EllaRose88 gave me the prompt "Truth or Dare." Was up too late (again) last night exorcising this from my head.
Ding.
The doors to the lift open late on a Friday, and he steps in, smiling bashfully at the one young lady with which he always hopes to share the small o espaço of the elevator.
“Evening,” he says quietly.
“Evening,” she respostas back, looking shyly down at her shoes.
God, she looks so cute tonight.
He’s wearing that cologne again.
Ding.
The doors slide closed and the lift starts to descend. Her office is on the topo, início floor of Camelot Tower, his one below. Twenty-five and twenty-four.
The two passengers stand silently, each uneasy in the other’s presence, each struggling with their attraction to the other, neither knowing if it is mutual.
In truth, had there been a third person in the lift with them, that person would have felt very uncomfortable, indeed.
There is a deep rumble that reaches their ears through the building and into the lift at its center, and the lights flicker and go out.
The lift stops somewhere between ten and eleven.
They look at each other. Rather, they look for each other; it is pitch black inside.
He is just about to say something when he feels her hand, shaky, groping, and finally closing around his upper arm. Tightly.
“I’m here,” he says dumbly. Where the hell else would I be?
She says nothing, just continues to grip his arm.
“Are you all right, miss?” he asks.
“Claustrophobic,” she whispers. “I don’t like elevators in general. This is worse.”
He reaches out with his other hand and places it over hers. She feels the warmth of his hand on her fingers. Warm. Solid. Reassuring.
“Thunderstorm must have knocked out the power,” he says, again stating the obvious.
“That would be my guess.”
“I’m Arthur,” he says, feeling like he should introduce himself.
“Guinevere, but most people call me Gwen.”
“Nice to finally meet you, Guinevere,” Arthur says, stroking the back of her hand with his fingers.
Her stomach flips.
So does his.
“Should we sit?” he asks suddenly. “We don’t know how long we’ll be dangling here, and…”
“Don’t say ‘dangling,’” she interrupts.
“‘Stuck’ isn’t any better, is it?”
“Worse.”
“Okay, so we don’t know how long we’ll be… here,” he decides to abandon any verb, “so we may as well get comfortable.”
“I can’t see,” she says.
“Neither can I,” he answers, but she feels him start to mover nevertheless, backing up, pulling her with him.
“Wait,” she says, and he can hear her digging in her purse. Suddenly there is a light source.
“No signal in here, but it can provide some light,” she says, waving her mobile at him.
“Aha, smart,” he says, and they find their way to the back mural of the lift and sit, leaning back against it.
She sits close to him, her hip touching his.
She’s probably just scared.
Then she reaches over and takes his hand.
She’s probably just scared.
Arthur digs his phone out of his inside breast pocket and swipes it on as well.
“iPhone?” he looks over at hers.
“Yeah. You?”
“Galaxy III.”
“Like it?”
“Love it.”
They sit in silence again.
“You work at Albion Marketing,” he says. “What do you do there?”
“Graphic designer. I mostly do magazine adverts. Put them together, make them all pretty, kind of thing. You’re at Pendragon Insurance.”
“Yeah.”
“What do you do there?”
“Pretty much whatever I want. My father is the CEO. Technically my título is Executive Vice-President, but basically I sign checks and tell people they can’t have any mais money,” he chuckles.
“Must be nice.”
“It’s okay,” he shrugs, poking his phone back to life when it goes black, enjoying how she looks in the eerie glow of their phones. The best part of the dia is riding the lift with you, he thinks. He contemplates saying it.
There is another distant, muffled rumble. Arthur hears the light clunk as Gwen removes her shoes, shoving them off with her toes and letting them fall.
“Make yourself comfortable,” he jokes.
“You wear heels sometime, see how long you last,” she says, but she is smiling. “I just hope the smell doesn’t kill you.”
He sniffs theatrically. “I don’t smell anything except…” he sniffs again, less theatrically, his nose following the scent to her neck, “lavender.”
She smiles and blushes, and her phone goes dark. She waits a minuto to fogo it back up, presumably hiding for a moment.
“Duh,” she says, poking and swiping her phone, setting the screen timeout to longer than 30 seconds.
He leans over to see what she’s doing. “Good idea again,” he says, and follows suit. “Ten minutos is the best I can do,” he frowns.
“I can do thirty,” she gloats.
“Oh, well, but can yours do this?” he asks, swiping over, pressing an icon, then a moment later the sound of a massive juicy fart erupts from the device in his hand.
Gwen bursts forth laughing, leaning towards him rather than away, he notices.
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t think my phone would accept the installation of such an app.”
He pokes the screen again, producing a different but equally robust sound.
She giggles again.
“You have a wonderful laugh,” he says, smiling at her, his eyes twinkling in the cell phone glow.
“We should play a game or something,” he says after a moment of mildly awkward silence. He’s shut down his virtual whoopee cushion, and is grasping for something to talk about.
I know what I want to say, but it would be highly inappropriate right now.
“A game?”
“You know, like I Spy or Truth or Dare or 20 perguntas or something.”
“I Spy? Really?”
“Okay, maybe not I Spy.”
Go for it. “Truth or Dare?” he asks smoothly, his voice bearing the slightest insinuation.
“Truth.”
“Ummm… are you ticklish?”
“That’s the best you can come up with?”
“I panicked.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Where?”
“It’s not a two-part question, Arthur.”
“Okay. Truth, then, since you’ve decided to start out wimpy.”
“How many women have you slept with?”
“Wow, you just went right for it, didn’t you,” he mutters, and she laughs. “Let’s see, last count was…” he starts ticking off on his fingers, muttering things like, “…carry the one…” then pokes around on his phone for the calculator app. “Ow!”
She pinched his arm.
“Three.”
“Okay. Um, truth again.”
“Chicken,” he says.
“I’m working up to it.”
“Okay, how old were you when you lost your virginity?”
“I suppose I should have seen that coming. Almost 20.”
“Wow,” he blinks.
“Oh, so how old were you? Twelve?”
“18. And it was a catastrophe. And that counts as my turn.”
“Does not.”
“Does, too. We can just assume I had said ‘Truth’ and you asked me the same question,” he pouts.
Okay, that is ridiculously cute, she thinks, watching his full lower lip as it juts out slightly. “Fine, but only because you are pouting like a little boy.”
“Am not,” he says, continuing to pout.
“Dare,” she says quietly, and the lower lip retracts, bitten quite alluringly por his teeth now as he thinks.
“Cluck like a chicken,” he says, then immediately regrets it.
“You panicked again, didn’t you?”
He nods. I really wanted to say ‘kiss me.’
Completely nonplussed, she makes a very passable chicken noise.
“That was really good!” he laughs, surprised and delighted. “All right. Dare.”
“Make your best and/or most embarrassing animal sound.”
Oh, no. “It’s really loud, just to warn you.”
“What on earth?” she wonders aloud, and her words are cut off por a very loud and very accurate donkey noise.
“Oh, my God,” she gasps, laughing again, “That was brilliant!” Her hands cover her mouth as she giggles. “Okay,” she recovers again. “I need to do another truth.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?” He knows she is not married. The first time he saw her he looked and saw no ring on her left hand.
“No,” she says quietly, biting her own lip now.
“Girlfriend?” he ventures.
“You’re trying to cheat again, but no, I’m straight.”
“Truth,” he says, fishing for the same pergunta back.
She doesn’t ask it. “Boxers or briefs?”
“You’re not going to ask me if I have a girlfriend?”
“No. Pants: What kind?”
“Boxer briefs, actually.”
“Very nice.”
“Why aren’t you going to ask?”
“Because I don’t need to ask,” she says quietly.
“Why?” How does she know?
“Because you and I are the only people left working in this building at nearly seven on a Friday evening. If you had a girlfriend, you wouldn’t be working this late. Not on a Friday.”
“Good point.”
“I certainly would have a problem with it, if I…” she stops mid-sentence, realizing what she is about to say.
“If you what?”
“Nothing. Who’s turn is it?”
“Yours.”
She sighs. “Dare.”
“Kiss me.”
“What?”
“You heard me,” he says quietly, turning his face towards hers.
“I know, I just wanted to see if you would say it again.”
“Kiss me, Guinevere,” he says, his voice low, washing over her skin like a caress.
“Okay,” she whispers.
Slowly, very slowly, she leans toward him. His eyes drop to her lips, and when her tongue darts out unconsciously to wet them, he nearly stops breathing.
Her lips touch his once, softly, lingering just long enough, just long enough for both of them to feel the jolt of electricity course through their veins at the contact, just long enough for the temperature inside the lift to rise at least ten degrees.
At least that’s how it feels.
“Truth,” he breathes against her lips, pulling away just a fraction of an inch.
“Did you feel that?” she asks, slowly opening her eyes to gaze into his.
“Yes,” he rumbles.
“Dare,” she whispers.
“Kiss me again,” he says, and her lips are immediately crushing against his, and her phone clatters to the floor as she clutches the lapels of his jacket, parting her lips when she feels his tongue ask for entrance.
Now his phone falls as he pulls her across his lap, wrapping his arms around her, cradling her head in one hand, his fingers delving into her soft curls, the other wrapping around her narrow waist.
They kiss hungrily, their tongues sparring, sweeping, massaging each other, drinking from each other as though they are stranded in a desert.
“Dare,” he tears his lips away long enough to speak one word.
“Touch me,” she gasps, pulling his hand to her breast, and his fingers grip it reflexively, feeling its shape, its weight.
“So good,” he whispers, trailing kisses down her neck as she throws her head back and shifts on his lap so she is straddling him.
She holds his head lightly, her fingers raking through his soft blonde hair as he nudges his way into her blouse, placing kisses on the bit of chest he can get to.
“Dare,” he says desperately, hoping.
“Buttons,” she simply says, not even a complete sentence, but he knows what she means. His fingers fly to the buttons of her blouse, opening several but not all, plunging his hand inside to her breast, over her bra, while he trails kisses on the soft mounds.
She feels his stiffness beneath her, and her hips instinctively roll against him, and he groans.
“Dare,” she moans.
Then the lights flicker back on and the lift starts moving. They blink in the light, staring at each other.
“Um, hello,” she says, smiling a little at him.
He chuckles, and starts re-buttoning her blouse. She fixes his hair, smoothing it back to its original location.
They retrieve their phones and Arthur helps her to her feet. Gwen cannot help but notice the telltale bulge in his trousers and smiles apologetically at him.
“I still owe you a dare,” he says.
“Do tell,” she turns to face him.
“Come início with me.”
Ding.
I lied. No longer a one-shot. Probably a series of drabbles, loosely connected.
Part 2: link
Ding.
The doors to the lift open late on a Friday, and he steps in, smiling bashfully at the one young lady with which he always hopes to share the small o espaço of the elevator.
“Evening,” he says quietly.
“Evening,” she respostas back, looking shyly down at her shoes.
God, she looks so cute tonight.
He’s wearing that cologne again.
Ding.
The doors slide closed and the lift starts to descend. Her office is on the topo, início floor of Camelot Tower, his one below. Twenty-five and twenty-four.
The two passengers stand silently, each uneasy in the other’s presence, each struggling with their attraction to the other, neither knowing if it is mutual.
In truth, had there been a third person in the lift with them, that person would have felt very uncomfortable, indeed.
There is a deep rumble that reaches their ears through the building and into the lift at its center, and the lights flicker and go out.
The lift stops somewhere between ten and eleven.
They look at each other. Rather, they look for each other; it is pitch black inside.
He is just about to say something when he feels her hand, shaky, groping, and finally closing around his upper arm. Tightly.
“I’m here,” he says dumbly. Where the hell else would I be?
She says nothing, just continues to grip his arm.
“Are you all right, miss?” he asks.
“Claustrophobic,” she whispers. “I don’t like elevators in general. This is worse.”
He reaches out with his other hand and places it over hers. She feels the warmth of his hand on her fingers. Warm. Solid. Reassuring.
“Thunderstorm must have knocked out the power,” he says, again stating the obvious.
“That would be my guess.”
“I’m Arthur,” he says, feeling like he should introduce himself.
“Guinevere, but most people call me Gwen.”
“Nice to finally meet you, Guinevere,” Arthur says, stroking the back of her hand with his fingers.
Her stomach flips.
So does his.
“Should we sit?” he asks suddenly. “We don’t know how long we’ll be dangling here, and…”
“Don’t say ‘dangling,’” she interrupts.
“‘Stuck’ isn’t any better, is it?”
“Worse.”
“Okay, so we don’t know how long we’ll be… here,” he decides to abandon any verb, “so we may as well get comfortable.”
“I can’t see,” she says.
“Neither can I,” he answers, but she feels him start to mover nevertheless, backing up, pulling her with him.
“Wait,” she says, and he can hear her digging in her purse. Suddenly there is a light source.
“No signal in here, but it can provide some light,” she says, waving her mobile at him.
“Aha, smart,” he says, and they find their way to the back mural of the lift and sit, leaning back against it.
She sits close to him, her hip touching his.
She’s probably just scared.
Then she reaches over and takes his hand.
She’s probably just scared.
Arthur digs his phone out of his inside breast pocket and swipes it on as well.
“iPhone?” he looks over at hers.
“Yeah. You?”
“Galaxy III.”
“Like it?”
“Love it.”
They sit in silence again.
“You work at Albion Marketing,” he says. “What do you do there?”
“Graphic designer. I mostly do magazine adverts. Put them together, make them all pretty, kind of thing. You’re at Pendragon Insurance.”
“Yeah.”
“What do you do there?”
“Pretty much whatever I want. My father is the CEO. Technically my título is Executive Vice-President, but basically I sign checks and tell people they can’t have any mais money,” he chuckles.
“Must be nice.”
“It’s okay,” he shrugs, poking his phone back to life when it goes black, enjoying how she looks in the eerie glow of their phones. The best part of the dia is riding the lift with you, he thinks. He contemplates saying it.
There is another distant, muffled rumble. Arthur hears the light clunk as Gwen removes her shoes, shoving them off with her toes and letting them fall.
“Make yourself comfortable,” he jokes.
“You wear heels sometime, see how long you last,” she says, but she is smiling. “I just hope the smell doesn’t kill you.”
He sniffs theatrically. “I don’t smell anything except…” he sniffs again, less theatrically, his nose following the scent to her neck, “lavender.”
She smiles and blushes, and her phone goes dark. She waits a minuto to fogo it back up, presumably hiding for a moment.
“Duh,” she says, poking and swiping her phone, setting the screen timeout to longer than 30 seconds.
He leans over to see what she’s doing. “Good idea again,” he says, and follows suit. “Ten minutos is the best I can do,” he frowns.
“I can do thirty,” she gloats.
“Oh, well, but can yours do this?” he asks, swiping over, pressing an icon, then a moment later the sound of a massive juicy fart erupts from the device in his hand.
Gwen bursts forth laughing, leaning towards him rather than away, he notices.
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t think my phone would accept the installation of such an app.”
He pokes the screen again, producing a different but equally robust sound.
She giggles again.
“You have a wonderful laugh,” he says, smiling at her, his eyes twinkling in the cell phone glow.
“We should play a game or something,” he says after a moment of mildly awkward silence. He’s shut down his virtual whoopee cushion, and is grasping for something to talk about.
I know what I want to say, but it would be highly inappropriate right now.
“A game?”
“You know, like I Spy or Truth or Dare or 20 perguntas or something.”
“I Spy? Really?”
“Okay, maybe not I Spy.”
Go for it. “Truth or Dare?” he asks smoothly, his voice bearing the slightest insinuation.
“Truth.”
“Ummm… are you ticklish?”
“That’s the best you can come up with?”
“I panicked.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Where?”
“It’s not a two-part question, Arthur.”
“Okay. Truth, then, since you’ve decided to start out wimpy.”
“How many women have you slept with?”
“Wow, you just went right for it, didn’t you,” he mutters, and she laughs. “Let’s see, last count was…” he starts ticking off on his fingers, muttering things like, “…carry the one…” then pokes around on his phone for the calculator app. “Ow!”
She pinched his arm.
“Three.”
“Okay. Um, truth again.”
“Chicken,” he says.
“I’m working up to it.”
“Okay, how old were you when you lost your virginity?”
“I suppose I should have seen that coming. Almost 20.”
“Wow,” he blinks.
“Oh, so how old were you? Twelve?”
“18. And it was a catastrophe. And that counts as my turn.”
“Does not.”
“Does, too. We can just assume I had said ‘Truth’ and you asked me the same question,” he pouts.
Okay, that is ridiculously cute, she thinks, watching his full lower lip as it juts out slightly. “Fine, but only because you are pouting like a little boy.”
“Am not,” he says, continuing to pout.
“Dare,” she says quietly, and the lower lip retracts, bitten quite alluringly por his teeth now as he thinks.
“Cluck like a chicken,” he says, then immediately regrets it.
“You panicked again, didn’t you?”
He nods. I really wanted to say ‘kiss me.’
Completely nonplussed, she makes a very passable chicken noise.
“That was really good!” he laughs, surprised and delighted. “All right. Dare.”
“Make your best and/or most embarrassing animal sound.”
Oh, no. “It’s really loud, just to warn you.”
“What on earth?” she wonders aloud, and her words are cut off por a very loud and very accurate donkey noise.
“Oh, my God,” she gasps, laughing again, “That was brilliant!” Her hands cover her mouth as she giggles. “Okay,” she recovers again. “I need to do another truth.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?” He knows she is not married. The first time he saw her he looked and saw no ring on her left hand.
“No,” she says quietly, biting her own lip now.
“Girlfriend?” he ventures.
“You’re trying to cheat again, but no, I’m straight.”
“Truth,” he says, fishing for the same pergunta back.
She doesn’t ask it. “Boxers or briefs?”
“You’re not going to ask me if I have a girlfriend?”
“No. Pants: What kind?”
“Boxer briefs, actually.”
“Very nice.”
“Why aren’t you going to ask?”
“Because I don’t need to ask,” she says quietly.
“Why?” How does she know?
“Because you and I are the only people left working in this building at nearly seven on a Friday evening. If you had a girlfriend, you wouldn’t be working this late. Not on a Friday.”
“Good point.”
“I certainly would have a problem with it, if I…” she stops mid-sentence, realizing what she is about to say.
“If you what?”
“Nothing. Who’s turn is it?”
“Yours.”
She sighs. “Dare.”
“Kiss me.”
“What?”
“You heard me,” he says quietly, turning his face towards hers.
“I know, I just wanted to see if you would say it again.”
“Kiss me, Guinevere,” he says, his voice low, washing over her skin like a caress.
“Okay,” she whispers.
Slowly, very slowly, she leans toward him. His eyes drop to her lips, and when her tongue darts out unconsciously to wet them, he nearly stops breathing.
Her lips touch his once, softly, lingering just long enough, just long enough for both of them to feel the jolt of electricity course through their veins at the contact, just long enough for the temperature inside the lift to rise at least ten degrees.
At least that’s how it feels.
“Truth,” he breathes against her lips, pulling away just a fraction of an inch.
“Did you feel that?” she asks, slowly opening her eyes to gaze into his.
“Yes,” he rumbles.
“Dare,” she whispers.
“Kiss me again,” he says, and her lips are immediately crushing against his, and her phone clatters to the floor as she clutches the lapels of his jacket, parting her lips when she feels his tongue ask for entrance.
Now his phone falls as he pulls her across his lap, wrapping his arms around her, cradling her head in one hand, his fingers delving into her soft curls, the other wrapping around her narrow waist.
They kiss hungrily, their tongues sparring, sweeping, massaging each other, drinking from each other as though they are stranded in a desert.
“Dare,” he tears his lips away long enough to speak one word.
“Touch me,” she gasps, pulling his hand to her breast, and his fingers grip it reflexively, feeling its shape, its weight.
“So good,” he whispers, trailing kisses down her neck as she throws her head back and shifts on his lap so she is straddling him.
She holds his head lightly, her fingers raking through his soft blonde hair as he nudges his way into her blouse, placing kisses on the bit of chest he can get to.
“Dare,” he says desperately, hoping.
“Buttons,” she simply says, not even a complete sentence, but he knows what she means. His fingers fly to the buttons of her blouse, opening several but not all, plunging his hand inside to her breast, over her bra, while he trails kisses on the soft mounds.
She feels his stiffness beneath her, and her hips instinctively roll against him, and he groans.
“Dare,” she moans.
Then the lights flicker back on and the lift starts moving. They blink in the light, staring at each other.
“Um, hello,” she says, smiling a little at him.
He chuckles, and starts re-buttoning her blouse. She fixes his hair, smoothing it back to its original location.
They retrieve their phones and Arthur helps her to her feet. Gwen cannot help but notice the telltale bulge in his trousers and smiles apologetically at him.
“I still owe you a dare,” he says.
“Do tell,” she turns to face him.
“Come início with me.”
Ding.
I lied. No longer a one-shot. Probably a series of drabbles, loosely connected.
Part 2: link