her wrist brushes her forehead because every fingertip is covered and untouchable. How feminine her fingers look when they pinch.

  I met Sophia before I broke up with Elaine. Full disclosure, they did overlap a few days. But my short-lived romance with Sophia was bound to end if only for the fact that I could not eat the sheer quantity of food she served. Her enchiladas, though, with hot Spanish rice and her red sauce. Mercy. I don’t know if anyone, even Sophia, could’ve maintained that body eating like that for the long term.

  Lynn didn’t cook. Not at all. Since I didn’t cook either, we survived for two full weeks on deli sandwiches with a wide assortment of cheeses and crackers, fruits and berries, nuts and breads. I’m keen on those fresh bakery rolls and baguettes. Ciabatta. Cheese breads. With Lynn, I learned to appreciate the nutritional benefits of the almond and the vast diversity of apples—from Gala to Empire. I heard she married a chef. Hats off to her.

  I met Ella shortly after that split. She runs the bakery downtown, with partial credit to yours truly, and she’s in happily married bliss. Even with too many years’ distance, I’m still not ready to resurface her. After Ella, I didn’t get too serious with anyone—not that I was alone, mind you.

  Then came Alicia, my last girlfriend. She made me lose interest in nourishment altogether, of the food variety at least. Take the time she greeted me in nothing more than her twenty-four-year-old splendor topped with a strappy tank top and loose-fitting boxer shorts embellished in teeny tiny red hearts. She fed me Swiss chocolate that evening, served the sweetest red wine, and the rest of that night could have gone down in history.

  And that it did. I called it quits two weeks ago. I’m not sure if that’s registered with her yet, given her text bombs today, but it will.

  Tonight, without a personal chef, I’m fending for myself. And I’ve decided to grab a quick bite out before the worst of this snowstorm hits and I’m holed up in my tiny studio, all by my lonesome. I know, woe is me.

  To this end, I spot the perfect parking spot right up front at Hops Brewery and walk in, helmet in hand. I sit at one of those two-seater wooden tables. It’s packed wall-to-wall with regulars as well as plenty of unfamiliars.

  This place is low lit and appealing, brightened by mini lamps and a few open laptops. The kind of lighting you pray for at two a.m. after a few pints too many. Bookshelves are filled with creased paperbacks that attract the geeked-up literary crowd from nearby colleges. A sunken section in the rear seats the see-and-be-seens in firm leather chairs where they sip cappuccino or tea or one of Hops’ infamous custom ales.

  The wall beside my table is a floor-to-ceiling chalkboard with a menu written out by hand. All of that dusty script spans the entire length of the room, from the front windows to the bar in the far rear. A bar that’s always crammed, even on a slow night like this.

  I rest my boots on the opposite chair. And I already know what I want.

  After a glance at a new text that rattles my phone, I slip it back on the table without a response. It’s just Alicia. Again.

  Hadley creaks the floor as she ambles over, Chapstick lipped, recently cropped Bobby Brady hair, black-rimmed glasses, cute plaid skirt, and a powder blue oxford shirt buttoned conservatively.

  “Back again?”

  “I know. This is getting to be a bad habit. You look pretty thin staffed tonight. Why are you out here?”

  This is the only friendship I haven’t ruined by taking things too far.

  “I’m down three servers. Of course it was three of my best. They couldn’t make it, so here I am. On the floor.”

  And that prudence has earned me the ultimate best friend. I’m talking decades long. She and I go way back. We’re like glue.

  “Could be worse. Job security.”

  “I know. I’m off in a few hours,” she tells me. “The usual?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Stay for dessert. Look at you. You’re too skinny.”

  “Hey, hey—I’m working out.”

  “Yeah, yeah—you’re working out.”

  “It’s stress.”

  “Can you give me some?”

  “Some what,” I ask, admittedly flirtatiously.

  “Some of your appetite-sucking stress.”

  “You don’t need it.”

  She rolls her eyes, changing the subject. “Looks awful out there.”

  She’s chewing cinnamon gum. I can actually smell it over the aroma of grilled burgers.

  “That would be why I’m in here.”

  And she’s not-so-subtly eyeing my dripping boots and the sopped jeans I’ve propped on a chair. I take the hint, settling my feet on the floor.

  Then she asks, “Think I’ll get home?”

  “So far, so good. I made it. On my bike at that.”

  “Why on earth are you still riding that thing?”

  “My truck’s on its last leg. Not much good that’ll do me.”

  “Take it in.”

  “Dude,” I say. “We don’t all make what you make.” Over my water glass, my gaze trails a twosome.

  “How’s Alicia?”

  “Fine.”

  “She stopped by the other night. I guess you had a late shift or something?”

  “I did.”

  “Is that who’s texting you?”

  “Possibly.”

  Hadley flattens a palm softly on the table and whispers, “You know? You’re way too good for her.” Her voice is high, una
ssuming.

  I lift my shoulders.

  “I swear I just don’t trust her.”

  If you only knew the half of it, I think.

  The lady at the next table raises a finger, catching Hadley’s eye. “Shouldn’t be long,” she tells me. It’s not until she darts away that I realize I was distracting her from a busy shift, which is a tad embarrassing. After her quiet exchange a seat over, I watch those hips curve around the bar to enter my order.

  Let me pause right here to say that the bar is wicked. Like the kind you’d find at some gilded hotel or something—carved wood and glass shelving. I’d probably eat here just for the atmosphere.

  There’s a takeout counter near the bar where a fidgety girl waits to pay and pick up, dark somber hair covering her eyes. She’s hard to miss, like some eighties British transplant. A little Echo & The Bunnymen. A little Dr. Martens. She sports nothing now, though she can’t be older than twenty.

  I drop my head to thumb through messages, not because I want to but because I have to. Her last one reads, Miss you. That just angers me. Until I catch one from my professor earlier today.

  A happy couple pushes in making a loud ruckus. They bring another gush of cold air in along with them, both hunched in laughter and slightly out of breath. I watch as one takes the other’s coat and hangs it. Then she pulls her own down over her wrist. They share a kiss. How cute is that?

  It’s not. So I go back to my phone, which I’ve hidden under the table rim, shifting to an incoming text. I need 2 C U. Guess who?

  “Veggie burger and sweet potato fries with a side of mayo,” Hadley announces, startling me for a second. I set my phone down, covering the screen. Okay, that looks suspicious but it’s not meant to be. She’ll just lecture me. She sets a tall glass of water in front of me and picks up the empty one. The water-stained coaster makes me smile. Keep Calm and Move On. How utterly appropriate.