Chapter 1: The First Forfeit
Rain tapped a steady, lazy rhythm against the living room window, blurring the neon sign from the bodega across the street into a smear of pink light. Inside, Travis’s apartment was a cave of warm, cluttered comfort. The only illumination came from a string of fairy lights tangled over a bookshelf and the flickering orange glow of a fake fireplace app on his TV.
“You’re cheating,” Travis said, without any real heat. He squinted at his cards, then at Cordelia’s triumphant face across the low coffee table.
“I’m winning,” she corrected, popping a cheese puff into her mouth. “There’s a profound difference. Cheating requires forethought. This is just the universe rewarding my superior strategy.”
“Your strategy is ‘draw the craziest card and make up a rule for it.’” He tossed a card onto the pile between them. “I don’t even think ‘Reverse Draw Four’ is a real thing in Uno.”
“It is now.” She laid down her final card with a soft, definitive tap. “And that’s game. Again.”
Travis groaned, letting his head fall back against the worn cushions of his sofa. They’d long since abandoned the official rules of any game they’d started with, the deck now a catalyst for a far more interesting, infinitely more dangerous contest of their own design. The stakes had escalated slowly over the last two hours, in tandem with the empty wine bottle on the floor.
First, it had been chores. Loser does the winner’s dishes for a week. Then dares. Cordelia had to text her ex a cryptic emoji. Travis had to sing the chorus of his favorite song out the window. Now, they were in deeper territory.
“Okay,” Cordelia said, leaning forward. The fairy lights caught the auburn strands in her hair, turning them to copper. Her freckles seemed to dance in the low light. “You know the penalty. Shirt. Off.”
Travis felt a flush start at his collar. This was the part where he usually deflected with a joke, where he cashed in one of his countless ‘get out of jail free’ tokens of their friendship. But the wine hummed in his veins, and the rain sealed them in, and the way she was looking at him—playful, but with a sharp, curious edge—made his throat go dry.
“You’re a tyrant,” he muttered, but he sat up.
He pulled his soft, grey henley over his head in one quick motion, tossing it onto the armchair. The apartment air was cool on his skin. He kept his eyes on the pizza box on the table, suddenly aware of the line of his shoulders, the definition across his chest that his usually baggy clothes hid. He’d never been self-conscious around her before. Not like this.
A beat of silence stretched, filled only by the patter of rain and the synthetic crackle of the digital fire.
“Hmm,” Cordelia said. Her playful smirk softened into something more contemplative.
“Hmm?” he echoed, finally risking a glance at her. “That’s all? No commentary? No critique of my lack of dedication to ab definition?”
“I’m formulating.” She uncurled herself from her corner of the sofa and stood up, padding barefoot to his tiny kitchenette. He watched, his heart doing a slow, heavy knock against his ribs, as she opened the fridge. She emerged with a plastic bottle, giving it a speculative shake.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“The next layer of the game,” she said, returning. She knelt on the rug in front of him, her knees brushing against his shins. The proximity was electric. She unscrewed the cap. The sweet, familiar smell of chocolate syrup hit the air.
“You’re kidding.”
“I never kid about game structure.” Her eyes glinted. “Winner applies the condiment. Loser… endures.”
“That’s not a rule we established!”
“It’s a rule of life, Travis. Victory is messy.” She tilted the bottle. A thick, dark ribbon of syrup oozed out, landing with a cold, startling plop just below his collarbone.
He sucked in a breath. The syrup was shockingly cold. It traced a slow, sticky path down the center of his chest, over the flat plane of his stomach. The sensation was absurd, childish, and yet utterly, devastatingly intimate.
Cordelia watched its progress, her head tilted. The playfulness had vanished from her expression, replaced by a focused intensity he’d only ever seen when she was lost in writing. She recapped the bottle and set it aside.
Then, she did what she’d always done. She bypassed the obvious, the cliché. She didn’t lean in. Instead, she reached out a single finger.
Her touch was light, almost clinical at first. She caught the trailing edge of the syrup pool on his sternum, spreading it in a short, deliberate line. Her skin was warm against his. The contrast of her touch and the cold syrup made his muscles tense. Her finger moved again, this time in a small, idle circle.
The air left the room. The rain outside faded to a distant whisper. All he could hear was the rustle of her jeans as she shifted, the soft sound of her breathing. All he could feel was that point of contact, a brand that was melting him from the inside out.
Her eyes flicked up to meet his. The green in them was deep, unreadable. The humor was gone, burned away by a shared, breathless recognition. They had stepped over a line they’d spent years carefully maintaining.
She didn’t stop. Her fingers, now slick with chocolate, drifted lower, following the path the syrup had charted. It was no longer just a game. It was a question. It was a map she was drawing on his skin, and every cell in his body was screaming the answer.
Travis’s hand, which had been gripping the edge of the couch cushion, lifted. He hovered, hesitating, the inches between his fingers and her wrist feeling like a canyon. He was terrified of breaking the spell, of reading everything wrong.
Her gaze dropped to his mouth, then back to his eyes. A silent challenge. A permission.
He was about to bridge that gap, about to let his hand settle on her arm and pull her in, when her other hand came up, resting lightly on his knee. A grounding point. A claim.
“Your turn to draw a card,” she whispered, her voice husky and entirely new.
But the deck was scattered, forgotten. The only rules left were the ones they were writing in the dark, sticky space between them. And Travis, after years of standing still, finally decided to move.
And Travis, after years of standing still, finally decided to move.
His hand didn’t land on her wrist. It cupped the side of her face, his thumb brushing the arch of her cheekbone, smearing a tiny fleck of chocolate she must have touched earlier. Her breath hitched. The world narrowed to the space between them, humid and sweet with sugar.
Then the fire log on the TV screen sputtered and pixelated, the program cycling back to a menu. The sudden shift in light, from warm flicker to bland blue menu screen, was like a bucket of cold water.
Cordelia blinked, leaning back an inch. A shaky laugh escaped her. “Wow,” she breathed, not looking away. “That’s… a new rule.”
“Yeah,” Travis said, his voice rough. His hand was still on her face. He didn’t want to move it. “I’m making it up as I go.”
She bit her lip, her eyes dancing with that familiar mischief, but it was tempered now by something hotter, more real. “Okay. But this card-based legislation is getting out of hand. We need a proper system.”
“What did you have in mind?” He let his hand drop, missing the warmth of her skin immediately.
“Straight odds. No wild cards.” She shifted, reaching for the scattered Uno deck and sweeping it aside. From the shelf beneath the coffee table, she pulled out a battered box. A deck of traditional playing cards, faded at the edges. “Five-card draw. Simple. Pure chance and skill.”
“And the stakes?” Travis asked, already knowing the answer, his heart beginning that heavy knock again.
She dealt two cards face down, her movements precise. “Clothes. One item per lost hand.” She glanced at his bare chest, then down at her own oversized sweater and leggings. “Seems we’re already partway there.”
Travis picked up his cards. A pair of eights. It felt like a sign. “And when we run out?”
Cordelia looked toward the kitchen, a slow, devilish smile spreading. “Then we get messy. I saw a can of whipped cream in there. And I think there’s a leftover pumpkin pie from Thanksgiving in the freezer.”
“It’s January.”
“It’s punishment, not gourmet dining.”
The first hand was a blur. Travis won with his two eights against her high card. She didn’t hesitate, pulling her thick sweater over her head in one smooth motion. Beneath it, she wore a simple, thin tank top. He tried not to stare at the way the fabric clung.
The rain picked up, drumming insistently on the glass.
He lost the next hand. His socks and jeans went, leaving him in his boxer briefs. The air felt different on his legs. More exposing. He focused on the cards, on the fan of possibilities in his hand, on anything but the way Cordelia was studying him, her writer’s mind no doubt cataloging every detail.
She lost the next. The leggings were shimmied off, kicked into a pile with the rest. Her legs were pale and long. She sat cross-legged now in just her tank top and a pair of simple cotton underwear, looking utterly unfazed, as if they did this every Tuesday.
“Full house,” she announced, laying down her cards with a quiet triumph.
Travis looked at his own hand—nothing. He was out of clothes.
He met her gaze. Held it. Then, hooking his thumbs in the waistband, he pushed his last article of clothing down and off, kicking them aside. He sat back on the rug, completely bare, the worn fibers scratchy against his skin. He refused to hunch, to cover himself. The blush was a fire on his neck, but he kept his shoulders back.
Cordelia’s eyes didn’t dart away. They travelled a slow, thoughtful path, her expression unreadable. Not leering, not shocked. Appreciative, maybe. Curious, definitely.
“Your deal,” was all she said, her voice a little thick.
The next hand was agony. Every scrape of the cards, every shift of her body, was amplified. He drew. He discarded two, begging the universe for anything. He looked at his new cards. A measly jack-high.
“Show me,” she said softly.
He laid them down. “Nothing.”
She laid down a flush. Ace high.
A silence filled the room, dense and throbbing. The prelude to the messy punishment.
Travis watched as she stood, moving to the kitchen with a quiet purpose. He heard the freezer door sigh open, the clatter of a pie tin, the metallic rattle of the whipped cream can. His mouth was dry.
She returned, the frozen pie in one hand, the can in the other. The pie looked sad and frost-bitten, the whipped cream absurdly bright and new.
“On your back,” she instructed, her voice not quite steady.
He complied, lying back on the rug, staring up at the ceiling where the fairy lights cast tiny, star-shaped shadows. The position was one of total vulnerability. He heard the explosive hiss of the whipped cream, then saw her standing over him, can poised.
It was cold, shockingly so. A fat, spiraling mound landed on his stomach. He flinched, a laugh caught in his throat. Another landed on his chest. Then a smaller dab on each shoulder.
Then she put the can down. She picked up the pie.
“This seems excessive,” he managed to say.
“You lost,” she whispered. “The rules are the rules.”
She didn’t slam it. She tilted the tin, and the frozen, congealed mass of pumpkin and crust slid out in a single, heavy slab. It landed squarely on his chest and stomach with a damp thwump, crushing the whipped cream, the cold so intense it was almost a burn.
He gasped. It was ridiculous. It was undignified. It was the most erotic thing he’d ever experienced.
Cordelia knelt beside him, the empty tin set aside. She looked from the mess on his torso to his face. Her own face was flushed, her lips parted. Without breaking eye contact, she dipped her index finger into the whipped cream and pie filling beside his hip. She brought it to her mouth, sucking it clean.
That was it. The last thread of pretense snapped.
In one motion, Travis sat up, pie filling sloughing off him onto the rug. He reached for her, his hands finding her waist, pulling her onto his lap, messy chest and all. The cold from the pie and cream soaked through her thin tank top immediately.
“Travis—” she started, but he cut her off with a kiss.
It wasn’t gentle or questioning. It was years of want, bottled and finally uncorked. It tasted like sugar and pumpkin and cheap wine. Her hands flew to his hair, gripping tightly, holding him to her as she kissed him back with equal fervor.
They broke apart, breathing ragged.
“The game,” she panted, her forehead against his.
“Screw the game,” he murmured, his hands sliding up her back beneath her tank top, feeling the warm, smooth skin of her spine.
She leaned back, her eyes searching his, all playfulness gone, replaced by a raw, hungry honesty. “Yeah. Screw it.”
She moved then, shifting in his lap, straddling him. The messy remains of the punishment pressed between them, cold and sticky and utterly irrelevant.
The messy remains of the punishment pressed between them, cold and sticky and utterly irrelevant. Travis’s hands were under her shirt, mapping the heat of her skin, and all he could think was finally, finally, finally. Her mouth was soft and urgent, and she tasted like the future.
She broke the kiss, her breath coming in short bursts, and looked down at the smeared wreckage of pie and whipped cream on his chest and now her own shirt. A wild, unhinged grin spread across her face.
“This is a catastrophic mess.”
“You started it,” he breathed, leaning in to kiss the corner of her mouth, her jaw.
“And I’m gonna finish it.” She pushed off his lap, standing up on slightly unsteady legs. She pointed a sticky finger at him. “Don’t you move.”
“Where are you going?”
“To arm myself.” She turned and marched toward the kitchen, the damp back of her tank top clinging to her skin. Travis watched, mesmerized, as she yanked open the refrigerator door. The cold light spilled out, illuminating her determined profile.
He didn’t move. He sat there on the rug, covered in dessert, more turned on and more terrified than he’d ever been. This wasn’t a dare anymore. It was a detonation.
She emerged with an armful of bottles and jars. He saw the chocolate syrup, a plastic squeeze-bottle of yellow mustard, a jar of maraschino cherries, a can of reddi-wip, a half-empty bottle of maple syrup.
“Cordelia, the maple syrup is like, twelve dollars for a small bottle.”
“It’s for a good cause.” She dumped the arsenal on the coffee table with a series of thunks. “Your pantry. Now. Bring me everything viscous, pour-able, or otherwise conducive to strategic deployment.”
He got up, the air cool on his skin. He walked to the narrow pantry closet, feeling her eyes on his back. He started grabbing things without looking, his heart hammering. A jar of honey. A bottle of cheap pancake syrup. A squeeze tube of neon-green hydraulic for cupcakes. A plastic bear full of molasses that had probably been there since he moved in.
He brought his haul over, adding it to the growing arsenal on the table. It looked like the aftermath of a grocery store riot.
Cordelia picked up the honey, weighing it in her hand. “Rules are suspended. Objectives are clear. Total mess.”
“Total mess,” he agreed, a laugh bubbling up from somewhere deep and anxious.
She swung the jar in a casual underhand toss. It wasn’t aimed at him. It landed on the rug with a solid thud, rolling to a stop near his feet. A challenge.
Travis picked up the bottle of pancake syrup. It was cheap and thin. He popped the cap, never breaking eye contact with her. He tilted it, and a stream of amber liquid arced through the air, spattering across her bare thighs.
She looked down, then back up at him, her eyes narrowing with pure delight. “Okay. You want to play that way.”
She snatched the squeeze tube of green icing, uncapped it with her teeth, and advanced. He feinted left, but she was quicker. She got close, and with a sinister PPPFFFTT sound, she laid a thick, disgustingly bright green line from his shoulder to his opposite hip.
It was cold. He yelped, then laughed, grabbing for the mustard. He sidestepped her, squeezing a chaotic yellow squiggle across her back as she tried to twist away. She retaliated with a glob of molasses, flung from the bear’s spout. It landed in his hair, warm and thick.
The room dissolved into a chaotic, sticky ballet. The chocolate syrup made dark, swirling patterns on her arms. The maraschino cherry juice dripped like blood onto the floor. He trapped her against the side of the couch, spraying a lavish, ridiculous wig of reddi-wip onto her head. She screamed with laughter, scooping a handful of it and mashing it into his beard.
They were both panting, dripping, painted in a absurd, multi-colored topography of condiments. The stains would never come out of the rug. He didn’t care.
She slipped in a puddle of maple syrup and honey, and he caught her, pulling her against him. Their sticky bodies slid together. The laughter died in their throats, replaced by something heavier, more breathless. He could taste the salt of her skin under the synthetic sugar. She wiped a smear of green icing from his eyebrow with her thumb.
For a long moment, they just stood there in the wreckage, holding each other up, listening to their own hearts. The rain had stopped. The only sound was the drip of syrup from the table onto the floor.
Plink.
Travis swallowed. “So,” he said, his voice low. “What’s the win condition here?”
Cordelia looked around at the apocalyptic kitchen, then back at him. Her face was serious, her eyes soft and unsure for the first time all night. “I think we both lost a long time ago.”
“I think we both lost a long time ago.”
The words hung in the sticky air. The mess was everywhere—on the rug, the couch, their skin—a chaotic map of a game that had spiraled far beyond its silly rules. The sweetness in the air was cloying, mixing with the scent of their sweat.
Travis looked at her, really looked. Honey was drying in golden trails on her collarbone. A stray cherry was stuck in her auburn hair like a bizarre jewel. Her tank top was a lost cause, plastered to her, transparent in patches where the syrup had soaked through. She was a beautiful, ridiculous, heartbreaking mess.
And she was looking back at him the same way.
He didn’t kiss her. Not yet. He reached out, his fingers trailing through a streak of green icing on her forearm. The touch was slow, deliberate, a silent question. Her breath hitched, a shallow little sound that got lost in the hum of the refrigerator.
She answered by closing the scant distance between them. There was no finesse to it. It was a collision of sticky skin and urgent mouths. The taste was overwhelming—artificial strawberry, chocolate, the salt of her. It wasn’t a clean, romantic kiss. It was messy and desperate and real. His hands slid around her waist, pulling her hard against him, the various syrups creating a strange, slick friction between their bodies.
She pushed his shoulders, turning them. His back met the wall beside the bookshelf with a soft thud, a few paperbacks teetering. Her hands were in his hair, pulling, possessive. He groaned into her mouth, his own hands sliding down to grip the backs of her thighs, hiking her up. She wrapped her legs around his waist without breaking the kiss, the movement instinctive, practiced in a thousand daydreams he’d never admitted to having.
They stumbled away from the wall, a two-legged, conjoined creature dripping onto the floor. He carried her the few feet to the hallway, his mouth leaving hers to trail down her neck, licking a path through a smear of maple syrup. She gasped, her head falling back.
“Bedroom,” she managed, the word a ragged command.
He didn’t need telling twice. He walked them down the short hall, shouldering his bedroom door open. The room was dark, lit only by the streetlight filtering through the blinds. He lowered her onto the unmade bed, the comforter cool against her sticky back.
For a second, they just stared, breathing heavily in the semi-darkness. The playful aggression was gone, melted away, leaving something raw and naked in its place. He saw the faint tremble in her lower lip, the rapid pulse in her throat. He was shaking, too.
“Travis,” she whispered. Just his name. It sounded like a confession.
He followed her down, bracing himself over her. He kissed her again, softer this time. A questioning kiss. Her hands came up to frame his face, her thumbs sweeping over his cheekbones, and she kissed him back with a devastating tenderness that unspooled something tight in his chest.
Then her hands pushed at his shoulders again, rolling him onto his back. She straddled him, sitting up, looking down at him in the striped shadows. With a deliberate slowness that made his stomach clench, she gripped the hem of her ruined tank top and peeled it up and over her head. She tossed it aside, where it landed with a damp slap.
The streetlight caught her. The curves of her breasts, the scatter of freckles across her chest, the elegant line of her throat. She was glorious. And still decorated with their mess. A line of chocolate curved under one breast. A splatter of whipped cream dotted her rib cage.
He reached for her, but she caught his wrists, pinning them gently to the bed beside his head. “My turn,” she said, her voice low and rough.
She leaned down, but not to kiss his mouth. Her tongue followed that trail of chocolate under her own breast, then across her skin to his chest. She cleaned a path through the stickiness on his collarbone, her warm tongue a shocking contrast to the cold syrup. He shuddered, a bolt of pure heat shooting straight down his spine. This wasn’t playful anymore. It was a claiming.
He freed his hands, sliding them up her thighs, over her hips, his thumbs branding circles on the sharp points of her hip bones. He hooked his fingers in the waistband of her cotton underwear and dragged them down. She helped, kicking them off.
Then she was guiding him into her, sinking down with a low, ragged sigh that seemed to come from the very center of her. He cried out, a sharp, broken sound. The feel of her, hot and tight and impossibly right, short-circuited every thought. For a moment, they were both utterly still, fused together, breathing the same air.
She began to move. A slow, rolling rhythm that built into something more urgent. His hands gripped her hips, guiding her, meeting her thrust for thrust. The sticky residue on their skin made a soft, peeling sound with their movement. The room filled with the sounds of them—shallow breaths, skin sliding against skin, the creak of the bedframe, a choked-off moan when he hit a angle that made her eyes flutter shut.
He pulled her down to him, crushing her against his chest, rolling them over so he was on top. He drove into her deeply, losing himself in the smell of her skin and sugar, in the feel of her nails scoring his back, in the broken, pleading sounds she was making into his ear.
It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t clean. It was frantic and messy and overwhelming, a physical conversation they should have had years ago. The tension snapped, the world dissolving into a white-hot wave that pulled them both under. He fell against her, his face buried in the sweet, sticky hollow of her neck, as the last tremors racked through them.
Silence.
Heavy, breathing silence. The distant, metallic groan of the building’s plumbing. A siren, blocks away.
Travis shifted his weight, reluctantly slipping out of her. He rolled onto his side, facing her. They were both still covered in drying sugary glue, now thoroughly mingled with sweat. They were a disaster.
Cordelia turned her head on the pillow. In the dim light, her eyes were wide, dark pools. She looked stunned. So did he, probably.
A slow, wobbly smile spread across her face. Then a giggle burst out of her, a helpless, incredulous sound. It set him off. Soon they were both laughing, weak, spent laughs that shook the bed, their sticky bodies trembling against each other.
“Oh, god,” she wheezed, wiping at her eyes. “The rug is ruined.”
“The rug,” he gasped between laughs, “is the least of our problems.”
Their laughter died down, fading into quiet, breathless smiles. He reached out, brushing a strand of hair—still sticky—from her forehead. The tenderness of the gesture felt more intimate than anything they’d just done.
They lay there for a long time, not speaking, just listening to each other breathe. The world outside the window began to turn from deep black to a muted, pre-dawn grey. The night was over.
Something had broken open. Something terrifying and new. Tomorrow, they would have to figure out what that meant. But for now, in the wreckage of his sticky sheets, Travis pulled her closer, and she came willingly, folding herself against him. They fell asleep just like that, a tangled, glued-together puzzle of limbs and drying sweetness, with the clean, blank slate of the morning still waiting on the other side of the glass.