by Sharpe, Elle
“I’m learning that you have some very strange priorities in your life, Green.”
She shot me a look full of poison.
“Luckily for you,” I continued. “I am an extremely competitive person. Usually about things that actually matter, but I can make an exception. If…”
“What?”
“If you say something nice about me.”
“Wow. Your massive ego has not diminished with time.”
I gave a slight, mocking bow.
“I live to be praised.”
“Okay. Fine. If we win, I will bestow upon you one compliment. But that means you need to bring your A-game, Baylor. Think you can handle it?”
“Thunderdome doesn’t know what’s about to hit it.”
We were the most intense competitors on the lawn.
We maintained a grueling speed-walking pace as we took turns carrying an egg on a spoon in our teeth. We watched each other intently and copied each other’s movements in the mirror game. We raced to pop as many balloons as possible in two minutes by pressing them together between our backs. While everyone around us laughed, flopped around, failed, and got eliminated, we maintained an unshakeable attitude of grim focus. We weren’t here to make friends. We were here to win.
We looked like absolute morons. Secretly, though, I was enjoying myself immensely. Norah was fun to watch when she was so intent.
“Okay, here’s the strategy,” Norah told me, as stern as a drill sergeant, when we started the game called “spaghetti dance off.” This game required the pairs to dance with each other while each person held one end of a dried piece of spaghetti in their mouth. If they broke the spaghetti they had to use one of the broken pieces instead. The more breaks, the shorter the spaghetti, and the closer the couples’ mouths got to each other. Anyone who kissed lost.
A stupid voice in my head suggested that it was a game I might not mind losing. Norah clearly felt differently, though.
“We have to dance, but we are going to do the bare minimum, okay? Gentle swaying only. If that spaghetti breaks even once, I will poke it straight into your eyeball.”
“Got it, boss,” I said, throwing her a cheeky smile. She made a sort of “hmph” noise. God, it was still so much fun to annoy her.
We swayed back and forth like awkward twelve-year-olds at a middle school dance, with a safe twelve inches of spaghetti between us. Actually, middle schoolers would have at least clutched at each others’ upper arms. Norah and I kept our arms robotically at our sides. The only contact we shared was eye contact.
The other couples on the lawn were being far less strategic than we were. Men and women alike were laying down some of their sexier moves, and seemed pretty fine with letting their spaghetti strands break. Giggling sounds began to surround us as people started moving closer and closer together. Eventually they even started pressing and rubbing against each other.
“It’s too bad,” I said to Norah through my clenched teeth. “I know you’ve got some great dance moves.”
“Stop distracting me, Ronan.” She sounded ridiculous, trying to speak coherently while her mouth held on to that spaghetti for dear life.
Dispute our best efforts, though, the spaghetti strand did break in half, just once. I jokingly shielded my eyes from Norah’s wrath, but she just slipped the end of the broken strand between my lips, and kept on swaying.
The distance between us had been cut in half. The waves of her hair were close enough to tickle my face. I could smell her coconut shampoo. I could count the gold flecks in her angry green eyes.
The reward for surviving the spaghetti game was a game that required even more physical contact. In this game each couple was given a small item—a poker chip, a thimble, a coin—and one member of the couple had to hide the item somewhere on their body. Then the other person—wearing a blindfold—had to try to find it by feel alone.
“I should probably go first,” I told Norah. “You don’t seem to have a lot of hiding places.”
It was true. That thin silk dress clung close to her skin. And it was pretty much the only thing on her body, aside from a pair of strappy high-heeled sandals. I was pretty sure she wasn’t even wearing a bra.
The second I had that thought I wished I hadn’t. Thinking of Norah’s soft breasts lying unbound just beneath the silk caused a noticeable stiffening inside my suit pants. Not great if she was about to be patting me down.
She wrapped the blindfold around her eyes, and I quickly tried to think of the least sexy place I could hide the object we’d been given—a comically short golf pencil which had clearly seen a lot of use.
For some reason I didn’t like the idea of Norah thinking I would play into the suggestiveness of the game on purpose. If she was going to insist on her indifference to me, I could play that game too.
I decided to go for the most obvious spot imaginable, just to see if she would figure it out. I placed the pencil behind my ear. My hair was long enough at the moment to cover it completely.
Jen announced “Ready, set, go!” over her MC’s microphone. Norah began to pat lightly at my suit-jacket, with obvious reluctance. Almost immediately I had to swallow down a dangerous lump in my throat. It was rare to see Norah unsure of herself, but being blindfolded made her look vulnerable. Not to mention it lent itself to certain types of mental imagery. I had a disturbing vision of me grabbing both of her wrists and holding them over her head.
She checked all of my suit jacket pockets, and then began making tentative passes over my chest. Her fingers were light as they explored my body. I felt a small shudder pass through me. I wasn't sure if Norah noticed, though I thought I saw her purse her lips together again, like she was trying to hold something back.
She took a step closer so that she could slide her fingers into my back pockets. The silk of her gown bumped against the growing bulge in my pants, and she noticed. Of course she noticed. There was no way she couldn't have.
But she didn’t say anything, or show any kind of reaction on her face. She just paused for a split-second, and when her fingers resumed their path over my ass I thought I felt her press a bit more firmly.
I drew in a long, deep breath.
“Hey, here’s a thought,” I said. “I could just tell you where the pencil is. No one would know.”
“You mean cheat?” Norah put on a fake-affronted voice that sounded far too close to teasing voice for my personal comfort. “Ronan Baylor, you should be ashamed of yourself. Do you behave this unscrupulously in your business dealings too?”
She slid her hands out of my back pockets and moved them towards the front. I felt my whole body go rigid.
“It’s not down there,” I said, as I felt her fingertips slide inside the fabric of my front pockets and graze over my upper thighs.
“Are you sure?” she asked, in an innocent, lilting voice. “I’m pretty sure I feel something…”
She was, in fact, getting dangerously close to wrapping her hands around something.
“I’m sure,” I said. “You’re wasting time. Don’t you want to win?”
“Hmm. Sometimes winning is relative.”
Fuck.
Norah hates you, I reminded myself. That’s the only reason she enjoys getting a rise out of you. Some sort of strange, sick sense of vengeance.
A memory flashed into my mind: the way she had surprised me with her sudden, tortuous kiss all those years ago. She was acting in a very similar way now. Moving her fingers around in circles, pretending to search very, very thoroughly. All the while getting closer to my poor, aching-
How much did Norah hate me, I wondered, to enjoy torturing me this much?
“You must hate me a lot,” I'd said to her. And then her hips had started to buck up and down, wildly. It took an enormous effort to hold myself still when I remembered it.
“You know,” I said, clearing my throat. “If you can’t find it, it gets hidden somewhere on you in the next round.”
Norah’s fingers came to a sudden stop
. She hadn’t thought this whole thing through, clearly. But once she did stop to think about it, she immediately realized that she didn’t want my hands groping all over her body the way hers were groping over mine. When she spoke next her voice had gone a bit stiff, and the soft, teasing tone was gone.
“Okay, tell me where it is.”
I gripped both of her wrists, pulled her hands from my pockets, and drew one hand up to my ear. She pushed my hair back, in what could have almost seemed like a tender gesture. Her finger brushed lightly against the top of my ear. I’d forgotten how sensitive a place that could be. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had thought to touch me there.
The next second her finger was gone. The pencil was found. We were on to the next round.
“Alight,” Jen called out, “This is the last round of the game. If you’re still standing, that means you have the heart of a true sportsman. You should all be very proud.”
She gave a cheesy salute Norah and I, and the four other couples who were left.
“The final game—the sudden-death elimination round—is called ‘a pair of sardines.’ One couple will be the sweet little fishies in question, and they will hide together and hope never to be found. Meanwhile, the others will try to hunt them down.
“But—twist—the rest of the searchers will be pursued by a pair of murderers—dun dun dun!—who will be none other than your hosts, Chris and I. The couple that finds the sardines without being caught by the murders will be named the winners: the new reigning monarchs of Thunderdome. If the sardines can’t be found, the title goes to them.”
“Is there a prize?” someone called out.
Jen’s turned to him with a completely straight face. She spoke soberly, in a deep voice, like Abraham Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address.
“The prize, sir, is the honor of ruling over all of Thunderdome. Like Simba, ruling over the animal kingdom, everywhere that the light touches. It is a great privilege, and a great responsibility that you battle for today. Remember this: play with spirit. Play with heart.”
She turned to Chris.
“Babe, are you ready to murder some people?”
“Yup!” Chris flashed a cheerful double thumbs-up.
“Great! Norah and Ronan are the sardines. You have exactly sixty seconds to hide.”
“Jen,” Norah groaned. “Do we have to be-”
“I HAVE SPOKEN!” Jen cried out into the microphone. “Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight. Better hide Norah! Fifty-seven.”
“Fine,” she muttered. “God. You enjoy counting down to things too much.”
I drew in close to Norah so that I could whisper in her ear.
“Follow me. I know the perfect place.”
I grabbed her hand and pulled her away, as Jen continued counting.
“Well, I have to hand it to you Baylor, I’m pretty sure they’re not going to find us down here.”
“What can I say? Home field advantage.”
Norah looked around the small-but well-appointed underground room in appalled awe. I’d taken her down here by entering a code into a panel hidden under a garden rock, which triggered a slice of the patio to slide back and reveal a hidden staircase. Down here there was a fully furnished apartment—very tastefully decorated, windowless, lit only by sunlamps. It was also soundproofed and encased in impenetrable steel. Our Thunderdome victory was pretty much in the bag.
It would have been perfectly natural, at this point, to have accused me of being the one taking the Thunderdome thing too seriously. But it would have been a lie to say that winning the game was my primary motivation. Guaranteed privacy with Norah was a temptation I could not easily turn down.
“I cannot believe that you have an actual doomsday bunker in your yard. This is such an insane rich-person thing, I can’t even. Are you like a serious prepper? How many semi-automatics do you have down here?”
I wrinkled my nose.
“Zero. And this was my mother’s idea, not mine. She insisted we all get them. ‘You can never be too prepared,’ is her motto. Would you care for some canned goods? Beans? Tuna? I’ve got a full six months’ worth.”
“Isn’t the idea to save those for the apocalypse?”
“I have to change them out regularly, or they’ll expire.”
“Well, who could resist a charming offer like that?”
She settled herself down onto the patent leather sofa and cracked open a soda from the refrigerator built into the custom oak coffee table. Then she put her feet up on the coffee table, daring me to complain.
“Looks like you’re really going to live large during the end times. Will you think of us little people when we’re all out there being eaten by zombies?”
I looked over at her slyly. Her skin was slightly reddened from all the Thunderdome activities, and her wavy hair looked a little wild. She was lounging back on the couch like she owned it.
“Maybe a few of you. May I sit?”
“Hey man, it’s your bunker.”
I decided to follow her lead and put my feet up.
“So,” I asked her, “What’s the deal with Thunderdome? Why is it so important to win?”
“Because the only thing that’s meaningful in life is winning at all costs. I thought you understood that.”
I raised my eyebrow at her. She glugged down a long swallow of Pepsi and sighed.
“Jen invented Thunderdome in middle school to help me have fun at parties, because I like stupid competitions more than normal-people things. And I have won every Thunderdome since I was twelve, except for three times, which were very upsetting. There, you happy?”
“These facts are making me very happy, yes.”
“Yeah yeah yeah. Go ahead, make fun of me.”
“That is actually incredibly adorable.”
“Yeah, you’ve told me before that I’m ‘adorable.’ Like a mentally challenged puppy, I assume you mean?”
“‘Like a very attractive woman, with very cute childhood stories. I can just imagine you as a twelve-year-old hellion, obliterating the twelve-year-old competition, rage and murder in your prepubescent little eyes-”
“You’re so mean,” she said. But she laughed when she said it.
I decided to try an experiment. I ever-so-casually draped my arm around the back of the couch behind her. She scrunched her face into a wrinkly frown and looked pointedly between my face and my arm and my face again.
“What is happening right now? What are you, like, being Danny in that drive-in scene in Grease?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Right, of course you don’t. Look, you need to stop acting like you’re coming on to me. It’s really not a funny joke.”
“If you’ll recall, you kissed me first, last time around.”
“‘Last time?’ There was no ‘last time.’ Because that implies the existence of a “this time,’ which is not a thing. And also I only did that, that one time—the only time—because you were flirting with me. I was just calling you on your bluff-”
I couldn't keep the smile off my face.
“Yeah? And how did that work out for you?”
“Well, but... then you only doubled down to call me on my bluff-”
I put my feet down, and scooted in closer to her. It was very rewarding to watch her breath catch a little, and to see a small shimmer of uncertainty flash in her eyes.
“Is that what you think happened?” I asked.
“I-” her voice went light, and high, and soft, and her eyes were so, so big. “Isn’t it?”
I realized that I had to kiss her. Just to convince her. There was no other option.
I eased my lips over hers and drew her into me. I gently sucked and nipped, first at the lower lip and then the upper lip, and I cupped the back of her head to pull her in deeper. After a few moments her soft lips opened under mine, and started working back against me. A sigh passed from her mouth to mine, and I felt a surge of warmth rush through me. Wildly possessive thoughts
flamed up in my brain.
These lips, sugary and sticky from the soda: mine. That lovely-smelling hair bunched up in my fist: mine. Every sweet, half-stifled moan that escaped her throat: those definitely belonged to me. Maybe only for a few seconds, but still. Mine.
“No.”
She pulled away, snatching it all back.
“No, no, no. You do not get to win this.”
“Norah, I’m not-”
“No. You shut up. No talking.”
I wanted to do something—I wasn’t totally sure what. Explain, or argue, or kiss her again and again until she gave in, until she admitted defeat.
But she pressed her hand over my mouth. And then she climbed into my lap and straddled me, pushing my body down into the leather of the couch. Her hands kneaded into my shoulders, and her breasts hovered temptingly close to my face.
My cock had become very demanding. I wanted to thrust up against her, to show her just how badly she was behaving.
But she had her angry eyes on, sending me a warning: do nothing.
I did not want to take the risk of her stopping. I’d assumed I’d never get this close to her again.
She was staring down at me with hatred, and hunger, and maybe a little bit of fear. A weird combination, but apparently it was the perfect cocktail for stoking my already painful erection.
“Don’t talk. Don’t move. Just- just don’t do anything.”
I swallowed and nodded. She followed the bob of my throat with her eyes, and the shimmer in her gaze got brighter.
“Stop doing that,” she ordered.
“What?”
“Looking like that. At me. And talking. And...close your eyes.”
For some crazy reason I did just what she said. I let my eyes fall closed, and I pantomimed zipping my mouth closed and throwing away the key. I heard her let out a small laugh above me, and I felt a clenching in my heart. And an added throbbing in my groin.
She slid her silk-covered body down between my legs, until she was sitting on the ground with her head right at the level of my crotch. I felt her hands begin to fiddle with the buckle of my belt.
I said nothing. I did not move. It took every ounce of strength in my body.
