“Truth,” he said without hesitation.
I offered a silent prayer to whoever was listening, grateful he hadn’t dared me yet. I wasn’t ready for that battlefield.
“Why did you kiss me when no one was watching?”
I saw the muscles in his jaw twitch like he wanted to swallow the question whole. Like he hated himself for not seeing it coming.
“Because I can,” he said, voice scraping low and thick. “You’re my wife.”
“Fake wife,” I reminded him, needing to hear the boundary drawn, even as my body screamed to cross it.
“Still doesn’t mean I can’t pretend you’re mine in the moments that count.”
His words hit deeper than they should have, deeper than anything fake had any right to go.
Our half-eaten sandwiches sat abandoned between us, growing cold and forgotten as something hotter, more dangerous, crackled in the air.
“Truth or dare?” he asked, more animated this time, like he couldn’t wait to see how much further we could push.
Still too chickenshit for a dare, I clung to what little armor I had.
“Truth.”
“Have you ever been sober when you hooked up with a guy?”
The question sliced through the space between us, brutal and unflinching. Memories flashed behind my eyes—memories I buried under bottles and pills and blackout nights. I didn’t want to explain. I didn’t want him to see me like that. So I said, “No.”
He flinched—an almost imperceptible jerk of his shoulders—but I bulldozed past it before the pity could settle between us.
“Truth or dare?” I asked.
“Truth,” he said again.
Shit. I was hoping he’d dare me, force the tension into action, force this unbearable pull to break.
“What are you thinking right now?”
The words barely left my mouth before he answered, his voice dropping an octave.
“That I want to fuck you on this kitchen floor right now, right here, so I’m the first guy to fuck you sober and one that you will never forget.”
The air was ripped from my lungs.
Holy shit.
My stomach flipped and kept flipping, my skin breaking into a fine sheen of sweat, heat radiating between us in suffocating waves.
“Truth or dare,” he nearly growled, the words crackling with restraint he was moments from losing.
“Dare,” I whispered, voice thick with something too big to name.
“I dare you to suck my cock.”
His green eyes burned molten, feral, and consuming. The challenge in them made my thighs clench together involuntarily. Anxiety spiked, sharp and dizzying, but underneath it was something worse—need. Pure, aching, desperate need. With wobblylegs, I pushed up from my chair, heart hammering against my ribs, every step toward him a free fall.
“I’m just kidding, sit back down,” he said with a light laugh, the edges of it fraying when he saw I wasn’t stopping.
“Mel, I’m serious. I was just fucking with you. You don’t have to do this.”
