Free Dare I? by Kallysten Page B

had kept this a secret so long. “Before you dated
Brian—that’s at least four years ago, and you never told us?”
    Jessie shrugged, grinning abashedly as she
pulled back her arm and shook the bracelets free. “I was a bit
afraid of what you’d say,” she confessed. “It was just the one
time, and all she did was feed from me.”
    “She?” Anna and Carol exclaimed together.
    “Maybe there was some inappropriate groping
too,” Jessie added, and at her friends’ look she burst out
laughing. “Just kidding!” Another devious grin and she ran a thumb
over the inside of her wrist, a gesture that Anna realized she had
noticed before without paying it much mind. “Maybe.”
    They were beginning to attract pointed looks
from the tables around them, so they tacitly stopped talking about
vampires and finished their lunch in near silence. Anna couldn’t
help thinking about what her two friends had revealed however, and
she didn’t know whether she was mostly shocked or intrigued. Dozens
of questions were filling her mind, and she wanted to ask what it
had been like to dance with a vampire, or to be bitten by one. She
kept looking at Jessie’s wrist until her friend noticed and caught
her gaze with a tilt of her head and a slight frown; after that,
she tried to keep her eyes on her food.
    It wasn’t until the three friends had left
the restaurant to go sit on a bench in a nearby park that the
subject of vampires crept up again. It was a beautiful autumn day,
and it felt a little strange to Anna to be talking of vampires with
sun cascading warmly over her.
    “What was it like when she bit you? Did it
hurt?”
    It was Carol who had asked, though the words
had been burning Anna’s lips for a little while. Sitting between
them, Jessie smiled as she answered. “It hurt a bit, yeah,
especially at first. But then she started pulling on my blood,
really slow and hard, like she wanted to give me a hickey, and that
was…” She was quiet for a few seconds as though struggling for a
word. “It was incredible. And more arousing than it had any right
to be.”
    The three of them laughed at that, startling
a few birds at their feet into flight. Even as she laughed though,
Anna couldn’t help but wonder. How could a bite be almost painless,
or even arousing? There had to be something she was missing.
    “I’m almost jealous all I did was dance,”
Carol said good-naturedly after a few seconds. “But seeing how
Johnny was glaring at me just for a dance…” She grinned. “Then
again, there wasn’t an inch between the vamp and me while we were
dancing. And speaking of arousing…I could tell that I wasn’t the
only one enjoying the dance.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I
swear, that guy was huge. If I hadn’t had a two-carat ring on my
finger…”
    More laughs ensued, but Anna’s sounded forced
to her own ears. Her friends’ earlier teasing that she didn’t know
how to have fun was coming back to her with their revelations, and
she wished suddenly that she had had something equally daring and
titillating to share. The feeling redoubled when they looked at her
and Carol said:
    “Your turn to share, missy. Any dark secret
you kept from us? You said you knew how to have fun…”
    She let the sentence hang in the air, and
Anna felt the need to defend herself. “I do! I have fun all the
time!” Her friends’ eyebrows rose in a similarly intrigued fashion,
and Anna struggled to find something to say. Anything at all. Long
seconds passed and she was unable to come up with anything.
    “Maybe you should go to The Edge,” Carol
teased. “You’re a free woman, nothing to hold you back if you catch
a nice specimen.”
    The wink she added made all of it so
suggestive that Anna smiled despite herself.
    “You should!” Jessie said, clapping her hands
gleefully. “Then you can tell us what we missed!”
    Carol giggled. “It’s not truth or dare, it’s
dare and then tell the truth!”
    Once again, they dissolved