Here it is. The long-anticipated act. (BTW, there will be legit smut in this 'verse, so... considering I have literally nine more acts until I hit 45, this could very well get to 50.)
Many thanks to BlOo KiSsEs, obsessed01616, thepeopleofthecrysis, ILLLovvv3TTThhh3NNNo.-3, Wolfen Artist of Hetalia, LinkinPark X, Kerra-Chan, bitblondetoday, RandomAnonymous, iDreamBig, CatastrophicAquarius, walomadolo, and can't login for your reviews to the last act (DAMN you all really wanted the sloppy Erisol makeouts!).
Eridan's heart thudded and he wondered if Aradia had completely lost her mind. Sol had gone ashen at the dare, but if that was the lesser of two evils, what would she have asked for truth?
"Hang on," Sol muttered, grabbing his bottle. "I need to be more drunk for this."
Aradia smacked the back of his head. "No, you don't."
Sol gave him an anxious look, and Eridan took one last quick swig of beer. "Let's get this ov-ver w-with," he said, trying to sound more sober than he was.
Sol nodded nervously, looking like he'd rather be anywhere but there at that moment. "Yeah. Okay."
Eridan had to scoot closer to draw level with him. Before he could talk himself out of it, he caught Sol's face in his hands, paused only a split second longer to admire the elegant curve of the other boy's lips, and kissed him.
Sol let out a small gasp of surprise, and for a second, Eridan was sure he was about to push him away even though it didn't make any sense, it was the dare, and he hadn't flat-out said he didn't want to kiss him, right? He sensed Sol's hands coming up to his shoulders and he mentally prepared for the letdown—He really doesn't want this, he thought sadly—but then those hands of his didn't push him back. One hand bunched up the shoulder of his shirt, pulling him closer, and his other hand went to the back of Eridan's neck. Sol was definitely not letting go. Once he realized this was actually happening, that he was kissing Sol and Sol was kissing back, he let himself melt into it.
The first thing that registered was the sweetness—the literal sweetness—of the taller boy's lips. The taste was vaguely familiar, but he couldn't place it. The hand Sol had at the back of his neck slid up, into the roots of his hair, and a pleasant shiver ran through him. He let his thumbs brush across Sol's cheeks, willing the two of them closer together, and smiled internally when he felt a sharp exhale against his cheek. He wanted so badly to run his fingers through Sol's hair, but this—holding his face, feeling the pounding of his pulse with his pinkies—was amazing, too.
He moved his hand back, accidentally knocking Sol's glasses askew, and Sol let go of his shirt long enough to pull them completely off, set them aside, and tug off Eridan's glasses, too. Then he moved his hand up to Eridan's cheek, sending a thrill along his nerves and causing him to shiver in undeniable pleasure.
He imagined he was in total control of himself, but he was the one who parted his lips first. Sol let out a quiet gasp and tightened his fists, opening his mouth and teasing his tongue against Eridan's teeth. He slumped back against the couch, allowing Sol to move over him, straddle his hips, and from somewhere far away, he thought he heard someone say, "Whoa, you guys can stop now," and someone else shooshed them.
Sol's tongue probed deeper into his mouth, sliding against his, and as a faint moan escaped his throat (Jesus, this felt way too good to be real), he finally realized the taste clinging to every surface of Sol's mouth was honey from the mead he'd been drinking. It should have been obvious in retrospect, but it came all at once and he just knew that nothing had never tasted quite this sweet before. He also knew, immediately and irrevocably, that he'd never be able to taste honey again without thinking of Sol.
Far from freaking him out like he once thought it would, having a guy pressing him down—having Sol pressing him down—thrilled him. A dull aching filled his gut and his head was spinning and he just wanted to feel more of Sol against him, to touch him and be touched by him, he wanted Sol's hand in his jeans, wanted to shove his own hand down Sol's jeans—God, he was so hard now and he knew Sol could tell but he didn't shy away and he moaned again, another tiny, pleasured sound.
His heart raced—Sol was great at this; no one had ever affected him like this before—and they'd just set up a brain-melting rhythm when an unpleasantly familiar voice wormed its way past the dizzying haze in his head. "Well, this is unexpected," Cronus said.
The moment was ruined as the kiss ended abruptly and Sol twisted around, still in Eridan's lap. Eridan groaned in frustration, fumbling for his glasses and sliding them on his face. "God damn it, Cro, w-what the fuck are you doin' here?"
"Girlfriend wanted to come home this weekend," Cronus said with a smirk that hinted no one would like where this was going.
"Hi, Feferi!" Meenah Peixes said, poking her head out from the staircase.
"Uh." Fef looked floored for a minute until it clicked. "Wait, are you dating him?" She pointed at Cronus.
"Ding-ding-ding! What has she won, Cronus?"
"An all-expenses paid trip to a chaperoned house party!"
Eridan buried his face in his hands. "Fuck my life."
"Speakin' a' fuckin', who's that on your lap?" Cronus added.
Sollux suddenly turned bright red and peeled himself away from Eridan. "No one," he muttered, reaching for his half-empty bottle of mead.
"No, seriously, w-what the fuck?" Eridan demanded, climbing unsteadily to his feet. "W-why are you ev-ven here? Did Mom an' Dad—?"
"They might a' had somethin' to do with it," Cronus said, shrugging. "Then again, they might not a'. Maybe I just wanted to check in on my li'l brother."
"God damn it, I'm a fuckin' adult an' they said I could do this!"
"Looks like we were too late anyway," Meenah said, eyeing the beer pong table and the various empty and half-empty bottles and cans of alcohol strewn across the room. Her gaze fell on Kanaya, sitting next to Rose in her underwear. "It's already degenerated into a den of depravity. Who's been drinking the Everclear?"
"That would be me!" Nepeta said brightly, waving. "And she took a shot—" She pointed at Aradia "—and she took a shot, too!" She pointed at Feferi.
"Look at that, Cronus. The gills have bigger balls than the buoys!" Eridan hadn't hung around Meenah much in his life, but apparently Feferi's penchant for fish puns hadn't been an isolated incident.
"More like everyone else prefers to get drunk gradually, like normal people," Karkat snapped, knocking back the Solo cup of beer that John had just sank his ping-pong ball into.
Cronus snorted with laughter. "Alright, daddy-o. We'll be upstairs if you need us." He pulled the two cigarettes that had been perched one behind each ear, stuck one in his mouth, and handed the other to Meenah, and the two of them mercifully ascended the stairs and left them alone again.
The whole mood had been quite effectively killed, though, and as Nepeta headed back to the beer pong table, the game of Truth or Dare fizzled out. Tavros suggested another movie, and since no one had any better ideas (except Rose and Kanaya, who took two pizza boxes, a Sharpie, and two dozen half-filled shot glasses between them to play Battle Shots), they popped in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and took it from there.
"You didn't have to pick Dare, you know," Aradia said softly, brushing a few strands of hair back behind Sollux's ear. "You could have picked Truth."
"Yeah, and have you ask me who I have a crush on? No, thanks."
"You could have lied."
"And you would have known it and called me out on it."
She sighed. "So why did you pick Dare instead? You could have... I don't know, absconded or something."
He shook his head. "People would have talked. Besides... it kind of gave me an excuse to kiss him," he added with a half-smile.
"See? I knew you weren't completely opposed to the idea."
"No, only mostly. Now it really sucks 'cause I know what I'm missing now."
She clucked sympathetically. "That good?"
"Either he's a really good kisser, or I'm too drunk to know the difference."
"I'm sorry."
"Yeah, me too. But at least this way I can still deny it meant anything. No one reads that much into a kiss, you know? People kiss people they don't really like all the time. I get to keep my dignity."
"I don't know," Aradia said slowly. "You seemed pretty into-it to me."
He groaned softly and buried his fingers in his hair. "You're really not helping, AA."
"So what are you gonna do?"
He shrugged and unconsciously licked his lips. He imagined he could still taste Eridan on them, and the wanting to kiss him again filled him with such an ache that he nearly doubled over. "Forget it ever happened, I guess. Or at least try, anyway." One kiss couldn't change everything. That only happened in chick-flicks and cheesy romance novels, and only to pretty, perfect people, not fucked-up basket cases like Sollux Captor.
One kiss wouldn't change anything.
Eridan was staring at the TV screen, but he wasn't watching the movie. His mind wandered with no hope of being reigned back in. He kept going back to that kiss, thinking about how it had felt to kiss Sol.
How could one little (okay, maybe not so little—he'd lost track of time but they'd been kissing for at least a minute, he was sure of that at the very least) kiss change everything? Suddenly, everything Eridan thought he knew had been shattered. He was too drunk to try to think this through by himself and he really wanted to pull Fef aside and confer with her, but there was no way to do that without attracting attention and he wanted to do with as surreptitiously as possible because considering the massive event that had just happened, it would be quite obvious what Eridan was talking to his best friend about.
He chanced a quick peek out of the corner of his eye. Sol and Aradia had crammed themselves onto one of the recliners, metaphorically laughing in the faces of physics and both of their six-foot-plus frames, although neither of them was laughing literally. In fact, Sol looked upset, and Eridan suddenly had the horrible feeling that maybe he really wasn't happy with how the night turned out.
It's obvious he doesn't like you, he told himself, forcing his eyes back to the screen and taking another swig of his beer. Disappointment flooded through him even as he loudly insisted to himself that he liked Feferi anyway, so Sol's opinion of him didn't really matter, now did it? He and Sol were barely civil to each other on their best days, and on normal days, they practically hated each other. Who cared if Sol didn't actually like him or want to kiss him?
But it had been a really nice kiss. His mind was still reeling from it, and a very big part of him wanted to go over to that stupid recliner, pull Sol out of it, and kiss him again. There was something magnetic drawing them together, and Sol apparently couldn't feel it, but Eridan could. He wished he couldn't.
One kiss changed everything.
"They're kind of stupid, aren't they?" Rose asked quietly, knocking back a shot glass filled with wine. She and Kanaya had decided not to use hard liquor for their game since neither of them relished the idea of liver failure and they were already pretty drunk.
"Their ignorance astounds me," Kanaya replied primly, still clad only in her underwear and perched on the now-dry towel.
"How do they keep missing each other?" They'd agreed shortly after The Great Gatsby began that she would watch Eridan and Kanaya would watch Sollux and they'd count how many times they looked at each other. In two and a half hours, the count hovered in the low hundreds for both boys. That number had skyrocketed after the dare-induced kiss, though.
"Boys are dumb."
"Tell me about it. A-9."
"Miss. J-4."
"Miss. E-4."
"Shot." Kanaya tipped the shot glass of wine back. "I have a feeling we will be witnessing quite a bit more dumbassery on their parts before the farce is played."
Rose snorted with laughter. "E-3."
"Shot."
"It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. E-2."
"Sunk."
I had the makeout part written for awhile. The rest was just... filling in.
More drama and plot in the next act.