When Maya came in that evening, she was soaked - the summer storm rolling over the city had started earlier than predicted, and she hadn't brought her umbrella to work, so the short walk to our apartment from the subway had been plenty long enough to douse her.
I had been sitting on the couch in the middle of a movie when she busted in, cursing. I was startled for a second, but then had to laugh at the sight of her, dripping, stomping, tossing her waterlogged bag down in disgust.
"How was your day?" I said in an exaggerated sing-song voice.
"Fuck off!" she yelled as her sneakers plopped to the floor and she went off to the bathroom, a trail of water following her. I got up and cleaned up the water, then poured her a glass of wine as a peace offering once I heard the shower turn on.
Not for the first time, I idly imagined her in there. I'd never seen her naked, though I'd come close once, getting home early from a trip and accidentally catching a glimpse of her bare chest as she slammed her room door closed in panicked laughter. When she asked what I'd seen, I lied and said I hadn't seen anything, and that was almost true; it had been a blur. Still, my imagination was solid enough to extrapolate, and so I could picture her there in the steam, eyes closed, letting the water stream over her arms, her back, her tits, her ass. I imagined myself getting in behind her... and then shook it off as I felt my body respond to the fantasy. Not going to happen, I told myself. Can't happen.
Maya had shared the apartment for a couple of months now. She was the younger sister of my old roommate and best friend Greg, who had moved in with his girlfriend across town. Maya had graduated from college around the same time as Greg was preparing to move, and was having trouble finding a place elsewhere in the city, so Greg asked if she could take over his room. That saved me the trouble of finding someone else, so I agreed. He'd said something or other, too, about not trying anything, which I agreed to as well, not thinking about it much at the time.
I hadn't really noticed how attractive she was at first. Not sure why, she was very much my type, with shoulder-length wavy, almost curly brown hair, a lean and curvy figure, smooth olive brown skin - her and Greg's mom was Brazilian - and a cute face: deep brown eyes, a small mouth, and a killer smile. But at first, all I saw was a haggard move-in in a ragged T-shirt who my best friend called "sis".
No, it had been a few days before I took notice of her. Not for anything super sexy, it just... happened. Coming around the corner, seeing her on the couch just so, her C cup tits straining at a gray V neck tee, her smooth legs stretched out from pajama shorts that didn't go down very far.
Maya didn't dress provocatively, but she was hardly conservative, clearly very comfortable with her body. Practically, that meant that when she got home, she loosened way up, rarely wearing a bra, often with T-shirts that were tight at the chest and a bit short, revealing her stomach regularly. It also meant those gym shorts, or on chillier days thin pants that showed off her ass well. It was hard not to start fantasizing, especially as on a couple of occasions I was pretty sure I heard her getting herself off through the this wall between our rooms - just a couple low moans, but enough to extrapolate.
Still... this was my friend's little sister, and he made me promise, and I wasn't going to go there. Plus, there was Erica - we were definitely in an "off-again" phase, but it meant I wasn't entirely, completely, officially single anyway. So, setting aside that latent sexual tension, we got along well and had even become friends. We had similar senses of humor, and schedules, but we both kept ourselves busy enough socially so as not to crowd each other at home, though we also occasionally just hung out together.
Maya came out of the bathroom in her towel, and without saying anything went into her room and shut the door. A few minutes later she was back out in the living room, in shorts and that light gray T-shirt she wore frequently around the house - the one that was just tight enough in the chest. I could tell she was braless, as usual. She thanked me for the wine and sank down onto the other side of the couch from where I was, stretching out a bit, her midriff peeking out from the shirt.
"How was work?" I asked.
"Fine. Uneventful. Then wet as hell. How about you?"
"A bit crazed." I worked from home, copyediting material for an education company, and the late summer was our busy season.
"This storm is kind of nuts - it wasn't supposed to be like this." She looked out the window as the wind whipped and water flew almost sideways.
We ate reheated pizza while the movie I'd been watching finished - she'd already seen it, but gamely didn't reveal the end. I saw it coming anyway, but it was entertaining enough. We watched another after that.
"We're pretty exciting on a Friday night, huh?" I said, turning off the TV after it had finished. "Nothing going on for you?"
"Nah. I was going to go see that thing with Samantha but she ditched me for some guy. You?"
"No. I kept the night open in case I needed to work late, but amazingly enough nothing's popped up, so... here I am."
"Yeah, so, as you said. We're exciting." She laughed. "We could watch something else? Play a board game? Stare into space?"
"As enticing as staring into space is... I already watched a movie, but I'd be down for a game." I went over to the small games cabinet - we were both board game fans, and had a small collection that we'd combined. We grabbed a funny card game I'd found, and played that for a while. I had a couple beers, she had a couple glasses of wine.
"Nothing else in here speaks to me." She said, looking into the cabinet again. "Come with me to the stash."
She had a few additional games in her closet, so we went in there to check it out. She started pulling things off the shelf, but nothing that either of us wanted to play. We'd almost given up when a small box dropped onto the floor and she gasped.
"Ohhhh my god I forgot about this." She picked it up. "D3 Truth or Dare Bombs XXX" was written on the top in silver sharpie. "This is a game my roommates and I made up one night sophomore year. It's basically a variation on truth or dare but with set questions and dares, and extra rules. I desperately want to look through this."
"Should we play it?" I asked. She looked at me and raised her eyebrows. "So... okay, but be aware: this was made by a group of extremely horny sophomore girls. I don't remember much about the cards, but I remember they were risque. Like, uh, very."
"We can agree to skip anything that is going to make things weird, but I'm intrigued." She cocked her head to the side and thought about it for a second.
"Okay, what the hell," she relented. "Might get to know each other even better though..." I laughed, inwardly fine with that thought. Maybe she was too.
We went back into the living room and sat down on the couch. She pulled out a sheet of instructions first, then a few tokens of different colors.
"Oh, okay I remember this!" She said, going through the tokens. "We each get three blue, three red, and three green tokens, and one black token. Blue means you can ask a follow-up question of your own on a truth question, red means you can make the asker answer or do the dare too, and green means you can pass it on to someone else - I guess we won't need those since there are two of us. Black is a basic skip, but you only get one of those - should we just ignore that, if we're going to give each other skips?" I agreed.
She took the cards out and separated them into two piles - truth, and dare. There were about twice as many truth cards. I was impressed at the number and the development - they'd clearly put a lot of thought in.
She also pulled out a die. "Rolling a 1 or a 6 means dare; anything in between is truth."
"Okay - who starts?"
"I'll roll, then you take the card and ask me." I nodded. She picked up the die and rolled a 1 - a dare.
"Right off the bat, huh?" Maya laughed. She raised her eyebrows at me, and glanced at the dare pile. I gave a little shrug and picked it up, then felt a rush as I saw the words on it.
"Uh, so it says 'make out with someone else in the room for three minutes.'" I looked up at her, and there was a beat of silence. "We can skip that one." I added, though I didn't entirely want to.
"Yep - skipping that for now." A weird look crossed her face for a split second, after she said "for now," like she'd slipped or something, but it vanished fast. "I'm rolling again."
This time it came up a 3. I reached for a truth card and turned it over.
