Never Have I Ever

Cassie gasped, jumping in her seat as the clap of thunder and splitting bolt of lightning across the screen lit the theater like daylight for an instant. In her momentary panic, she grabbed at the armrest, the fingers of her left hand finding instead the warm forearm of her fellow movie-goer and best friend, Andrew.

Their met eyes for a moment, hers still wide with residual surprise and his glittering with amusement. With a blush for her silly panic and for the unexpected touch, she took her hand away, crossing her arms across her stomach and turning her face back to the screen.

Recently, for reasons she couldn't entirely understand, Cassie had begun to feel awkward around Andrew; too often she found herself blushing for small things, or giggling nervously, or losing the courage to do things like brush a hand through his hair or jump on his back for a piggy-back ride - things that a few months earlier she would have done without thinking.

It was their stupid friend Margaret who'd started it, with her talk of "friends with benefits." Cassie had never considered the idea that her tall, gangly Andy could be, as Margaret had put it, "a certified hottie." They'd been friends for so long that she could no longer hold herself far enough away from him to be able to see him with an objective, appraising eye.

Andrew's lips suddenly brushed her ear as he leaned over close to whisper to her, and she nearly jumped again. "The scary part's coming," he murmured, offering his shoulder as a place for her to hide her eyes.

Ah, this was why she loved him so. Who else would understand how much she loved horror films - and how deeply they terrified her? Who would take the time to go to these films first without her, then come back to see them a second time, ready to point out all the really horrific scenes so that she could hide her face and not be scarred beyond belief?

No doubt he would also stay with her after the movie tonight, curled in an uncomfortable ball on the floor next to her bed to act as her protector. He snored and drooled and would probably sleep through the apocalypse, but somehow having him there still made her feel better.

When the film ended, the heroine narrowly escaping by boat as the only survivor, Cassie and Andrew filed out into the chilly, early autumn night. Cassie shivered, and Andrew dropped a friendly arm around her shoulders.

"Did you like it?" Cassie asked.

"It was alright. Definitely better this time than when I watched it by myself. Your reactions are priceless," Andrew said with a laugh.

"I can't help it! I jump at the jumps, I'm scared of the scary parts - that's what's supposed to happen when you go see a horror movie!"

"I wasn't complaining. I'm amused."

"Hey, I saw you jump a little when he came out from under the shed to grab that girl's ankles."

"Strictly for your benefit. I am never scared."

"Oh? Well, good. You can stay up and keep watch tonight. Make sure no creepers come in my house in the middle of the night to chop me up for their stew."

Andrew stifled a yawn, shaking his head. "An all-night vigil? Fat chance of that. You'd have to stay up with me."

Immediately, Cassie began to think of ways she might keep him awake, each a little more risque than the last, and she blushed again. What was it about him tonight that made her think such silly thoughts? He was joking with her, being her almost-brotherly friend as he always had been. The flirtatious edge was something she was imagining, she knew.

"Whatever you want, just keep the monsters away from me!" Cassie cried with a melodramatic wave of her arms. She ducked out from under his arm, darted the last few feet to the door of his car and leapt inside.

The drive to her house was quiet, each of them thinking their own private thoughts in companionable silence. Once they got to the house, Cassie began to feel again a twinge of that fear she had experienced in the theater. The darkness, the quiet, the sense of waiting, it unnerved her enough that she let Andrew lead the way through the front door, clinging to his arm as if that would save her if some slasher movie antagonist were waiting on the other side.

"I don't want to go to sleep yet," Cassie said as they marched to her room, Andrew turning on lights as they went. "I'm all antsy. Let's play a game or something, huh?"

Cassie had a grand total of three board games, one of which was nothing more than a sticky Candy Land board, devoid of any cards or playing pieces; there was little there with which to while away the evening hours.

"Let's play Never Have I Ever," Cassie suggested, and Andrew shrugged, his preferred signal of acquiescence.

They sat on either end of her bed, both cross-legged, facing each other and hugging pillows in their laps. Each of them held up all ten fingers, ready to play.

"Never have I ever...read Hamlet," Andrew said by way of starting. Cassie shook her head.

"No, that's boring!"

"What? We always do stuff like that."

"I know! Let's talk about something more fun than our reading lists and bodily functions." She eyed him beadily, daring him to repeat his disgusting scatological comments from the last time they'd played this game.

"Like what?"

"Like..." Cassie considered and discarded a dozen suggestions instantly, filing them away as either too mild or far too dirty. "Like, never have I ever kissed someone below the chin."

"Really, never?"

"Never ever."

"I'm not putting a finger down for that. It's dumb. You can't seriously have gotten to be nearly twenty years old and never done that."

"But I haven't!"

"Come here. Kiss me right here on the neck, and then think of another one." He was laughing, but he did lean forward and pull his shirt away from the side of his neck, clearly intending for her to follow through.

With another blush - would they never stop? - she bent and pressed her lips quickly to the spot where his neck met his shoulder. It was brief, but she was still pleasantly surprised by how warm his skin was there.

"Alright, now think of a better one than that," Andrew said with another laugh, sitting back.

"I can't think of anything. You say one."

"Alright, fine. Never have I ever...made out with a hot girl who was sober."

It was Cassie's turn to laugh. "Wait, how many drunk hot girls have you made out with?"

"Just one, but she was scorching."

"Oh, prettier than me, huh?" She meant it as a joke, but her tone fell a little short of the levity she was going for, and she ended up sounding a great deal more jealous than she felt.

"Well, no, I mean, not prettier than you, per se..."

Cassie gave him her most dramatic look of mock-hurt. "You don't think I'm pretty, Andrew?"

"Are you kidding? You're beautiful, Cass. But you're...you know...you're Cassie."

A jolt of something like fear, but entirely not, shot through Cassie's stomach. He'd never said that before, that she was beautiful. True, he'd qualified it, but at the same time...he thought she was beautiful. Her face warmed.

"I'm tempted to make you make out with me and pick another one, just because you were so obnoxious about mine," Cassie said, laughing.

Andrew laughed once, but then his smile became something decidedly more inviting.

"Oh, really? That wasn't obnoxious. I was merely pointing out that there are things in this life that you should have done in your teenage years."

"And making out with a girl with no alcohol involved is definitely something you should have done. I still have another couple months before I'm out of my teens. You've missed the boat already! Anything you do now is necessary just to catch up."

"So you think I should have done...this?" He rolled up onto his hands and knees, which put his face directly in front of hers, an inch or two away. After a pause, their lips touched, and in her surprise at the suddenness of it she broke the kiss to suck in a startled breath.

He backed away a couple of inches, thinking he'd startled her unpleasantly, but Cassie followed him, leaning forward until they were separated by a mere sliver of air. Andrew kissed her again, softly at first, but then inspiration seemed to strike, and he sat up a little, putting his hands on either side of her face to hold her to him. When he finally released her, both of them were breathing a little harder, eyes a little wide, movements a little uncertain.

"So," Andrew said, clearing his throat and sitting back. "So, I guess I can't use that one anymore. Unless you've been drinking, of course?" Still too stunned to react properly to his comic jabs, she merely shook her head. "I thought not. You're not alcoholic enough to sneak a flask into a movie theater. Well, is it your turn to think of one, then, or are you going to make me go again?"

"I, um..." Cassie shook her head a little, cleared her throat. "Well, let's see. Never have I ever..." She thought of the moment earlier when Andrew had pulled his shirt back from his neck, showing off the lovely, muscled shoulders he was secretly proud of. She wondered if the rest of him was as nice as his shoulders. "Never have I ever seen any of my friends naked."

Andrew's eyebrows shot up. "What, you've never been in a locker room before?"

"When would I have been in a locker room?" Cassie laughed. She was not the athletic sort, as Andrew was well aware.

"Still, never? Like, you've never gone streaking, skinny dipping, changed in front of each other, anything?"

Cassie shook her head, grinning. Andrew stood up next to the bed. "Well, I can't let that go unchanged. Seriously, nudity among friends - it's a rite of passage!"

He seized the back of his shirt and tugged it over his head, dumping it unceremoniously on the floor before going to work on his belt. Cassie watched with a mixture of horrified amazement that he was actually stripping naked in her bedroom, laughable discomfort because it was Andrew, and a growing appetite for the new perspective she was gaining on him, this thought of him as a real, handsome, sexy boy - not just her buddy Andrew.

His pants hit the floor and he stepped out of them, standing awkwardly in his boxers for a moment before seizing the waistband and tugging those down to his ankles, too. Cassie couldn't help but stare; she'd never seen any boy totally naked, and here was a very fine specimen of man, standing in front of her with much less self-consciousness than she would have expected.

After a moment, he bent to pull his boxers and pants back on, but Cassie protested.

"Aw, you're going to put it all back on?" she asked jokingly. "Here I thought you were going to play the rest of the game that way."

Shrugging, Andrew sat back at the end of the bed as he had been, with the notable difference that he was now stark naked. "This hardly seems fair."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm totally hanging free here, and you're still bundled up like a nun. A little reciprocation would be fair, don't you think?"

Cassie shuddered at the idea of Andrew seeing her naked. She was self-conscious enough about seeing herself in the mirror.

But Andrew was staring at her expectantly, and she knew he would play along no more without this quid pro quo. She stood nervously, then pulled her shirt up over her head, dropping it beside her. Andrew just watched, expressionless except for his small smile, so she carried on.

Her skirt followed her shirt to the floor, and then with a deep breath she unclasped her bra in the back and dropped that onto the pile as well. Without looking at Andrew, and with a face undoubtedly colored like a beet, she slipped her panties off, sliding them down her long bare legs and kicking them off onto the pile of discarded clothes.

Andrew's eyes took in every inch of her nudity, and he sighed; she thought she heard him say "Cass" under his breath. When his eyes trailed back up to meet hers, he smiled. "And now neither of us can use that one."

Cassie sat back down, a little closer to Andrew this time, their knees touching. "It's your turn."

Andrew hadn't taken his eyes away from her yet, and still didn't as he answered without hesitation, "Never have I ever touched every inch of a girl's naked body." His hands were already reaching out to touch her shoulders, trail along her leg, cup her face. Grabbing her legs, he pulled her farther down on the bed so that she could fit lying down without hitting her head on the headboard. He took her face in his hands and kissed her sweetly.

"Andrew!" Cassie cried in a voice that was half a laugh when they paused to breathe. "What are you doing?"

"Not sure yet," Andrew said absently, tucking her hair behind her ears and kissing her soundly.

Cassie could feel her heart beating in every extremity; had she ever been able to feel every inch of her hypersensitive skin the way she could now? Andrew did not stop kissing her as his hands fell away from her face, slipped down her neck and gently ran over her breasts to her stomach. When his thumbs grazed over her nipples, a shock wave ran down through her torso, straight to that soft, dark place between her legs. She had never been as aware of that spot as she was at that instant.

Andrew was kneeling over her now as she lay back on the bed, and in their mutual nudity it was impossible for him to hide his body's appreciation of this turn of events. His erection brushed against her thigh as he shifted, and she tensed, the unfamiliarity suddenly overwhelming her.

The kissing stopped immediately; Andrew sat back, concern on his face. "Is this okay? Are you-- I mean, is this too weird?"

"No, no," she assured him, and she meant it. All this felt surprisingly natural, even as quickly as it was moving - as if this was the most obvious and right state for them to be in, and everything they had been and done before had been awkward and unsatisfying. "Please come back."

He acquiesced with a vengeance, the force of his kiss pinning her to the bed as she wrapped one arm around his shoulders and grasped the back of his neck with the other. When he suddenly moved to change positions, he almost lifted her off the bed in his enthusiasm as she clung to him. She admired for a moment the powerful muscles of his abdomen and lower body when he sat up on his knees to shift, putting himself between her legs.

She was unbelievably, overwhelmingly aroused, almost to the point of discomfort; she could feel the slickness of her own juices between her thighs as she moved over on the bed to center herself, and when she spread her legs apart to give Andrew a place to kneel, the cold air of the room was a shock on her wet flesh.

Andrew's hands were on her hips, his thumbs tracing small circles on the skin of her stomach as his kisses began to trail downward - along her neck, across her collarbone, up the mound of her breast. His mouth closed over one nipple, his tongue moving torturously slowly in a narrowing spiral around it, ending at last in a fierce, cat-tongue lick and a small, playful nip.

The muscles in Cassie's stomach tightened suddenly, jerking her, forcing a small gasp out from between her lips. Andrew smiled against her skin.

One hand slid away from her hip, along the outside of her leg, fingers dragging lazily across the skin of her thigh. He folded his hand so that only his index finger pressed against her skin as he worked his way back up, running it along between her legs as she squirmed. At length, his finger found the already wet-slick folds of her nether lips, teasing them apart and sliding from her clit to her drenched opening.

Her fingers tightened on the skin of his back, her mouth dropping open; it seemed suddenly as if there wasn't enough oxygen in the room, and the lack made her deliciously dizzy. He pulled back from her a little, watching her face as his finger slid up and down slowly.

She couldn't get enough of his face, especially the tiny smile, like he had a secret and was going to tell her in little pieces, stretched out over the night. There was something strange and thrilling about watching him touch her; he seemed to waver between being the Andrew she'd always known and trusted more than anyone else in the world, and a completely different man, surprisingly sexy, totally aware of what she wanted and needed and ached for.

"Is this really happening?"

She didn't realize she'd spoken the words aloud until Andrew paused in his finger's ministrations and bent to bury his face in her neck, whispering between kisses, "It must be, unless we're both sharing the best dream I've ever had."

He sat up, eyes on her body like he was trying to memorize it. His hand started to move again, faster, his fingertip teasing her clit and sending alarmingly powerful jolts of pleasure through her body. Her toes and fingers were going numb in waves of tingles. She was blazing hot inside; her skin ought to be steaming in the air of the room.

And at the core of her, so close to his hand, she began to feel an almost unbearable emptiness, as if he'd stolen a piece of her and he alone could return it. She closed her eyes, concentrated. She was so empty; she was a shell made only of feverish skin, holding nothing but this raging inferno and a desperate, gaping vacancy.

"I need you," she breathed, her eyes slitting open to see him. "Now. Please."

He met her eyes, his forehead creasing as he posed the silent question: Are you sure? She was beginning to feel frantic, something akin to panic filling her chest. Reaching up, she grasped his shoulders, letting her urgency show in the tightness of her grip, tugging him down where he could kiss her.

For the length of several long kisses, he just lay against her, and Cassie realized a new level of pleasure as she reveled in the buttery smoothness of his skin on hers, the solidity of his muscles as he held his weight just off of her, the unbelievable warmth between their two bodies.

And then she slid her hands from his shoulders to his waist, her eyes meeting his, wordlessly begging him to end the torturous wait and take her as they both clearly wanted. He complied eagerly, shifting, aligning himself with her slit.

In a moment of sober clarity, she allowed herself to realize what was happening. This was her virginity, that part of her that was hers to grant; she'd been holding onto this, guarding it carefully for nearly twenty years - would she give it away here, suddenly, without pause for thought or consideration for anything but how perfect the moment felt?

Andrew watched her, his eyes burning with his readiness, incredible patience on his face. She could see that he would wait until the anxiety cleared from her face again, until she asked him again to fill that space. She could see that he would stop altogether at a word, even with every cell in both of their bodies calling for them to come together in every way.

Who better to experience this with? Who would she ever trust so implicitly? Her apprehension evaporated, and she smiled up at him. She lifted her hips, the tip of his penis pressing against her flesh, the slit widening to allow the head inside. He hadn't gone far when an obvious resistance stopped their motion.

He leaned into her harder by a fraction, and she gasped at the shock of warning pain. It was so unlike any pain she'd ever felt; not terrible or unbearable, just so intensely personal. Her body was shrieking, intruder! Invader! Internal alarms everywhere were insisting that she do something to stop this thing from entering her.

But a larger part of her saw more clearly. This was Andrew. She wanted him inside her. She wanted him in her and on her and against her. So she relaxed her legs, which had tensed and tried to close. They dropped wider suddenly, and Andrew's weight carried him into her.

Her head jerked back of its own volition, her breath hissing out from between her teeth as her flesh gave, tearing a path for him.