The First Timers Club Pt. 09

"Did you...hurt her?" asked Brittney, more concerned than I would have expected, considering the awful things Erin had done and said.

"No," I lied. "But I scared her."

Kayla crossed her arms and nodded. "Good."

Courtney walked out the front door, her face pale. "Dude, Ash's mom wants to talk to you. They're up in Ash's room."

Me and my two conspirators exchanged a look and we all turned toward the house, but Courtney held up her hand and shook her head.

"Just him," she said to her friends.

Brittney looked at me with a worried expression, but I gestured for her to remain. "I'll be fine," I said. "Would you mind waiting for me, though? I'm going to need a ride home."

"Yeah, of course."

I found Erin and Ashley sitting on Ashley's bed together, holding hands. My stomach churned. What had Erin told her?

"Thank you for coming up," Erin said in a calm, almost contrite voice. "I just apologized to Ashley for my outburst earlier today and I wanted to apologize to you as well."

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. "For what?"

"For speaking badly about you to Ashley. I shouldn't have done that and I'm sorry."

For speaking badly about me? How about for drugging and assaulting me? I glanced at Ashley. She wore an anxious expression on her face and seemed as unsettled as me by her mother's abrupt turnaround. I wondered if her manipulation red flag siren was blaring as loudly as my own. I said nothing, but gave Erin a slight nod.

"I also wanted to thank you for everything you did for my daughter and her friends these past several days. From what Ashley tells me, you were everything I'd hoped you would be and more. So, well done."

She'd spoken in the past tense. A knot of dread tighten in my gut.

Erin sighed heavily. "It's obvious your work here is done, and just as well. I don't feel comfortable hiding this from Clay anymore. It's put a lot of strain on our marriage, and I think we're all ready for our lives to go back to normal. I'm afraid we're going to have to say goodbye to you today."

"What?" Ashley cried. "No!"

Erin tightened her grip on Ashley's hand and held out a one hundred dollar bill to me.

"What the hell is that?" I asked.

"Take it. It's for the shirt I ruined."

"Is this what you want?" I asked Ashley, but Erin answered for her.

"Ashley's my daughter, and as long as she lives under my roof, she'll abide by the rules her father and I set down. I understand you have a certain...fondness for her, and I appreciate that, but I hope you're as smart as I think you are and recognize that you're not the type of person she should have any kind of relationship with. She's a teenaged girl in high school and you're a middle aged man."

Ashley's face was a mask of anguish. I wanted to say something to comfort her, to tell her that I didn't agree with her mother, but I couldn't. Everything she'd said had been true. I didn't belong near any of them. I'd already committed to cutting the girls out of my life for good after tomorrow night. What difference could one day possibly make?

I took the money and Ashley's face fell.

"I appreciate it," I said to Erin. "Thanks for your confidence in me."

Ashley stood, dumbfounded by my capitulation to her mother's scheme. "You're really going to leave me? Just like that?" she asked, her voice tremulous. "I thought you were my friend."

I glanced at Erin and she said, "Tell her I'm right."

I nodded solemnly. "She is right," I said to Ashley, and her mouth opened in shock that I would agree with her mother about anything after all that she'd done. "I'm no good for you, Ashley. I'm no good for any of you. Sooner or later, I'm just going to hurt you, and I couldn't live with myself if I did. It's better this way."

"No!" Ashley cried. "Why would you say that? Why are you listening to her?"

"I'm sorry. I didn't want it to be this way, but this is for the best. It's time for me to go."

I turned for the door and she ran after, chasing me down the stairs.

"No! Don't go! You can't leave! Just stop! Please!"

I turned at the front door and she stopped abruptly when she saw the expression on my face.

"Ashley, enough! I can't stay. Now please, I'm begging you. Don't make this harder than it already is. Please. Just say goodbye so I can go."

Ashley's lips trembled and tears streamed down her face. "But I don't want you to go..."

"I know, Ashley. I'm sorry, baby, but it has to be this way."

She rushed forward to wrap her arms around me, and I returned her embrace, burying my face in her hair as she sobbed into my shoulder. I rubbed her back and shooshed her.

"Say goodbye."

"No..." she cried, unwilling to look at me.

"Please, Ashley."

Her body shook under my arms. I shooshed her again, then pushed her away, keeping my hands on her shoulders to look at her. Finally, her large blue eyes came up, her eyelids red and swollen, and her eyebrows parted when she saw there would be no talking me out of my decision. I'd made up my mind. Her chin trembled.

"Goodbye," she whispered, then slipped from my hands and ran to the kitchen. I heard the blinds on the back door rattle and her painful sobs as her feet carried her across the back deck. And then she was gone.

Erin stood at the top of the stairs, leaning against the banister. Her face conveyed none of the smugness and self-satisfaction I expected to see. Instead, her expression revealed something entirely unexpected. A heavy sadness. She sighed and lowered her head before returning to her bedroom, leaving me alone in the vestibule.

When I exited the house, Ashley's friends rushed forward to ask about what had happened inside, but I walked past them to Brittney's car.

"I just want to go home," I said to Brittney. "Please."

After a brief exchange with Kayla and Courtney, she removed her keys from her pocket to unlock the car. Kayla hurried to follow, but Courtney went the other way, back into the house.

The trip home was far more subdued than the frenetic autocross that had brought us to Ashley's. Brittney frequently shifted her eyes to observe me through the rear view mirror, but I spent most of the ride staring out the side window with unfocused eyes as a blur of trees whizzed by. After a few unsuccessful attempts to get me talking, the two girls settled in for a long, quiet road trip with only a top forty radio station to break the silence.

At my request, Brittney dropped me off at the street entrance to my building. I declined their offer to come up to my apartment with me and told them to please go home, handing the hundred dollar bill to Brittney. Their troubled, concerned faces killed me because I knew it would be the last time we would ever see each other again and that this moment would be their final memory of me.

I'd never wanted to leave things that way. I had planned to say a proper goodbye. To tell them how special and uplifting our time together had been. To express my pride and admiration at how far they'd journeyed and to let them know just how lucky I felt to have known them. To hug them all for one last time. But I couldn't bring myself to do it now. Not yet. When I'd had a chance to put some distance between us and reflect on the events of the past week, I'd compose a final message to the four of them. Until then, I left them with a cryptic sendoff.

"Thank you for everything," I said before turning away.

My cold, stark apartment greeted me like a funeral parlor. The smell of burned bacon permeated the air and the joyful memory it evoked shredded my heart. I'd never see any of them ever again. I collapsed onto the sofa and wept.

Chapter 41 - Little Runaway

I suppose it shouldn't have surprised me when a pounding at my door turned out to be Ashley. An overcast day had further depressed my melancholy mood as I sat huddled on the balcony, chain smoking cigarettes. The insistent knocks, punctuated by frantic doorbell ringing, brought me swiftly to the peephole where I saw Ashley's long, stoic face staring back.

Don't open the door.

"What is it, Ashley?" I asked when I'd opened the door. Courtney stood next to her, looking equally stolid.

"I want to talk to you," Ashley said.

I noticed that she dragged a suitcase behind her. "What's that?" I asked, gesturing to it.

She looked at it and said, "I left."

"Jesus, Ashley..."

"She said, as long as I lived under her roof. I'm not going back there."

"Why are you here?"

"Let us the fuck inside, dude," Courtney demanded, losing her patience. "You owe us a fucking explanation."

"I don't owe you shit," I said, then regretted it because the truth was that I had ached to see them again.

Courtney narrowed her eyes. "The fuck you don't! You're supposed to be our fucking friend!" she cried, her voice cracking as tears brimmed in her eyes.

"I'm sorry, Courtney, but it's better this way."

"I don't have anywhere else to go," Ashley said, interrupting us.

"I wish you hadn't come here. Why can't you stay with one of the others?"

"One of the others?" Courtney repeated, incensed. "Is that how you...what the fuck happened to you, man? Why are you being like this? What did we do wrong?"

"You didn't..."

How could I tell them in a way they'd understand? I had to tell them something. I knew now that to leave them the way I did would only cause them to dwell on whether or not it had been their fault. To second guess everything that had happened and wonder which small thing they'd said or done had finally set me off. I couldn't do that to them. Not to those girls. I opened the door and ushered them inside.

"Why did you leave us like that?" Courtney demanded to know once we'd settled in the living area.

Why did I always choose to cling to alcohol and drugs in these moments? I wondered, when I'd drained my whiskey. Ashley held the can of seltzer water I'd given her in her lap with both hands. Other than tap water and alcohol, it was the only beverage I had to offer. Courtney's white wine sat off to the side, untouched.

"You said it yourself," I told her. "I fulfilled my promises to you. To all of you. Now I have to get back to my life, and you need to get back to yours. It was never meant to last forever."

"But you don't just walk out on us like that!" Courtney insisted. "You were supposed to be our friend. We've given everything to you. We've done everything you asked. How can you just cut us off like that? How can you be so cold?"

Although she no longer cried, her voice still carried the hurt she felt. Her face said that she refused to believe I could be such a heartless bastard and that there had to be some explanation for why I'd treated them that way. Ashley sipped her water silently, eager to hear my response. I sensed that she'd come to my house just to confront me with those very questions, and then to judge whether my reasons remained consistent with what I'd told her in front of her mom.

"...You didn't do anything wrong," I said. "No one's to blame here. We're just different people, is all. Other than sex, we have nothing in common. I have a career and a lifestyle that's so different from yours that I can't even believe we ever bonded at all. But I'm a grown man, Courtney, and the four of you are high school kids. Smart, beautiful, wonderful kids, but kids, nonetheless. Can't you see why this could never work?"

"We're not kids," Courtney insisted. "You said it yourself. You called us women."

I exhaled an exasperated sigh. "Yes, you are women. At my age, anyone under thirty is a kid, but you're missing my point. Our trajectories are moving in totally different directions. We just happened to cross paths at the right place, at the right moment, but that moment has passed. You're going to go on to graduate high school and go off to college and build careers and have families. That's not my path. My path is different than yours."

"I don't understand," Ashley said, jumping into the conversation. "Why should any of that matter? Why would that prevent us from still being friends?"

I set my empty glass down and leaned forward to put my arms on my knees, clasping my hands together. "I tried to explain it to you earlier. I'm no good for you guys. I know I'm going to end up hurting one of you. I already did. I'm not a good person for you to be around. I know you think I am, but I'm not."

Ashley stood and came to me. She put her hand on my shoulder. "You didn't hurt her. Why can't you understand that? And why would you think you're not a good person? You've been nothing but wonderful to us from the very start. So you're not perfect. Who is? We love you anyway. You're one of us and you always will be."

She choked on her words and fought to hold back the dam that threatened to burst. How could anyone be as sweet as her? So giving and kind and generous? Courtney cried silent tears, failing to comprehend how I could spurn the four of them so coldly.

I stared down at my hands, too ashamed to look at either of them. Ashley bent to wrap her arms around me.

"You'll always be my friend...," she cried, and then her dam burst and her shoulders heaved as a wracking sob shook her body. Tears blurred my vision and I pulled her into my lap. When my arms wrapped around her, she hugged me back as tightly as she could. Courtney could no longer hold back her emotions and hid her face behind her hands to weep loudly.

As often as they'd begged me to tell them the truth, I once again found myself unable to give it to them. We couldn't continue to be friends because I didn't trust myself around them to not have sex, and I feared hurting them. But without sex, there could be no relationship. All my relationships with the women in my life revolved almost entirely around sex. The only female friend I had that I didn't fuck was Denise, but even that friendship had been built on a foundation of sex.

Sex defined me. I was addicted to it. I'd said as much to the girls on the very first day we'd met. I always craved sex, and the sex I craved was brutal and unforgiving. I knew myself well enough to know that I'd always be tempted to fuck them any time they were around, and that every encounter would end the same way. With my cock inside of them. And every time we had sex, there'd be a chance I could lose control and hurt them. They meant so much to me now that I would never forgive myself if I did, and I refused to continue putting them in that kind of danger. Not when I could walk away now, before we grew any closer. If we continued our relationship, the heartache and anguish that would inevitably follow when we parted ways would only be more profound.

When everyone had cried themselves out, I released Ashley from my embrace, but she remained seated in my lap with her arms draped loosely around my neck. I so desperately wanted to kiss her, and I could tell she wanted to kiss me too, but I knew If I did, I would end up fucking her.

"You need to go back home," I told her softly. "This has to end."

"I know," she said. The defeat in her voice carried with it a pronounced sadness and pain, but I felt relieved she agreed. "But not tonight, okay? Tonight, I want to stay here with you."

I stared into her eyes, then looked to where Courtney sat wiping tears from her red face. "Ashley, that's not a good idea."

"I don't care. You made a promise to us," she said.

"What promise?"

"You said you were taking us all out tomorrow night."

"I didn't really promise that."

"What are you, some kind of fucking rules lawyer? We don't give a fuck if it was a by-the-book promise," Courtney said between sniffles, jumping in to back up her friend. "You said you were taking us out Saturday, and we're going to hold you to it. Fucker."

"But I'm not set up for guests," I said to Ashley. "I don't have a spare bed. Just the couch."

Ashley ran her fingers through my hair, then tilted her head and gave me a sympathetic smile that said I had to be the stupidest man on the planet. The words had sounded ridiculous coming out of my mouth. The way they had when I'd asked Ashley where I'd sleep the night we fucked in her bedroom. I sighed and looked at Courtney.

"And what about you?" I asked.

"What about me?"

"What are you planning to do tonight?"

"What do you think, dude?" she asked with an exasperated look that confirmed my status as the world's stupidest man. "I'm going to fuck the shit out of you. Same as Ash."

The game the girls devised after a couple bottles of wine was as simple as it was painful. A combination of Marco Polo and flag football they dubbed 'Fuck Face.' Ashley and Courtney would each wear one of the several butt plug tails that Ashley had packed in her luggage. Courtney chose a red and white racoon tail and Ashley wore her My Little Pony horse tail. I would be blindfolded. The two girls would call out 'face' whenever I said 'fuck', and whosever's tail I caught would get fucked.

Two minutes of game play resulted in a broken lamp, a bleeding shin, and two naked girls rolling on the floor in laughter. I pulled off the blindfold and splayed out on the floor. Ashley went to the kitchen to fetch a wet paper towel and returned to tend to my small wound, dabbing it softly.

"You'll live," she said, leaning over to blow on the tiny avulsion.

She sat up on her haunches with her pink tail resting on the floor behind her. She smiled at me when I looked at her, but not the shy, awkward smile she'd given me on that very first day we'd met on the side of the house. Instead, her smile seemed warm and contented. I could hardly believe she was the same person, though I suppose, in a lot of ways, she wasn't. Over the past week, she'd blossomed from a nerdy virgin girl into a sexy nerdy woman and I loved everything about that.

Courtney had changed too, but her transformation had been more subtle. Although still a firecracker with a smart mouth, she appeared more at ease in her own skin, assured of both her desirability and her sexuality. She'd grown bolder and more demanding of the things she wanted, and seemed less concerned by what other people thought of her. She proved it when she removed a brand new dildo from Ashley's suitcase.

"Ash, is it okay if I use this?" Courtney asked.

Ashley looked over her shoulder and nodded after a brief moment of consideration. Courtney took it back with her to the sofa.

"I want to watch you fuck him," she said to Ashley. "Sit on his face and suck his big dick."

Ashley turned to me and I put my hand on her hip. "Get over here, baby, so I can eat your little pussy."

Courtney blew a laugh from her nose and I realized that I'd said it almost exactly the same way Denise had when she'd mocked me the other night. What could I say? I loved eating pussy. Ashley lifted her leg to straddle my head and her tail fell on my face. I lifted it and flipped it onto her back to see my prize.

"God, your little pussy is so fucking gorgeous," I said.

Courtney leaned back on the sofa to tease her pussy with the head of the dildo while Ashley took my cock into her hand to gently stroke it.

"Not as gorgeous as this big, beautiful dick," Ashley replied.

"Nope. You're pussy is way better," I said and then pulled her down to prove it to her.

My tongue slid over her entire pussy in one long lick. Then I kissed and licked my way around it, parting her thin slit to seek out her tiny labia. Her pussy tasted so delicious, I wanted to bite it and eat it. I couldn't get enough of her, and she showed her appreciation for my cunnilingual skills by giving me the best blowjob she'd ever given.

Her mouth moved sensually over my cock, her tongue and lips soft and wet, gliding over the sensitive glans before swallowing me whole and taking me as far into her mouth as she could, only to reverse and roll her lips over the broad ridged head. Her throaty, impassioned moans vibrated my cock and sent a surge of lusty desire directly to my balls.