The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 461: 461 | The Devastating Simplicity of a Dare [CASTLE BONUS]

"Dare."

No hesitation. The word arrived before the question finished leaving my mouth, carried on the same competitive instinct that made Camille Ortega the first person to finish every conditioning session and the last person to leave any training field. She did not consider consequences because considering consequences was for people who planned to lose.

"Take a drink."

She stared at me. "That’s your dare."

"That’s my dare."

"That’s the most pathetic dare in the history of the game. I came here expecting you to be interesting."

"Drink first. Be disappointed after."

Camille grabbed her glass and took a long pull, her throat working as the liquid went down, and I watched the tension in her shoulders dissolve by maybe fifteen percent which was exactly the margin I needed to make the next twenty minutes survivable.

She set the glass down and the flush on her neck had deepened. "Felicity. Truth or dare."

"Dare," Felicity said, matching Camille’s energy with the bright certainty of someone who considered backing down from challenges a personal moral failure.

Camille’s brown eyes held Felicity’s for two full seconds. Something passed between them that I could not decode, some frequency of female communication that operated in registers my one hundred Intelligence could identify but never fully translate.

"Sit closer to him."

Felicity’s lips parted. The dare was so simple it was devastating, because it acknowledged out loud what all three of us had been performing around for the last ninety minutes, the physical distance between my body and theirs, the careful geometry of proximity that allowed plausible deniability while creating enough friction to keep everyone’s pulse elevated.

Felicity moved. She shifted from where she’d been sitting at the bed’s edge to directly beside me, close enough that her thigh pressed flush against mine with no gap between the fabric of her shorts and the denim of my jeans, close enough that I could feel her breathing through the point of contact, close enough that her vanilla shampoo filled my next three inhales with the scent I’d been trying to ignore since she walked through my door carrying party games and plausible deniability.

"Better," Camille said, and her voice had dropped into the register she used during sparring when she’d identified an opening and was deciding whether to commit.

The game accelerated. Truths landed with increasing precision as each question peeled back another layer of the pretense we’d been maintaining, Felicity admitting she’d thought about kissing me since the entrance exam, Camille confirming through clenched teeth that she’d replayed the bathroom doorframe incident more times than she’d ever admit to anyone who asked twice, me telling Felicity her laugh was one of my favorite sounds at Halloran which made her go completely quiet for four seconds and her blue eyes get wet before she blinked it away and told me to stop weaponizing sincerity.

Dares escalated in the specific pattern that truth or dare always follows when played by people who want each other and are using the game’s structure as permission to do things they’ve been imagining for weeks. Felicity dared Camille to finish her drink. Camille dared me to take off my shirt, which I did because saying no to Camille Ortega was the kind of tactical error that produced consequences lasting longer than any shirt’s value. The room got warmer or maybe that was the sparkling beverage or maybe that was the way Felicity’s eyes traveled across my chest and stomach with the focused appreciation of someone conducting a professional assessment of assets she intended to acquire.

Camille’s breathing changed when I pulled the fabric over my head. Her brown eyes tracked the motion and landed on my torso and stayed there, taking in the Demigod-sculpted definition that three weeks ago had been merely athletic and now looked like someone had hired a personal sculptor to optimize every muscle group for maximum visual impact. Her lips parted. She caught herself staring and her jaw tightened and the flush spread from her throat across her collarbones.

"My turn," I said. "Felicity. Truth or dare."

"Dare."

"Put your hand on my chest."

She didn’t laugh. She didn’t deflect or make a joke or perform the kind of bright social misdirection that was her default response to situations carrying real weight.

She placed her right hand flat against my sternum.

The contact sent warmth flooding through my nervous system. Her palm was soft and her fingers spread across my pectoral muscle with the confidence of someone who had been wanting to do this for longer than she’d admit and was now committing to it with full awareness of what it communicated to the third person on the bed.

Camille watched. Her nostrils flared. Her fingers curled into the sheets.

"Camille," Felicity said, and her voice was lower than before, running in the register she’d used in the theater when she told me she had many wants. "Truth or dare."

"Dare."

"Put your hand on his stomach."

This was it. This was the moment where the game stopped being a game and became the thing the game had always been pretending not to be, the permission structure that allowed three competitive, intelligent, complicated people to touch each other without having to be the one who said I want to touch you first.

Camille Ortega placed her hand on my abdomen.

Her palm was warmer than Felicity’s and her grip was firmer, the calluses from years of Rivet deployment creating a texture against my skin that was rough and specific and undeniably Camille, and the sound she made when she felt the muscle beneath her fingers contract was a small sharp inhale that she tried to suppress and couldn’t, a sound like hnn that came from somewhere deeper than her throat and made Felicity’s fingers tighten on my chest.

I sat on my bed at midnight with my shirt off and one girl’s hand on my heart and another girl’s hand on my stomach and the System’s mandatory quest ticking in my peripheral vision and the Bond Resonance carrying Sloane’s sleeping frequency across campus and the absolute certain knowledge that I was the luckiest and most doomed person in any hero academy on any continent in any timeline.

Three knocks hit my door.

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