The Agreement
19 Promises
I GAVE EACH of my girlfriends a kiss goodbye and then instead of watching them leave, I ran into the house and up to my room. I was satisfied. It wasn’t just because of the agreement—not for my name on a piece of paper. I did it for them. Life rule number one, do whatever is necessary to protect and defend the ones you love. Life rule number two, treat people with kindness and respect. Life rule number three, keep your promises. I’d written my final essay for English Comp about them. Now I knew what they meant. I grabbed my pillow and curled up on a beanbag chair in one of the dormers. I heard two cars leave. I guessed Allen was staying. It had been an exhausting and emotionally draining day—and night. I hugged my pillow and nodded off.
When I awoke there was a little crick in my neck that cracked when I straightened. I had a profound sense of peace and well-being. I knew I’d done what was right. There was a warm, soft weight against my chest. I looked down at Hannah’s head. Her arms were wrapped tightly around me. I glanced at the glowing dial of my wristwatch. It was almost four-thirty. Dark out. It was four-thirty in the morning. Hannah stirred.
“Morning,” she said sleepily. “Is it time to deliver papers?”
“Papers? Yeah it is. How are we going to get the papers?”
“Sarah promised to pick us up at four-forty-five. She has a license now.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Mom and Dad played cards with your parents. I came up here. I told my mom and dad that my boyfriend needed to be held tonight. They saw us curled up together.”
“Your parents are cool.”
“Mmmhmm. We better brush our teeth and get going.”
Sarah drove us all the way around Hannah’s paper route and we started getting back to normal as we raced from house to house in the snow. I went back to their house after papers and napped in the basement for a couple hours while Hannah and Sarah got into their own beds for a little more rest.
I had an odd feeling when I woke up of not knowing exactly where I was and being watched. When I finally pried my eyes open I discovered it wasn’t just a feeling. Rev. Gordon was sitting in the ‘storyteller’s chair’ a few feet away from me. He had a reading light on and was holding what I assumed was his Bible. He was looking at me, though.
“Good morning, Brian. I hope my reading here didn’t disturb your sleep. I often spend a few quiet moments here in the morning to get my day started. The room has such lovely child-energy in it from the kindergartners. Even when they aren’t here.”
“Yessir. I mean, no sir. I always wake up about this time, Rev. Gordon.” I was glad I’d laid down in all my clothes and hadn’t woken up in just my underwear.
“Why don’t you call me Brighty like the other teens do?”
“It… uh… seems a little disrespectful, sir. I mean, they’re talking about… uh…”
“My bald head,” he laughed. He polished his head with his hand. It really did reflect the light. “I earned the loss of every hair. I have two daughters.” We both laughed. “Speaking of which…” Uh oh. I knew I was going to get lectured. I slept the entire night with Hannah cuddled to my side in my bedroom. Not in my bed mind you. And I didn’t even know she was there until I woke up. But she said her parents had seen us. “You have a pretty good relationship with your parents, don’t you? You talk over your problems with them?”
“Yes. I mean, you can’t just talk about everything with your parents. It’s a little embarrassing.”
“I remember well,” he laughed. He sure laughed a lot for getting ready to lecture me. Brighty always had a smile and a laugh. “That’s the difference between having a son and having a daughter, I guess. Hannah and Sarah talk to me about everything.” I gulped. Everything? “I want you to know that you can talk to me, too. Not as the father of your girlfriend or even as a minister. Just as an adult you don’t have to hide anything from.”
“Uh… thank you.”
“Why don’t you tell me about New Year’s Eve? Oh, Sarah gave me a full rundown from her perspective last night. She was very upset and thought she had betrayed you and all your friends. But I’d like to hear it from your perspective. Girls only ever see one side.” He was quiet and I realized he was waiting.
“It was a great party. Thank you for hosting it.” He nodded and before long I was telling him the whole story. I’d never told anyone about it—not all of it. But going from the party straight to the hayloft wouldn’t have made any sense if I didn’t tell him about growing up next door to Heaven. I was surprised that I could tell him everything without being too embarrassed or crying. His gentle laugh and little jokes encouraged me and sometimes he’d say something like, “I remember what that was like when I was a teen. Things haven’t changed.” I finally told him that even though I met Jessica in the hayloft and she asked me to make love to her, I couldn’t because I felt I’d made a promise to my girlfriends and boyfriends and would be cheating if I broke it.
“I was surprised to wake up this morning with Hannah holding me, sir. I want you to know we didn’t do anything bad with each other.”
“Oh, I think it would be hard for you to do something with Hannah that she didn’t want you to,” he laughed. “You learned that last spring, didn’t you?”
“Yessir. Our breakup was all my fault. I tried to kiss her.”
“A pretty natural thing for a healthy young man to want to do with his girlfriend. She just wasn’t ready yet,” he paused and I thought maybe we were done. “Brian, do you know what the Bible says about promises?” Oh, man. I’m not going to escape the lecture after all.
“The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” I was still memorizing five Bible verses a week, three years after I quit going to Cassie’s church. It just seemed like good exercise and a defense when someone tried to tell me what the Bible said.
“Very good. But think about it. Every promise in the Bible is between God and His people. But nothing really about what happens when a person keeps or breaks a promise to another person. I think that is one of the reasons churches should only focus on a person’s relationship to God and the idea of treating others as we’d like to be treated. The Bible calls that love. What you’ve adopted as your personal standard is moral. Morals are not legislated by the Bible. You made an agreement and considered it a promise to each of your girlfriends.”
“And the boys, sir.”
“That may be even more important. I’d like you to consider being cautious about making promises. Don’t make many and don’t make them lightly. Avoid making promises you can’t keep. Once you have a reputation as always keeping your promise, your friends would be even more devastated if you broke it. And you’ve made that reputation. Don’t imagine that what you did will long be a secret, any more than your rescue of Jessica a few years ago stayed a secret. I truly believe we are entering an age where secrets simply won’t exist. Every time I pick up the newspaper, the world seems to get smaller.”
“Thank you for your advice. Jessica promised once that she would never hurt me. But that wasn’t a promise she could keep. She just didn’t have control over whether or not I was hurt. I hardly ever use the word promise, but now I’ll think about it before I do.”
“Thank you, Brian.”
“For what?”
“For having the trust to share your story with me. I think I hear the girls moving around in the kitchen upstairs. I’ll bet they’re fixing breakfast.”
Keeping promises. That’s how it happened that I ended up at Liz’s house Friday afternoon, even though I didn’t feel much like it. I knew I was going to have to tell her about what happened and I was pretty emotionally drained. I hung out with Hannah and Sarah all morning and we baked cookies to take to school on Monday. I realized that I liked Sarah a lot and I got to see more of how she and her sister interacted. They even took me to Liz’s house after lunch.
“Have fun with our girlfriend,” Hannah said as she kissed me on the cheek. I turned toward her and touched her nose with mine.
“You are the best girlfriend ever,” I said to her giggles.
“Thank you for telling me all that, Brian,” Liz said as we sat next to each other on her bed. “Now can we get naked?” I laughed at her. Some days Liz has a one-track mind. I guess maybe all days. But I’d promised to help her stay in bounds and that included knowing that she and I would sometimes get together for no other reason than to see how many orgasms we could have. “I give you explicit permission to touch me anywhere and any way that the rules allow,” she said. I sprang a boner right then and there. Even though she was “hot to trot” as Mom described Betts yesterday, I managed to slow her down and tease. Before long, though, we had everything off but our underwear. I was afraid I was going to make a mess before we really got started, so I had Liz roll onto her stomach so I could give her a back rub.
Liz had a bottle of body lotion on her dresser and I grabbed that and started rubbing it in, much to her delight. She had a lean frame, richly covered with freckles. They were especially dense on her shoulders and I wondered what caused that. I leaned over to kiss her shoulders while I straddled her and let my hands trail lotion down her arms. She shuddered and I wondered if she’d had a little orgasm or if that kind of thing was just part of the normal build-up. This position also had the unexpected result of having my hard cock pressed right up in her butt crack. Of course, we both had our underwear on, but the way Liz was squeezing her butt cheeks, I knew she could feel me. In the interest of not coming right away, I moved down her legs. I applied lotion liberally to my hands and spread it on her thighs. Liz moaned and couldn’t stay still. Her hands were by her sides, but she kept thrusting her hips into the bed like she was touching herself. I remembered rubbing the arnica cream into the girls’ butts after our ride last fall and slid my hands all the way up under her panties and onto her butt, squeezing and kneading her cheeks.
“Oh. Oh. Oh.” Each simple word that Liz uttered sounded like it had multiple syllables as she stuttered under her breath. “Is that legal, Brian? Touching me under my panties?”
“I’m not touching your pussy, sweetheart, and I don’t think anyone would call your butt your genitals.”
“Oh yes. I’m almost there. I just can’t quite make it.”
I pulled my hands out from under her panties and slid my left hand under her to tug at her left nipple while I dragged my right hand over her pussy, on top of her panties, of course.
“Now this, my dear girlfriend, is your genitals.” She screamed.
We had a great afternoon, just making each other come. My underwear was a mess and I went into the bathroom twice to wipe things off so it didn’t get too sticky. The highlight for me was when she got on top of me. Liz pulled my undershorts down to my knees.
“Liz. You can’t…”
“I still have my panties on, so there’s one layer of clothing between your cock and my pussy. That’s legal.” Well, yes, I guess it was. I just hadn’t thought about it that way. Liz’s silky wet panties, molded to her pussy, rocked up and down my cock stimulating me and grinding right on her clit. We both came, me spraying all over our stomachs and chests. Liz collapsed on me continuing to rub my come around with her body. I think, the tip of my cock might have been up against her bare tummy for a little bit while we lay there locked in an embrace, kissing. But it was my fourth time and I had long since lost track of how many times Liz came. My cock shrank and Liz finally seemed sated.
We finally rolled apart and I took a quick shower before I got dressed again so I didn’t smell too much like Liz’s pussy. It was a smell I was really beginning to love, but I didn’t think my mom would approve. I got dressed while Liz showered. She came out of the bathroom wearing only a towel wrapped around her head. We’d been making love all afternoon but when I looked her up and down, she blushed from her face to her stomach. She didn’t make a move to cover up, though.
“I got to see you,” she said simply. “It’s only fair that you get to see me.” I was dressed, so I had no problem at all holding out my arms and letting my naked girlfriend sit on my lap and kiss me. “Thank you for a wonderful afternoon, Brian. I’m looking forward to when we can really have sex, but you’ve helped me slow down a lot. I don’t feel like I need to let every boy I date into my panties. I want sex so badly, but I really don’t want to be a slut. Thank you so much for being my boyfriend.”
Life was back at full speed as soon as we started classes on the fifth. Classes all day. Basketball after school. Homework at night. On Saturday there were twelve of us in the attic studying. JV games were played two hours before almost every varsity game, which meant one or two games a week. Half of them were away. Sometimes we’d have a week with three games, but there were also a few weeks we only had one. Not every school the varsity played had enough kids to have a JV team, too. Just like our school had only JV and didn’t have a separate freshman team like the big schools did.
We were almost at end of term and the county tourney would be held the week of semester break at the end of January. I liked the fact that we had another break from school just three weeks after we got started back, but we hardly got into the groove and we were out again. I hung out with my girlfriends at lunch and as many as could come to study on Saturday, but I didn’t go on any dates. I just wasn’t up to it. All our group, except Jennifer and Courtney were coming to the tournament, though, so if we could just keep from getting knocked out, we’d have fans.
The group voted unanimously to have Sarah join us. Sora Miller talked to Rose and asked to join, too. Sora was a kind of solidly built JV cheerleader who had coal black hair cut chin-length with bangs just above her eyebrows. She had Asian characteristics, but I had no idea if it was Japanese or Chinese or some other. Neither of her parents looked Asian. If the girls did a two-person high cheer where one got on another’s shoulders, Sora was on the bottom. I knew, though, from watching our cheerleaders, that Sora was solid and muscular, not fat. She could do flips and splits and pretty much anything the other cheerleaders could. In fact, her flips were better than anyone else on the JV squad. We had her join us at our table so everyone could get to know her. I found out her little brother Monte was the one who was friends with Judy in seventh grade.
I was really surprised when Josh Whitaker and Bert Wazniak approached our table at lunch the week before break. Josh had served his suspension but practiced hard with the rest of the team getting ready for the tournament. He and our other guard Bert also started hanging out with us more after practice and a couple times had asked Whitney to sit next to him on the team bus. The days of Josh hogging the ball or ignoring either Whitney or me on the court were over. Even Coach Hancock had commented that our guard rotation was getting stronger every day.
“Hey, guys,” Josh said. “Can we join you?”
“We need another table,” Carl laughed as we dragged two more chairs around the two tables we’d commandeered. “You might have to hold your lunch in your lap.”
“Or you could hold me in your lap,” Samantha said to Carl. “That would make more room.”
“You can only get away with that for a couple minutes before the lunchroom monitor comes and makes you move,” Brenda said. “We tried it.”
“Pooh.”
“You guys ready for the tournament next week?” Doug asked Josh.
“Yeah. Uh… that wasn’t exactly why we came over, though.” He hesitated and looked at Whitney.
“Just say it, Josh. We don’t bite,” she said.
“Bert and I were wondering if we could join your dating group.” Two more guys? I had a pang of jealousy that I put down fast. It would actually give the girls more options for going out. I know that Hannah, Denise, Rhiannon, and Samantha had openly declared that they were exclusive to our group and weren’t going to date outside it. Rose hadn’t been out with anyone since the holiday. I just figured that was because we were so busy with basketball. Everybody was looking at me.
“Oh. You know you can date Whitney if she wants to without being a member of the group. You just have to agree to the rules while you’re on the date,” I said.
“It’s not that,” Josh said. Bert was being really quiet. “Whitney, you’re great and we’ve buried the hatchet, right?”
“Sometimes in each other,” she laughed. “Yeah, we’re cool.”
“But,… damn, look around the cafeteria. All the coolest girls in our class and a few from other classes are at this table. I know you guys don’t always eat at the same table every day, but I look around when you sit with your other friends and you’re always having fun. I can hear Candace Jones laugh all the way across the dining room.” That was punctuated by Candace laughing over at the drama table. That got us all laughing.
“I’ve got nothing against letting other guys join the group. You’re a good teammate and what you did at the holiday tournament was awesome. If we haven’t said thank you enough, let me say it again. Why don’t you hang out with us at the table like Sora is and we can include you in the vote after the break. You guys do know there are rules you have to agree to, though, even if you date someone outside the group.”
“Yeah, but your rules say we can do anything but skin-to-skin genital contact,” Bert said. He looked around at the girls at the table. “That’s pretty cool.”
“Bert!” Hannah said. “I don’t know you all that well, even though we’ve got two classes together. But you understand that the rules tell us what we can do if both or all parties involved agree. They don’t say what we have to do. If you touched any one of us in any way without our permission, none of us would ever go out with you again.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Doug answered.
“And the rules apply even if you date someone outside the group, which is okay. But if you don’t treat your date with the same consideration and ask for the same permission you would in the group, you’re out,” Brenda said. Bert turned back to Doug.
“So, if that hot varsity cheerleader, Syl that you are always looking at, asked you to go out and make passionate love to her one night, you’d turn her down?” Bert asked. Doug just nodded. “No way. No guy could do that.”
“He did,” Carl said, nodding at me. “I’d feel like a turd if I didn’t live up to that example.”
“I guess this isn’t really for me,” Bert finally said. “I agree with Josh that you all are the hottest girls in school and I’d love to get it on with any of you, but I want to keep my options open. I like you all and hope we can all be friends, but this is too much like going steady.” We all laughed and Bert looked at us like he was confused.
“That’s exactly what it is,” Rose broke in. “We’re going steady with each other. The truth is I might go out with you sometime as a friend. Might even give you a goodnight kiss—on the cheek. But Carl, Doug, Lionel, Geoff, Brian… they’re my boyfriends. I wouldn’t do anything with anyone outside our group that would make me ashamed or feel guilty inside the group. So, I’ll cheer like crazy for you on the ball court and probably hug you after the game as we’re getting on the bus, but I won’t be ‘getting it on’ with anyone but my boyfriends. Not only do I really, really like them, I trust them.”
The lunch bell rang and we all had to head to class. Josh fell in beside me.
“He isn’t really a prick,” Josh said. “Not like I was. I’m really trying to think before I shoot off my mouth anymore. And I’d still like to be considered for membership. Could you get me a copy of the rules?”
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