1279

"Holly said you said that."

"I..." I fumbled, looking left and right at the steady flow of human traffic going by, oblivious to whatever might be going on in this quiet alcove. Actually, people seemed to be deliberately avoiding looking at us, and once I realized how closely Sam was pressed up against me, I realized why.

There's a reason people avert their eyes when they see a couple kissing in public. We're trained to not involve ourselves in others' intimacy. Sam had held my arm with both of hers for the entire walk here. And even now, I was hugging her to my chest so that our faces were only inches apart. I had done so for the purpose of keeping our volume down, but to everyone else, it must've looked like we were making out or something.

Like any number of romantic couples at this school. Committed couples.

And it hit me. I realized why I couldn't fuck Holly. "It would have felt like cheating."

"What?"

I hadn't realized I said that last part aloud. "Uh, sleeping with Holly," I explained. "It would have felt like cheating."

"Cheating on who? You don't have a girlfriend."

"You're ALL my girlfriends. the BTC. Now maybe I'm not technically your boyfriend or anyone else's, but I DO belong to the club."

"As our friend."

"Let's get real: I'm the only male. The rules are different. If I were to start dating somebody and spending time away from the club, feelings would get hurt."

"Which is why we gave permission to Holly. We knew she wouldn't try to take you away from us."

"You're just proving my point that the rules are different. If some guy wanted to hook up with Neevie, would he have to come ask your permission? Of course not. The simple fact that any girl needs to ask your permission to hook up with me proves I already belong to you."

"Holly didn't just get my permission. You can't put this all on me."

I shook my head. "She wanted permission from the club. I belong to ALL of you."

"And you got permission. So it wouldn't have been cheating."

I snorted. "Just because a guy's girlfriend gives permission for him to go flirt with another girl doesn't mean she won't get mad about it retroactively. Look me in the eyes, Sam, and tell me you wouldn't feel a little hurt if Holly got my cherry. I saw the way you got up from the movie and stormed off. Now maybe if I fell in love with one of the BTC girls, we started dating, and finally took that next step, you'd understand. But not Holly."

"Well..." Sam pursed her lips and avoided my gaze before admitting, "Okay maybe you're right. But then that would still suggest there's one of us that you're in love with."

"There's not."

"So what? You're just gonna stay a virgin forever?"

I shrugged. "It's not forever. At the very least, once we all finish high school and go off to college, everything will change and the BTC as we know it will cease to exist."

"So you're gonna stay a virgin until next year?"

"Sure." I shrugged. "That's not such a long time, and it's a fair price to pay for the special relationships I have with each of you."

"But the idea that you're saving yourself for the club isn't fair to you. What if one of us decides to take matters into her own hands and breaks The Rule? That could ruin the BTC, and I don't want that. I think we're all better off if you find a casual hookup outside of the club, like Holly. It's not too late for you to change your mind. That girl will drop her panties and bend over for you in a heartbeat."

"Maybe someday I will, maybe even sooner than next year, whether with Holly or someone else who catches my eye. I won't know for sure what will happen until another hot girl throws herself at me. I'm just trying to wrap my head around what happened last night. Everything spiraled out of control so fast that I couldn't handle it and I locked up."

Sam frowned and pursed her lips. "So lemme get this straight: Holly put on the full-court press, you got overwhelmed, had a panic attack over the impending loss of your virginity coupled with a fear that you were somehow 'cheating' on the BTC and got scared of the fallout, so you got cold feet. That about sum it up?"

"Uh, yeah, pretty much."

"So it sounds like we basically need a notarized affidavit from each of the girls certifying that we don't own you, you don't need our permission to sleep with Holly or any other girl, and it would not be considered cheating on us if you did."

I snorted. "I think a notarized affidavit would be a bit much."

"What if we pinky swore? Would that help you not lock up the next time a pretty girl throws herself at you?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe there's no way to know until something like that happens again. That said, having each of the girls tell me they wouldn't get jealous really would do wonders for putting me at ease. But it's one thing to say it and something completely different to actually not feel it."

"Let me worry about that," Sam assured me. "I just want to put this whole Matty-saving-himself thing behind us and get things back to normal. Don't you?"

"Absolutely."

"Okay then." Sam nodded and checked her watch. "Shit, we're gonna be late."

****

When the entire BTC got together for lunch, everyone was pretty nervous, including me. By now, everyone had heard that I'd turned down sex with Holly because I was "saving myself for the BTC" and they'd discussed amongst themselves all of the implications therein. Sam took charge, and while she didn't actually try to get notarized affidavits or anything, she did stress the importance of all of the girls understanding that I wasn't actually their boyfriend (she got head nods around) and they had no right to get jealous should I actually end up sleeping with someone (the girls had to look at each other a bit first, but eventually they all nodded).

Then it was my turn to assure the girls that I wasn't in love with any of them. I explained that I'd simply locked up and wasn't ready for everything Holly was offering, simple as that. The girls seemed to accept my explanation, and we all promised things could go back to normal.

They didn't.

For the next week, all six of the girls were a little standoffish, a little unsure how to act around me. It seemed to me that each of them was still wondering if she was the one I was in love with and saving my virginity for, and even if she didn't think herself a likely candidate, she was at least stressed out overanalyzing the possibilities. Even Belle was acting weird around me despite my assurance that I thought of her as a sister, something her dad noticed at dinnertimes.

Nobody flirted with me. Nobody teased me. We still hung out together as a group, but the carefree joy wasn't there. Small groups of us would meet up in the afternoons to do homework, but that's all we did: homework. It was exactly the awkward "opposite sex" tension Alice had been worried about, and that whole week solidified in my mind the need for The Rule to keep the BTC running harmoniously. If the tension remained much longer, there wouldn't BE a BTC much longer, at least not a version that still included me.

It was Alice, actually, who managed to break the tension. While she had always messed around and teased me the same as the other girls, she had done so far less often than some of the others. Alice and Mari were the less physically aggressive ones of the group, making fewer flirtatious comments, covering up a little more skin, and not copping quite as many feels of my body as the other four.

So it was a bit of a surprise Friday afternoon when Alice abruptly dropped herself into my lap while I sat in the armchair, greeted, "Hi, Matty," and promptly shoved her tongue down my throat.

I stiffened up in surprise and at first didn't kiss her back, but the lovely Korean girl held my head in a tight grip, kept up the pressure, and a moment later I found myself kissing her back while my arms circled around her body to hug her close. It wasn't our first ever kiss, so I didn't feel completely shocked, but I was pretty sure we hadn't yet broken double-digits on the kiss count.

Kissing her was quite nice, though. While she was still a tomboy through and through in terms of personality, eschewing pretty dresses and makeup in favor of track pants and playing sports, her body was completely feminine. She was of average height for an 18-year-old American girl, which made her taller than most every other Asian girl in the school. She was also more muscular and curvier than most every other Asian girl in the school, sporting fat 36D tits and a nicely rounded ass. She grabbed my hands and planted them on that rounded ass while she ground her crotch against my pelvis and shoved those big tits into my chest.

But the kiss didn't last long before Alice broke away. Panting hard, she searched my eyes and asked with deadly seriousness, "Are you in love with me?"

I blinked twice in surprise, not expecting the question and therefore not answering right away.

"Are you in love with me?" she repeated, setting her jaw and giving me a fierce look that demanded an answer.

So I stuttered, "N-no. I'm not."

"Are you saving your virginity for me?"

"Uh, no. I'm not."