Page 114 of Dark Little Game

When the box is passed to Jason, one of our senior members, I hear the first words of my own secret as he starts to read out loud.

My heart beat a little faster hearing my words in another person’s voice.

“I care about you more than I’ve cared about someone in years, and I don’t know what to do with that feeling. It doesn’t make sense. I can’t make it go away, no matter how hard I try. I don’t want to want this. I know it will get snuffed out like a flame, sooner rather than later. But I think I’ll always care about you. You’re carved into me, now. And I want to tell the one person I shouldn’t tell.”

My heart’s beating hard in my chest by the time Jason finishes reading my words.

My skin feels hot.

I’d written the secret in a moment of desperation, after trying to figure out what to write for over an hour.

I’d gotten frustrated and just let honesty spill out of me after I’d gotten home from the fall fair, and I didn’t let myself read my own words after scrawling them out.

Hearing them in a room full of my society brothers now, though, feels like being completely exposed.

Like they can all see it on my face.

That they know it’s about me and Hunter, and thirty pairs of eyes are seeing right through me.

But I sit with my heart threatening to beat right out of my chest and the box gets passed right along. A couple more secrets are read out loud, and as I finally summon the courage to look around the room, nobody’s watching me.

I meet Hunter’s eyes last, though.

And he may as well be staring right into my soul.

I feel like I do when I’m underneath him, naked and vulnerable, as a heat creeps up to my cheeks.

Nobody else knew, butHunterknew.

And I have no clue what he feels about that information.

I watch the box get passed again and try to avoid his gaze, and finally, I’m the last person who gets the box.

I reach in, feeling around. Since I’m the last, I know there should only be one paper left.

“Wait. There are three papers left in here,” I say.

“That shouldn’t be possible. Thirty guys, thirty papers,” Noah says. “And they’re all the specific red note paper that I passed out.”

“Not all of them,” I say as I pull out the last three.

One of them is red.

But the two others are cream white, and I realize that they were at the bottom the entire time because each one has a heavy gold wax seal on it, weighing the paper down and causing it to stay at the bottom of the box.

Everyone looks over at me as I take out three papers.

I read the redone first.

“Sometimes I wake up at night and I’ve had a wet dream, and I’m a mess.”

Fairly tame.

“What are the other papers?” Roman asks, narrowing his eyes.

I break open the wax seal on the first one.

My heart pounds as I see what’s written.