One Little Dare

by Whitney Barbetti

I tucked a strand of her hair behind an ear. “Do you think I’m afraid of someone knowing? You can tell whoever you want. I’m not embarrassed by it.”

  She sighed and leaned in to press her face to my chest. “It seems unreal that I’ve known you all of, what, five hours?”

  “Five hours and ten minutes, if you count the night we met.”

  I felt the curve of her lips against my shirt. “Five hours and ten minutes,” she amended. “And yet, I feel like I know you.”

  I wrapped an arm around her waist and rocked back and forth with her along to the beat of the music. “I know. I don’t even know your hopes and dreams.”

  “Oh, blah,” she said. “Hopes and dreams are overrated.”

  “What would you rather learn? My favorite color? I told you where I worked, but I still don’t know what you do.”

  “I teach online classes to kids overseas. I help them with English.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s not a long-term thing.” She moved closer, our bodies flush as we rocked along to the song. “Just until I figure things out. I’m living temporarily with my parents.” She winced. “I got my degree two years ago and I still don’t know what to do. Isn’t that pathetic?”

  “No,” I replied immediately. In so many ways, she reminded me of Will. Even after graduating and receiving his degree, he had worked freelance gigs exclusively, not wanting to be tied down or committed to any one thing. “What’s your degree?”

  “Computer science,” she said. At my questioning look, she elaborated. “I have a double minor in statistics and sociology.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Don’t sound so impressed,” she said, reading my mind.

  “Sorry, but a major and two minors is impressive to me.”

  “Well, you want the truth of it? It was easy. And I know how shitty that sounds.”

  “Shitty?”

  She sighed and leaned into me. My hand came around her back, cradling her close. “Everyone was talking about what they wanted to do with their lives after high school. All my friends. And I couldn’t relate. I’ve never known what I wanted to do. I should. I’m twenty-four. But I have no fucking clue where I want to be six months from now. So, yeah, I got a degree in something that was—on the surface—easy. I’ve always had a knack for math. I planned to go to college, get my degree, and then figure things out.”

  “And you haven’t.”

  She shook her head. “So I’ve got this degree I’m not using, and I don’t know if I’ll ever use it. And I know how many people would kill for a degree. I don’t like to talk about the fact that I have this piece of paper that cost a lot of money that I’m not using. There’s too much pressure around high school kids after they graduate when they’re still such new adults.”

  “Hmm,” I said, listening to her tirade and understanding Will a bit more by it. Had he felt suffocated by the social demands placed on him after high school graduation? I’d brushed it off as him being flighty, but maybe there was something deeper going on. Something I’d never asked him. “So now you teach English to kids online.”

  “Yeah.” She relaxed slightly in my arms. “And maybe six months from now, I won’t be doing that. Who knows? But it works right now, so it’s what I’m doing.”

  I was quiet for a moment, and realized that the song had long since ended, but still we held one another.

  “Hey,” she said, pulling my attention from my thoughts back to her. “We weren’t supposed to talk about our hopes and dreams,” she said after a moment.

  “Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, everyone talks about their hopes and dreams.”

  “And not everyone has this grand plan, these wild hopes and dreams that they’re chasing.”

  “Dreams are overrated. Got it.” Patting the bed, I sat down. “So, if not dreams, what about sharing your tale of woe?”

  “My tale of woe.”

  “Everyone has one. At least by their mid-twenties.”

  She leaned back on the bed, and I followed so that our legs hung off one end and our heads met at the opposite end. With a raise of one eyebrow she said, “Bold of you to assume there’s only one.”

  “Let’s hear ‘em.”

  She opened her mouth like she was going to say something before closing it. “Only if we take turns. Assuming you have a tale of woe yourself.”

  “Bold of you to assume there’s only one,” I repeated her words back to her. “I’ll go first, if you want.”

  “Yes.” She rolled to her side, facing me, cushioning her head with her hands.

  “You want me to get some popcorn or something?” I asked jokingly in response to her eagerness.

  At that, her stomach made a loud sound. We stared at each other for a moment before bursting into laughter. “I guess I am pretty hungry.”

  I pushed myself up onto my elbow and snagged the room service menu on the nightstand.

  “Oh, we don’t need to order room service.”

  But I’d already picked up the receiver and dialed the extension for the kitchen. “What do you want?”

  “Really, Liam—”

  “Cake?”

  A small smile bloomed on her lips. “Okay.”

  I placed the order and turned back to her. “Where were we? Oh, my tale of woe. One of them, at least.”

  “Yep.” She nodded and squirmed as she settled into the billowy soft duvet.

  “When I was five, I tried jumping over a chain-link fence and got caught on the way down on the other side.” I turned so I could show her the Frankenstein scar along my forearm.

  “Whoa.” She dragged her finger down it, her mouth in a little O shape. “That’s pretty gnarly.”

  “It felt pretty gnarly.” She dragged her finger back up the scar and it was if there were dozens of nerve endings along its path. One little finger dragged across my skin and I was itching to touch her. But she’d seemed guarded, so I wanted to get to know her first, allow her to get to know me a bit too.

  We traded our stories from childhood until room service arrived.

  “Champagne,” she said, sitting up on the bed. “I didn’t hear you order it?”

  I turned the bottle so the label was in view. “I called it this.”

  She laughed. “I thought that was a fancy name for whatever you’d ordered.” I poured us each a glass and handed hers over. “We had our first dance, and now we’re having cake?”

  “You called me a romantic. I guess I needed to prove it to myself.”

  She picked up one of the two forks I’d laid on the plate. “Tradition says we are supposed to feed each other, doesn’t it?”

  Picking up my fork, I nodded. After securing a bite to the fork, I held it up and faced her. “Ready?”

  She nodded, bringing the fork close to my mouth. I was so distracted by the parting of her lips that I paid little attention to anything else. Which meant I didn’t see Tori swipe her finger through a glob of frosting before she smeared it across my upper lip.

  She fell back laughing with the piece of cake I’d successfully delivered in her mouth. “Tradition,” she said as I blinked at her.

  I ran my tongue over my upper lip, but it didn’t quite reach all of the frosting that had become a white mustache above my mouth.

  “I’ll get it,” she said, sitting up and crawling over to me.

  I didn’t have a second’s notice before she climbed into my lap, straddling me, and brought that mouth down to mine. My hands found her, gathering the shirt behind her back as her tongue ran in one continuous motion across the frosting on my skin. I had to restrain myself, to stop from flipping her onto her back and kissing her with all of the heat I held for her.

  When her bottom lip grazed the opening of my mouth, I opened to greet her.

  It was slow, languid, like we had all the time in the day, in the week, to enjoy this. To savor one another. She tasted like chocolate and something dark, something inviting.

  And when she emitted the littlest moan into my mouth, it was all I could
do to keep myself from deepening that kiss and pursuing something more with her. I wanted to deepen the kiss. I wanted something more. But more than those things, I wanted this to last longer than tonight.

  Which was why I broke away first, pressing my forehead to hers as I calmed my uneven breathing. “Thanks,” I said, hearing the strain in my own voice.

  “You don’t have to thank me for that.”

  I pulled back and brushed my hand over the side of her face, tucking her hair behind her ears and ending the movement with a gentle tug on her earlobes. “For humoring me.” I looked pointedly at the cake, which had a Tori-fingerprint marred across its otherwise perfect surface.

  “Trust me,” she said, scooting off my lap to grab her glass of champagne, “I’m getting plenty of enjoyment out of it myself.” The tilted her head back to drain the glass and I became mesmerized by the long column of her throat. “I think it’s your turn,” she said, settling back down on the bed like it was perfectly normal for this beautiful creature to drink champagne and eat cake in my bed at nearly four in the morning.

  “My turn?” I asked dumbly.

  “Your tale of woe.”

  I took her in as I laid beside her on the bed. Long, pale lashes brushed the tips of her freckled cheekbones when she blinked. Her blonde hair curled at the temples and her pretty rosy lips smiled while I was quiet.

  “My dad went to jail for murder,” I said. It shocked us both. It wasn’t exactly a conversation I liked to engage in, but for some reason, I wanted to tell her. I don’t know if it was due to the lack of sleep, the way my body bounced from calm to on fire for Tori, or if I was finally doing what Will had wanted me to do for years: open up. Let go.

  “Murder?”

  I nodded at Tori’s question. “I can bet your next question is who.”

  “How old were you?” she asked, surprising me.

  “Ten. Young enough to not understand how to process this information, but old enough to be hyper aware of the stares and whispers I heard behind my back at school.” I tipped my head back in a stretch. “My dad was—is—a piece of a shit. Beat up my mom a bunch when he was home. And when he wasn’t home, he was out cheating on her. One of the nights he left…” I paused and swallowed, the memory vivid and loud. “He had just kicked my mom down the stairs. Her head went through the wall at the bottom. She was knocked out, instantly. And he stood there, doing absolutely nothing. I was ten and half his size, but I grabbed the nearest heavy object I could—an aluminum coffee mug—and threw it at his head.” I rubbed a hand over my face. “I missed.”

  Tori’s hand slid across the duvet until she found mine. I felt each press of her fingers as she opened my hand and slid her fingers across my palm until her fingers rested in the spaces between mine.

  “The coffee mug bounced off the wall and he picked it up, intent on hitting me with it. For the first time, I didn’t duck. I didn’t start crying. I just started yelling. So loud that I knew the neighbors would call our landlord and complain—and he knew it too. So he took off. One week later, his face was on the news. He’d murdered one of his girlfriends. Strangled her.”

  “That’s heavy.” Tori’s hand was warm, reassuring as she squeezed my hand. “Fuck.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How did your mom handle that?”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, picturing my mom the way I always remembered her—brown, frizzy curly hair, eyes so green they made one do a double-take, and smile that could warm even the coldest hearts. Which was probably why my dad had loved her, in his own fucked up way. “She never talked about it—at least not with me. She was strong through it all, but in her own quiet way. If she caught me watching the news during his trial, she’d switch the channel like she was changing channels during a commercial. It was background noise for her, I guess.”

  “She sounds brave.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, with a smile I knew didn’t reach my eyes. “She was.”

  Tori’s eyes changed at my use of ‘was.’ “Did she die?”

  “A few years ago,” I said, nodding. “Cancer. Seemed pretty shitty, after all the bullshit life had handed her. But, just like my dad, she kept it mostly to herself. She changed the subject when her sickness came up.”

  “Liam, I’m so sorry.”

  I took a breath. “Yeah. Sorry, I kind of had a two-for-one there. So, your turn,” I said in a moment of embarrassment, for having turned the conversation so heavily.

  She looked me over, her eyes contemplative. After a moment of quiet, she said, “When I was sixteen, I had a crush on my English teacher. And crushes themselves are innocent enough, but he knew. And…” Her hand in mine went slack and I began to rub circles into her palm. “One thing led to another. I guess we had an affair.”

  I let that sink in a moment. “You were sixteen?”

  She nodded. “He was married.” She cringed. “I didn’t know. And his wife found out. She went crazy on me, keyed my car, slashed my tires, followed me home a few times. And, well, it sucked.”

  That was a lot. And I could see the trauma she still carried from it, the blame she misplaced on herself. “You were sixteen,” I repeated. “And he was your teacher. That’s not an affair. That’s immoral and illegal and a whole host of other shit. That was his fault.”

  “I know,” she said, waving a hand like she was dismissing what I said. “It’s embarrassing. I never even told my best friend.”

  Which told me that she probably hadn’t told school officials. “Have you told anyone?”

  “My dad.” She blew out a breath. “He went over to the teacher’s house and I don’t know what was said, but the teacher resigned, and I never saw him again.”

  “He was never charged.”

  She took in a deep breath. “I had this reputation in high school. People labeled me a slut because I dated a lot.”

  “Everyone dates a lot in high school.”

  “I dated a lot. I didn’t sleep with them all—”

  “It wouldn’t matter if you had.”

  That gave her pause. “Still. I dated a lot. And I didn’t want it getting out that I’d had sex with a teacher.”

  I wanted to protest, to tell her that it wasn’t sex; it was abuse. But I didn’t want to keep interrupting her.

  “So, my dad did whatever he needed to do to protect me. No one knew. I didn’t want to tell Hollis—my best friend. I didn’t want her to think differently of me, I guess. It was easier to keep it to myself.”

  “Was it?” I couldn’t imagine holding onto that kind of secret for eight years.

  “I think…” she said, her hand coming back to life in mine, “that I tell myself things are easy when they’re hard. Because I have this desire to prove to myself that I can make it through them.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t confide in someone.”

  “I did. My dad. And I am, with you.” She gave me a soft smile. “It’s weird, but I think it makes it easier telling you because you have no biases. You didn’t know me in high school.”

  “I wouldn’t say I have no biases,” I said, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I think I have plenty of bias toward one enigmatic woman in particular.”

  “Well, if you’d known me in high school, you’d probably feel different.”

  “Doubtful,” I said. “I’m glad you had your dad. He sounds like a good guy.”

  “He is. Was. I don’t know.”

  “Was?”

  “He’s not dead. Sorry, God, terrible choice of word.” She face-palmed herself. “He’s alive and well. But it’s complicated. I don’t want to hijack the conversation.”

  “You’re not. I gave you a two-for-one, right? Dad in prison, mom passing away, remember?”

  “Right. Well, it’s a long story, but I was supposed to go back home to Idaho tomorrow, but I think I’m going to stick around in Vegas a bit longer. Right before I left to come here, I discovered my dad was cheating on my mom again.”

  “Again.”

  �
��Yeah. I accidentally caught him a couple years ago. And he’s doing it again. And last time, I had to be the one to tell my mom. I didn’t want to tell her this time, so I kind of peaced out and came here.”

  “Can’t say I blame you. I wouldn’t want to be in the middle of that.”

  “Yeah, well, me being away means my brother is in the middle of it, alone, but he doesn’t know what their fighting is about. He’s blowing up my phone, trying to get me to come back. But I don’t want to.”

  “I’m sorry, Tori. That sounds … tough. It’s such a weak word for how it sounds.”

  “It is tough. And James—my brother—is pissed at me for not wanting to come home to help him through it. I know it’s selfish, but I just want as much distance from my dad and my mom as I can get right now. I’m so, so angry with my dad. He didn’t cheat on me, but I feel the betrayal all the same.”

  “Because he’s your hero,” I said. “He saved you from a situation that was over your head. You don’t want to believe that he can fuck up, but he has—more than once. I don’t blame you for feeling betrayed.”

  “Yeah, well, when James finds out that I knew about the first time Dad cheated, he’s going to be even more pissed off with me.” She grimaced. “Not to change the subject, but please—let’s change the subject from my fucked-up family. Are you all out of tales of woe?”

  “I’ve got one more,” I said, my voice somber. “It’s a real downer.”

  “Hit me with it.”

  “My best friend, Will, died. Last week.”

  Whatever she’d been expecting from me, that wasn’t it.

  13

  “Your best friend died.” I don’t know if it was the way his eyes changed, or the way his voice turned all gravelly, but either way the news was like a sucker punch to the stomach. “How? I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”

  “He went creeking.” At my look of misunderstanding, he continued. “Will was kayaking down steep slides, waterfalls, over in California. His head hit a rock and he was knocked unconscious and drowned.”

  I didn’t even know Will, but the thought of it slammed into me like a freight train, leaving me shaking and a bit breathless. “I’m so sorry. God, that sounds horrible.”