"So, what you're saying is, that was a real alien corpse?"
After renting another room next door, Peter stood in the bathroom, scrubbing his body frantically while crying as he shouted his question to the girls outside.
Leaning against the tightly shut door, Gwen touched the ends of her hair, which had been dyed a faint pink. Raising her voice over the sound of running water, she replied, "Yeah. We got intel that an alien corpse had shown up here, so we agreed to come investigate together after school!"
"Then why didn't you tell me earlier? Why did you have to wait until after I jumped into alien soup? I feel like my whole body is crawling now. What if I catch some alien virus? Maybe I'll mutate and then die horribly, like a caterpillar with white fungal disease."
No matter how hard Peter scrubbed, he could still feel the alien corpse's muscular chest pressed against his back, and the sensation of the dead man's hair lingered at his fingertips.
The girls outside exchanged amused looks. They had actually arrived earlier. Gwen and Cynthia had already examined the body; there were no alien parasites, much less any rare pathogens. It was simply a corpse—perhaps cleaner than most living humans on Earth.
Strictly speaking, none of the five girls was Peter's girlfriend. He was still single.
It was only that, in his inner world, where he had crushes on all five of them at once, he thought they were.
The girls had originally been a close-knit group of best friends. Though each of them had feelings for Peter, it was impossible for any one of them to take that step and become his official girlfriend.
Things were better this way, with everyone acting together, fighting for justice together, and keeping certain