I stretched my arms a bit and cracked my knuckles. Less than a minute later, Alice was slumped forward before me, her chin against her chest and her spine going Limp as she moaned and groaned rapturously.

Mari glanced over at us and stopped her conversation with Belle.

Evaluating the ecstatic pleasure on Alice's face, she announced, "I call ‘next’.

“Get in line, bitch!" Zofi hollered from across the room. That made everyone laugh, and for a little while I started to relax. Zofi walked up to me and Alice, set two bottles of beer on the coffee table, and then sauntered away.

I actually had to focus to remember my routine. I'd been making the girls relax and sigh in contentment using... ah... a different part of my anatomy, and a few times I caught myself missing a step here or there. Not that Alice seemed to mind or notice. Her head was lolling and she never really stopped groaning.

Completing the final set of firm moves, I let up on the pressure and gave pretty much every square inch of Alice's bare-naked back a gentle caress. I trailed my fingertips downward, ever so gently ticklish to make her quiver. And I finished up by bending over and giving her a teasing kiss on the back of her neck, my signal to the girl that I was all done.

Alice remained hunched over, eyes closed and breathing deeply as if in a trance. I waited patiently, giving her space to come back down to earth from her higher plane of existence.

Eventually, Alice inhaled deeply and sat up. She turned around, forgetting about her bra, and as it slipped away from her big boobies my eyes dropped down to her exposed nipples. She looked ready to fall into my arms and kiss me, but while I'd sent her off to Dreamland, I hadn't forgotten The Rule myself. So I held up a hand between us so that she ended up kissing my fingers, and when that happened, she suddenly remembered herself and collected her bra back against her chest.

“Sorry,” Alice mumbled in a bit of a daze.

“No apologies necessary.“ I looked up. Naimh sat on the couch nearby, patiently waiting her turn. I'd lost track of where she'd gone when I had started on Alice, but she'd obviously returned. "You ready?"

Naimh's emerald-green eyes were intense. "Yeah," she replied thickly as she stood up and extended a hand out to me.

“Let's go."

“Go? Where?"

She nodded upstairs. "To your bedroom."

At first I was confused. Wasn't the whole point of doing this to keep things ‘in balance’? On the other hand, perhaps the point was to get me to cave and fuck Naimh so that everything could just go back to normal.

Not just for the two of us, but for all of the BTC.

"Relax," Naimh said casually.

“I'm not gonna seduce you. I just want to talk in private while we're doing this.”

I didn't quite trust her. Hell, I didn't trust myself. I wasn't lying to Sam when I'd said Naimh and I had never had a long, truly emotional conversation since the urge to rip each other's clothes off kept getting in the way. Even her confession about Conor during Valentine's kept getting interrupted with Naimh having to repeat to herself,

‘Valentine's. Friends. Don't ruin the plan."

But I knew we needed to have these conversations if we were ever to truly put the past behind us. So I took her hand and let her help me up.

God help me, I stared at Naimh's ass the entire way up the stairs. I mean seriously, guys went seventy-two hours without having sex around the world ALL the fucking time, and it had really only been about sixty-five or sixty-six hours for me. But I had just gotten so spoiled having a bevy of willing beauties ready to bend over for me at the drop of a hat that being celibate for two days was making me jumpy. I was like a crack cocaine addict trying to quit cold turkey, ESPECIALLY because I had such fond (and plentiful) memories of the times I'd had this view of the gorgeous Irish redhead's ass, usually with my dick plunging in and out of it.

Part of me wanted to just say, 'Fuckit. The girls want me to nail her, she wants me to nail her, Imma gonna nail her’. I was certainly horny enough to want to go through with it. But there was a reason I'd held myself back. I knew that caving right now - just bending her over and shoving myself in -- before we'd established the parameters of our new relationship, would basically be giving tacit acceptance of the parameters of our OLD relationship, making promises to Naimh of love and dedication that I wasn't prepared to fulfill. And when I inevitably fell short of those promises, it could ruin us forever.

We had to figure that stuff out first. If all went well, maybe we could even get all this stuff worked out right here and now and start fucking right away. The possibility of imminent sex was certainly motivation to put the past behind us and get things worked out sooner than later. So

I took deep breaths and focused on what was important here: my emotional relationship with a girl who I cared a great deal about, who was very important to me, and who... if I fucked things up... could very well lead to the destruction of the BTC.