Played. Liz Fichera

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      14

      Sam

      “I’m not playing.”

      I was defiant. I even forgot how chilled I’d become for a few seconds. There was no way I was playing Riley’s stupid game.

      It was such a girl thing. Why did girls always feel compelled to share personal embarrassing stuff? And BOTOX? Are you kidding me? Why would a pretty girl do something like that? Girls confused me.

      “Please?” she begged.

      “No.”

      “Chicken!”

      “Maybe.”

      “Maybe you’ll play?” She tugged on the collar of my T-shirt, hard.

      “Never.”

      “Then I’ll have to guess.”

      In the growing darkness, I heard her lips smack. It was obvious that she was giving this way too much thought. I could practically hear the wheels spinning in her head. Or maybe that was just her teeth chattering.

      “Still cold?” I said to change the subject.

      “I’m freezing,” she said, just as a gust of wind blew through the tree, knocking icy raindrops off the branches. “This is miserable.” We shivered in each other’s arms.

      “Your sweatshirt is wet.”

      “So’s your T-shirt.”

      We hugged tighter. We breathed heavily for warmth. We rubbed skin where we could reach. We didn’t have a choice. And while it didn’t seem so bad in the dark, now that we couldn’t see each other’s eyes, the situation was clearly going from bad to really, really freaking bad. Ugly words raced through my head—hypothermia and pneumonia, for starters.

      “Riley.”

      “Yeah?”

      “Don’t take this the wrong way—” I paused for courage “—but there’s something we need to do. Now.”

      “You’ve changed your mind about playing?” Her voice turned giddy, even as her teeth resumed chattering. I hoped she wasn’t starting to crack. I’d read about such things in life-or-death situations. Some people turned crazy as a survival mechanism.

      My eyes rolled. “No. I’m not talking about playing your game. Be serious.”

      “What, then?”

      “We have to take our clothes off.”

      Her body stiffened against mine.

      “We’re soaking wet,” I added by way of explanation. “We could freeze to death if we don’t take them off.”

      “We could freeze to death with them on.”

      “True.” I nodded, trying to play to her reasonable side. “But we should at least...consider it. For body heat.”

      “Get naked?” she whispered.

      “Get naked.”

      But then her shoulders softened beneath my hands. “Yeah, I was thinking about how to handle the wet clothes, too.”

      “This is survival,” I stammered a little. “Nothing else.”

      “Agreed,” she said. “Survival.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than me. “What about underwear?”

      “I guess...I guess we can leave those on.”

      “Okay,” she said. It sounded like she was trying to work up her nerve.

      At least it’s dark, I wanted to assure her, but that sounded like something a creepy guy would say. “I’ll go first—”

      Riley caught my arm in the dark, interrupting me. “Let’s do it together.”

      “Okay. On the count of three.” I counted slowly. “One...”

      “Two,” Riley said with me.

      “Three.”

      With only a couple of inches between us, we stripped out of our wet shirts. Blindly, we fumbled and felt for a branch beside us to hang them in the hopes that they might dry, knocking arms at the same time.

      “Sorry,” we said at the same time when our elbows crashed against each other. I winced when hers caught my funny bone.

      I doubted that our shirts would dry even a little in the damp night air. Removing our pants was harder. I had to help Riley pull off hers, one slightly soggy leg at a time. When her jeans pulled over her injured leg, she moaned.

      “Sorry,” I whispered.

      She garbled something back that sounded like “sleigh” but it was probably “it’s okay.”

      After helping her, I unzipped my jeans and then shimmied them down and stripped them off my bent legs without kicking her in the face.

      Beside me, Riley shivered even more and I wondered if stripping was the right idea, especially as rain continued to fall. If there had been a more awful night, weather-wise, I hadn’t experienced it. This was like a bad horror movie.

      As we sat across from each other in our underwear, shivering in the dark, lightning lit up our hiding space. In the flash, I looked at Riley, and she looked back at me. In that instant I saw everything. She was so white she glowed. Her arms crossed to hide her chest. Most of all, I saw that she was as terrified as I was, and for that reason alone I could not look away.

      “There’s no reason to be embarrassed, Riley. Or scared. I’m as scared as you are.” I had to push off to the side of my brain that I had never been with a girl before, naked. Not like this, so close we were practically sharing the same heartbeat. I wondered if I should tell her that? Would it put her at ease?

      Instead, when it turned dark again, I reached for her shoulder. “Come here.”

      A few seconds later, as if she’d needed time to consider it, she crawled to me on her knees. She sat between my legs, facing me. I wrapped my СКАЧАТЬ