Truths by Candlelight - Part One

“You wanna play Uno?”

Nicola had already pulled out the decks of cards, her nimble fingers expertly shuffling them. The room was pitch black save for the single candle on the living room table between them. The tiny flame battled against the darkness in the room, its plume careening wildly such that the shadows cast about would shake in a coordinated dance.

They both sat cross-legged, each wrapped in three layers of blankets but still shivering from the unregulated cold.

“Sure.” He tried to keep his voice steady but between his chattering teeth and nerves this proved impossible.

It had been two days since William heard Nicola being given the fucking of a lifetime by a mysterious stranger. After the newly satisfied man had left, William had kept in hiding for another hour, then had come out only after Nicola left the apartment also. As far as he knew, she had no idea of his unwitting voyeurism, and he preferred to try to think about the incident as little as possible lest he be **** to consider what his reaction to it meant about himself.

Things had been largely monotonous since; he continued to study fervently for his upcoming classes, whilst doing everything within his power to avoid interacting with Nicola. If she noticed this behavior, she didn't seem to show it. Twice, he had played one-on-one basketball with Mark, but given his relatively demure stature and Mark's incredible height and athleticism, this was more of an exercise of letting his best friend practice his dunks.

Three hours ago, the electricity had gone out for the entire campus. Nobody knew why, all anyone had heard was a loud crack like an invisible whip soaring over their heads then every light and appliance was out. Moreover, nobody could get any cellular connection on their phone, which wasn’t surprising given how rural the college was; it would be reasonable to think that the power for the campus and the cell towers came from the same source.

Landsborough University had gone dark.

Campus staff, to their credit, had quickly made all students return to their dormitories for their safety and supplied candles looted from the chapel. Last William heard, the problem had been identified and everything would be normal in the morning.

As Nicola and William were quickly discovering, without climate controls Building 22 quickly succumbed to the cold. Nicola had at first traded her normal apparel of tight gym wear for cotton pajamas, then wrapped herself in several layers of blankets until she resembled a giant woolen blob with an exceptionally beautiful head sticking out. William had followed her example.

As she dealt seven cards to each of them, a mischievous smile crept across her face. “How about we make this interesting?”

“Interesting how?”

“The winner of each round gets to ask a question, and the other person has to answer truthfully.”

"Wh- why would you want to do that?"

"I don't know, seems like a fun way to get to know each other." Her eyes twinkled as the light of the flame twirled across her perfect features.

He could feel swollen beads of sweat meandering down the back of his neck, like a horde of fat buffalo running down his backside and growing in number with every passing heartbeat as she stared at him expectantly with that crooked smile. Did she know what he had heard? Was this her plan to confront him? In that moment, he was glad that the darkness hid the abject terror no doubt scrawled all over his face.

“Sure.”

“Okay then, but it’s my deck so my rules. Plus-two’s and plus-four’s can be added on top of each other, and same numbers with different colors can be placed altogether at one time.”

Those rules sounded almost heretical to him, but he figured it would be easier to go along with it. Nicola dealt the hands, and so the games began.