The Dare Exchange

The reunion was held in a barn outside the village, a big stone thing the hosts had rented for the weekend. Six years since most of us had seen each other. I was twenty-eight by then, and I had flown in from two time zones away mostly because Margot begged me, and partly because I heard Glen Poole was coming. I told nobody the second part.

We had been in a driver's ed class together when we were nineteen, back home. The instructor put us in the same practice car for a whole summer because we were the two worst talkers. We spent three months daring each other to do small stupid things, and then one night at trivia when we were twenty-two, we dared each other into one kiss that neither of us ever brought up again. I thought about it more than I should have over the years. I run a pawnshop now. I appraise things all day, and I had never figured out what that kiss was worth.

The speeches started around nine. Somebody's uncle stood up with a microphone and went through every name on the committee twice. The barn lights had been flickering all evening, a brown dimming that made everybody look like they were underwater. On the third flicker they quit entirely. The room got loud with laughing and phone lights, and the uncle said something about the wine cellar generator, and then the owner of the barn said there was a backup server room in the old cellar, because the barn did double duty as a rental for tech retreats, which is the kind of sentence you only hear in the countryside anymore.

Margot, who had organized the whole weekend and looked like she wanted to lie down on the floor, grabbed my arm and then grabbed Glen's arm and said the two of us should go check the panel down there since we were the youngest and she had seen us talk once already that night. Glen said sure. I said sure. That was the entire planning session.

He had a flashlight on his phone. I had a flashlight on my phone. We went down the outside steps to the cellar door, and the cold down there hit like a wall. The server room was a converted wine closet, brick walls, a rack cabinet against one wall, and a panel on the far side. The rack was dead. The panel was dead too. Glen opened the cabinet and looked at the wiring for a while and said the main feed had tripped and he could reset it but the generator upstream needed a manual start, which was a two person job at the top of the steps.

"So we're stuck down here until someone gets the generator," he said.

"Fine by me. I like the quiet."

"You never liked the quiet. You filled every silent minute I ever sat through with you."

He wasn't wrong. I sat down on an empty plastic crate because the floor was freezing and the cold came up through my jeans right away. He sat on another crate across from me, knees nearly touching mine. The dark in that room was real dark. Two phone lights, aimed at the ceiling, made a low gray glow that was almost worse than nothing.

Let me explain what happened next, or at least how it started, which is that I got bored before I got scared, and bored plus competitive has been my whole personality since I was nineteen.

"Tell me something true," I said.

"About what?"

"Anything. It's dark. Nobody can see us. Say something true."

He thought about it. I could hear him breathing. Then he said, "I still think about that kiss at trivia."

I had not expected him to lead with the heavy ammunition. My pulse did something unfair. I made myself laugh, a short dry sound, because the alternative was answering honestly and I did not have the nerve for that yet.

"You're just saying that because it's dark," I told him.

"I'm saying it because it's true. Your turn."

Instead of a truth I said, "I dare you to let me tie your hands."

He went still for a second. "With what?"

I had a cable tie in my jacket pocket. I carry them for work, bundling cords behind the counter, and I had used two that morning on the barn speaker setup, helping Margot, and kept the third. I held it up where the glow caught it. It was a joke. I meant it as a joke when I said it. Mostly.

He put his wrists out. Just like that, no arguing, and I heard my own pulse in my ears while I looped the tie and cinched it down to where the teeth caught. Not tight enough to hurt. Tight enough to mean it. His hands were warm and bigger than I remembered and I took maybe one second longer than the task required before I let go.

"Okay," he said, calm as a man reading a bus schedule. "Now what."

"Now you get out. That's the dare. Or you ask me to cut it."

He rolled his wrists once, turned them, and the tie popped. He had kept a strand of something in his fist the whole time, some trick from doing cable work on the model railway display he built back in school, the one that used to sit in the town library window. He opened his hand and showed me the broken lock. Four seconds. It had taken me four seconds to lose.

"Well," I said.

"You're out of practice," he said, and he sounded pleased, which stung worse than if he had laughed. "My turn. I dare you to let me pick the next one."

"That's not a dare. That's just a question."

"It's a dare. You can say no."

I did not say no. That was the problem. I sat there on the cold crate with my pride doing arithmetic, and I nodded, and he saw me nod before I finished deciding to.

He stood up and took his time about it, and the room got smaller in some way I can't explain with numbers. "Kneel on the floor," he said. "And say the line."

I knew which line. Of course I knew which line. Trivia night, our last round, the tiebreaker question neither of us could answer, and he had leaned over and said something quiet against my ear right before the host called time, and I had kissed him rather than answer him. The line was, "You're only brave in the dark, Lila."

"Kneel," he said again, softer.

The floor was stone and it was freezing and I knelt on it anyway, jeans on the cold, head not quite level with his waist, and I got the words out. "You're only brave in the dark, Lila." My voice shook and I hated that it shook, and I was angry in a hot way, and under the anger there was heat, the kind that has nothing to do with temperature in a wine cellar. He crouched down to my level. He did not touch me. That restraint was the most aggressive thing anyone had ever done to me.

"Your turn to dare," he said.

I stayed kneeling a moment longer than I needed to, just to prove the floor didn't scare me, which fooled neither of us.

I stood up, mostly because my knees were starting to ache and partly because I refuse to lose a stare fight from the floor. My phone battery had finally given up, so now there was only the glow of Glen's, and I went through my jacket pockets looking for a charger I knew I did not have. What I found instead was the train whistle.

It had come into the shop that spring. An estate lot, mostly junk, but the whistle was brass and small and it had a sound like nothing else, and I had put it in my jacket pocket one day for no reason I could name and never taken it out. I held it up. The glow caught the brass.

"What is that," Glen said.

"Train whistle. Estate sale. It's older than both of us put together." I turned it over in my fingers. "New dare. You do what I say for three minutes. Anything I say. The whistle blows, three minutes starts. The whistle blows again, you're free."

"And if I say no?"

"Then you're out of practice," I said, and gave him back his own words, and heard him breathe out through his nose, which I decided was a laugh.

He was quiet for a second. Then he said, "Blow it."

I blew it. The sound filled the cellar, one long low note that bounced off the brick and died against the rack cabinet, and I put the whistle on the crate and looked at my watch, because my phone was dead and my watch has hands. "Three minutes. Start."

"Stand up straight," he said.

I stood up straight.

"Hands at your sides."

I put them there. It was a strange feeling, being given orders by a man who had just spent four seconds proving he could get out of anything I did to him, and the strange feeling was not an unpleasant one. He walked a slow half circle around me. I kept my eyes forward because I figured that was the test.

"Unbutton your jacket."

I did it. Two buttons, and the jacket hung open, and he said nothing for a while, just breathed, and I counted the seconds off against my watch face. Ninety left. Eighty. My heart was loud in my own ears but I kept my face flat, because that is what twenty-eight years of being the one in control has trained me to do.

"Take off the jacket."

Off it came, onto the crate.

"Now unbutton your shirt."

I stopped. Not because I minded, exactly. Because it was the first order that went past costume into real, and he knew it, and I knew he knew it. "That's a big jump," I said.

"You said anything. You can say no. That's the rule you made. And nobody loses anything by saying it."

I looked at him in the gray half dark. He wasn't smirking. He wasn't pushing. He was just standing there with his hands in his pockets as a man waits for a bus, and that calm was somehow worse than any lean-in would have been. "Fine," I said, and unbuttoned my shirt. One. Two. Three. My fingers were steadier than I expected. Four. I left the shirt hanging open over my bra and stood there with goosebumps climbing my arms, and the cellar was cold and the goosebumps were maybe half cold.

"Good," he said, and the word went through me like current.

My watch hit three minutes and I blew the whistle, harder than I needed to, and the note cracked off the brick and we both stood there while it faded.

"That was one round each," I said. "Tie game."