Alistaire Ch. 06: Bridget

One of my favorite sub-genres on Literotica is what I call the "Shy Nerd Harem", in which a young virgin utterly improbably discovers his inner sex-beast prowess, and that prowess is in turn discovered by a series and/or group of his fellow students. This is my first shot at the trope.

Please remember (as is the case with all my stories), if you are looking for 'Realism', just move on. As always, I aim for 'Ridiculously Plausible'. All sexually active characters are eighteen, or older, at the time of the action.

With this entry, we come to the end of what I call Alistaire's "Shy Virgin" phase. There is a second arc, Alistaire Too, out there, but this chapter brings the first story to a close. Thanks for reading along with the ride.

Oh, and huge thanks to the commenters out there who noticed that I had changed Bridget's name to Britney halfway through the tale when I first published this! Don't work on two stories at once with similarly named character, kids!

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THE ONE WITH BRIDGET

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Beth, Carla, and I left my room and walked down to the Tuck, which was pretty full, though it was still early. I wondered if later we would see more activity that looked like dates on a night with no movie, or less. Not my problem. I had plenty of other problems, but that wasn't one. I was personally riding a double blow job high, and walking with the two girls who had delivered them, if not as interactively with each other as I still hoped might happen someday.

Maybe I did not actually have 'plenty' of other problems...

We were met with a surprise. Fortunately, or so I thought at the time, the Sarniokis had gotten back from their Date Night early, and Bridget was there in a booth, sucking on a thick milkshake in a momentarily distracting manner.

"Wow! You are done early, Bridget," Carla observed easily, reaching the booth first and sliding into it opposite Bridget. Beth followed immediately and sat beside Carla. I was slower, waving at people as I followed, even pausing briefly to say hello to Jenn Potter who was on her way out with a friend. That delay earned me at least a glance or two as I settled into the booth next to its original occupant.

"Date night for the Sarniokis tonight was dinner at Wendy's, an ice cream cone, and an attempt to buy every last thing in the store at Target," Bridget reported, explaining her early release. "But an early evening still pays the same! And I even got the creatures in bed and asleep for the Sarniokis before they got home. They were pretty stoked about that, actually." She sniggered after a moment, "I'll bet they realized that they were going to get to have sex on date night, after all!"

We all shared a laugh, and Carla and Beth volunteered to go fight the modest line to get food for everyone. Bridget didn't want anything besides the shake and fries the she was already idly devouring. I just wanted a double-sized chocolate malt.

As they walked off through the crowd, Bridget turned a little toward me in the booth and asked, "So what were you guys up to while I was doing toddler rodeo?"

It was just an idle attempt at conversation. In retrospect, I am sure of that. But with all the talk about secrets that afternoon and evening, especially secrets from Bridget, I jumped like she was hitting me with the Third Degree. "Oh... um, nothing. We were hanging out in my room... torturing Ben," I added, wanting to focus on not the three of us.

Bridget briefly cocked an eyebrow. I saw it. It scared me. She genuinely let it go, however.

"Torturing Ben is always good," she observed, sucking once more on her shake. "How did he deserve it this time, and how'd you do it?"

Dumbass. Explaining that would require revealing the Maddie secret, which I still wanted to keep close, though at least it was not the nuclear level one involving Carla and Beth.

"Oh. Uh. Nothing, really," I temporized. "The three of us were just hanging out, taking about... nothing really, when Ben came in. Then Beth decided, kind of out of the blue really, to tease Ben. It was, um, effective. A real sight to be seen," I added, momentarily brightening in an attempt make the story at least interesting enough to not sound incomplete.

Bridget just looked at me skeptically, and not at Beth's sudden decision to sexually torment Ben. That seemed to be the only part that met with casual belief. My mind, which was frantically and inefficiently scrambling for cover stories, was immediately distracted by that. Had Beth been pondering Ben for a while now? How long? Before me, even?

Now was not the time to ponder Ben's chances. I had somehow wandered into a field of running chainsaws without warning, all because I had flinched just once.

"And Carla?" Bridget asked drily. "Did she torture Ben, too?"

"What? Oh... No!" I brightened. "No, she just enjoyed watching it with me."

I'm not sure what I was hoping to accomplish there, but I sure didn't accomplish it.

Bridget just sat there, staring at me with an unreadable, but probably angry, look in her eyes, searching my nervous face, until Beth and Carla returned with munchies. It was about the longest I think I've even been in the same place with Bridget without saying anything.

See, the problem is, Bridget knew me too god-damned well. As I've said over and over, we have been friends almost from the start of Freshman year. She had watched me grow taller than her. She had listened to me tell dumb joke after dumb joke after I had been shut out or ignored by other kids and didn't want to stop talking in case I started crying. She had helped me learn to tell better jokes, possibly in self-defense.

We had played terrible practical jokes on each other, one time even getting in trouble for it. I had once helped her get a date (meaning hang out in the Tuck Shop for an hour before Study Hall) with Felix de Pont back in the tenth grade.

And I had held her while she cried after Gianni Torrine dumped her, back in the fall. It is interesting that every time I say I had basically never touched a girl before Carrie, I kept forgetting that night, when I must have hugged Bridget for twenty minutes. I'm pretty sure that is because that traumatic episode was not about the holding, and I sure as hell didn't have it in my mind that I was holding a girl. I had just been there for a buddy who was hurting, bad.

But.

But that, and so much more, meant that Bridget could read me like a damned open book. I could read her just as well, to be honest, but she wasn't the one hauling around a book full of secrets at the moment.

The girls slid back into the booth and shoved my malt toward me.

Then they both caught sight of Bridget's face, which had gone from stony when we were alone, to full-on stormy.

"What?" Carla asked, perhaps unwisely.

Bridget just stared at us all, somehow she managed to lock eyes with us all simultaneously, despite how spread out we were around her.

"Who?" she asked flatly.

"Who what?" Beth tried to ask flippantly. She and Carla still didn't know what was up, only that Bridget was pissed. I had an awful insight that somehow, we were on the verge of being busted.

"Who fucked Alistaire?" Bridget ground out. I was more prepared for those words than the girls were, but it still felt like the bottom dropped out from under me. She was way more upset than I had expected. And I had expected her to be majorly pissed if she found out.

Neither girl responded. Given the look they were getting from Bridget, I didn't blame them.

"Which one of you," Bridget ground on, "fucked Alistaire, and which one of you knew about it and did not share this information with me?" Her gaze went back and forth between them like a searchlight in the silence that followed.

It was pretty loud in the Tuck, but to me, and I'm betting to all four of us, there was less outside sound than you'd hear in a sensory deprivation tank.

Not looking guilty was apparently not a strength for either of my friends, any more than it was for me. Neither even looked at Bridget at first, as her gaze swept back and forth between them. When they did, they both looked like they had run over her cat. My eyes were glued to Bridget's face. I had always been happy to look at her face... until now. But know I could not look away, so morbid was my curiosity about our fate.

Her eyes narrowed. Then narrowed again.

Then they shot wide open. "Fuuuuck!" She breathed in fresh shock, eyes snapping to mine without warning, searching whatever she wanted to find there... She caught whatever she was looking for, but definitely not what she wanted, in my face. I was unprepared. Her eyes got even wider.

She trembled. She actually trembled. Not trembled, like crying either. Trembling like Vesuvius in 79 AD.

"Let me out," she said flatly to me, all trembling instantly banished.

"Huh?" I asked, brain not tracking still.

"Move your scrawny ass, so I can get the fuck out of this booth," Bridget said with thunderous calm.

Meekly, I stood up.

Bridget slid out in an actually pretty scarily smooth motion, and stood up. "See you guys later," she said and walked off as if without a care in the world.

I sank back into the booth.

Beth, who had known Bridget the least time, observed, "I think we are in trouble guys, aren't we?"

Carla and I, who had known her longer, replied that we were so all going to die.

Carla wondered which of us Bridget would slay first.

"I hope she decides on one of you," I observed, with gallows humor.

"Well, thanks for nothing, hero," Carla said snottily.

"No, it's just that then she might lock up while trying to decide which one of you to kill, and we all might get to live to see graduation."

As I said, gallows humor. We had hurt Bridget, worse than we had feared, and we all were dying a little inside.

*

My alarm went off Sunday at 8AM, like it always did. That is a horrifyingly early time to wake on a Sunday, when the school dining hall doesn't even open until 10:30 for brunch and omelet bar. But every Sunday morning for three years, year round, unless it was actively snowing or maybe pouring rain, Bridget and I had gone for a training run. My phone's alarm went off at eight every week, and I would meet Bridget by the bridge beyond the hockey rink to go for a run. That was the calm, right order of the universe.

I groaned and slapped Cancel on my phone. That tradition was well and truly fucked now, all because I had decided secrets were more convenient and easier than telling the truth.

At least I could sleep in.

At 8:15, my phone rang. Why was my mother calling so early? It had to be her. There was literally no one else but her, if you looked on my phone's call log. No one else on the planet called anyone any more. You texted, like a civilized creature.

"Hello?" I asked blearily.

"Where are you?" Bridget's voice came acerbically through the phone. "I'm out here in the cold, and you sound like you are still in bed."

"Well... I, uh... I thought that you would want... wouldn't want to..."

"I told you three years ago, when we started running together, you don't skip a day, Al. You skip a day, you start skipping a bunch of days until it isn't worth doing any more. Get moving!" Fleetingly, and for the first time, I was disappointed to not be called Alistaire.

Still very confused, but eager to try to salvage whatever I could, I hung up and practically leapt into my shorts and a teeshirt. I tugged on my shoes, and was out the door in two minutes. Five minutes later, I was jogging around the back corner of the rink.

There was Bridget, looking fresh as a god-damned daisy and stretching impatiently.

"How about we do the Big Box today?" she asked without preamble.

"Sure, okay," I said in confusion. Of all the school's measured road routes, the Big Box was the longest, at an exact 10K. We never ran the Big Box, even in practice, once the actual track season began. It was mostly a cross-country workout

Before I could think twice about the sudden, grueling prospect, we were on the pavement, turning left like you only did for the Big Box.

We usually talked all the way around the route, whichever one we took on Sundays, but that morning we were silent for almost the first kilometer and a half. Finally, Bridget broke the silence.

"You can't skip a day, you know. Neither of us can. We have a lot left to do."

"What do we have left to do?" I replied, both of us still breathing easy, though Bridget was setting a slightly stronger pace that I'd have expected, or liked. "We have two meets left in the season, both of which, absent a meteor strike, Varsity, Girls, and JV will all win."

We ran a few another hundred meters before I added, "And then we graduate. And while, yes, you are good enough to have a chance to make the team at Penn, I'm not sure they are going to even let me into the stands to just watch a meet at USC."

"We have two meets left," she agreed, breathing easy. "You still have a chance to win a fucking race at least once in your career. Don't you want to?"

"Hell yes," I said emphatically. Then, even more emphatically, "But it isn't going to happen. I don't have three seconds in me in the 800, seven in the 1,500, or God knows how many in the 3,000."

"You only need ten to beat Donovan in the three," Bridget snapped automatically. "But more importantly, do you think either he or Rick are out training today? No, they aren't. They are cruising. They have already qualified for the New England's. Those two guys ahead of you are sleeping in and getting fat."

The idea of either Donovan or Rick getting fat was almost laughable. But Bridget was being intense about something other than me fucking her two best friends, so I was not about derail the conversation.

"You still have to win a race," she repeated between breaths. "I still want to get my qualification times up into the top heats at the New Englands. So we run. Hard."

Unfortunately, she punctuated that last word by picking up the pace further. I didn't respond at first, and she started to pull ahead of me. She glared back at me, and I caught back up, but with ill grace.

"Do we have to make this a race to get you into it?" she growled at me.

For a moment, I forgot about the gorilla out there on the course with us and reacted like we were the same old friends. "You want to race me? On the Big Box?"

"Afraid?"

"Bridget, I'll kill you," I laughed quite sincerely, even though it cost me a few cubic inches oxygen.

"Bullshit," she said almost angrily, but it seemed to be pretty much friendly anger about the matter at hand. "When have you ever beaten me in any race, moron?"

"Two times last fall in Cross-Country," I said promptly. "My time was two seconds better than yours in the meet here against Choate, and I beat you by three when we were at Taft."

"You hang onto those times, dreamer. Both races, it rained after you ran and while I did," Bridget scoffed. That was true, but immaterial. I had run better times those days. I had cherished those times ever since.

"In the 800, which is your best event and my worst, your personal best is five full seconds better than me. In the 1,500, it is also only five seconds better than mine," I went on. "In the 3,000, I'm only seven seconds back."

She looked at me.

"And if you compare our times from the same meet to the same meet, I'm usually at least that close, if not closer," I added.

"You still have never beaten me."

"Sure, and that is because you are close to being an Ivy-League level collegiate women's athlete, and I am a barely-varsity high school scrub," I said, really not wanting to actually work hard enough to race. "But I'm a guy and you are a girl," I went on.

"Glad you got that figured out."

"Aaaand," I said, overriding her before we drifted back to dangerous territory, "I have six inches of height and more than a foot of stride length over you, even with your superior form. I have more muscle, and more lung capacity. You cannot beat me at six and a half god-damned miles, Bridget! Why are you trying to make me put in the effort to show you?"

"Do I have to bet you, to get you to take this seriously?" Bridget asked.

"A bet?" I asked, a bit incredulously. We had never been betting kind of friends. That was me and Adam, or me and Chris back home.

"Yeah, a bet, loser. You. Lazy. Loser," Bridget taunted. Taunting was not her strength, I noted, though it was still annoying. And I still did not want to race this morning. "What do you want to bet that you can win this race?" she snapped

Alright kids, hold onto your ass, because your are about to see me do something spectacularly stupid here.

I had been on a five week bender of pushing my way through awkward situations through sexual bluff, sexual self-confidence, and usually self-confident sexual bluffing. It was becoming my default first draft response. The lesson I had not yet learned at that moment was that those had been sexual situations, for which that set of tools were appropriate solutions.

This was an attempt to avoid a fucking impromptu road race... against a friend who was mad about me... about sex, so I at least had that last, incredibly unhelpful bit. Introducing sex at this point was a Bad Idea.

But I did not think better of it until I was almost finished speaking.

"If I win, show me your tits," I said. Then I winced.

"What the actual fuck?" Bridget yelled, never slowing her stride.

And, still stupid, and since bluff had become a big part of my repertoire, I said, "Yeah. If you are gonna make me win, you have to show me your tits. Or are you ready to admit the truth? Maybe it just isn't worth it to you to run this dumbass race idea?"

Bridget shouted wordlessly at the sky, then added. "Done, if you win, I'll show you my tits."

Fuck. But at least she hadn't asked for stakes on my part. That had been my real worry. God knows what...

"But you have to have stakes too," she went on. "When I win, you drop your pants."

"What?"

"I want to see what is causing everybody to piss me off," Bridget growled.

And I had thought this might be a healing run. Here we were with seven and a half kilometers to go, and we were picking at fresh scabs. Damn her. It's not like any of us had done anything actually wrong. We had just gone about it in a shitty way.

"Deal," I said. "The rest of the way, back to the bridge."

"Done," agreed Bridget, and picked up the pace. I just let her go. I'm not a great runner, but I do know pace. She was suddenly moving faster than her best 3K pace. The more she pushed too hard like that, the better I was going to come out in this. "We are already racing, you know," she called back, once she had put 200 yards and growing between us. It was dead quiet and we were just heading onto the only straight, flat stretch of the entire course. Her voice carried back easily to me.

"Yep," was all I called back, and waved. When I race, I don't waste oxygen shouting.

And now that we were doing this fucking thing, I was sure as hell in it to win it.

And I was in it to rub it in Bridget's unwarrantedly superior face. I freely admitted that I had neither her form, nor her grit, nor her natural speed. But fucking-a, I had not killed myself for four god-damned years, making myself the best runner my body could become, to have her thinking that I couldn't beat a girl my own age over almost seven miles! Bridget held a lot of moral high ground at the moment, but damn it, I still deserved at least this much respect.

And...

Yeah, and. And, now that the subject had been broached, I found that I was rather interested in seeing Bridgets breasts. I was, in fact, looking forward to it. A lot. It was, in fact... motivational.