Page 97 of Two for Roughing

“Ask them if Firecrackers red makes you look fat,” Fulls suggested.

Ketchup popped his head over the seat backs to join in. “Ooh, compliment the D-men on how big their biceps are; that’d psych them right out.”

“Ask the D-men how big their Ds are!” Matheson crowed.

“Kinda trying to combat homophobic stereotypes here, not hit on a bunch of guys at work. I probably shouldn’t have said what I did today either.” Kilian didn’t meet anyone’s eye as he said it.

A brief, solemn silence ensued.

Rocky ruined it by bursting into giggles. “D-men,” was all he could get out.

The rest of the bus ride comprised a series of ever-worsening puns on the letter D. Damir sank lower and lower in his seat with each one, wishing he’d been as smart as Coach Simmons and brought noise-canceling headphones.

Beside him, Kilian was blotchy red but smiling all the same. “Buncha overgrown high schoolers,” he muttered.

“Throwback!” Ketchup shouted. “Team game of Truth or Dare on the flight!”

A cheer went up so thunderously loud the bus driver honked the horn in response.

Damir hated his life.

“You don’t have to play,” Kilian told him under his breath. “You can borrow my headphones.”

Damir eyed him. How did he know Damir had forgotten his?

The offer tempted him. There was a podcast about the benefits of mixing quinoa with rice he’d been meaning to listen to… But he could handle being irritated for a few hours; he’d handled it all day and for most of his life. “Someone has to make sure no one gets dared to storm the cockpit or post nudes on social media.”

Kilian grimaced. “Good point. Sucks having to be responsible, eh?”

For a wild, juvenile, idiotic moment, the words I dare you to kiss me right here, right now formed on Damir’s lips. He shook his head to clear them away. “Someone has to be.”

For such a large group, the logistics of setting up a game of truth or dare took a good chunk of the available flight time. Eventually, Ketchup managed to input everyone’s nickname on a random generator. He promptly dared Matheson to moon the plane, at which point Damir halted the proceedings to collect everyone’s phones besides Ketchup’s. He stacked them up on the tray tables of the two seats he and Kilian occupied and hoped there’d be no turbulence causing them to topple. The last thing the team needed was footage of this juvenile bonding getting shared with the wrong person.

Then Damir looked studiously away as Matheson showed everyone his bare ass.

Ah, the glory and prestige of professional sports.

Cerny drank a vile mix of tomato juice, red wine, and tequila; Lissy told everyone in great detail about how he’d met Céline when he had to see a podiatrist for his disgusting fungal foot infection after a hard playoff run, and she had miraculously not been repulsed enough to turn him down. Perhaps because of the gratuitous tip he’d left.

“And now she sucks my toes all the time!” Lissy concluded, and Damir gagged a little bit.

“Denny!” Lissy called after activating the name generator app. “Truth or dare?”

Ugh. Damir had hoped interest in the game would die down before his name was called. He had no interest in getting out of his seat and making a fool of himself. With Lissy deciding his punishment, he also didn’t want to choose truth in case he’d be forced to discuss the helicopter again. “Dare.”

“Hmm,” Lissy said, drawing the sound out into the ridiculous. “I dare you…to go into your last Instagram message and send that person a picture of your abs.”

At least it wasn’t his dick. To be fair, Lissy probably knew Damir would have vetoed anything explicit.

Damir took his phone from the stack, pulled up his shirt, sucked in his stomach, and snapped a photo. As he did it, he caught sight of Kilian in the window seat, stealthily removing his own phone from the pile. Damir tabbed over to Instagram, hoping his most recent message wasn’t from a female fan. When he saw the smiley face Kilian had texted him three seconds ago, he grinned. “Done.”

“Wait,” Lissy said. “Why are you smiling? You hate this kind of thing. Show me your phone.”

Damir showed him the sent picture, but when Lissy went for the phone, Damir snatched it out of his reach. He had no idea what messages might be most recent in his thread with Kilian, but he knew he didn’t want Lissy reading them.

The game went on. Damir pulled Rocky, and when he chose truth, Damir asked him how it had gone with CrossFit Girl from Carolina. Rocky’s subsequent stammering through an admission of some heavy petting and a few racy FaceTime calls killed another five minutes of flight time. Damir wondered how Rocky got through phone sex. He could barely even say the word “sex.”

Fulls was then forced to burp the alphabet, after which Ketchup demonstrated his unfortunately famous cunnilingus technique, which, under the given circumstances, looked like a man wagging his tongue over thin air. And then Kilian chose truth.