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Mike continued to stare at the fire. Danni stood and came over and hugged her. “I’m so sorry that happened to you. We don’t have any right to judge you, though. I used to be just as wild as you were, or at least I would have reached that point if my little brother and my big sister hadn’t intervened. But, you’re right though. Mike is a very good man.”
“You’re a good man too, Matt,” Emma said. “You’re a pervert, barely containable and always grabbing some part of me or my sisters, or your own sister… uncouth, loud, obnoxious. But you’ve never hesitated to stand up for, and with my brother, or for us,” she said, indicating the sisters. “You’ve always been a good friend to my brother and you’ve held your own in a number of fights with him beside you.”
“If he had you there that night at the frat party, Mike wouldn’t have gotten jumped from behind,” Danni said.
Matt was quiet, for once and simply nodded. He turned and looked at Emily. “Look, I know I’m loud, obnoxious, and you and I have never really gotten along real well, but I’d fly out to California and beat the shit out of that motherfucker if you wanted me to, and you know Mike would!”
Emily smiled. “When can you be there?” she asked with a giggle.
Mike smiled and shook his head.
“So who’s next?” Emily asked. Everyone had forgotten they had been playing truth or dare after Emily’s long story.
“Normally it’s your choice,” Sarah said.NôvelDrama.Org owns © this.
She nodded and glanced at Sarah. “Truth or Dare?”
Sarah pursed her lips, trying to gauge Emily. “Truth,” she decided finally.
Emily thought for a minute. “What’s the biggest dick you’ve ever had?” she finally asked.
Sarah spit her drink out over the fire suddenly, causing everyone to burst out laughing. After a minute or two, the laughter died down. Sarah forced herself to avoid looking at Mike. “Well, the biggest guy was hung like a mule, the poor guy. It was around 9 or 10 inches I think, but it was really thick and it hurt like a motherfucker. I prefer them around seven, eight or nine inches, and thinner than that freak was.”
The game continued on, the first few people choosing truth and getting sex related questions. Eventually Matt got bored and chose dare and the game heated up a little, a few people ending up naked, but nothing went past that.
As the night got late, the girls retreated to the cabin, and Mike, Emma, and Matt retrieved their sleeping bags to curl up around the softly glowing fire.
Dawn greeted them and the three slowly awoke. Mike and Matt roused themselves faster than Emma and headed immediately down to the dock to check the trot line. Mike pointed at one of the milk jugs and saw it moving around in the water.
“Looks like we got at least one,” he said. Matt nodded and aimed for the distant shore. They began to check the line, reeling it around an old Styrofoam block. They came back to the dock as the girls began to file out of the house and Mike stepped on to the dock, holding a stringer full of catfish. There were three channel catfish, two yellow catfish, and one large blue catfish. They’d tossed the turtle that had decided to snack on one of their larger grasshoppers back into the water.
The girls cheered as Mike headed over to the tree behind the cabin to clean the fish as Matt tied up the boat.
A few minutes later, Mike handed all of the cleaned catfish to Sarah so she could put them in the refrigerator for later. As he came back outside, he passed Missy who was followed closely by Matt. Missy was turned the other way and Mike put his hands up defensively to stop her from running into him. She crashed into him, and he failed to avoid her breasts as she nearly fell over the top of him. “I said not right now,” she was saying.
“Shit,” she said. “Sorry Mike.”
Matt had turned and was headed the other direction.
“Don’t worry about it,” Mike said as Missy extracted herself from him.
Matt was headed back to the path, and Emily was just about to him when he suddenly reached out and grabbed her, yanking her forcibly behind him. She screamed loudly and began to climb on top of him. Matt reached down, lightning fast, snatched at something and slowly pulled it off the ground. It was a rattlesnake that Emily had nearly stepped on.
He pulled it up, his hands pinching it behind its head. It was small, still a baby. “You okay?” he turned and asked Emily. She was still scared and jumped off his back as he held up the snake.
“You’re lucky,” Mike said.
Emily came and stood behind Mike as Matt came and brought the snake up to her.
“He can’t hurt you now,” Matt said. “I’ve got him.”
Emily shook her head and hid behind Mike. “I don’t care if he’s a baby or not, I don’t wanna see him.”
“Actually,” Mike said. “Baby rattlesnakes can be much more dangerous than adults. When they strike, they release all their venom in the first strike. Adult rattlesnakes know to save enough for a second attack.”
Emily shivered and went inside. Matt pulled out a pocket knife to kill the snake.
“That the first one y’all have seen?” Mike asked.
Matt shook his head. “Naw, we killed this one’s momma before y’all got here.”
Mike nodded and saw Emma and Beth swimming out in the river. He wandered down to the dock and they swam over. “Y’all be careful. Matt just killed a baby rattlesnake.”
Emma nodded and swam back out, but Beth shook her head. “Nope,” she said simply, sliding gracefully out of the water and walking back towards the cabin. Missy laughed and went back to sunning herself. After a few minutes, Matt came back down and whistled at Missy. “We need to go check the caretaker’s cabin, still,” he said to her.
“So go do it,” she answered curtly.
“Dad told you to do it too,” he said, sounding immature.
She sighed deeply and finally stood. “Fine.”
“I’ll go,” Mike said, but as if in cue, Sarah poked her head out the back door and called down to Mike.
“Can you come in here, Mike?”
“Don’t worry about it man, this won’t take long,” Matt said. “We just need to go check it out, make sure no one broke in or anything.” They walked up the hill and past the cabin, towards a hard-to-spot house that was a ways off in the trees, farther down the road they had come in on.