Role Play
How do you handle falling in love on the table when you might be falling in love off of it?
I've been playing D&D with Sam for years, and we've been friends for even longer. I've done a great job of not letting my crush interfere with that, until his paladin kisses my bard and now I can't get any of it out of my head. Sam's all fire and divine rigorousness, and he looks at me like they want to devour me. The problem is, I only seem to be able to say what I'm really feeling in character. Both my character and I are keeping secrets now, and the only question is what's going to happen when the truth comes out?
When Mirabel and Sam’s D&D role playing crosses the line between friends and lovers, they start to toy with the line as well. It’s easier to pretend to be a dashing bard and steadfast paladin than two people falling in love, but is their connection only as strong as their characters’?
Sam wants me to surrender.
“Absolutely not.” I lean over the table, leveling them with my best smug expression. My character, Ratha, has been keeping these secrets for years, nestled right inside her heart. No one is worth her security. Sam, who plays Dontae, fiddles with his silver d20 as he meets my gaze. This tension has been building for a dozen sessions and I am not going to be the first to break it. “Ratha raises her brow and smirks.” I copy the facial expression, getting fully into character.
Sam’s cheeks turn pink. It isn’t a hardship to imagine Dontae’s checks reddening, but is it embarrassment? Anger? Sam glances from the Dungeon Master to me and then shrugs. “Fuck it. I kiss her.”
The room turns sweltering. I lose my breath and my entire train of thought. I stare down at the table, where the miniatures of our characters stand next to each other—and yet five feet apart—and yet… kissing. Ratha, the elvish bard with a dark past and more secrets than even I know. Dontae, the human paladin with an oath that binds him like steel and aligns him against me.
Ratha has been dancing on a knife’s edge as the game moves towards her arc. The others have been egging us on, placing bets on when we’ll snap and fight. I swallow. This isn’t fighting. He waited in her room, in the shadows, to ambush me. The last time he had me cornered he pinned me to the wall and a fight was only avoided because the cleric noticed we were gone. This time… this time we’re alone and no one is going to interrupt us. This time he’s kissing me.
Danny coughs. “Well, um, do you, um, let him?”
I lift my eyes from the table to Sam, who is still red faced and fumbling with his silver d20. His blond curls cover his eyes as he stares at the table and purses his lips. Are they soft? How would he kiss? It’s only a question I’ve asked myself a dozen times before.
I close my eyes, take a breath. Sure, I might be all tongue tied at the thought of kissing Sam, but our characters have been at each other’s throats, the tension building into something. This makes as much sense as anything else.
Ratha would kiss him. She’d bite his tongue and rake her nails down his back as some sort of payback for everything. “Fuck yeah, we’re doing this. She kisses him back, bites him so hard he bleeds.” I sit back, crossing my arms. My face burns. I glance down to our plastic minis. Nothing’s changed, but everything has. Something in Sam’s gaze shifts and confidence sharpens their look.
“Okay! Well then-”
“Then,” Danny interrupts firmly, “We fade to black. That's honestly a great point to leave this session.”
Is it? I feel like I’ve just been edged.
I can practically hear him now. Like that?
I’d have to tangle my fingers in his hair. I’d have to pull him in and make him stop teasing, but would it be a deep laugh, a startled chuckle, or a sharp inhale of breath? Either way, he’d be a generous lover. He’d have to be, as a man who serves an oath; especially one of devotion.
I press the vibe against my clit and then away, teasing but growing, inching ever closer to orgasm. He’d be the type to consider my climax a gift. He’d ask for it. He’d press against me until it was enough. He wouldn’t leave me wanting.
Or maybe I’m wrong.
Maybe he approaches fucking like training. He’d palm my pussy with a devilish smirk, then his mouth is on mine in a bruising kiss. He’s almost violent with it, a torrential downpour of passion. His fingers slide into me, pumping me full of divine energy. Oh, the power in those fingers! I moan into the night, pressing the vibe down, lifting my hips.
His body would be burning hot against me, like a Searing Smite. Strong. Powerful. He’d hold me down without meaning to, tame me without effort, and work me into a frenzy. My orgasm builds like a wild thing, like it’s being pulled from me with his magic. I toss my head to the side, panting. My toes dig into the bed. I keep the vibe focused as I toss the phone. At this angle he’d be able to bite my neck, to sink his teeth in deep enough to draw blood, to mark me forever, to claim me in a way I’ve never been claimed.
“I grab her arm, hold her in place so that I’m whispering in her ear.”
My arm tingles as his hand—or rather a phantom hand from my imagination—settles heavily on my bicep. His touch feels impossibly hot, as though there’s too much magic inside him and it’s pouring out through his fingers. I’ve crawled so far into his skin that he’s losing control. It takes my breath, warms my cheeks, and the look I send Sam’s way makes him swallow his words.
“What?” I bite, but the heat in my tone isn’t anger.
“Confess.” He isn’t using his magic to imbue the words with a Command, but it is a command all the same.
“Confess?” I whisper. “Confess what?”
“Confess what you want me to know the least.”
A hundred thoughts fly across my mind. A hundred victims of my magic scream to be acknowledged. My allegiance to my people demands to be spoken. The truth of my magic, of the myths that scare him, yearn to be revealed. The secret that leaps from my lips is mine more than it is Ratha’s. I don't know if that makes me a bad roleplayer or a great one. “I wish you hadn't left last night.”
Suddenly every little action seems amplified. I’ve been playing pretend since I was a little girl, taking on a new name and a new personality to play house, or cops and robbers, or pretending to be warring factions for a steal the flag game. We came for each other last week, over the phone, where I voiced one of my biggest secret turn ons and they ran with it until I came so hard my legs wouldn’t stop shaking.
Now that it's Mirabel and Sam instead of Ratha and Dontae, it’s different. It’s almost too much. I toss my bag on the couch and turn to face him, but what should I say? Should I just kiss them? I never said what he should do when he came over. Where did all my confidence go?
The silence drags. My heartbeat thunders in my ears as we both just stand and stare.
His Adam's apple bobs. “I was thinking about our first kiss.”
We haven’t even had a first kiss, so he has to be talking about our characters, but I understand that. It’s easier to talk about them than us, to be them than us, in this tentative twilight. “I was drowning in the tension, just waiting for you.”
“For me? When would you have done it?”
Their fingers curl, sending stars dancing through my vision.
“Please.” I whine. “Let me, let me.”
He doesn’t. Only takes his mouth off my clit long enough to say. “Roll for it.”
It’s a 14.
“Not good enough.”
Good enough to keep me here, to not let me over. “Please.”
“Roll for it.” They repeat, voice hoarse and deep.
“6.” I whine. “No mods?”
“Roll for it.”