My Best Friend Dared Me to a Game I Couldn’t Stop

Renata showed up with two beers in hand and walked into my room without warning, as always. We had known each other since our first year at university, and by then neither of us asked permission to open the fridge or flop down on the other’s bed. An old playlist was playing softly from the speaker, the curtains were half-closed, and the afternoon sun was drawing orange bands across the wall.

She handed me a cold can and settled beside me, legs crossed and back against the wall. We talked about anything and everything for an hour: her new job, the guy I had gone out with a couple of times without much enthusiasm, how boring the city was that weekend. We had both known for a long time that the other was bisexual. We had never done anything about it. It was one of those facts that just sat there on the table, without either of us deciding to pick it up.

—I’ve got an idea —said Renata, twirling the can between her hands—. What if we play truth or dare?

I looked at her like, what are we, sixteen? She smiled sideways, with that crooked smile I’d known forever, and that smile was what made me say yes.

The first rounds were stupid. Whether she’d kiss some random actor. What was the last lie she had told me. A dare to text her ex something cheesy. Us laughing at the face he’d make when he got it. Normal stuff between two friends who trusted each other too much and had very few limits.

And then she said, as if it were nothing:

—Let’s make it more interesting. Whoever loses takes off a piece of clothing.

It took me three seconds to answer. Three seconds in which I felt the air in the room turn heavier. Three seconds in which I thought I could say no, finish my beer, go back to neutral conversation. I didn’t.

—Okay —I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant it to.

I lost the first round. I forgot to answer a question before she counted to five. Renata clapped with the tips of her fingers, like she was in a theater.

—The blouse —she said.

I took it off without looking her in the face. When I looked up again, she was looking at me. Not at the ceiling, not at my hands. At me. Her eyes swept over my shoulders, dropped to my bra, and came back up, and for the first time in years of friendship I felt naked with half my clothes still on.

The next round she lost. I couldn’t help choosing the obvious.

—The shorts.

Renata got up from the bed, stood in front of me, and pulled her shorts down with a slowness that was no accident. Underneath she had on a black thong, tiny, lacey. She sat back down, crossed her legs, and held my gaze as if daring me to say something.

I said nothing.

We kept playing, but there were hardly any questions left. They were direct dares, each one a little closer to the edge. She ended up without her T-shirt and I got to see her in a red bra I’d never seen before. I lost my bra and felt the cool air against nipples that were already hard before the garment even hit the floor.

Renata was biting her lip. I was breathing through my mouth.

—Truth or dare —she said, her voice a shade lower than before.

—Dare.

—Touch yourself. But don’t stop looking at me.

I slid my hand inside my thong. My fingers found my own wetness before I even registered how soaked I was. I touched myself slowly, with two fingers, parting the soft, slippery flesh, never taking my eyes off her. Renata didn’t move. Her lips were parted and her chest was rising and falling fast. I saw her left hand clench around the sheet, gripping it hard, as if she needed to hold on to something to keep herself from coming closer too soon.

It didn’t last long. A few seconds later she got up, crawled across the bed to me, grabbed my face with both hands, and kissed me. It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It was a hungry kiss, with tongue, with teeth, with the urgency of two bodies that no longer wanted to keep asking anything. Her mouth tasted of beer and restrained desire. She sucked my lower lip, I answered with a small bite, and we both moaned softly at the same time, startled by the sound coming from our throats.

***

After that there were no more rules. Her hand replaced mine inside my thong. Her fingers found my clit at once, rubbing it in firm circles while we kept kissing, and I returned the favor over the black lace, slipping two fingers between the fabric and her wet heat. We took off the last pieces of clothing by yanking at the fabric, gracelessly, half-laughing between kisses. The beers were forgotten on the nightstand.

I laid her on her back and looked at her naked for the first time. Pale skin, the freckles on her shoulders I had never noticed, the soft line from waist to hip. I kissed the center of her chest. I kissed my way down her sternum with my mouth open, licking her warm skin, feeling her breathing speed up under my lips. She sank her fingers into my hair and didn’t let go.

I sucked one nipple until it was truly hard, then the other, alternating tongue and suction while I pressed her hips into the mattress. Renata arched, pushing her pelvis upward, looking for friction, looking for more. My hands traced her ribs, the curve of her belly, her open thighs, until I got between her legs and found her cunt soaked, hot, throbbing under my hand.

When I reached between her legs, I looked up for a second to meet her face. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was tight, holding something back. I kissed her there with the same calm with which I had started kissing her neck, parting her lips with my tongue and sinking slowly into her wetness, as if time didn’t matter and everything else in the world had gone dark.

The first sound she made was long and low. I held her hips so she wouldn’t move too much and kept going. My tongue was learning a new body, a map I had never traveled. I licked her center again and again, alternating pressure and softness, and when I felt the tremble in her thighs I stayed right there, moving my mouth patiently, sliding a finger into her at the same time, feeling how she tightened around me, how she swallowed me up with an eagerness that made me wetter still. Her hand pushed my head, softer than firm, asking without asking.

—Don’t stop —she said, and her voice came out broken.

I didn’t stop.

Renata came with a shiver that started in her thighs and ran up her whole back. I felt her entire body tense and then go slack in a matter of seconds, felt her soaking my tongue with her release, felt her holding my head as if she were afraid I might let it drop. When I lifted my face, she was smiling at me with her eyes still closed.

—Come here —she murmured, and pulled my arm.

She dragged me over her. Then she turned me over. I ended up on my back, with her hair falling over my face, her breasts brushing mine. She started kissing her way down: clavicle, center of my chest, one nipple, the other, my navel. I felt her tongue drawing a straight line downward and couldn’t help arching my back even before she reached where she was going. She opened my legs with one hand, holding me by the hip with the other, and when she buried her mouth between my thighs she sent such a strong shiver through me that I had to bite my forearm to keep from screaming right away.

When she got there, I grabbed the sheet the way she had before. Her fingers went in first, slowly, curling inside me while her mouth worked higher up, sucking, licking, returning to the center with an insistence that made me lose track of my breathing. The combination left me unable to think. I was there, in my own bed, with my best friend between my legs, and all I could do was breathe badly, rock my hips against her face, and feel how her tongue opened me wider and wider.

—Look at me —she asked, lifting her eyes for a second.

I looked at her. She held my gaze without stopping, her mouth wet and shining between my legs, and that —knowing she was looking at me while doing what she was doing— was what finally pushed me over the edge. Her fingers kept going in and out, her tongue hit me exactly where I needed it most, and I felt the tension break in a hot rush that left me trembling. I came hard. With a cry I didn’t manage to muffle in time and that the downstairs neighbor probably heard. I didn’t care.

***

After that we were both lying on our backs, sweaty, staring at the ceiling. Renata had one leg crossed over mine. Without looking, she found my hand and squeezed it.

—I owe you one truth —she said after a while.

—What?

—I’ve wanted to do this for three years.

I laughed. She did too. We both kept laughing for a while, that nervous laughter that comes when you don’t know what to say and everything you say feels too small. Then we fell silent, listening to the sounds of the street drifting in through the half-open window.

She fell asleep first. I stayed there watching her back rise and fall, the afternoon light already turned into early-night dimness. I thought that tomorrow we’d have to talk. I thought maybe not. I thought nothing that happened afterward would change what had already happened between us that afternoon.

I stretched out my arm, turned off the lamp, and settled against her. Renata turned in her sleep and held me around the waist as if she had been doing it all her life.

Maybe we had been doing it all our lives without realizing it.