Page 139 of Arctic Titans of Northwood U: Volume 3

“What do you want to play?” I asked, quietly thankful that he hadn’t simply jumped into kissing and the rest of it. It had been easier last weekend. Seeing him for the first time in a year had unlocked something wild in me. Besides, we had met at the prologue to a frat orgy. It wasn’t exactly the place for catching up and creating the mood.

This, though, was different. And that’s what made me nervous. This was just us, intimate, familiar, yet so foreign to one another that it seemed like an unbridgeable gap.

“Go Fish?” Damon proposed.

“Seriously?”

“Sure,” he said. He wasn’t kidding. “Here are the rules.”

“I know how to play it,” I said, taking the deck out of its worn pack and starting to shuffle.

Damon chuckled. “Extra rules, I mean. Each round, the loser takes something off.”

I pretended to be skeptical, but the truth was that it made my heart beat a little faster.

“Your blush says yes,” Damon said.

“I hate you,” I muttered, shuffling the deck and dealing the cards.

“Nah, you really don’t.”

He was right. I didn’t. I dealt the cards and put the deck in the middle. He picked a pair and set it down, then sorted the rest of his cards while I looked at my mismatched hand. “Got any aces?” I asked, wondering if socks counted separately or together.

“Go fish,” he said, his lips quivering on the verge of a smile. He could already see me undressing.

I picked up a card, and it was a seven.

“Remember how we used to pretend we were in Vegas?” Damon asked. “Got queens?”

I bit off a curse and handed him a queen. He paired them up and put them down. “But none of us knew how to play any of the gambling games.”

“So we played this instead,” I said, remembering it pretty vividly.

He drew another card and grinned, ridding himself of two more. The game went on with Damon pairing up two more queens and two more aces. I managed to get a pair of jacks, but Damon was leading by a lot.

And when we ran out of cards, the difference was clear without having to count the cards.

“Off,” Damon declared, lifting his mug in a toast. “Take something off.”

I stripped one sock, and for the answer to my earlier question when Damon sucked his teeth and said they went in pairs.

“I’ve got two of them,” I protested.

“You’d never put on one sock and go for a run,” Damon said. “Therefore, they go together.”

I took off the other one and shuffled the deck. The wine went easily, and Damon poured a little more into my mug.

The second round was quicker. I’d fallen back into the old days of playing the game, but I still had no luck. There was no skill involved, of course, only an overthinking mind that somehow always got it wrong.

Damon laughed loudly when I miserably lost the second round. “I’m enjoying this more now that we’re all grown up.”

I lifted my hoodie over my head and tossed it on the chair, shrugging. The room was warm, and Damon’s gaze seared me as it passed over my bare torso.

When my luck finally turned on the next game, Damon had the nerve to take his jacket off and remain fully clothed.

“Are you kidding me?” I asked. “I didn’t have a jacket.”

“How’s that my fault?” he cried. “I was smart in how I dressed.”