Truth or Dare - Danielle Allen Page 0,34

up with him tonight or what? I saw the way he was looking at you last night.”

“I thought you had a rule about hooking up with people in the group,” Corrine mentioned, cutting her eyes at me. “Is that still the case?”

“I mean…” Chloe made a face and shook her hand in the air. “It’s not a rule. It’s more of a…” She sipped her drink and sat back in her chair. “To prevent any rifts, it’s just easier if there aren’t any hookups. Dating and relationships are fine, but because flings can come with complications, it’s for the best interest of the group to not add any benefits to the friendships,” she explained.

Tisha and I discreetly kicked each other under the table since we were both reaping the benefits of a friend in the group.

“I mean, almost everyone has done someone in the group, but the rule of thumb is to not hook up,” Maria elaborated.

“Almost everyone has hooked up with someone?” Corrine wondered with a frown.

“Yeah.” Tisha grabbed her drink and put it to her lips. “Past tense.”

“Tyler and I had a brief thing in college,” Maria clarified. “Eli and Tisha were an on again off again thing. Omar and Simone were a thing for the longest.”

Corrine looked at me. “Is something still going on between you and Omar?”

My eyebrows crumpled. “Me and Omar? No. Not for a long time. Omar and I dated for two and a half years—from late sophomore year until a few months after graduation. We haven’t been a thing since we were essentially kids.”

“Twenty-two isn’t a kid, but I see the point she’s making,” Tisha added her unnecessary commentary in a stage whisper.

Everyone but Corrine laughed.

“We were nineteen when we started dating,” I argued.

“And twenty-two when you broke up,” she retorted, still in a stage whisper.

“I said essentially kids,” I pointed out, pretending like I was going to throw a melon ball at her. Popping it into my mouth instead, I looked at Corrine. “Why? Where did that come from?”

“Well, I heard you guys refer to Omar as Omar of Simone and Omar a few times and I didn’t know what that was about,” she explained.

“Ohhhhh,” the rest of us said in unison.

I assumed she knew.

“Before we started dating, during freshman year, I had four classes with Omar. We were both business majors and we had almost all the same classes. The rest of us”—I gestured around, referencing our group— “all lived in the same dorm freshman year and that’s how we met and became friends. Omar didn’t live there, but working on a project with him, I realized he was cool but shy. We all had each other, and he didn’t really have anyone, so I invited him to hang out with us—”

“Long story short,” Tisha interjected. “Simone was popular, and Omar wasn’t. So, whenever someone would say something about Omar, the response would be like ‘who?’ And then when he became our friend and we were talking to people and we’d say Omar, people wouldn’t know who we were talking about until we’d say Simone’s name. Once they started dating, it just became a running joke to introduce him as Omar of Simone and Omar for clarity.”

“And by the end of junior year, even though people knew him at that point, we still would do it because it was funny,” Maria added.

“Now, it’s just to keep him in check and remind him of his roots,” Chloe giggled.

We all laughed good-naturedly.

Corrine sat back in her seat and sipped her mango juice. “Hm.”

“Speaking of Omar,” Chloe began with a high-pitched giggle. “Dom said that he was irritated with you two because he was on a hot streak at the blackjack table and the minute you two arrived, he started losing.”

“Oh!” Maria exclaimed, throwing her arms in the air. “That makes sense because he did say we were bad luck.”

Tisha snapped her fingers. “You know what…” She shook her head and pointed at Maria. “Maybe he didn’t call us bad mofos. I bet he said bad mojo.”

“That makes so much more sense!” Maria gasped, covering her mouth. “And that’s probably why he looked at us like that when we started yelling ‘we are bad muthafuckas’ as he walked away from us.”

“Admittedly, we probably shouldn’t have started yelling that anyway,” Tisha reasoned.

I laughed at their exploits. “You know Omar hates for all the attention to be on him like that. He was probably embarrassed.”

“In our defense, we thought he called us mofos first,” Tisha snickered.

“So,