Author's note: The game that most of the world calls kiss chase is known in Australia as kisschasey. Since I happen to be Australian, that's what I grew up with, and I've stuck with it for this story.
***
"Okay, gather in, everyone!" shouted Jenny, clapping her hands for attention and flashing everyone a wicked grin. "I need to go over the rules!"
Even when we were kids, it had seemed transgressive. Aged ten or eleven and understanding very little about men and women, we had still known by instinct that there was something
naughty
about playing kisschasey. I remembered racing down the grassy slope in our schoolyard, determined to outrun Jenny, determined not to let her kiss me, because the thought of being kissed by a girl was simply disgusting. And yet when she caught me -- I was small and unathletic back then, and Jenny was agile and speedy -- when she caught me, and pinned me gleefully against a tree, and leaned in and kissed me on the lips... something deep in my tummy that didn't know what it meant yet had fluttered in queasy confusion.
It had usually been Jenny who started the games of kisschasey. She was giggly and wild and loved to chase us, and the rest of the girls in our group had gone along with her, caught up in the excitement of the game. To us boys, it had been something that we protested, complained about, shouted over the girls about -- and yet somehow we never actually made enough of a fuss that we stopped the games from happening. Perhaps deep down, even then, we knew we wanted to play.
And then we had hit puberty, and the games of kisschasey had stopped. Once the desires in us started to surface -- once we
knew
that kissing each other was something we might actually want and enjoy -- then the game became far, far too real. We left it behind just like we left behind toy trucks and barbie dolls. And as we grew older, even as our friend group stayed together and stayed in touch, it became something we never even mentioned -- except maybe as an occasional "Remember when we used to..." that was inevitably followed by an awkward laugh.
Until, that is, the topic came up at our reunion night two weeks ago.
We had all had a few drinks. We were sitting around in Emma's living room, chatting aimlessly about new jobs and old memories, when somebody mentioned playing kisschasey in the schoolyard. And this time, the topic didn't get awkwardly dismissed. Earlier in the night there had already been a raunchy conversation about Jenny's sex life, during which our still-wild, still-giggly friend told us way more than we had expected about exactly what she liked to do with her endless supply of Tinder dates. I think quite a few of us had caught each other's eye in that conversation and known that the talk was turning us on. So when it came to talking about kisschasey, at least some of the group were feeling ready to let that topic take us to new and interesting places.
I think the idea came to quite a few of us before anybody said it out loud. People were edging towards it -- one person was brave enough to say they missed playing kisschasey, someone else said they wished it were acceptable to play it as adults. But I will never forget the moment when one of the girls -- it was Tess, the tall and willowy redhead -- had looked round the room, taken a deep breath, and tentatively said:
"You know... there's probably ways we could...
upgrade
kisschasey. Make it into a more
adult
kind of game, if you know what I mean."
And the entire room had frozen for a moment, holding its breath, while the air suddenly crackled with charged excitement, and all of us looked at each other, and knew what we were thinking.
So now, here we were.
We had rented out a giant indoor play space -- a 'soft play' centre, as it was called. It was one of those adventure playgrounds that parents take kids to tire them out during the school holidays, and we all remembered loving it when we were younger. There were multiple levels of tunnels, walkways, stairs, and slides -- a labyrinth of play spaces, all colourful and soft-floored. There were slides that twisted around to send you whizzing into a ball pit; there were mini-mazes where you could easily get lost and come out in a completely different part of the playground; there were places to climb, places to run and dodge, and places to hide. We had hired the place for the whole night, and Tom had slipped the staff an extra few hundred to go home and leave us undisturbed. We had the playground completely to ourselves.
Everyone had got tested and posted their results in the group chat -- we had agreed that the game would run a lot better if nobody had to worry about condoms. It had all gone smoothly, and to my amazement, nobody had got cold feet, none of us had backed out. And so here we were, stood in a circle at the edge of the play space in a kids' adventure centre, some of us grinning awkwardly at each other and some of us having fits of the giggles, and all of us, I think, amazed at what we were about to do.
We were here to play a game of fuckchasey.
"Listen up," Jenny called in a mock-stern voice -- though the effect was undercut by the massive smirk that she couldn't help herself giving all of us. There were a few more titters as we all stopped talking to listen to her. I was standing next to Tom, Jason, and Patrick, and I could tell that all four of us were trying to look casual, as though we were totally cool with all this. As though the prospect of playing this game with the five women we'd been friends with all our lives wasn't making us wildly, ridiculously excited.
We weren't concealing it very well.
I let my eyes rove over the girls. Of course, this was hardly the first time I'd imagined fucking them. We'd grown up together, been together all through college and stayed in touch beyond, and I'd had plenty of fantasies over the years about hooking up with one or two or all of them. But it had never happened. I knew that some of us had been together before: Jason and Aimi had dated for a while in college before splitting up amicably, and there had been a night when Tom and Tess got drunk and fucked at a party. But in general there had been remarkably little sex within our friend group -- and for me, no sex within the group at all. I was a late bloomer anyway, and by the time I knew what I was doing, we were all moving out of college. One or two of the girls had certainly
talked