by T. K. Leigh
“Should have been Satan,” he mumbled.
“What did the cat do to make you so terrified of it?”
“Existed.”
“One of his girlfriends adopted the dang thing from the shelter,” Asher pipes in, sharing the story of Fluffy, the devil cat.
“She was nuts,” Lincoln adds. “Certifiable.”
“Are we talking about Fluffy or the girlfriend?” I ask.
“The girlfriend,” he answers, then pauses. “Well, both. I’m pretty sure Mia’s psychosis rubbed off on Fluffy.”
“What could a cat do that’s so bad to make you think it cursed you? I love cats,” I offer. “They’re the perfect pet. They shit in a box and clean up after themselves.”
“They’re nature’s little serial killers. You cannot trust a cat. Or a cat person.”
“Well then…” I settle into the couch. “I guess you can’t trust me. Because I’m a cat person.”
“Were any of your cats cockblockers?” he presses.
“Umm…no. But I never bring guys to my place to begin with.”
This piques Lincoln’s interest and he tilts his head. “Ever?”
“It’s one of her rules,” Izzy states. “Don’t shit where you eat or something.”
His brow furrows. “Doesn’t that phrase refer to sleeping with a coworker?”
“To some, but I expand it to mean not wanting to ruin anything that’s important to me.”
“And not bringing a date home is important.”
“It complicates things. And I like…uncomplicated. The rest of my life is difficult enough. So rule number one is never let them into my home.”
“After all…,” Lincoln begins, “home is where the heart is.”
I peer at him, my mouth falling open. People I’ve known most of my life don’t fully understand why I refuse to invite a guy to my apartment. But Lincoln gets it. Maybe we’re not as different as I originally believed.
“This isn’t about me,” I say quickly. “This is about Fluffy.”
“Right. Fluffy. Like Asher pointed out, my ex adopted him. Referred to him as our ‘baby’. When I ended things, she went a little crazy.”
“How crazy? On a scale of one to Single White Female.”
“She would have been more than happy to pin some murders on me,” he replies, understanding my movie reference. “At least she never attempted to adopt my appearance. Suffice it to say, she didn’t deal with the breakup well. One day, I got home from work to find she left the cat on my front stoop with a note saying she couldn’t handle being a single parent and I needed to step up my game.”
I choke on my beer at the ridiculousness of it all. I’ve done some crazy things in my life, but nothing like this.
“Sounds like you found yourself a clinger.”
“I think she was just lonely and looking for attention,” he responds thoughtfully. “Because once she started dating someone new, she forgot about me…and Fluffy.”
I can certainly understand that. My mother’s the same way.
“At first, I couldn’t believe she’d leave the cat outside for what could have been hours in the middle of winter in Manhattan.”
“Wait a minute.” I shoot my eyes to his. “You live in New York?”
There’s a sparkle in his gaze as he nods, brushing the pad of his thumb against his bottom lip. “Chelsea.”
“I’m in the Village.”
“Hmm… What are the odds?”
I sip on my beer, hiding my smile. “I’m thinking I really need to play the lottery now.”
He smirks before continuing his story. “So I took the cat in. As much as I’m more of a dog person, I wouldn’t abandon an animal. He was a pretty easy-going cat. Like you said, he shit in a box and took care of himself. But that first night…” He trails off.
“Yes?”
“I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. That’s when I noticed him sitting on the opposite side of the bed, staring at me.”
“He was probably curious,” Izzy offers.
He slowly shakes his head. “No, because he would have eventually gotten bored. But he just sat there, watching my every move. And it happened night after night after night. Then, about a month later, I started seeing this new girl. Things were going pretty good, so I brought her back to my place.”
I ignore the pang of jealousy at the idea of Lincoln bringing a girl home. I have no stake over him. Hell, we haven’t even kissed. There’s no reason for me to be jealous of any women in his life, past or present.
“Things started heating up and we were about to…”
“Cross the finish line,” I say, completing his thought, giving him a knowing look.
“Precisely. And that’s when they waved the red flag.”
“On what grounds?”
“Due to the cat staring at us. It was creepy, and I couldn’t…”
“What?” Asher laughs. “You couldn’t get it up?”
“It’s not that I couldn’t get it up, but knowing that cat was looking at us with his beady eyes… Nothing helped. It’s almost like Mia knew that would happen. Like the cat had some mystical powers and she purposefully left him to live at my place so I’d never have sex again.”
We all burst out laughing, and I swipe the tears forming in my eyes.
“Well, I hope you found a way to get rid of the curse.” I look at Lincoln beside me on the couch.
“I sure did. About three months later, my boss was going through a tough time because the family cat was hit by a car and his kids were distraught over it. I said I had a cat I could part with if he thought it would help. He refused at first, but I insisted. So now I’m free to… Ya know.”
“See the checkered flag.”
“Precisely.”
“But what about your boss and his wife?” Izzy asks. “Don’t they—”
“That’s the thing!” Lincoln interrupts excitedly. “I asked him about it.”
“You asked him? How does that even come up in conversation? I’m not quite sure a cockblocking cat is a normal topic.”
He waves me off. “He invited me over for a dinner party. We both had a bit to drink, so I asked. He was convinced I was messing with him. Which leads me to the only possible conclusion. My ex tried to curse me with her cat.”
We all roar with laughter once more, and it’s a remarkable sound, particularly against the emptiness. It’s strange how silent everything becomes when there’s no power or cell service. No constant pings or vibrations from phone alerts. No hum of electricity. We’ve been forced back to simpler times when we actually have to communicate face-to-face, our only source of light and heat the fire pit we’re sitting around.
“Okay. Who’s next?” Izzy returns her attention to the coffee table, then frowns. “We’re out of cards.”
I chew on my bottom lip. “Maybe it’s time we go off script. We stopped with the board game part of this a while back.” I gesture to the game board where all the pieces were abandoned long ago in favor of just going through the stack of cards containing different scenarios. “Maybe it’s time to make things more interesting and ask different kinds of questions.”
“What kinds of questions did you have in mind?” Izzy waggles her brows, grinning mischievously.
“I don’t know. Something deeper. A little more…personal.”
“Therapist personal or sexy personal?”
“Therapist personal,” I answer confidently. Then I catch Lincoln’s gaze. “And sexy personal.”
There’s an instant shift in the atmosphere. Until now, we’ve all been relaxed, just a bunch of people getting to know each other, or catching up with old friends. But with those two words, we’re about to change the rules.
“I’m okay with that.” Asher takes a swig of his beer, his demeanor giving off the impression that he has nothing to hide. “We’re all adults. Not much makes me uncomfortable.”
“We are all adults, aren’t we?” Izzy comments, her mouth a tight line
as she taps a fingernail against her upper lip.
“What’s going through that brain of yours?” I ask guardedly.
Instead of sharing, she jumps up, grabbing one of the flashlights off the table, then proceeds into the house.
“What is she doing?” Asher floats his gaze to me.
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
We sit in silence, apart from the music coming from Asher’s phone, all of us curious as to what Izzy’s up to. Finally, she reappears, a wide smile on her face.
“What’s going on?” I ask as she approaches.
“Like Asher said…,” she begins with authority, “we’re all adults, correct?”
“Yes…,” we mumble, more or less at the same time.
“I’m declaring a circle of trust…a bubble, so to speak.” She waves her arms in a circle through the air around us, enclosing us in an invisible dome. “I submit for your consideration a new take on Never Have I Ever.”
“I’m not sure I want to know what this new take is,” Asher jokes.
“You probably don’t, considering it’s how I met your brother, but…” She holds out her arms, wavering slightly, physical proof of how much she’s had to drink. “Circle of trust.” She pauses, waiting for us to agree, which we all do with a quick nod.
“We’ll go around in a circle, saying something we’ve never done. If someone says they’ve never done something and you have, you drink. The changed rules apply to the person speaking. For example, if I say ‘Never have I ever shot Abraham Lincoln’, obviously, no one here will drink. In that case, we go to the penalty round.”
She opens her palm, revealing a pair of dice I recognize from the goody bags we received this weekend. But they’re not your traditional dice. Instead of little dots indicating a number, they have words. One is an action, the other a body part.
“How do we know whose…” Squinting, I read off the first words I spy on the dice, “thigh we have to bite?”
She grabs her nearly empty beer and drains it before waving it in front of us. “That’s what this is for. Whoever the bottle lands on is the lucky winner… Or perhaps unlucky.”
“I am not biting Asher’s thigh,” Lincoln says in a voice that sounds even deeper than his usual one.
“And I am not…” Asher grabs the dice, watching as they roll across the surface of the table, “sucking his finger.”
Izzy sighs an exaggerated sigh, flopping back onto the couch beside Asher. “Men. This game is much more fun with only girls. They don’t care about this shit. We have no problem licking each other’s tongues.”
Both guys instantly snap their eyes to her. It’s so adorable that just the idea of two women making out gets their hormones running wild.
“But fine,” she continues, ignoring the way Asher adjusts his shorts. “How about this? Everyone gets one free pass. Of course, just say something you know at least one other person sitting here has already done and you won’t have to worry about spinning the bottle. Unless you want to…” She scoops up the dice and rolls, “blow on someone’s neck.” She looks around, lifting her bottle. “Are you all in?”
Lincoln flashes his eyes to me, a devilish glint in them. It is a bit juvenile and reminiscent of drinking games we played in college. But we’re in the city of sin. What fun is being here during a blackout if you can’t sin a little?
“Blackout Club,” I say.
“What?” She scrunches her brows.
“The first rule of Blackout Club…”
“You don’t talk about Blackout Club,” Asher and Lincoln finish in unison. Every man in their twenties and thirties knows a Fight Club reference when they hear one.
“Exactly.” I raise my beer, meeting Izzy’s eyes. “Like you said, this is a bubble. We’re all consenting adults… Single consenting adults. I’m in.”
“Me, too,” Asher says, lifting his own bottle.
We all shift our attention to Lincoln. He raises his beer and we all clink bottles, sealing the deal. “Let the games begin.”
Chapter Eight
An hour and two beers later, Asher confidently says, “Never have I ever gotten so drunk I had to be carried out of a bar.”
I glance around our little party, our circle of trust. Neither Lincoln nor I raise our beer to our mouths. I’ve carried more than my fair share of drunk people out of a bar, but I’ve never been carried out myself.
When I look at Izzy, she smirks, slowly bringing her bottle to her lips. Something about the smug expression on Asher’s face leads me to believe he was aware of this incident.
“Okay.” I place my lukewarm beer on the coffee table and lean across it to where she sits next to Asher. “There’s obviously a story here. I need to hear it.”
“Fine.” She takes another sip of her beer, then faces me. “It was Christmas break my junior year of college. I was spending it in Connecticut with my family. Jessie was in Massachusetts. I had planned to visit him, but decided to surprise him and go early.”
“Jessie? Your brother?” Lincoln asks, looking to Asher.
“Yes. They were, well… They were—”
“Engaged,” Izzy finishes. “Until that night.” A flicker of heartache passes across her expression before she recovers. “Their parents are snowbirds who flee the cold north for the south every winter. The guys usually went down to Florida for Christmas. Well, Jessie was getting back into town that day. Asher was already back, since he was a music teacher and school had resumed. Anyway, I told Asher my plan to surprise Jessie when he got home that day. I had this entire scenario in my head.
“At first, it all did go according to plan. Asher left me a key to Jessie’s place so I’d have enough time to freshen up after the two-hour drive. I even made him the lasagna he loved, thinking he was probably going to be hungry after traveling all day. When I heard the car pull into the driveway, I went into the dining room, taking a page from Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. You know, when she surprised Edward wearing a tie…and that’s it. Sexy, right?” Her expression falls. “Until Jessie walked into the house and I could hear moans and giggles.”
“Oh, Iz,” I exhale, my hand covering my heart. I may not have the healthiest approach to relationships, but I’ve never cheated. I’ve never been anything but honest about what they were getting into with me — laidback, no strings, uncomplicated fun. Nothing more. Still, a pang squeezes my chest, thinking how Izzy must have felt at that moment.
“He tried to apologize, promise it was just a one-time thing, but in my heart, I knew that wasn’t the case, that it had probably been going on a lot longer, especially considering she was the one he ran to the second he landed in Boston, not me. So I stormed out of there. After getting dressed, of course,” she says, her voice lightening.
“I was a mess and not thinking clearly. I was so convinced he was the perfect man for me, although hindsight’s always twenty-twenty. As I tried to figure out what to do, I passed a bar.”
“Which just so happened to be where my band was performing that night,” Asher continues. “Around the time we finished our first set, I looked up to see her sitting at the bar, some punk putting his hands all over her. But she was too drunk to realize what was going on.”
“Not one of my finer moments.”
“I knew some kind of shit had to go down for her to be there when she was supposed to be with Jessie. So I hauled her out of there before something untoward happened. Canceled the rest of our gig that night, much to the displeasure of the bar’s owner, and took her to my place to sober up.”
“The next morning, as he helped me nurse one of the worst hangovers of all time, I told him what happened. To which he said—”
“You deserve to be with someone who looks at you every day as if they won the lottery.” He meets her gaze, a tender moment passing between them before Izzy quickly averts her eyes, clearing her throat.
“So that’s how I was carried out of a bar. Who’s next?” Her voice brightens, an obvious attempt to get the focus off h
er and Asher. “It’s your turn, isn’t it, Chloe?”
I stare at her, dozens of questions on the tip of my tongue. I want to know why she never told me about this, why she never mentioned Asher at all. Did they hook up that weekend, but she hid it because of how Jessie would react? Despite the heartache and pain he’d caused her, she’d still care about him. She probably still does. That’s the type of person she is.
Izzy narrows her gaze on me, wordlessly telling me not to press the topic. So I don’t. Not now. I don’t want to ruin the fun we’ve been having. And I do admit I’ve had a lot of fun. I suddenly have a new appreciation for game night.
“Okay then.” I adjust my posture. “Never have I ever given or received a lap dance.”
“Try again,” Izzy sings. “Already asked.”
“Crap. That’s right.”
I pull my lips between my teeth, trying to come up with something that hasn’t already been said and at least one person has done. This has proven to be the difficult part of the game, considering Izzy’s the only person I know well and I’m running out of risqué things I’m confident she’s done. Factor in the rule that you must say something before time is up, added after Asher took several minutes during one of his turns, and it’s a bit more stressful, yet exciting.
“Ten seconds, Chloe,” Lincoln taunts, waving his phone in front of me, displaying the countdown.
“Okay, okay.” I bounce on the seat, adrenaline filling me as I wrack my brain. Then I look back at Lincoln, the timer only showing two seconds, and say the first thing I think of. “Never have I ever gotten freaky in an elevator.”
My voice rings out as I bring my own beer bottle to my lips, taking a small sip. I expect someone to drink with me, indicating they’ve done it, but no one does.
“Remember, we’re in a bubble. Circle of trust. Blackout Club and all that. It’s okay if you have.” I shift my eyes around, everyone shaking their heads.
“Looks like you earned a penalty round.” Izzy pushes the bottle and dice my way, her lips kicking up into a sly grin.
So far, everyone else has done this at least once. The first time, Izzy had to touch Lincoln’s finger. We all laughed when they did a little E.T. finger touch with each other, Izzy fanning herself afterward, pretending to be all hot and bothered from the contact.