Tastes Like Chicken

"Truth or Dare?" Rian questioned excitedly, perking up a considerable amount, as though this was the greatest thing the four boys had done all fucking day. In reality, though, it actually was. Teenage boys can only play video games and watch stupid movies nonstop for so many days in a row before it starts to lose its touch and become really god damn boring.

"Dude, seriously? What are we, five?" Jack scoffed, rolling his eyes slightly at his best friend's lame suggestion.

"Come on, it's not like we're doing anything better!" Rian pushed, looking up to Zack and Alex for some support.

Zack merely shrugged before looking back down at his lap while Alex glanced between his two arguing best friends. He loved them both, in a completely platonic way, but Jack did come just a bit higher on his list. By, like, a lot of spaces. Jack would always be his number one, his right-hand man, and then came the members of Blink-182.,. and New Found Glory... and Green Day... and... well, you get the point.

It was the fact that he loved Jack oh-so-much that had him saying, "Truth or Dare sounds like tons of fun, man."

Jack knew exactly what Alex was doing, knew he only agreed that it'd be a good idea just to get on his nerves, and he simply grumbled away quietly to himself as the other boys arranged themselves into a circle on the carpeted ground. Alex pat the space next to him when Jack didn't make any move to sit with them, and the tallest of the boys sighed before crawling over to the spot that had obviously been dubbed his.

"So who goes first?" Rian chirped, happy to have actually gotten his way for once. It wasn't often that happened, but, then again, he was hardly ever the one to make suggestions in the first place.

"Well, it's your idea, so you should go first," Zack mumbled, and Alex nodded along.

"Alright, well in that case, Zack, truth or dare?"

The quiet boy's eyes widen a bit as he looked up at the other three, who were watching him expectantly, just waiting.

"No, wait, I don't think we should do truths," Jack cut in before Zack could even give his answer. "We already know, like, everything there even is to know about each other as it is, so it should just be dares."

The group remained quiet for a few moments before Rian and Alex nodded, Zack too busy biting at his lip to really give an answer. He didn't want to, honestly, because he knew that there was a very slim chance he'd be able to go through with any dare they could possibly dish out for him. At least it was Rian to ask him, and they were as close as Jack and Alex were in a non-douchey way, so Zack knew he wouldn't have to go through all too much.

"Okay, so then, Zack, I dare you to... run around outside while screaming, 'I've lost my voice, please help me find it!'" Rian said, smiling widely when he realized how truly genius that dare was.

Zack audibly gulped but nodded nonetheless before standing from his spot on the ground and heading out of Jack's room, the others following right behind.

When they were outside, Zack hesitated for a moment before running down the sidewalk, his arms waving around in the air as he screamed at the top of his lungs, "I've lost my voice, please help me find it!" When he got to the end of the road, exactly six houses down, he turned back and continued on with his flailing and yelling, successfully gaining the rest of whoever's attention wasn't on him before.

When he reached the other three once more, though, he didn't even stop to listen to their hysterics, instead running straight back into the house, right on up to Jack's room, where he plopped down on the ground yet again. Thankfully enough, the blush covering his cheeks could easily be mistaken for vasodilation—the expansion of blood cells so that excess heat can escape your body while exercising.

Eventually Rian, Alex and Jack all made it back up, the eldest and youngest boy clinging to each other as they stumbled along, both still consumed in their bouts of uncontrollable laughter, which only seemed to get considerably worse when they saw Zack again.

After they could all properly breathe and were situated on the floor once more, Rian looked over to the still-embarrassed boy and reminded him that, "Dude, it's your turn."

It took a few minutes of deep thought and heavy silence for the darer to think of something good enough as revenge before he was saying, "Ri, I dare you to put lipstick on Alex, and you can't use your hands to hold the tube."

"What?" they both squawked in protest, eyes wide as Jack laughed.

"None of us even own lipstick," Alex said, shaking his head. He was smiling, though, and that was because he thought he'd totally gotten out of it.

"We don’t, but May does," Jack sing-songed, standing from his spot and practically skipping out of the room. He returned a few moments later with a tube of bright red lipstick, the cap in his right hand and the tube in his left, the contents being twisted out from a crank situated on the bottom.

"Here ya go, Ri," Jack said as sweetly as he could as he handed it over to the older boy, who was busying looking between different parts of his body and Alex's lips. The shaggy-haired teen sighed as he grasped it in his fingers, still looking between it, his body and Alex's now puckered lips.

"Come on, make me look pretty," Alex pushed, clearly getting some enjoyment out of this; he really didn't think Rian would go through with it.

"You get even gayer every damn day, Gaskarth," Rian grumbled, just before lifting the backing of the lipstick tube up to his own mouth, which wrapped tightly around the plastic. With that, he leaned in and began to do his best at swiping the red glaze over the older male's lips. When Zack called time a mere thirty seconds later, Rian backed up and assessed his work, smiling rather triumphantly when he realized that he'd managed to coat Alex's lips evenly in the sticky substance without getting it all over his fucking face.

"Wow, you look so hot, Lex," Jack drawled jokingly as he gave the eldest a rather halfhearted once-over. As Alex smacked his lips together obnoxiously, doing only what he'd seen every other girl do after applying the product, Jack took the tube back up to May, who shook her head at her younger brother when he thanked her for letting them use it. She didn't want to know what they'd needed it for, and honestly, she was more than likely just going to throw it out. Or burn it. Either would do, really.

Once Jack was back in his room, after his third trip out in the past ten minutes, Rian was proclaiming, "Jack, I dare you to play sexual chicken with Alex."

Both victims were slightly confused, not previously having heard of such a game, but they were also pretty intrigued. What teenage boy wouldn't be interested in something that had the word 'sexual' in its title?

"So since I don't think either of you know what I'm talking about—real shocker there, am I right?—it's basically just like chicken, except what you do is kiss. Well, not really. You both move closer and closer towards each other until one of you moves away or you end up kissing. The first person to pull away is the chicken and loses the game." Rian explained, and Jack and Alex simply looked at each other before shrugging and shuffling the tiniest bit closer, so that they'd be able to reach when they leaned forward. Besides, what's so bad about kissing your best friend anyway? Sure, they'd never done it before, but it'd pretty much just be like kissing your significant other, right? Well, if either boy even had one in the first place...

"Any time you're ready," Zack snickered quietly, now much more invested in what was about to happen; he'd always wondered who the gayer of the two really was, and now was his opportunity to find out first hand. Whoever didn't pull away first got the title, obviously.

"Ready?" Alex murmured, and Jack couldn't help but be momentarily transfixed by the way his lips moved, now much more prominent with the deep red painting the soft-looking flesh. He simply nodded in response and they both began to inch ever closer, holding eye contact for as long as physically possible.

It was only when Alex's vision began to blur slightly from staring at Jack's face, which was now no more than two inches away from his at most, did the eldest allow his eyes to slip closed, and the younger mirrored the action.

Time seemed to move just a bit slower now that neither of the boys could see each other, and both jumped when their lips finally connected, but they made no attempt at all to pull away. Instead, their lips moved slowly in sync, gentle smacking noises filling the air around them.

It felt different, in a way, but they couldn't really tell why. They'd had girlfriends before, of course, but the kisses they'd share with Lisa and Holly never turned out like this, slow and soft and just... different. Not necessarily a bad feeling or anything, but it was new and it was certainly not shunned.

The seconds passed, soon turning into full-on minutes, and the kiss seemed to get a bit more feverish, both boys losing themselves in the touch, the taste of the other's lips. Rian and Zack weren't sure whether to laugh or just leave, and merely continued to sit on the ground, their best friends now making out between them as their eyes roamed the room with a new found interest in the numerous band posters they knew by heart.

Neither Zack nor Rian noticed when Alex crawled into Jack's lap, his thighs straddling the younger's, or when Jack's right hand crept up to Alex's hair, his left moving to grip tightly at the eldest male's waist, and neither saw when Alex's arms shifted to rest on Jack's shoulders, his own hands tugging a bit harshly at the thinner boy's skunked hair.

What they didn't fail to notice, however, was the way their tongue-tied friends let out a simultaneous—albeit rather low and quiet—groan caused by the friction Alex created when rolling his hips down into Jack's. Rian and Zack’s heads both turned at an alarmingly fast pace to not only see if what they thought was happening was happening, but to make sure that this wasn’t part of the other boy’s plans to make them feel awkward and uncomfortable. They knew enough about their friends to understand how they worked, how they more or less thought on the same wavelength, and this all could’ve been part of some elaborate scheme to make them freaked out.

What they saw, though, was Alex situated firmly in Jack’s lap, their lower halves rolling together and their lips still locked. Hands continued to tug at hair, fingernails digging into barely-exposed hips. Really, it wasn't either boys' fault for getting turned on so quickly and easily; the last time someone else had touched either of them intimately was nearly a half a year ago, when Holly and Lisa broke up with them, and as teenage boys with out-of-control hormones, neither of them can really be blamed. It had completely slipped both of their minds that, hey, I'm making out and grinding on my best male friend, and they just truthfully didn't care anymore.

"Um," Zack eventually drawled, eyes moving to gaze longingly at the door; he didn't know whether he should leave or not, and he simply continued to sit in his spot. Would it be rude to leave? Would it be rude to continue sitting there? He'd never been in this situation, and he honestly didn't think he ever would be.

It was only when Alex and Jack disconnected did Zack and Rian let out a sigh of relief. They couldn't tell who'd been the first to pull away, and though that'd been the whole point of this, they really just didn't care anymore. They were starting to get a bit more uncomfortable with each passing second and merely wanted it to end.

However, before either of them could say anything or attempt to laugh it off, Jack's lips were on Alex's neck, moving up and then sucking and biting at a spot behind said male's ear that had the older boy chewing hard at his own bottom lip and whining, eyes squeezing shut even tighter than before as he rut down just the slightest bit faster.

And that right there was the final straw, and Rian was quickly scrambling to his feet and coughing awkwardly, hoping to at least get the other boys to realize what they were not only doing with each other, but what they were doing in front of their other two friends. They didn't, though, Zack being the only one to look up, and he soon followed the slightly older boy's lead and climbed to his feet.

With a simultaneous nod, they both simply walked from the room, closing the door firmly behind them because if someone else were to see what they'd just witnessed, they'd probably get a serious talking-to or something. Either way, it'd be a lot more than the teasing the other boys would dish out when they felt comfortable enough with everything they'd just seen.

Neither boy said anything to each other as they left the house, too consumed in trying to block out the images clouding their minds. It was only when they were three blocks down, feeling slightly less confused and weirded-out, did Rian speak up, muttering nothing other than, "I fucking told you they were both gay."