“Awesome,” Su-Lin says. “So we’ve gotTate, Emily, and Brendan—”
Jason raises a long arm in the air. “I’m in!” Jane sets down her drink and declares the same.
“Okay.” Su-Lin pretends to scan the room.Those who have neither fled nor volunteered look at their drinks, at the floor, anywhere but at Su-Lin. “Maren!” she says. “How about you?”
Maren pauses with a pretzel halfway to her mouth. “Me?” She looks shocked that Su-Lin remembers her name.
“Sure,” Su-Lin says. “That’ll be just enough people.”
“I’m out,”Tate says. “I’ve seen the length of Jason’s arms. He’s got the whole board in his wingspan.”
“Not to mention the size of his hands,” Emily says.
Oh my god. Did she seriously just say that?
Across the room, I see Jason smile.
“Okay!” Su-Lin says, though it comes out too loud. “Places, everyone!”
Jane sidles up to Su-Lin and gestures to the board, which the crowd has managed to clear. Mostly. “Let me spin,” Jane says. “It’s your game. You should get to play.”
I let out a breath of relief. I really don’t want to end up straddling Jane in that outfit. I don’t want to be a jerk, and of course women can wear whatever they want, but there are just some positions I’d rather not be in with women who I’m not sleeping with who are barely dressed, and all of them become substantially more likely on aTwister mat.
Maren approaches the mat warily, while Su-Lin tries to gently suggest that she doesn’t want to deprive Jane of the honor of playing. I’m not sure if she’s just hoping having two possible girls I could get in a compromising position with is better than one, but I do gesture to Maren to come stand by me. We each put our feet on two of the dots on one of the smaller edges of the mat.
“I’m not drunk enough for this,” Maren says.
I smile. “Me neither.”
Su-Lin’s “no-really” arguments are getting increasingly high-pitched, and Jane increasingly (and insistently) benevolent as she says that she’d really,reallylike to let Su-Lin play. My guess is she wisely decided she doesn’t want to playTwister in her Faye Valentine outfit.
“Come on, Su-Lin,” I say. “Play with us.”
Su-Lin shoots me a death glare. I’m sure I’m going to hear all about this betrayal later, but I really want to get this over with. Playing with Su-Lin has its own compromising-position risks—though she’s relatively covered up in jeans and a tank top—but she’s set on getting me all tangled up with somebody else, so she’ll be avoiding me as much as possible.
Jason and Emily have taken the two pairs of dots on the side opposite Maren and me, while everyone else in the room is grabbing more drinks and settling in to watch. Su-Lin grudgingly takes up position on the dots around the corner from Jason. She’s smiling, and probably no one else will notice, but I can see how tense she is. I’m pretty sure the plan was for her to cheat, calling out limbs and colors that would get me appropriately tangled up with Maren.
I can’t say I’m sad if that part of the plan is a bust.
Jane calls out left hand blue, then right hand green, and we maneuver around the mat, trying to get our limbs on the appropriate spots without either falling or groping each other inappropriately.This becomes harder than it sounds when Su-Lin is forced to stretch across the mat in my direction to reach a blue dot with her left foot, and then I have to reach over her to get a yellow dot with my left hand. She ends up mostly underneath me, so that I’m basically mounting her doggie-style on theTwister mat. In front of everyone.
Yep, this was the risk. And oh my god, I’m glad I’m wearing tight jeans.
“Right foot blue!” Jane calls.
“Our right feet are on blue,” Su-Lin grumbles back.
I look down at the back of her head. My achilles tendon is cramping up, and I look back to see Maren perched on four dots in the corner, not tangling with anyone. She has clearly made better limb placement choices than I have.
“Right hand red!” Jane calls, and I groan and reach for the nearest red dot that won’t cause me to topple forward onto Su-Lin and squash her flat.That one gets taken immediately by Jason—who I note is mostly on top of Emily, though she’s doing a crab-walk position, so they look like they’re ready to start dry humping right there on the mat.
By the intense way they’re staring into each others’ eyes, I think they just might.
I groan again and reach for the next red dot, glad that Su-Lin can’t see Emily and Jason staring at each other.Tate is on the other side of the room talking to some girl in a red cocktail dress, so I’m pretty sure he hasn’t even noticed.
I get my hand on the red dot—but damn, Emily is right about the size of Jason’s hands.The dot he stole from me is almost entirely concealed.To stretch this far, my body sinks a bit onto Su-Lin’s.
Now I’m pressed against her ass, and I know she can feel exactly the reaction my body is having to being on top of her.
