You're on. Tonight it is.

"Fine, I'll do you that favor. If you're that **** to get a peek at me for your spank collection. But joke's on you, for suggesting something after dark. You should've thought that through, lil' buddy," you tell him in your best condescending, Bossy-Bridget voice.

"Hmm. Did I fail to think it through? Or did I propose a setting that encourages more than just looking?" Scott says.

"Wow," you tell him, making a face to buy yourself some time to settle on how you feel about this progression. "You really must be drunk."

"Hey, I'll toast to that," he says, grinning, holding his cup out to you.

You laugh. "Right. And now we're toasting. Sure."

"I needed some way to keep you from looking over and noticing my hard-on until it looked more suitably magnificent," he quips, which makes you snort, and of course, drop your eyes to his lap. Where, as advertised, he's pitching an impressive tent.

You feel yourself blush. "I never guessed being talked down to was such a huge turn-on for you," you tell him, because it feels like to sincerely acknowledge real physical arousal means you're both skirting something it might be smarter to stay away from... and you're not sure you want to be the first one to actually end the joke and commit to this turning into a thing.

Scott grins at you. "All I heard was a beautiful woman looking at my crotch and saying the word 'huge,'" he says brightly, which makes you laugh aloud.

"Beautiful woman," you say with a snort. "Do better, smooth-talker."

"What am I supposed to say?" Scott protests, raising his cup to yours again. "You are."

"Was that meant to distract me from something else you have going on?" you ask, pretending to look him over again as you oblige with a clink of your glass.

"No, it was actually meant to distract me from the fact that your nipples are hard enough to cut diamonds right now," he says glibly, and you almost **** on your drink at that.

He's completely right, and you immediately cross your arms over your chest and sit there, face flushed, sipping your drink carefully so you don't spill it down your front since you don't have the full use of your arms and you're actually rather a bit tipsy, now that you've stopped to take notice of it.

"You know you don't have anything to be embarrassed about, right?" he says more seriously after a minute. "It's okay for us to be attracted to each other."

"I'm not disputing that," you say. "I'm just... not fully convinced it's okay for us to act on a possible attraction, behind our friend's back."

Scott considers that, then says, "Dex had a lot of opportunities where he could have done stuff differently. His jealousy of me isn't your responsibility, or maybe even your business, depending on who you ask."

You scoff, laughing a little. "He's not jealous of you."

He scoffs right back. "Wanna bet?" he says, then glances away.

This day has pulled your mind back to that stupid New Year's party way more than you ever expected. Because now he has you recalling how peculiar that night really was.

How Scott was being unusually flirty with you, not with quite the heavy hand as right now, but still. And how it was making you a little curious to follow that thread and see where it went.

And how Dex wanted to leave and was clearly annoyed when you didn't want to. You never reached accord on that front, and it actually turned into a bit of an argument. You and he rarely ever disagreed in any material way, so when you exchanged irritated words and he reacted to that by leaving early and not even asking you to come with him, it hurt your feelings a little. Even though later you were grateful for his sake that he didn't get busted along with you. Dex's strange behavior and unexpected departure upset you enough that you weren't feeling as excited anymore, to find some private place and explore what kind of interesting heavy petting mischief you and Scott might get up to.

That's why when the cops showed up, Scott had already wandered off to find himself some less gloomy company elsewhere and managed to slip away, and you were sitting alone on Lizzie's kitchen floor, leaned against the island and getting progressively drunker as you tried in vain to get Dex to text you back. It only made you more distressed, how utterly unlike him it was to give you the silent treatment like that.

"Wait," you say after thinking about this, "are you saying he left the party that night because you and I were kinda flirting and it made him jealous?"

Scott shrugs. "I mean. It sure looked like that from where I sat."

You stare at him. "But he doesn't even think of me that way."

"Are you so sure?" Scott disagrees. "I mean, he might be mostly into guys, but he's still bi. He had that thing for Lindsay our freshman year, remember? He used to get a hall pass so he could walk by the gym during her P.E. block and wave. So he's not fully immune to female charms."

You're so used to thinking of Dex as just, well, Dex, that you'd halfway forgotten how hard he crushed on Lindsay Wick that year.

"Sure, but she was still basically the first and only girl he was ever really into. And he got over her just like that," you point out, snapping your fingers to illustrate how fast Dex pretty much forgot Lindsay ever even existed. "Over Thanksgiving he begged me to go to the mall with him because he saw on Insta that she'd be there. And then by January he was like, Lindsay Who? Remember? He didn't even have some new intense crush like he would have back in middle school."

There's a short silence, while Scott still doesn't retract his assertion, and while you chew on that fact.

After the quiet sprawls a little too far for his comfort, Scott sighs and shakes his head. "Hey, let's just forget about that dare, okay? I feel like it's sort of stressing you out. I totally get you not wanting to do that with me. I didn't mean to pressure you or make anything weird. And you're not wrong to want to be a good friend."

You look at him, heart pounding, feeling suddenly and thoroughly weird, and try to decide what to say to that.