My Slutty Cheerleader Fantasy

Here we have a relatively slow-burn (somewhat forbidden) HEA heteromance with a slight age gap (she is 18 at the beginning and 19 at the end; he turns from 26 to 27) between a classic rich bad boy and a virgin good girl college cheerleader, told entirely from the MMC's POV. There's a low-key interracial element but as of this draft it's not really a factor in the story.

Every character in this story is 18 or older. They're all in college.

I can't think of anything that would require a trigger warning. I must not have been myself when I was writing this. I've tried to make it sound like it really happened but everything is entirely fictional.

Finally, I feel this might be my best story here so far, and I'm even considering trying to publish it, so I'd really appreciate comments and ratings! Also suggestions, in case I write another draft--especially from college cheerleaders or former college cheerleaders or anyone who's known them well! Thank you so much! Enjoy!

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Chapter 1: The Most Beautiful Woman I've Ever Seen

Probably every straight guy knows the "love at first sight" experience. You see a particular woman and she's perfect, more beautiful than you'd ever imagined a woman could be, and you instantly know that if you had a chance to be with her you'd work as hard as you had to work, risk anything you had to risk, do anything you had to do, give up anything you had to give up.

Rosa (let's call her) was and remains the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. It was the morning of the first day of cheerleader training camp my senior year of college and I'd just stepped inside the dining hall where we were having breakfast before the first workout and I saw her on the other side of the room and my brain blew the fuck up.

She didn't look like a cheerleader and I mean that in a nice way. Sure, like most cheerleaders she had a huge bright smile and shining happy eyes, but she seemed too tall and frail, with tiny little arms and legs more like a model than a cheerleader.

People outside cheerleading often don't realize how athletic they are, especially at the big college level. (We were at a big college. Let's call it USCLA. Go Red Herrings! Fight! Fight! Fight!)

I couldn't easily imagine Rosa performing a complex tumbling routine, but it wouldn't be long before I realized, once again, that looks can be deceiving. Of course she was always a "flyer," never a "base," but her long, skinny limbs had a lot more strength than a lot of people (not only me) would've assumed.

Not that I initially gave much thought to any of that. Sure, I was a cheerleader, but more fundamentally I was a heterosexual male, and as the old joke goes: not enough blood for two organs.

I don't know how to describe the wonder of her body. People talk about waist-hip ratio, and there's something to that, because I loved--lusted after, desperately desired, urgently needed--the astonishing smallness of her waist and wideness of her pelvis.

But expressing it as a mere number misses most of what made her so amazing. It was the shape of her curves, a three-dimensional aesthetic perfection probably not reducible to any measurement. I've seen very few women with a waist like hers--I mean very, very, very few--and some women with an ass like hers and actually quite a few women with legs like hers, and I could have loved almost any of those women, but I have never seen another woman with all of that all at once.

Besides, she had beautiful brown skin and a long brown ponytail. Just everything perfect.

So the sight of her wrecked me. I felt it in my heart, my gut, my dick, my arms and legs and fingertips. I was fucking finished.

By cheerleading camp standards she was almost modestly dressed, with a crop-top t-shirt over a sports bra (showing off her flat but soft tummy) and little running shorts over her leggings, but you could tell she knew how pretty she was. She wasn't hiding anything out of shame; she was teasing the male gaze.

Holy fucking god I had to have her.

Overwhelmed by the hotness of her body, I didn't immediately realize how pretty she was, although I couldn't fail to notice her sparkling dark eyes and super-cute dimples--I'm an absolute sucker for dimples. If I actually told this story the way I experienced it, 66% of it would be about her smile and 33% of it would be about her body and anything left over would be about everything else--you know, feelings and all that stuff.

Only later, after I'd spent some time looking closely at her face, the details of her lips and cheekbones and eyelashes and the tip of her nose and the place under her chin and probably a thousand other things that I saw without consciously noticing, did I realize she was not only the hottest girl I'd ever seen but the prettiest too.

People, including Rosa, tell me this means I was in love, seeing her through rose-colored lenses. Which, whatever. I'd fallen in love just seeing her one time. Even if I'd never seen her again, I would've remembered that moment forever.

You can say I'm crazy but I swear I began to think about marrying her that very day.

The mystery of attraction. All the tiny little differences that make one guy's "six out of ten" another guy's most beautiful woman in the world. Sometimes one particular person's features just fit another particular person's desires in ways that perhaps no one will ever fully understand. That inexplicable click.

And when two people feel it, magic happens.

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Chapter 2: Cheerleaders

Flashback to spring my freshman year of college. I was in the gym, working out with a trainer from the gymnastics team.

"Come on, Chad!" he shouted. "Come on, motherfucker!"

With a fierce grunt, I executed the jerk, straining to raise the bar.

"That's right!" my trainer yelled. "That's what the fuck I'm talking about!"

As the weights crashed into the mat, I celebrated, clapping my hands hard. "Whoooooo! Let's fucking go, baby! Let's fucking go!"

It was my new personal best. Three hundred forty-five pounds--not quite the kind of clean and jerk number that gets you into the Olympics but one that most guys will never touch.

Looking at me, you wouldn't have guessed I could lift that much. As a gymnast, or at least an aspiring gymnast, the goal was to add as much strength as possible without adding any unnecessary mass. But you would've known for damn sure that I could lift something pretty heavy.

For a moment my trainer and I roared together like lions celebrating a kill, but then he suddenly went weirdly quiet. He was looking at something behind me, apparently something frightening, so I turned and squinted through the cloud of chalk to see what the matter was....

And then I saw the girls.

Appearing out of nowhere, five, six, maybe eight or ten or a thousand of them surrounded me: black, white, Asian, Hispanic, who knows what... blondes, brunettes, redheads... blue eyes, green eyes, brown eyes, black eyes... big boobs, small boobs.... The full arsenal of feminine charms.

All of them, every single one, smoking hot and showing it off in spandex, short shorts, loose tank tops....

"Wow," they cooed seductively. "You're really strong."

And, "That was really impressive."

And, "With muscles like that, you could easily pick up a couple girls. One in each hand!"

Suspecting I'd lost consciousness and fallen into the best wet dream ever, I tried to behave myself but I couldn't help checking them out a bit.

Not that they minded. They stepped closer, twisting their hips, their big bright eyes blinking sweetly up at me through long lashes.

"Have you ever considered being a cheerleader?"

"He's a gymnast," my trainer informed them.

"A gymnast? You look too tall to be a gymnast."

"He is too tall," my trainer confirmed.

"But I'm hoping to get back in," I insisted, rediscovering my ability to speak for myself.

"Get back in?" the girls chirped. "What does that mean?"

"I injured my foot, so I might be finished."

"He's finished," my trainer continued to inform them. "He barely even made the team before he got hurt. This is a vanity project. I wouldn't be wasting my time with him if he wasn't paying."

The man apparently couldn't shut up.

"I'm good on the floor," I continued to insist.

"He's a god on the floor," my trainer admitted, teasing me for the girls' entertainment. "It's only every single other event...."

"But if you're a gymnast," the cheerleaders interrupted, "can you, like, do splits?"

"Of course."

"And you can, like, tumble?"

I laughed. Were they kidding?

"You should be a cheerleader," they insisted.

"Um...."

"We need big, strong guys who can hold us up in the air for a long time."

"I'm pretty busy," I tried.

"With what?"

"I'm a dance major, so I have a lot of projects--"

"A dance major?" the girls cried out. "You can dance? Like, really dance?"

"I mean...."

"Come on! Oh my god! You have to be a cheerleader! At least until you can do gymnastics again! Please! Just try it for us! Please!"

They grabbed my arms, jumping up and down excitedly, boobs bouncing all over my field of vision....

But really it wasn't their sexiness that got me. Don't misunderstand, they were all hot, all pretty, I would've happily hooked up with any of them, but most of them weren't exactly my type. They were on the short side and I was all the way on the other side of the tall side, universally regarded as way too tall for gymnastics and determined to prove the world wrong.

But their sweetness and cheerfulness was irresistible. Not merely cute and pretty, they all seemed genuinely nice.

A guy wanted to help them if he could.

Seemed likely to work out for him somehow.

Feigning a lot more reluctance than I felt, I agreed to try.

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The try-out initially seemed almost laughable compared to what I had to do as a gymnast. They had me do stuff like handsprings and roundoffs and tucks, impressed that I could stick a landing. They moved me along pretty quickly and I was just having fun until the first time I tried a cupie (a stunt where I, the base, lift a girl, the flyer, up so that she's standing with both feet on one of my hands).

Should've been easy but I dropped her. Something went wrong in the balance, she started to fall backwards and I panicked and forgot we had a spotter and tried to run backwards to get back under her and tripped over the spotter.

We were all going down but my flyer was going down way too hard. Fortunately I still had a grip on her shoes so in a last ditch effort to keep her from crashing into the mat I just jerked her down and grabbed her so she landed safely on my body, frightened but not really hurt.

The coaches were not pleased and the poor spotter was pissed (you wouldn't want a guy my size landing on you and one of my elbows had gone pretty deep into his gut) and I didn't feel too hot either but the girl was okay and I'd learned a lesson.

The shit had to be taken seriously. I wasn't going to be able to just stand down there enjoying the view.

Still, the most important thing was that the girl hadn't been hurt and since I could dance and tumble and do splits and throw a girl into the air and catch her before she hit the ground too hard, I easily made the squad.

That night four of the girls--let's call them Amber the redhead, Angie the blonde, Brooke the brunette, and Reika the dark-haired girl--invited me to their house to celebrate.

I thought, okay, here we go, slutty cheerleaders for the win! Woohoo!

I showed up all optimistic with two big bottles of sweet rosé champagne. Something great seemed likely to happen.

They invited me to sit down on the futon in their common room so I manspreaded myself out and wearing very short, loose shorts and even looser tops they sat Indian-style on beanbag chairs blinking up at me with the cutest, fakest innocence.

We toasted cheerleading, bumping plastic cups together. Legs and bra straps everywhere.

"So," Amber began, "what's it like to be such a hot guy?"

"Amber!" Angie objected.

"What?" Amber insisted. "He knows he's hot. Strutting around all the time like he just won some kind of prize. Did you see him flirting with everyone today? And look at those abs. It's not like that tight shirt forced itself on him."

"We can't protect you from Amber," Brooke warned.

"Protect him from what?" Amber challenged. "I'm not blaming him. If you've got it, flaunt it!"

"Have you ever done any modeling?" Angie asked.

"I posed nude for drawing classes in Japan," I joked.

"Really?" Angie gasped.

"I spent one of my gap years learning Japanese, and they asked me, so...."

"If you've got it, flaunt it!" Brooke laughed.

"I think they cared more about drawing muscles than anything else," I admitted.

"But you let them see 'anything else' too, didn't you?" Brooke teased.

"One of your gap years?" Amber persisted suspiciously, as if interrogating me.

"I took four."

"Four? Who takes four gap years?"

"I wasn't planning to go to college. I'll never need a job, so--"

"Why not? Are you rich or something?"

"Not that rich, but, you know."

"Okay," Amber concluded, "I'm getting it now. Hot, rich, traveling the world, posing nude--you're a playboy."

"Basically," I laughed. "But I wanted to experience college before I got too old."

"Basically," Amber mocked me, "you wanted to bone coeds before you got too old."

Still hoping for my slutty cheerleader fantasy to come true, I knew better than to deny it. Nor did I want to admit how hard I'd worked at gymnastics only to fail.

"Where did you spend your other gap years?" Reika asked.

"Europe. Mostly Italy and Russia."

"Wherever there are hot girls," Amber sneered.

"Hot girls are everywhere," I shrugged.

"Good answer!" Brooke cheered. "But then why Japan, Italy, and Russia?"

"Culture. Language. Gymnastics. Dance."

"What kind of dance?" Angie asked.

"I started in ballet but now I do whatever. The ballet place was right across the street from the gymnastics place, so I always saw the ballerinas...."

"You were ever better than you had to be. And I bet you got into gymnastics for the same reason."

"No, I originally wanted to be a ninja, and I thought the skills would be transferable."

Even Amber laughed at that.

"Do you have a girlfriend?" Brooke asked.

I shook my head. "Broke up over spring break."

"Why?"

"I guess I was too needy."

"She didn't bone you as much as you wanted," Amber said. "So you dumped her."

"I mean, if I'm not having sex because I'm not in a relationship, that's one thing, but being in a relationship and not having sex felt really shitty."

"And now?"

"Just enjoying the hookup culture," I shrugged. "The ratio of ballerinas to straight ballerinos favors me pretty nicely."

Amber sucked her teeth unhappily. "Well, I have some bad news for you, Chad," she said. "I hope you're not planning to hook up with USCLA cheerleaders. We have a very strict no-dating between cheerleaders policy and that includes hooking up. We're serious. We almost won the national championship this year. The four of us are graduating but the squad has a real chance next year. Everyone needs to trust each other. It's too important to risk any drama."

"Besides," Brooke added, "cheerleaders are the face of the university. Really, USCLA's reputation depends on us."

"There's real money at stake, too," Amber agreed. "Big-time sponsorships."

I couldn't help sighing. So much for my slutty-cheerleader dreams.

"We're sorry," Angie laughed, enjoying my disappointment. "But we do know lots of cute girls who aren't cheerleaders and we can tell them nice things about you--"

"Or," Amber suggested, "we can tell them not-nice things about you, which you'd apparently prefer."

"It's never a bad thing to have two dozen cheerleaders on your side," Angie confirmed.

"And you're gonna love cheerleading," Reika promised.

When I left, all four of them gave me really nice hugs, consoling me with boobs pressed into my stomach, sending me home to masturbate myself to sleep imagining slutty-cheerleader stories that would never happen.

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Everything they said turned out to be true. Cheerleading quickly became the most important part of my college experience--and I don't even mean that because of how much time I spent with beautiful girls sitting on my hands or standing on my hands while I looked up their skirts.

Don't get me wrong, I did appreciate that stuff, but trying not to drop a girl on her head takes some attention, and even I got over the sexiness of it pretty quickly.

What I really mean was that cheerleading itself was actually incredibly fun. USCLA had great teams at that time, so we did a lot of big games. Of course the football and basketball players were the main attraction but we were an important part of the show too. When we did our more impressive stunts, we could make a crowd roar. Once I got into it, the girls loved the way I would shout and pump my fists and wave my arms around to rile up a crowd. People started recognizing me all over campus.

And we did compete for national championships. After having Olympic gymnastics aspirations it didn't seem very important to me initially, but when I saw how much it meant to the girls it wound up meaning a lot to me too. We worked harder than you'd probably believe, and some of the stunts we were able to pull off would blow a lot of people's minds. You know how high a few strong guys can throw a girl into the air? Or what acrobatic girls can do up there? I really did feel a lot of pride in what we were able to achieve together.

And soon I genuinely respected the girls. I'm not saying I was better than most other guys but I had enough sense to figure out that it wasn't in my best interest to act like an ass. Everything would go much better for me if I behaved myself.

So pretty soon I realized that the girls were all above-average human beings. They had real ambitions, they studied hard in class, they took really difficult courses, and of course the thing about cheerleaders, believe it or not, besides their prettiness and athleticism, is their cheerfulness. (The guys? Well, we had lower standards for guys. After all, they'd recruited me! But we were all relatively decent at least. Not bad as guys go.)

I don't mean we never had drama or bad days--we were all human--but I found the cheerleaders a lot more fun to hang out with than the average human. We traveled all over the country together, did events like book fairs at local elementary schools, they helped me get into the frat I wanted to join, trusted me to take care of them when they got too drunk to take care of themselves....

And incidentally, they did in fact introduce me to all their hot friends. Between the cheerleaders and the dance majors, I basically had a standing invitation to sorority parties.

Soon I'd earned the most amazing reputation. Everyone knew I was "not the boyfriend type" but coeds all over Southern California knew they could call me on a lonely night. I'd give them some romance--maybe watch the sunset from my balcony with champagne and chocolate--tease them flirtatiously, make them feel beautiful, maybe play some classical guitar for them or sing to them or dance with them, take my sweet time with the foreplay, make them cum their brains out--I've always loved eating pussy, never understood any straight guy who doesn't--bang them several times in various ways, hold them all night, make them breakfast in the morning, give them a goodbye kiss and one last naughty little smack on their hot little asses, and never tell anyone anything ever.

But they told each other for me.

First they nicknamed me "man-whore" or (even better) "the man-whore." Sometime in my sophomore year some girls were calling me "Cunnilingus Rex," but I heard that far less often than I would've liked. The one that eventually stuck was "Señor Consolador," supposedly a Spanish euphemism for a dildo.

I'm not saying every girl wanted me. Most liked me well enough, happy to have a big guy around who enjoyed flirting and dancing and wasn't an asshole, but they didn't all leap naked into my arms.

Still, girls do get lonely, even really beautiful ones, and every now and then some of them appreciate a guy who's going to treat them right for a night or two without getting possessive or betraying them.

Or they just want a great orgasm for a change. Or they want a guy to really take her and just use her like a sex toy. Or a real tall guy. Or a guy with abs. Or they want to try a threesome with a guy who can keep a secret. Or whatever.

You might not like to think too much about it but I never regarded it as my responsibility to enforce a girl's fidelity to her boyfriend, so if he wasn't giving her something that she wanted badly enough....

Point is, I was banging far more girls than I'd ever expected to bang, so I figured I'd never want a girlfriend again. I'd reverted to an adolescent "more is more" attitude. The peak of wisdom as far I was concerned: who would fuck one girl if he could fuck ten? Or twelve? Or twenty?

Secretly, I always thought the "no relationships between cheerleaders" rule was bullshit but you can understand why it never actually mattered to me.

Until Rosa.

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Chapter 3: Dance

So back to that first day of training camp my senior year.

I had to find out if she had a boyfriend; if she did, I had to murder him, and if she didn't, I had to ask her out. That would probably get me kicked off the squad, there would be all kinds of drama, the girls would feel betrayed, blah blah blah--but consequences be damned, I had to have that girl. Not having her hurt me too much.

I mean it literally, physically hurt.

But I couldn't just ask. In the cheerleading world at USCLA, I don't know about now but back then, a guy merely asking something like that about one of the girls would have been a red flag. Especially a senior captain asking about a freshman.

Perhaps especially me; the coaches never completely trusted me. They had reluctantly made me a captain because I was a senior and, of the males, the best dancer and tumbler, but they knew I was a bit of a loose cannon. The girls liked me so they had advocated for me, promising the coaches that I would behave myself. I sat that aside mentally: I had not made that promise, merely held my peace when the girls made it for me.

So if I'd shown explicit romantic interest in Rosa the coaches would have gotten immediately involved. Nip that thing in the fucking bud. If I had a chance with her I was willing to burn down the whole university, but if I didn't have a chance there was no point in causing drama until the other guy was out of the picture.

Rosa and I had immediate chemistry and we both felt it the first time I tossed her up for a cupie. We somehow just knew how to move together. I could feel how she was going to move, she could feel how I was going to move her. We nailed it, perfect balance, no wobbling at all. As if we'd done it together a thousand times.

"That was my best cupie ever!" she cheered.

"Mine too!" I laughed.

We did a cheerleader-style celebration, holding hands and shaking each other's arms for a moment.

And in that moment we saw something in each other's eyes.

You know how it is when you have a special connection. We communicated very clearly but unless someone caught me accidentally licking my lips or something probably no one else could have seen anything. We didn't need special facial expressions or gestures or anything, only eye-contact.

She knew I liked her; I knew she liked me; and we both knew that we both knew that we couldn't let anyone else know this. Writing that sentence ignited a four alarm syntactical fire but all that flaming information flowed between our eyes in an instant.

We smiled to confirm it and released each other's hands and turned away for the next stunt like nothing had happened, but we'd barely even said "hi" to each other and already we had a shared secret. We felt it every time we touched and we kept acting like it wasn't happening.

And as you can imagine that only made it more intense.

What everyone else could see was that we were good together. From that time on I was her primary base and she was my primary flyer and with practice we eventually did amazing stunts together. Truly elite level stuff. Most of the credit goes to her--all I did was toss her up and catch her, while she had to do crazy flips and turns and splits in the air, almost too fast to see--but I was the one she could do the best with. Especially when it was just the two of us. Besides, since I was the tallest base and she was the tallest flyer, we were at the center of a lot of formations.

So did she or did she not have a goddamned boyfriend? That was the question. Was I going to have to figure out how to dispose of some guy's corpse--just joking... probably--or what?

By the end of training camp, I still hadn't heard anything about a boyfriend, so I felt optimistic, but I didn't know for sure.

Then, thank God, fate forced us together.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

You might think all the cheerleaders would've majored in dance, but no, in my three years as a cheerleader, I was almost the only one.

The dance major required a performance course every term. Two credits for two hours of dancing per week. An amazing deal since academic courses usually only gave four or five credits for a hell of a lot more work and their assignments never seemed to involve me touching pretty girls' bodies.

We could choose courses in different dance traditions but I didn't really care about this genre versus that genre so I always just took the one with the fewest guys. The girls teased me about being a hell of a gentleman but they really did appreciate it. Even more than the cheerleaders needed me, the dancers needed a tall guy--a guy they could look up to even in heels--who could toss a girl into the air and catch her on her way back down and appreciate how pretty she was without wanting to be the star of the show or acting like all that touching meant too much.

Usually that meant I took ballet, but that fall it turned out that the ballroom dance course had an even worse shortage of dudes. After the first week, the girls asked me to transfer, so of course I did, and when I walked into the room for class on the second week guess who I saw?

USCLA is a big enough place that coincidences like that don't just happen. You could walk around campus for hours without bumping into anyone you knew, for months without bumping into any particular individual.

But there we were.

She always looked even better in regular clothes, especially showing off her shoulders like she was that night in a little black halter dress.

With half a boner already, I wasted no time.

"Hey there, pretty girl. Need a partner?"

"Waiting for a man to ask politely," she teased, "like a proper gentleman."

"Pardon me!" I bowed, affecting old-fashioned formality. "Would my lady kindly bestow the honor of this dance upon thy humble servant's unworthy self?"

She held her hand out for me and I raised it to my lips. Everyone watched us flirting. She ate it up.

Somehow we had even more chemistry as dancers than as cheer partners. The girl just knew how to move her body, especially her amazing hips and legs, and we both greatly enjoyed my leadership.

It was a rumba night, and with a style like that there are always so many little moments where your touch can linger just a tiny bit longer than necessary, where your bodies can press just a bit closer or tighter than necessary. Where you feel something and you realize maybe you should move apart a bit... but you don't actually have to... so maybe you don't....

We did all that, looking into each other's eyes, understanding that in dance class we were free--the dance majors didn't give a damn who dated or even slept with whom except as juicy gossip--so we had nothing to worry about and we just danced together and had fun touching each other's bodies and moving together and making believe it didn't mean anything.

From that point on it was magic. I loved feeling her press her body into me, just letting herself enjoy the animalistic sensuality, but the best part was when I could see her feeling her beauty in my gaze and touch. Maybe every woman likes feeling beautiful, but some really like it, and Rosa was one of those. She seemed to open up like a flower blossoming.

Of course we had to take turns with other dancers but by the end of class everyone was watching us. Especially her of course. She absorbed all that attention like a fish dropped back into the water.

I had not expected to see her at the class so I had a girl waiting to meet me afterwards. Too bad for her because I could not pass up a chance to talk to Rosa alone.

"Can I walk you to your room?"

"I know the way," she teased. "I got here all by myself."

"Would my dearest lady bestow the honor...," I began.

She laughed, delighted by my willingness to play along.

"I suppose I can't stop you."

"Might be fun if you tried."

She gave me a flirty "you better watch yourself" look and led the way, wagging her hips like a girl who felt good about herself.

Once we were alone outside--alone in the sense that no one else talked to us as we walked across campus--I seized my chance.

"You're the hottest girl I've ever danced with."

"Really? Most guys don't think I'm that hot."

"Come on. You could be a model."

"I am a model."

"I'm not surprised. What do you model?"

"Clothing," she laughed. "I am a very poorly-paid clothes hanger. In fact so far I've even lost money. I think my agency has given up on me."

"I've known a lot of models. High fashion doesn't always appreciate the kind of beauty that guys actually like."

"But most guys want curvier girls. Big hips and bigger boobs."

"No, you're exactly my type. If I sculpted Venus, she would have your figure."

"That's a good line but a horrible lie. Are you a sculptor?"

"No, but if you'll hold still for me long enough I'll make a plaster cast."

She hit me happily.

"I've heard that every girl is your type, Señor Consolador."

"Uh oh."

"So it's true?"

"Definitely not, but the other things you've heard probably are."

"That's disappointing. But what did I expect? Guys do whatever they can get away with doing. You're all just sluts."

I couldn't really defend myself or men in general so I knew better than to say anything. We were still walking together but the distance between us suddenly felt bigger.

"Anyway, Chad, I want you to know I really like you as a friend."

"As a friend?"

"But cheer is so important to me."

"I could quit."

"Why would you do that?"

"For a chance with you."

"No."

"But--"

"No, Chad. If you quit because of me, all the girls will hate me. You're an important part of the squad and they all love you and they don't even know me yet. You can't do that to me. Also, I'm a freshman. Just starting college. I'm still learning my way around campus and everything. I don't want to be like a fruit that some senior picked just for fun."

"I'm sorry I made you feel that way."

"I would feel that about any senior. Plus I heard you took gap years. How old actually are you?"

"Twenty-six, but I'm very immature for my age."

"I can tell." She laughed along with me but without really feeling it. "But would you really date an eighteen-year-old?"

"If she looks like you."

"That's sweet. But I hope we can still cheer and dance and everything as friends."

"Absolutely. But I have to tell you one thing."

She could hear it in my voice.

"Don't, Chad. Please."

"Rosa."

"Chad, please don't."

"But you know what I want to say."

"Kind of. Maybe. But it won't help. I wouldn't want to be just another girl who throws herself at you anyway."

"You wouldn't."

She laughed at that. I could tell she didn't believe me and I couldn't blame her. I had no idea how to persuade her that I was serious.

"I do like you, Chad. You're cute. But cheer is so important to me. We just can't. Please understand."

"I understand. I just want you to know it's not what I want."

"That's really flattering. You would really quit cheer for me?"

"Without hesitation. I would quit much more important things for you."

She laughed sincerely then and decreased the distance between us. Anyone seeing us might've assumed we were a couple. I wanted to put my arm around her so badly.

"I would like to know if you have a boyfriend."

"Why?"

"You know why."

"Jealous?"

"It's killing me."

She took a moment to enjoy my discomfort before answering. "My boyfriend cheated on me over the summer, so I'm single now."

"Oh, shit, that sucks."

"Especially for you. How can a girl trust a guy--especially a guy like you?"

Dear reader, would you believe I chose to dodge that question?

"I hoped you didn't have a boyfriend, but not like that."

"We were finished anyway. It was a relief, really. I could dump him without seeming like a bitch. He was selfish."

"Well, can I tell you something very selfish?"

"You're glad I don't have a boyfriend?"

"Yes, and not only that. I'd be really sad and jealous if you did."

"Are you, of all people, telling me not to date anyone?"

"Want to make a deal?"

"You can't be serious."

"I told you I would quit much more important things for you."

She laughed at that, sincerely again. We'd passed all the way through the crisis. She was relaxed again, having fun with me.

"So we'll both just be lonely," she concluded.

"Together."

"You couldn't tell anyone why you're doing it."

"Our secret."

"You actually like me that much?"

"More than that. You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen."

She pretended to be annoyed. "So it's just looks."

"It's never just looks. But your looks would be enough."

We'd reached her dorm by then so we were standing outside, kind of off to the side in the shadows. People were going in and out without looking over at us.

"Well, you're sweet. No wonder you're everyone's favorite guy. But you'll have to settle for all your other girls."

"I thought we had a deal."

"You're actually serious?"

"I don't want to have to beat up some guy."

"You're an idiot. You can't do it."

"You think I can't beat up some guy?"

"I think you can't keep it in your pants. Not if what they say about you is true."

"But for you I sure as hell can."

"Well, hey," she laughed, "if you can do it, I can do it."

"That would mean so much to me. I've been so worried."

"Well stop worrying," she laughed again, giving me a huge hug that I wouldn't have described as a "just friends" hug.

"Really?" I begged. "Please promise."

"You promise."

"I promise."

"Really?"

"Absolutely."

"Fine," she laughed. "This is absurd, but I promise too."

I watched her walk into her dorm and realized I would have to get rid of the girl who was waiting for me. She was a naughty little freak so it stung a bit to cancel on her but I had to hope it would turn out to be worth it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Took about three days for the cheerleaders to find out I'd stopped sleeping around and then the gossip fired right up.

"Who is she?" they demanded. "There has to be a girl."

"No comment," I shrugged.

(Rosa, later: "No comment! No comment? What kind of answer is that? Couldn't you just tell them your dick had stopped working or something?")

"Oh my God! You're in love! Who would've thought it was possible? The man-whore? In love?"

They had a great time teasing me.

Probably took them about six seconds to figure out it was Rosa. We flirted too much, laughed together too much, and she hit me way too much.

She loved hitting me. Not in an abusive way of course because she could not have hurt me even if she'd wanted to. In fact, I think that's one thing she loved about it. She could just hit me as hard as she could and if I felt a need to retaliate I'd simply threaten to tickle her and she'd have to surrender. I regarded it as an outlet for romantic/sexual frustration--and something to do when I'd gotten the better of her in a teasing contest and she couldn't think of a response.

Everyone also knew we had a dance class together and that I always walked her home afterwards. What they didn't know was that every single time we parted I asked her if we were still just friends. She always said of course we were, we could never be more than friends due to "the situation."

And before going inside she'd always give me a hug that felt a lot more than just friendly. I watched her hug other guys to be sure it wasn't just the way she hugged people, and it definitely wasn't, she definitely knew how to hug a guy without putting her boobs into it. After a few weeks she even started kissing me on the cheek, supposedly also in a "just friends" way.

Clearly she didn't want to discourage me too much, so I kept thinking "maybe next week" and trying to figure out how to push things forward.

The funny thing about relationships between cheerleaders being so taboo was that talking about relationships between us was also kind of taboo. Nobody could just come out and say that they thought Rosa and I were anything like a couple, so they all pretended not to suspect anything because apparently everyone thought that was for the best. The kind of bullshit you can get overachieving, well-behaved twenty-year-olds to do.

Still, they did try to pry it out of me.

"She's really pretty," one of the girls told me when she'd caught me glancing at Rosa as she walked away. The three of us--me, Rosa, and Jules (AKA Julia), another freshman who had become Rosa's best friend on the squad--were having lunch in a dining hall and Rosa had gotten up to go back to the salad bar and Jules had caught me brazenly appreciating Rosa's amazing ass. Busted, I couldn't pretend like it hadn't happened.

"The prettiest girl I've ever seen."

"Not literally."

"There has to be one, right? I can't even imagine a prettier girl. I think I'd remember if I'd seen one."

"So it's her. She's the mystery girl behind the sudden otherwise inexplicable celibacy of everyone's favorite man-whore."

"We're just friends," I sighed.

"Not in your hearts."

I looked at Jules closely.

"Hearts? Plural?"

"Your heart, I mean."

She'd corrected herself too quickly, guiltily. I pretended to believe she'd merely misspoken, but I knew I'd caught Rosa's best friend telling me something she wasn't probably supposed to tell me.

Or she'd done an amazing job of pretending to accidentally tell me something Rosa wanted her to tell me.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Only one time that fall did it come up explicitly. Rosa and I had been goofing off before practice, doing some aerials (dance moves where I would pick her up and throw her around). Of course I did the same things with other girls whenever they wanted, but afterwards the other male captain pulled me aside and gave me a very strict warning.

"You're not taking this seriously enough," he began.

"What are you talking about?"

"Having a relationship with another cheerleader--and a freshman too. Disrupting the harmony of the squad."

As if no organization in human history--especially not one as important or complex as a team of cheerleaders--had survived its members getting together or even having messy breakups.

"Ryan, even if what you're saying were true, which would be none of your business, what are you actually going to do about it?"

Poor Ryan. As soon as he got in my face we both knew he wasn't up for a physical confrontation. He was almost as big as me but he didn't have the sack to maintain eye-contact. He did his best to shame me with words and the whiney tone of his voice but I was not the kind of guy to give a damn about that kind of thing.

After our next dance class Rosa told me that he'd given her a gentler version of the same talk. I would've expected it to upset her but she laughed it off, her toughness surprising me. She guessed he wanted to be at the center of some big drama. As long as we weren't "doing anything," she believed, we had nothing to worry about.

On Rosa's nineteenth birthday I anonymously sent her a bouquet of flowers and a Tiffany jewelry box, which she loved. I'd complimented her choice of jewelry several times and she'd confessed that she loved wearing it. She understood that I suspected she'd regard giving her actual jewelry as crossing a line, so I'd gone as far up to that line as I could get. Implicitly it was a promise to buy her jewelry later....

On my twenty-seventh birthday she gave me an actual kiss with the proviso that it could never happen again. I told her "never" was a lot longer than I was going to be a cheerleader.

"I know," she said, "but what are you going to do after you graduate?"

"I plan to start by taking all your clothes off."

She very happily hit me as hard as she could and ran inside her dorm as if I might chase her.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Things continued like that all the way through fall term.

The entire fucking fall term.

I'd badly underestimated Rosa's stubbornness. I'd originally guessed we'd start a secret relationship within two or three weeks, a month at the most, but she held out a very, very, very, very horribly, painfully long time.

Going suddenly cold turkey on sex was not easy. Funny to think I'd once dumped a really nice girl who I really liked just because she didn't have sex with me often enough, and now I had completely given up sex.

But I didn't even question my situation. You can say that maybe I could've gotten away with a little cheating but--and I know how strange this sounds, coming from me--if I'd been caught, I think it would have hurt her. I really cared about her. I didn't want to hurt her. I wasn't willing to take that risk.

Especially since fucking other girls wouldn't have solved my problem. I had to fuck Rosa. Nothing else was going to satisfy me. I had to have her hot little body naked in my arms. I had to fuck her about ten thousand times. I went to sleep every night imagining the things I would do with her if I had a chance. Sometimes I didn't even have to touch my dick--I could make myself cum just thinking about her. She was that fucking beautiful. I had to wear a dance belt whenever I knew I would see her.

And if she had fucked someone else, it would've killed me. The mere idea of it kept me up at night trying to figure out how to solve the problem.

So under the circumstances no sex was a pretty good deal.

Meanwhile, you can say rose-colored lenses again, but I also noticed that she seemed to be the nicest person I'd ever met. Whenever we were hanging out with other cheerleaders, she was always attentive to everyone's needs. She would notice whose glass was empty, or who might appreciate a pillow to sit more comfortably, or who might want to add something to a conversation but need a little encouragement to say it.

Her intelligence also impressed me. Every now and then we cheerleaders would have an actual intellectual conversation, especially about politics which were then (as now and apparently as always) very contentious. I usually kept my mouth shut in those situations and really Rosa didn't say much either, but when she did say something I usually disagreed. Not vocally of course, I would just think, oh, that's interesting, she's wrong.

For about three days. By which time I would have thought about what she said, maybe asked her about it, and she would have said something I hadn't expected, and I would realize that she'd thought about it more than I had and that actually she was right. It didn't happen every time but it happened most of the time, often enough that before long, if she said something that I thought was wrong, I pretty much assumed that she was probably right and I just didn't know why yet.

She was inspiring me to be a better person. Any guy who wanted to be with her was going to have to make more of an effort than I usually made to match her compassion and thoughtfulness.

On the other hand, when it came to conversations about culture, she looked up to me. I had unfair advantages, being older and more able to travel, but she loved talking to me about literature, art, dance, music, theater, film.... She'd always wanted to appreciate things like Shakespeare and Michelangelo and Beethoven and Kurosawa, but never had the time to understand why they were actually such big deals.

We just kept growing closer and closer... but she kept saying "just friends...."

Things finally broke during winter break. I spent most of it in Europe so we emailed each other every day (we didn't have social media back then), which made us closer than we'd ever been before.

She wrote me long accounts of her family drama over the holidays. Her Cuban-American father was a career officer in the USAF; he'd met her stay-at-home mother while stationed in the Philippines. They were a very conservative Catholic family and Rosa wrote that "until recently" she'd always wanted to be "a good little Catholic girl."

I asked what she meant by "until recently" and after some encouragement she wrote a long philosophical account of her growing skepticism about religion in general. The short version was that she loved Catholicism and still wanted to be a good little girl "in most ways" but didn't really believe in it anymore, especially not in its most conservative interpretations, but couldn't imagine confessing anything like that to her parents.

Me being me, I expressed support and admiration for her thoughtfulness and spent a lot of time wondering if that meant she was somehow still a virgin. It would explain why the boyfriend had cheated on her--what kind of dumbass would cheat on a girl like her if she was banging him?

And in that case what exactly did she mean by "in most ways?"

Her older brother was the star of the family, about to graduate from Princeton and already admitted to Wharton. Her younger brother was the baby brat who could get away with anything, including teasing her in front of their parents about "the itty-bitty titty committee." She was the middle child, regarded as a cute little bimbo, treated basically like a maid, apparently unable to do anything that impressed anyone. Sounded like hell and I told her so; she appreciated me sympathizing with her.

I decided to wait until I saw her in person to tell her how much I liked her "itty-bitty titties."

She wrote that she wanted to major in English because she loved reading classic literature but she worried that she wasn't smart enough to handle the theory. I told her she was letting people's assumptions about her--that such a pretty girl couldn't actually be super intelligent--affect her too much.

I loved how much stuff like that meant to her. Not that she wasn't strong enough to survive without affirmation, but she definitely appreciated it. Gave me something I could do for her.

And I wanted to do a lot of things for her.

And with her.

And even to her, as long as she didn't mind too much....

I wrote to her about the Christmas markets and balls and concerts and museums. She loved all that stuff so I promised to bring her with me next year. We'd waltz Vienna right off the map. I told her a bit about the scandals that happen when rich kids get together in exclusive ski resorts, assuring her that I was not partaking of the fleshly offerings. (I wanted to make sure she knew that in case the ex-boyfriend was lurking back in her hometown.)

After I told her about a meal at Au Crocodile, she wistfully admitted that she'd never experienced truly fine dining. I asked if I could treat her to such a meal when I got back to LA:

"As friends if you insist but as a date if you allow."

She answered with what counted as a heart emoji back then, constructed out of dashes and slashes and underlines and such.

So that was a great sign.

Fortunately, she chickened out, unwilling to risk the tiny, tiny chance that we'd be seen together, so I offered to cook a fancy meal for her at my apartment.

She agreed to come over on the first night that dorms re-opened, when her family would think she was at school and her roommates would think she was with her family.

My heart exploded when I read that--she was planning to spend the night!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Chapter 4: Our First Night

She showed up in a button-up shirt that wasn't all the way buttoned-up, tied to show off her waist, and Daisy Dukes so short that they revealed the bottom of her butt cheeks.

I was like, "God damn, girl, turn around for me."

And then I was like, "Holy fucking God damn, girl, turn around again."

She loved it, shaking her ass for me and giving me another of those not-just-friends hugs and a kiss on the cheek and I knew we were finally going places.

"I stopped in my dorm to change," she giggled.

"It's suddenly a lot hotter in here," I told her, unbuttoning one of my shirt buttons.

"I know how to cool you off," she said, unbuttoning another one.

"Aren't you hot too?"

I reached for her shirt but she ran giggling into my apartment. She squealed happily when I caught her but then she told me to put her down, and it sounded like she really meant it, so I just gave her the grand tour of my apartment, guiding her with my hand on the small of her back, sometimes all the way around her waist. She said it was the nicest apartment she'd ever been in. I invited her to move in.

"Why don't you have any furniture in your living room?"

"I put it all in storage because I want to dance with you after dinner."

"You have big plans?" she teased.

"Huge," I answered, turning towards her. "Let's twirl you around some more."

"Let's eat first," she giggled, running away again.

I'd brought a lot of fancy chocolate back from Europe for her so we started with some of that and champagne. She'd rarely had much alcohol so I knew I had to be careful not to get her drunk. A little tipsy, yes, definitely, but nowhere near drunk.

With Tchaikovsky's ballet suites playing softly, the lights off, and the candles burning, I offered her my best attempt at oysters Rockefeller as an hors d'oeuvre.

"Is it true that oysters are an aphrodisiac?" she asked.

"I thought it was worth a try."

"Up to your old tricks again! You can't fool me, man-whore."

I leaned forward, looked into her eyes, and lowered my voice.

"I'm not trying to fool you."

Laughing, she leaned back and looked away, fanning herself.

For our appetizer, I served shrimp with cocktail sauce, explaining that if any sauce dripped into interesting places I was willing to lick it off. She held up a piece of shrimp covered in sauce and, with all the mischief in the world twinkling in her eyes, just dropped it right on the floor.

"Really?" I asked.

"You're the one running your mouth," she shrugged.

"Let's see what happens."

I got up from my chair, knelt down beside her, picked up the shrimp and before she had time to react I dabbed her bare thigh with it.

"Hey!" she laughed, jumping up from her chair.

"Come back here! I'm not finished yet. Let me lick it off!"

"I'll use my napkin, thank you!"

"You're a little tease."

"Finally you understand me. Now wipe up that mess you made me make and behave yourself like a proper gentleman for a change."

"I made you make this mess?"

"You heard me. Let's go, man-whore, clean it up!"

Next was salad, basically the staple food of cheerleaders and dance majors, but I served mine with world-class ingredients, especially the vinegar and oil. Noticing the difference, she made an ambiguously dirty joke about whether the oil was good for anything else and I promised we'd find out later.

She stood beside me, arms around my waist, while I grilled our steaks and fried our asparagus--another aphrodisiac, I pointed out. She admired my cooking even more than she admired my Chianti Classico; I felt precisely the opposite. Finally, for dessert, we had ice cream with cherries and ruby port.

"This has been the loveliest, most delicious, most romantic meal of my entire life," she smiled, "but I believe you might be attempting to get me drunk. Why would you want to do something like that to a sweet, innocent girl like me?"

"To be completely honest, I was hoping to break down your defenses."

"My defenses? Oh, dear, what could you possibly mean?"

"One cannot dance to Piazzolla unless freed of all inhibitions," I answered, getting up to change the music.

"What's this?" she asked, taking my hand.

I danced her through Tango Zero Hour, one of the sexiest, most sentimental compositions in human history. I'd fallen in love with it helping another dance major with a term project, but I had much naughtier choreography planned for Rosa.

She didn't know the music and tango nuevo is not for beginners but she knew exactly how to follow my lead, keeping up with me during the fiery blazes and luxuriating with me during the slow burns. In between tracks, I held her still, just looking into her eyes. No dance belt for me that night and she knew it. Sometimes she looked away coyly but she always looked back up at me through her eyelashes, chin lowered.

She was mine for the taking. I could've done it right then but I wanted to give her the greatest night I could imagine.

We danced through the sunset, leaving us alone together in the dark. For the entire last track, sweet and slow, I picked her up, held her ass in one hand and her back in the other, and she wrapped her legs around my waist, and still swaying to the music I began to kiss her.

First just a little peck on her upper lip, then one on her lower lip, pinching it tenderly between my lips. I kissed her lips like that for half the song, gradually introducing my tongue, then I kissed her cheeks and forehead and neck and shoulders, her lips again, this time with more tongue, then all over her face and neck and ears, and nudging her shirt and bra strap aside I licked and sucked her shoulders, then her mouth again, my tongue massaging hers, and then I did the whole thing over again, kissing her from the crown of her head to the exposed skin between her breasts.

By the end of the song, all our clothes were still on but she was fucking me with her body, pressing herself into me as hard as she could, both her arms wrapped tightly around my head as she kissed me.

When the music faded into silence, I stopped dancing and moved as if to put her down but her legs gripped me even tighter.

"We're lying to ourselves," I whispered. "We're lovers if any two people ever were. Let's lie to the world if we have to but let's be honest with each other."

"I know," she whispered back.

I pulled my head away and took her face in my hands so that we looked into each other's eyes, our foreheads touching.

"Can I finally tell you what I want to say?"

She nodded.

"I love you, Rosa. You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen. I fell in love with you the moment I first saw you and I've fallen deeper in love with you every moment we've been together since then. I've never felt this way about anyone. I never even knew I could feel this way. I think about you every fucking moment of the day and I dream about you every time I sleep. I need you, Rosa, I need you, and I need you, and I need you, and I need you, and I don't care what--"

She kissed me to stop me and then whispered:

"Take me, then, Chad. Take me. I'm all yours."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

She had no idea what was about to happen to her.

I carried her to my bedroom and laid her down on my bed.

"It's my first time," she whispered. "Tell me what to do."

"Just enjoy yourself," I answered, holding myself above her with her legs still around my waist. "I'll try to be gentle but I want you to tell me if anything feels wrong."

"But I want to be good for you," she insisted. "Tell me what you want."

"You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen and I love you. No matter what you do, this is going to be the best sex of my life. Just relax and let me know if you like how things feel."

"Really? That's all I have to do?"

"That's all."

"But I really want to please you, Chad. I just don't know what to do."

"Don't worry," I winked, "You do please me. And I'll make sure you do what I want."

"Good, do that. I will do exactly what you want."

She pulled me in for a kiss, moving her body like she wanted to get it over with right away.

But I wanted to make her wait. She'd gotten a little tense so I wanted her to relax again.

As I stripped her, I kissed and praised her entire body:

"Fuck, girl, I love your fucking shoulders," I whispered, licking and sucking them, slowly making my way to her breasts, not taking her bra off but just pushing it aside with my face as I whispered, "And I love your fucking tits."

"My itty-bitty titties," she giggled nervously.

"Your fucking perfect fucking tits," I affirmed, licking one of her nipples. "Fucking, fucking perfect."

"No," she insisted, so I stopped and raised up and looked at her. "They're not perfect. They're--"

"What are you talking about? They're--"

"They're too small. This is a push-up bra. They're--"

"Too small for what? The bra isn't fooling me. I can see them. They're fucking perfect." She started to say something but I put a finger over her lips.

Sometimes a man has to take charge, and this was one of those times.

"Listen to me, Rosa. I don't care what anyone else says. You're a hot little sex goddess and your hot little tits fit you perfectly. They're not too small or too anything else. They're fucking perfect and I fucking love them. Maybe you don't like them, and that's too bad for you, but they're perfect for me, and as long as you're with me you're not to say shit like that about them anymore. You understand?"

She nodded so I took my finger off her lips and she lunged to kiss me, her body more supple than ever, somehow even more surrendered and relaxed, and when she stopped to look into my eyes again I saw tears in hers.

"I love you, Chad," she whimpered. "You're the fucking greatest. I'm sorry I made you wait so long."

"Me too," I chuckled, "but I would've waited much longer if I'd had to."

I spent a long time on her breasts--mostly because I wanted to, but as I took them into my mouth and licked her nipples I also wanted her to feel how much I liked them, how much they pleased me.

"I can't believe you don't know how fucking hot your tits are, Rosa. Perfect shape and size, perfect underboob and perfect sideboob. Perfect little areolae and perfect little nipples like hot little candies. You're a fucking miracle, girl. A fucking goddess. Your tits make my cock so fucking hard. I cannot wait to watch them jiggle when I'm fucking you."

"Then do it," she moaned, arching her back. "Fuck me, Chad."

"Let me have a little time with your tiny little waist first. Oh, fucking fuck, Rosa, I do love your body! I've waited so long for this!"

As I kissed her waist and her stomach, I unbuttoned her shorts. Then I rose up and her legs released my body so that I could pull them off.

"You ready?" I teased.

She raised her hips and began to push them off herself.

"Oh fuck yeah!" I exulted as I pulled them off along with her shoes.

I dove right into her pussy, splitting her labia apart with a long, wide swipe of my tongue that concluded almost at her clit. She cried out and gripped my hair but I pulled back again and raised up, taking her legs in my hands and spreading them wide for the best view I could get.

She'd apparently waxed recently, which disappointed me a bit because I love a big full bush but I could understand why a cheerleader wouldn't want to have one.

And of course she had done it for me, guessing what would please me. That meant a lot.

And I could not complain about the view.

"Very fucking nice, girl. What a beautiful fucking pussy."

That was apparently too much for her because she reached down and covered herself with both hands.

"What the fuck are you doing?" I laughed. "Be a good girl and squeeze your tits for me. That's right. Move your hands. Good. Squeeze them for me, girl. Fuck yeah, I like that. And I love this pussy. You know how your inner lips kind of stick out? I love that."

"It's not weird?"

"I love it and I can't wait to eat the fuck out it."

"Your clothes aren't even off," she protested, blushing bright red all the way down to her chest as I continued holding her legs apart and looking into her. "Not even one thing."

I didn't need long to fix that, standing up and pulling everything off in about one second. As soon as I released her legs, she put her knees back together so once I was naked I got back on the bed and took her ankles and lifted them up to kiss the bottom of her feet, making my way slowly up to her ankles and the backs of her knees and so on right back almost to her pussy, pausing to praise her as I went.

"I love these curves," I told her, kissing the inside of one thigh and then the other. "Every time I see them I want to put myself right here between them." I kept licking and sucking, trying to notice which spots seemed sensitive for her so I could give them a little extra oral attention.

"This part right here," I concluded, demonstratively licking the place where the very end of her legs curved out to make room for her pussy, "is one of my favorite parts. I love looking up your skirt during stunts and seeing this. I've looked up a lot of skirts but I've never seen one this sexy before."

"Fuck me, Chad," she moaned again.

"Let me do this a bit more first, girl. I've waited so long to eat your beautiful pussy and it smells so fucking good."

I had her so worked up. I could feel the tension in her body seeking a release. No way I was putting my cock inside her until she'd cum so hard that she'd never forget her first time with me.

I'd eaten a lot of pussies by then and talked about it with a lot of different girls so I had a pretty good idea what I was doing down there, but I wanted to play around a bit and find out what would really make her buzz.

I loved her so much; I wanted to make her feel as good as I could make her feel.

She seemed already wet enough for a finger so I gently slid one inside and began feeling around to see if she had a G-spot. My personal guess is that some women do, some don't. Maybe some do sometimes and not other times, like if it's not just a matter of a physical thing but of how a woman feels at a particular time with a particular partner. I don't know. But I was pretty sure I'd found something inside her by the way her back arched as I did the "cum hither" gesture about two knuckles deep while pinching just a bit with my thumb on the outside.

"Oh fuck yes!" I growled then, squeezing one of her ass cheeks with my free hand, licking all around her inner and outer lips, just a little closer to her clit every time. "I love your pussy, girl! You taste so fucking good!"

The way she moaned when I grazed her clit showed me she was ready for the final assault, but I wanted to make it last as long as possible. What the kids now call edging. Just build her up and up and up, the slower the better, so that when the release finally hit it would blow her to a place she'd never been before.

I went at it as gently as I could, licking her clit so softly--sighing things like, "oh, girl, oh my God, I love your beautiful little love button, it's so beautiful"--and then just a little more firm when she raised it up into me for more pressure... and then just a little more....

Fingering her and licking her, I felt it building and building, and I made it last as long as I could, giving her just enough, making her want it more and more, and when finally it hit her, it hit her every bit as hard as I'd hoped.

"Oh, fuuuuuuck!" she wailed, her beautiful little body convulsing wildly.

"Fuck yeah!" I cheered. "Cum for me, girl, cum hard for me!"

I tried to go in for more but as soon as my tongue touched her she got two handfuls of my hair and pulled me away and this time she wasn't fucking around.

"I can't," she begged. "Please, Chad, please just fuck me!"

"Let me get a condom."

"For fuck's sake!" she cried, clawing the sheets as I opened the drawer and got out a package and some lube. "Hurry up!"

Yeah. I had her. The greatest night of my life, and hopefully of hers too. All that time had been worth it.

"Look in my eyes as I put myself inside you," I told her when I was ready. "Here we go, girl."

I tried to do it slowly to make sure it wouldn't hurt her, but she moved to take me in faster and it felt so good I almost involuntarily thrust myself all the way in.

"Oh, yes!" she sighed, closing her eyes and throwing her head back.

"Fuck yes!" I agreed, just beginning to pump slowly, thrusting downward so that my body would rub her clit. "You're so fucking tight, girl."

I wasn't lying. Her pussy gripped me so hard, even with a condom on, it felt so good, and the way we moved together was unbelievable. I didn't know if she'd want to taste herself in my mouth but she pulled me down into a kiss and used her legs to pull me further inside her, moaning and bucking for it.

I was too wound up to last long anyway but that was really too much and she seemed good with everything so I just started pounding as hard and fast as I could. Hearing the way she moaned felt so good that after only about six thrusts I came so much and so hard that I worried about the condom leaking but I wanted to stay as far inside her as I could get. She held me there too, wanting the same thing, her body still shuddering from her orgasm.

Eventually of course I went limp and fell out but even after that we stayed there, catching our breaths.

"My god, Rosa," I whispered. "You're fucking amazing. That was the best sex I've ever had. I love you so fucking much."

"Me too, Chad. Oh, my god, I can't even."

Gradually her body settled into exhaustion and of course I was ready to go immediately to sleep, so I rolled her over--away from the wet spot because I wanted her to go on imagining I was a considerate gentleman--and spooned her. Her head on my arm like a pillow, her buttcheeks against my cock like a promise.

I fell asleep knowing that I'd fucked the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen, that we were in love with each other and that as soon as either of us woke up we'd fuck again.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Chapter 5: A Plot Interlude with a Lot More Fucking

Sometime in the middle of the night, I felt her stirring.

"You awake?" I asked.

"Yeah. You?"

"I love feeling your ass up against me."

She pressed it more firmly into me. "Me too."

"Want to do it again? I want to take you from behind this time."

"Anything you want, Chad."

"Good. I like your attitude."

She laughed as I rolled over to get another condom from my drawer.

"You're pretty big," she smiled, reaching out to touch my cock tentatively with one finger.

"You make me big, girl. You won't be so impressed when it's flaccid."

"I can't believe that."

"Just wait."

"I won't care," she promised. "This is what matters."

"Thank God," I answered, beginning to open the condom.

"Is it safe?" she asked, helping me roll it on.

"I hope so. This is a good brand."

"I mean, you've been with so many girls. When was the last time you actually checked? Like, medically?"

"As soon as you told me you were spending the night."

"Really?"

"I wanted to make sure you were safe. And I thought maybe you'd ask."

"I should have asked. But I was afraid you would think I don't trust you."

"Don't be afraid of that anymore. You can ask me anything."

"Well, then, can you keep a secret?"

"We have a few to keep now."

"We don't actually need this. I've been on the pill for several weeks. Because I kind of thought maybe you'd want...."

She rolled the condom back off my dick.

"Oh, fuck, Rosa, you're amazing."

"I know," she giggled. "So... from behind? How does that work?"

I stood beside the bed, lubed my dick up, and guided her body to me, lifting her hips up and sliding pillows under her knees.

"Reach back and put me inside you," I told her. "I want you to do it. Oh, fuck yes, girl, just like that. Oh, my God, Rosa, your pussy feels so good! I love it!"

"And I love your cock, Chad! Fuck me hard now!"

Despite her command, I started gently just in case she had any discomfort with that position but when I could tell she didn't I held her waist and just took her to pound town like a fucking caveman. I didn't intend to make her cum--this one was for me--but she loved it.

"Oh, fuck yes!" she cried. "Fuck me, Chad! Fuck me hard!"

I slapped her ass a bit to see if she liked that and she cried even louder, "Oh, yes! Fuck me!"

"Can I pull your hair?"

"Pull it, Chad! I don't fucking care!"

She apparently liked it rough and I didn't mind either. I pulled just a little and she let out a moan of something beyond mere pleasure so I pulled harder and she moaned even harder so I pulled hard and she whimpered with so much ecstasy and with her back arched like that I was already about to cum. I held her waist tightly in one hand and crammed myself into her.

I wanted to call her a slut so bad but I didn't know if she would like something like that and I didn't have time to figure out how to ask.

"Fuck! Oh, Rosa! Oh, fuck!" I cried as my balls unloaded themselves inside her. She was loving it and I was beginning to think maybe I really would marry this chick. You cannot argue against sexual chemistry.

When it was over, I released her and collapsed onto the bed and pulled her onto me, her head on my chest.

"I almost lost control that time," I told her when I'd got my breath back.

"What do you mean 'almost?'" she gasped.

"I mean that was so fucking hot. Your ass is so fucking hot and your body is so fucking amazing. I almost called you a slut."

"You did not!" she laughed, slapping my chest.

"I really almost did. I couldn't help it. I definitely would have if it would've been okay with you."

"I don't care, Chad," she repeated. "If it turns you on, call me a slut."

"It's just something I want to say when a girl is so fucking hot that nothing else can express it."

"So I won't be the first girl you call a slut?"

"I'm sorry, Rosa, I don't think you get be the first anything except the first girl that I love this much."

"That's good enough, I guess," she giggled. "For a slut like me."

"We're made for each other. A slut and a man-whore."

"But I'm not actually a slut," she pointed out. "I was a virgin until you got ahold of me."

"I'm not done with you yet."

"What does that mean?"

"I'll make you my own personal slut. The fulfillment of my slutty cheerleader fantasy."

"Good. That sounds fun. Let's do that. I'll be your personal slutty cheerleader."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In fact, the next morning she woke me up licking my dick.

"Oh my god, Rosa," I sighed, overjoyed to know that in addition to all her other virtues she was a cocksucker. "You can have anything you want from me forever."

"I thought so," she smiled. "Should I lick your balls or just suck it?"

"Keep kissing it. I just want to watch you kissing it. I swear, Rosa, you have the prettiest face I've ever seen but somehow it looks even prettier when you're kissing my cock."

"Somehow it does," she laughed. "Where do you want to cum?"

"In your mouth this time. I want it on your face in the shower afterwards."

"I admire your optimism," she teased. "What do I get in between?"

"You get tied up," I answered.

She looked thoughtful for a moment, and then said, "Deal," and gave my dick a long, sweet lick.

She took her time, the way I had with her. I could tell she loved making me feel good. That was our magic, ultimately, not just how attracted we were to each other but how much we loved pleasing each other. Maybe even more than we loved being pleased. We could be as generous as possible without reservation.

I praised her the whole time.

"God, you're beautiful," I told her. "What an amazing cocksucker you are."

"You haven't let me suck it yet."

"You can suck it whenever you want."

Truer words never spoken!

"I don't know what to do. Guide my head and fuck my face a little but don't push too hard," she told me as she caressed my ballsack. "And look in my eyes when you cum. I want to see you."

"My god, Rosa, you are so fucking good at this."

I put a pillow behind my head so that our eye-contact never broke and pretty soon I filled her mouth with cum. She looked so happy and I felt so good.

She swallowed it for me and asked, "How was I?"

"The best ever."

"No."

"Really."

"I didn't even know what I was doing."

"Physically, it was perfect, Rosa. But emotionally, I love you so much and I've never felt so good."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I made her oatmeal and fruit for breakfast. Then, as promised, I tied her up, kissed the most sensitive parts of her body while she squealed and ate her pussy and called her a slut until she came and then, while she was still cumming, I came inside her again.

Holding her afterwards, I was already sure I would marry her. I was living a dream--the hottest girl I'd ever seen and I were in love and fucking the fuck out of each other. What else was life for?

Sometime around noon we showered, washing each other's bodies with our hands. She was going to let me cum on her face but I wanted her pussy too much so we went back to the bed and she rode me, happily letting me hold her hands and watch her beautiful little tits bounce.

Then she literally made me a sandwich. I couldn't believe it. I was glad that she felt comfortable enough in my apartment to rummage around my fridge, and I felt beyond glad that she'd taken it upon herself to literally make me a sandwich. What kind of goddess had I found?

Wife material. No doubt about it.

I had to start thinking about how I would make myself husband material for her.

We fucked two or three more times that day, but finally she really had to go back to her dorm so we put our clothes on and kissed goodbye but just before she left I pulled her shorts and panties back off for just one more quickie, picking her up and holding her against the wall.

"Rosa, I love you so much," I told her, kissing her goodbye (for real this time).

"I love you, too, Chad," she answered, "but we can't tell anyone."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Chapter 6: The Drama

Nor could we stay apart.

She basically moved in with me a few days later, just hoping her roommates wouldn't blab the wrong thing to the wrong people. I bought another desk so we could study together in the bedroom I used as a library, and we went shopping for all her toiletries and a lot of new clothes because she wanted to keep her dorm room fully stocked in case anyone dropped by.

I don't usually love shopping but shopping with her was a different matter. She tried on a lot of hot outfits for me. I bought her a lot more lingerie than she needed.

My apartment smelled so much better with her living there. Even the cleaning ladies noticed. It didn't take Rosa long to appreciate them either.

"It's like magic! Just drop clothes in a hamper and two days later they're washed and ironed and everything!"

Funny how different it is to grow up taking that stuff for granted.

But the poor girl was tortured because she was not made for deception. She was paranoid that her parents or someone from the cheer squad would discover us. We did all the silly things so that people wouldn't catch us: I always rode my motorcycle to school, and she enjoyed riding behind me, but every morning before practice she made me drop her off in an alley about six blocks away and she would walk from there. We no longer had a dance class together and we never hung out together outside of practice....

But what we did every morning and several times every night made everything worth it.

Besides, now I was allowed to buy her gifts whenever I wanted, and since she loved jewelry I began by giving her a diamond necklace and earring set that I'd bought for her in the Swarovski store in Vienna during the winter break. She hugged me, weeping for joy. She said it was the nicest thing anyone had ever given her. I wanted to make her that happy all the time so I bought her several more things but she told me she had enough jewelry "for now."

The national cheerleading championship took place about two weeks later, which meant we had lots of practices. The coaches had obviously recognized her talent as a flyer and given her a really important role in our routines, and since I was her primary base we didn't even need to invent excuses to spend extra time together.

We all flew out to Florida for the championship and had a great time. It lasted several days, so we had time to go to the beach and go boating and have all kinds of fun.

The day at the beach was when Rosa and I went too far. I was there laying on a towel under an umbrella just trying not to get too sunburnt and she walked by with her beautiful brown body in a tiny pink bikini and said I looked hot and just for fun dumped her entire bottle of ice water on me. I howled and jumped up and she ran off down the beach, screaming happily and sexier than ever.

This was one of our things. She loved being chased. She would walk around our apartment wearing nothing but one of my shirts and bending over or stretching to get my attention and when I noticed I'd jump up and she'd run off squealing and I'd catch her and carry her to the bed, spank her and kiss the most ticklish parts of her body to "punish" her while she laughed and cried and hit me and begged for mercy and then I'd eat her pussy and fuck her. Just good clean wholesome fun.

So that day on the beach she ran into the ocean and I ran after her and just as I caught her we fell into the waves. I stood up with her in my arms, nibbling on her waist while she screamed and tried to twist around so she could start slapping me. I thought maybe we were going too far in front of the other cheerleaders so I tried to play it down by throwing her as far into the ocean as I could, enjoying the sight of her beautiful body flailing in the air before she splashed into the water. Then I turned around to walk back to my towel and umbrella as if I had settled the matter.

But she wasn't finished. She got up and tried to tackle me from behind, which didn't exactly work out because she wasn't even nearly big enough to tackle me. Not only that, she lost her footing in the water. All she managed to do was get two handfuls of my trunks and take them down with her.

So there I was naked in front of all the cheerleaders--and not just our squad, several squads were there. I pulled my trunks up as fast as I could, and she ran off laughing that now everyone knew what she knew.

Which, first of all, wasn't that bad. I mean I posed nude for drawing classes. I never felt bad about myself in a gym shower. It was in the acceptable range. Of course if I'd had a boner, it would've been much better, but no one who saw me that day lost any respect for me.

However, the questions everyone had were what had she known and how had she known it?

So we got in trouble. I didn't realize how bad it was until that night, when one of the assistant coaches knocked on my hotel room door and somberly informed me that the coaches wanted to speak to me.

Apparently we'd blown our cover in more ways than one. Rosa had told Jules, who must have told someone else on the squad, and soon everyone on the squad knew, which probably would have been okay had Ryan not been on the squad. Ryan had told the coaches everything he knew and some stuff he'd made up.

When I went into the room where the coaches were, Rosa was already there. She'd obviously been crying.

"Oh my God," I said, reaching for her.

She got up to embrace me, telling me she was sorry and weeping into my chest.

"Sorry for what?" I asked her.

"I'm really disappointed in you, Chad," Coach Garson said. "You've violated our trust."

I didn't care very much about her trust as long as Rosa was crying, so I didn't say anything.

"How do you think we should handle this?" Coach Anderson asked me.

"I don't care," I told him. "But do it to me, not her. This means too much to her."

"She should have thought of that before," Coach Garson said. "So should you."

"Well, this is bullshit," I told them both. "We're didn't do anything illegal or violate any kind of contract."

"Chad, please don't," Rosa begged, but the coaches and I glared at each other over her head.

"I don't like your attitude," Coach Garson told me.

"I don't like to find her crying. What's the situation here?"

Coach Garson growled. "Don't play dumb, Chad. Even you knew the rules."

"Your rules suck."

"Because you don't give a damn about anyone but yourself," Coach Garson said. "If you cared about the squad, you'd understand why they're necessary."

"I care about her. Why is she so upset? Are you kicking her off the squad or what?"

The silence that followed already told me the answer was no.

Eventually Coach Anderson broke.

"We don't have time to install whole new routines, so we need you both. But we have to address this with the team to re-establish trust. And then you should stop seeing each other, but--"

"No," Rosa cried, looking up at me. "I can't do it. I already told them I'm choosing you, Chad. I'm tired of the lies."

"So after the tournament," Coach Garson said, "you're both off the squad."

This meant little to me since I was about to graduate anyway, but Rosa had three years left.

"Can't you find a way to punish me instead of her?"

"We are punishing you," Coach Garson reminded me. "As soon as the tournament is over."

"Just enjoy the tournament," Coach Anderson advised. "We need you two so you have to pull it together."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So the next step was a big squad-wide meeting where Rosa and I "confessed" we'd been seeing each other since winter break.

"Only three weeks?" Ryan gasped. "You've been lying to us for months!"

Jules vouched for us.

"How did it happen?" one of the girls asked. I don't think she meant to participate in the interrogation. She and several other girls were there for the romance.

"We just eventually had to admit our feelings for each other," I answered.

"But when did those feelings begin?"

"For me, the first time I saw her."

"And when did you decide you were willing to violate our trust?" Ryan snarled.

"The first time I saw her," I repeated. "But it took me a long time to persuade her."

"So it's entirely your fault," Ryan said, rather triumphantly.

"No," Rosa said. "I wanted it too. I held out because I didn't trust him yet, not for any other reason. I thought we could just keep it a secret. I didn't know how hard that would be."

"We're sorry that we violated your trust," I told everyone, trying to spare Rosa the humiliation of talking in front of everyone....

But she wasn't having that. Never underestimate the toughness of a skinny little girl like her.

"I'm not sorry," she snapped. "I'm sorry that we stayed apart for so long. We love each other! And everyone knows we're both completely committed to the squad."

"No, we know you're not committed to it!" Ryan bawled. "You betrayed all of us! Especially Chad! You're just a freshman but he should've known better!"

"She's not 'just' a freshman," I growled.

"Just shut up, Chad!" Ryan wept.

To be clear, I mean he was literally crying. Two of the girls hugged him and Rosa touched my leg to keep me from getting up.

"This is why we have these rules," Coach Anderson said. "What if someone is jealous of you guys? Or what if you two have a fight? Or even a bad breakup? What if people take sides? These things can destroy a squad."

"Well, we're not breaking up," Rosa insisted.

Jules, thank God, came to our rescue.

"They obviously love each other," she told everyone. "And it's not like they're the only people here who've ever hooked up secretly. We could all name some names if we wanted. Even if there's some drama, we can hold it together at least until the end of the tournament."

"We have to," some of the other girls agreed. "And they are a darling couple. We all kind of knew all along."

Ryan was the difficult one to bring around. Rosa obviously wasn't willing to kiss his ass so that unpleasant task fell to me.

"Ryan," I told him, "I'm really sorry that I hurt you. If Rosa and I could've been together without hurting you, we would've done it."

I don't think he wanted to extend forgiveness but we'd turned the squad against him so he had to fake it. We all had a big group hug and went back to our rooms.

Rosa called me that night.

"Can you get us a room?" she asked. Because we were both sharing rooms with other cheerleaders.

"I can try."

"Try."

So I went down to reception. A few minutes later I texted her a number.

I'd assumed we were still sneaking around but she showed up with her luggage.

"It was Jules's idea," she told me. "We can prove we're not sneaking around for them anymore. And we can have a good time doing it."

"A great time," I agreed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The tournament went off without a hitch. We nailed all our stunts and tumbling and our team placed higher than we ever had, just missing the championship. Everyone was happy again.

Rosa and I gave everyone our tearful goodbyes when we landed back in LA, but it was obvious to me that they would have to let Rosa back on the team next year. Ryan and I would graduate, so those issues would solve themselves, and the squad needed her. She was their best flyer, light as a feather with great balance and an absolute magician in the air.

After they kicked us off, she missed being on the squad. The men's basketball team went to the final four and of course they all got to go. I offered to buy us tickets, we could have sat right in front of our cheerleaders, but she didn't want to. It would hurt worse to be there and not cheer than not to be there.

So much for the drama.

Until around Easter, when she told me she was late.

"Late? But have you taken a test?" I asked her.

"I'm sorry," she said, showing me the stick. I'd been sitting in the living room when she came out of the bathroom. She looked so frightened. I stood, trying to reassure her.

"Sorry? We did this together. I had even more fun than you did."

"But what are we going to do?"

"What do you want to do?" I asked her.

"What do you want to do?" she asked me back.

I looked carefully into her eyes but for once I couldn't tell exactly what she was feeling or thinking.

"I'll support you no matter what," I told her.

"But I really want to know what you want," she insisted. "Please tell me, Chad."

"Rosa, if you're serious, I want to marry you. Let's be a family."

She fell into my arms, crying happily, still obviously scared. We held each other in the same place we'd danced only a few weeks earlier.

"It's not too soon?" she worried. "Everyone's going to say it's too fast!"

"Who cares? I've been thinking about it anyway," I told her. "I assumed it would be three years from now, but--"

"You were going to wait for me?"

"I wasn't going to leave you. I don't want to leave you--ever."

"But what about finishing my degree? What about my parents? What about everything?"

"Take a gap year," I laughed. "Or two or three. Or just keep going to classes while I raise our little gymnast. Or anything! We'll figure it out."

"But my parents are going to kill me."

"We'll tell them together. They'll get over it. You're not the first girl this ever happened to."

"But when will we get married? Where will we live?"

"How about right after finals so that all our friends can come? You won't even be showing yet."

"But how are we going to plan all that? We still have classes!"

"I can do most of it. I'm basically finished. My grades don't matter anyway."

"Can we do it that fast?"

"We'll hire a wedding planner."

"My parents won't let me marry you unless you're Catholic."

"I can pretend to be Catholic."

"You can't just pretend! You have to convert."

"Then I'll convert."

"You'll really convert?"

"I don't care who gets my soul as long as I get your body."

"Where will we live?"

"Where do you want to live?"

"Are we going to live here? With a baby?"

"Do you want to? Or do you want to buy a house?"

"We can't just buy a house!"

"Actually," I laughed, "we can."

"You have all the answers," she sighed happily. "Thank God you understand. I was really afraid you'd be angry."

"With you, girl? Never."

"I mean I must have messed up the pills or something."

I will admit to wondering whether my good little Catholic girl had felt guilty using contraception but I didn't actually care if she'd messed up or even intentionally deceived me. I didn't believe she was consciously capable of that but even if she had played some kind of game, fine: I'd won. I wanted my ring on her finger. I wanted her all to myself forever.

"They don't always work. Maybe I have super-strong sperm or something."

"I bet you do," she giggled. "It's probably your fault."

"Definitely my fault. You usually tried to run away but I always caught you."

"I didn't always run as fast as I could."

"Thank God we got kicked off the squad," I told her. "Something might have gone wrong if you'd been doing that kind of exercise."

"You really want this baby!" she laughed.

"Yes and I want to spend the rest of my life fucking you. I've kind of got you trapped now."

"But what about--I mean, you're not going to want to fuck other girls?"

"You know you're the only one that can satisfy me."

"You're going to have to fuck me for the rest of your life."

"Poor me. Having to fuck the hottest girl I've ever seen about ten times a week for the rest of my life."

"Only ten?"

"This pregnancy is eventually going to slow you down, girl. Meanwhile, how do you want me to propose?"

"I thought you just did."

"No, you should make me buy a ring and ask politely like a proper gentleman."

"I would like that," she admitted. "Do it however you want. I want you to plan it."

We held each other happily. Eventually I turned her around, standing behind her so that I could put my hand on her stomach, amazed to imagine the miracle taking place inside her body, trying to contemplate the journey that we were about to begin together.

This felt like what life was really all about. Two people loving each other, figuring things out, creating life together. Nothing else mattered.