[color=#b97703]“We did?”[/color] Cas blinked when Iris said they’d already talked about their favorite colors. Thinking back on everything they’d been through, it wasn’t surprising to him that he couldn’t remember that conversation. The day he’d taken her to the mall to buy new clothes felt like an eternity ago. Now that she mentioned that her favorite color was purple though, he hazily remembered that the subject had come up offhandedly while she had been sifting through items that she would need while she stayed at his home. It was no wonder they had grown close so quickly. The days they’d spent together had been long, and since they’d left the capital, things had gotten intense. He’d heard before that trauma bonded people, but now that he was experiencing it for himself, he actually believed it.

[color=#b97703]“I can’t promise that I’ll remember everything you told me before all the madness started,”[/color] he warned her. [color=#b97703]“But I’ll do my best not to forget it this time.”[/color] Now that they’d made the decision to be together, he wanted to know as much about her as he could. So, when she pushed him again to give her an embarrassing story whilst batting her eyelashes coyly, he groaned. On one hand, he wasn’t sure he liked how eager she was to get ammunition to tease him with, but on the other hand, he found it hard to say no to her big, blue eyes. [color=#b97703][i]Why does she have to be so damn cute?[/i][/color] He marveled with a subtle shake of his head.

[color=#b97703]“You’re manipulative,”[/color] he smiled at her incredulously. [color=#b97703]“I’m gonna have to remember that too. But fine,”[/color] he exhaled in resignation. [color=#b97703]“I guess I can tell you one story if you’re not going to let this go.”[/color] Reaching out to take her hand again, he fell quiet for a moment while he decided what kind of humiliating information he was willing to divulge to her. Once he’d settled on a story, he started:

[color=#b97703]“Okay, this was probably one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever done. When I was sixteen, I and a few of my friends at the time had been drinking. One of them had an older brother who bought us vodka. Anyway, we all had had way too many shots, and one of them—his name was Doug—came up with the brilliant idea of going skinny dipping in a retention pond. Since we were all too intoxicated to think through the consequences, we agreed to do it with him.

“In hindsight, I know it already sounds stupid, and it was, but it gets even worse. Around midnight, we all snuck out of his parent’s house, probably not as quietly as we thought we were being, and went to the nearest retention pond in the neighborhood. All four of us got bare-ass naked and went swimming. At first, we thought we were clever enough to get away with it, and after about an hour, we got out of the water to put our clothes back on and go back into the house. But when we walked over to the spot where we’d left everything, we found out that someone had stolen our clothes while we weren’t paying attention.”[/color]

He pressed his free hand to his face as the humiliation of the memory resurfaced. [color=#b97703]“We ended up having no other choice but to run back to his house two blocks away in our birthday suits. I don’t know who saw us when we were outside, but when we got back to his place, both of Doug’s older sisters were in the living room. Turns out they were the ones who’d taken our clothes.

“While we were still flustered and too drunk to think of a logical way out of the situation, they took pictures and recorded a video of us fighting each other to escape to his bedroom upstairs. All of it went viral for months online, and to make things worse, I started getting stopped by reporters who wanted interviews about that night on my way to and from school. My life was hell for the rest of my junior year.”[/color]

Sufficiently embarrassed by the retelling of the story, he nudged Iris in the arm, [color=#b97703]“Alright, that was painful to talk about, so you’d better have a good one to give me in return or I’m going to feel gypped.”[/color]