“You think I wanted to know that about your skanky ass?”

“Oh, fuck you, dick!”

“That’s what the dildos are for, bitch.”

Jeremiah intervenes with a laugh, “Settle down, you two. Cam, you haven’t gone in a while.”

“Hm… never have I ever stripped for money,” Camilla says, grinning wickedly at her sister.

“You bitch,” Clover says, taking a quick swig of her drink. “I was in college and broke!”

Rowan would kill for either of those excuses as he takes his own sip, the beer now gone warm from how slowly he’s been nursing it. Fuck. Tonight is really dredging up a lot of shit that he didn’t think would come up ever. He knows, logically, that he could lie, but well…. He’s never been very good at that particular skill.

“I’ll be damned, Campbell,” Mal says next to him. “Is there anything you haven’t done?”

Rowan shrugs, trying to play off his racing heartbeat as indifferent. “Guess not.”

“And you never stripped for me?”

“Uh….”

Because what the hell does he say to that, other than We don’t really do that, Mal, or I gladly would as long as you weren’t paying me anything.

They’ve sexted plenty of times now, sending each other pics and videos with barely a second thought anymore, but stripping is… deliberate. Deliberately intimate, Rowan guesses. Even with his history of doing it “professionally” when he was a coked-out teenager, he’d promised himself years ago that if he ever did it again, it would be for someone he wanted to show off to and not to put food in his belly or poison in his veins.

Not as part of a nonromantic just fuckin’ arrangement.

But thankfully, Jeremiah swoops in and saves the day with “Never have I ever been in a gangbang.”

The rest of the Menagerie employees howl with laughter and bang on the table, chanting for Mal and Rowan both to drink.

“Fucking gross, Mal!” Amy squeals, pretending to avert her eyes as if Mal’s going to get ravaged right in front of her.

“I fuckin’ told you not to come, skank!”

The Savaryns continue their bickering, but the rest of the game goes by largely without incident. Thankfully without any more skeletons of Rowan’s smashing through the layers of closets Rowan’s locked them in.

Rowan learns that Mal is allergic to grapefruit—which Rowan drinks with in solidarity due to the interaction the citrus has with his meds—Camilla is older than Clover by seven minutes, even though she acts like the younger of the two, Jeremiah has his master’s in psychology but prefers bartending, and Amy used to run track in high school, among many, many sexual things about everyone, most of which Rowan probably shouldn’t know.

Only when Mal announces that he needs another drink does it end, and another round of drinks materializes by their side without the excuse of a game to sip down.