Page 24 of Set Me On Fire

Well, I assumed it was. I was still searching for that kind of a relationship.

I nodded to them and the other couples as they made their exit right as Gareth stood up.

“C’mon then.” He and his team were on the night shift tonight, so they hadn’t had a single beer. “We better try and get some rest in while we can. Let’s put this food away, but Knoxy.” He looked over at me. “Try to keep the noise down to a dull roar, yeah?”

I would’ve agreed, but that was the moment Charlie returned with a length of butcher’s paper and some pens.

“So the way this works is everyone playing flips a coin. Who’s got a twenty cent piece?”

I grabbed one out of my pocket and flicked it his way, sending it spinning through the air, only for it to land on the paper. Charlie moved and drew a circle around the coin and then wrote my name in it.

“Any time someone’s coin lands on his name, Knox has to drink.”

I raised my Coke can then, making clear how little I cared about that outcome.

“Ohh, this is Pangaea,” Millie said, dragging her chair closer, not noticing the way all the single guys’ eyes followed her like hungry sharks. Yeah, she was the other reason why I’d decided to be Sober Bob for the night. While I didn’t like to think of my colleagues as creeps, I wasn’t about to give anyone the opportunity to become one. “If your coin lands on a blank spot after the first round, you create a rule, and anyone’s coin that lands on there has to obey that rule.”

“Like showing the room your underwear.”

Dave was one of the other lead firemen, but I wasn’t exactly a fan of his work. Took too many risks in my book, but Brentseemed happy with his performance. My Coke can dimpled as he leaned forward with a leer.

“Shit, that’s easy.”

Millie was pretty tipsy right now. Hell, she was just pretty. Her cheeks were bright pink, her eyes shining as she reached down to retrieve a scrap of cloth. Every muscle clamped tight when I saw the black lace. Were they…? My mind worked overtime, and in my mind, I saw that wisp of lace stretched across an arse as sweet as a peach and just as biteable. Maybe if I did, her juices… My suspicions confirmed when she used the elastic waistband as a slingshot to fling her underwear across the table. Dave caught them in one hand.

“I wasn’t going to sit around in wet undies,” she said, not seeing the dangerous gleam in his eye.

“So you’re?—”

“Give them back.” I thought for a second I’d said that, because the words were on the tip of my tongue. No, it was Noah that snapped that. He had his beer in a death grip. “Give them back, Dave.”

“Fine.”

He smirked as he tossed them to Brian, who spun them around on his finger before flicking them around the circle until they were returned to their owner. It was only then that I could take a full breath.

“Needless to say, I will not be creating a rule about seeing anyone’s undies here,” she said. “Playing you-show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine lost its appeal when I was five.”

“I’ll show you—” Dave growled, but Charlie flipped the coin his way.

“How to flip a coin? Good boy.”

He couldn’t have sounded more patronising if he tried, which was perfect because that had Dave rising to the bait. He flipped his coin and wrote out his name and then the coin wentaround the circle. Everyone added their names to the piece of paper, including Millie.

Sometimes it felt like the only way men could make friends was by doing dumb shit and embarrassing each other. I’d played the game plenty of times before, and the results were always stupid. Oftentimes, that was exactly what we needed. Our day-to-day work was either bloody boring or literally a matter of life and death, so doing something dumb was a relief. Most of the women usually cleared out when the drinking games started, knowing instinctively that it wouldn’t be smart to stay.

But not Millie.

She took the coin from Charlie and flipped it, crowing when it landed on a blank spot. I watched her uncap the pen with her teeth, too caught up in the way she held it between her lips to see what she was writing until there was a series of chortles around the table.

“Hot seat?” Joe, one of Dave’s team, leaned forward to look at what she wrote. “You want to ‘pump’ us for information?”

“If you wanted to find out how big our dicks are, you just have to ask,” Dave added.

“Pretty sure she’s seen a button mushroom before.” Noah picked up the coin and tossed it to me. “Your go.”

I aimed for one of the many empty spots, and that had the peanut gallery leaning forward. Half the appeal of the game was the way tension built as people anticipated being forced to do something embarrassing. I was about to disappoint them, writing ‘stay silent until a coin lands on your name.’

“Fuck, you’d be out in five seconds if you land on that, Head Job,” Dave said to Charlie.

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