I have a buddy, Chris, who’s been my best bud since we were kids. We grew up on farms, one canyon apart. Walking over the ridge between us to play famous explorer or some other kid’s game was pretty common when we were ten and nine and older. There was a big rock formation on my dad’s farm that likely had been put there by someone in the long past as a rock shelter that was perfect for two boys to use as a base when discovering the world. We always used to assume that it was probably Kit Carson or some other famous explorer who had built it.

Oh, by the way, my name’s Steven ... Stevey to Chris.

Chris is a year younger than me, but he was the one who grew up to be an athlete. By the time I was a senior in high school and he was a junior, he was six-feet-five and the star on our better than average basketball team. I preferred baseball but wasn’t particularly good at that either. It was a good thing we had a small school or I’d have never made the team.

We were pretty good in school, typically getting A’s and B’s, but if Chris had one failing it would be that he was painfully shy with girls. I wasn’t exactly Don Juan, but at least I could speak to a girl without getting all flustered and making an idiot of myself (at least sometimes). I actually had a girlfriend in my senior year, Tina. She was my table-mate in study hall. We went to several dances together and even made out in the car a few times. Not Chris, though. We talked about it a few times and he simply couldn’t bring himself to ask one of the girls out or even start a conversation. Whenever a girl tried to start a conversation with him, he just got flustered and couldn’t put three words together in a logical string.

After I graduated from high school, Tina and I went to different colleges so our romance was pretty much over. Chris had one more year in high school, then he wanted to come to Oregon State with me. I enjoy mathematics and was very good at it. It was the one subject that I excelled above my classmates. That and physics were my straight A classes, even at the local Community College where I took classes more advanced than high school offered. Consequently, math was my college major.

I was looking forward to my friend coming as well. We’d been friends since we were old enough to know what a friend was and being hundreds of miles apart was difficult.

I met a girl at Oregon State. Our dormitory had a ‘big sister’ program where new freshmen boys were paired with one of the upper-class girl volunteers, typically a senior at another dorm, who took on the role of a big sister. My big sister’s name was Lois. She was nice and always helpful to me: showing me around the campus, encouraging me when I got homesick, and even introducing me to a couple girls from her dorm.

She arranged blind dates for me with two girls, Jocelyn and Sarah. Both dates turned out to be duds. It was probably my fault, but we just didn’t click. They were city girls and expected something different than a somewhat bashful country boy would provide. I know they were both bored the whole time.

Then, there was Elena. I recognized her as soon as Lois introduced us. She was in a couple of my math classes, Applied Differential Equations and The Theory of Numbers. She was the girl who I had been drooling over and never had the courage to speak to; straight, shiny hair, black as nighttime in a cave, to the middle of her back, a body a guy could only dream about and a smile that lit up the entire room. Plus, she was gorgeous. How a girl like her hadn’t had a steady boyfriend within the first week of school was beyond me.

Anyway, I was taking her on a date! That is if I could get past the blubbering idiot stage when Lois introduced us. I had reverted nearly to Chris’ level of shyness. Fortunately for me, she wasn’t the kind of girl you stayed shy around for very long. She was fun, fascinating, and most of all, even made me feel interesting.

Our first date was to a movie. I don’t remember the movie’s name or even what it was about, I was so enamored with the girl sitting next to me, intertwining her fingers with mine. We learned that besides mathematics, we had a lot in common: both of us were from small towns, although hers was in Western Oregon and mine in Eastern Oregon, we were majoring in mathematics, and we were Freshmen. Afterward, when I took her home, we sat in the car talking for probably an hour, getting to know each other. Then she leaned over and kissed me. It was completely different from the little bit Tina and I had kissed. It felt more like Elena was making love to my mouth when she kissed me. That night I felt like I had gone to heaven.

The next week in our two classes together, she moved to a desk beside mine, and we started studying together outside the classroom. She took the fun of mathematics to a whole new level. I guess I was a bit of a male chauvinist, thinking that mathematics was a guy’s specialty, but she proved me totally mistaken. She was always the first one raising her hand to answer any question and was clearly the star in both the classes we shared. I was only too happy to discover how wrong I had been.

On our second date, Elena encouraged my hand up under her blouse, and for the first time ever I felt a girl’s braless boobs. At the same time, she wrapped her hand around my boner over my slacks and squeezed. That night, after I went back to my own dorm, my hand was very busy under the covers relieving the pressure from my rock-hard cock. I was sure the girl was going to drive me totally insane.

We saw each other several times the following week, studying together. I had a hard time paying attention to what we were supposed to be doing when all I could think about was her bare tits in my hand. I didn’t even progress to the what-ifs beyond that.

That Friday night, Elena’s dorm held a Christmas dance in their ‘great hall’, and she invited me to be her date. I made it a point to buy a red shirt and green tie to wear with my only pair of black slacks. When I arrived at the dance, Elena was there to greet me, wearing a red dress that hugged her figure and looked fantastic on her. It had white fur around the hem, which was well above her knees, and the neckline, which showed off her beautiful cleavage; black fishnet stockings and green high heeled shoes. She was wearing perfume that smelled like feminine heaven. It was hard for me to grasp that this smart, gorgeous, sexy minx was actually my girlfriend.

Lois was there too, with her boyfriend, David. I had thanked her numerous times for introducing me to Elena and did so again that night. We got a glass of fruit punch (most of us were underage, so there was no alcohol) and sat at a table with Lois and Dave, listening to the music.

Elena was tracing little figures on the back of my hand with her fingers while we talked about school, home, and other things. When a song came on that Elena particularly liked, she leaned over and asked me to dance with her. It was a fast song so there wasn’t much touching, although she did bump her pelvis into mine just enough to keep my libido on edge. We danced several songs in a row and my brain was breaking free of the ability to think so that by the time we sat back down, all I could contemplate about was my girl. When she sat, it pulled her dress up her thigh, further eroding any possibility of rational thought.

A few minutes later, the DJ played a nice slow song and Elena pulled me out on the floor again. This time she wrapped her arms around my neck, snuggled her cheek against mine and pulled our bodies tight together. “Mmm, Stevey, I like this,” she whispered in my ear. No one had ever called me that name before, except Chris.

I liked it too, and that is perhaps the understatement of the month. She smelled and felt so good nuzzled up tight with me. We shuffled around the floor, cheek to cheek, and I know she had to have been feeling my boner through her thin dress. I knew that that night was going to be a massive masturbation session before I’d be able to get any rest.

This was how the rest of the evening went; fast dances, an occasional slow dance and visiting with Lois and Dave. I made several trips to the punch bowl to keep mine and Elena’s cups filled until the DJ announced that it was going to be the last song. That song was the first time during the night that we’d kissed. I felt Elena move her cheek away from mine, then her soft lips on mine and her tongue between my lips. Her hands were in my hair, scratching at the back of my head and pulling me tighter to her.

When the song ended, and it was time for me to go home, my cock was harder than I remember it ever having been. We walked back over to where we had been sitting, and people were already putting up the chairs. Lois and Dave were carrying chairs, and Elena and I grabbed some, too.

After the chairs were put back in the carriers and tables folded up, it was time for me to go home, back to my own dorm to masturbate with thoughts of a particular girl flooding my head. When I started to kiss Elena good night, she whispered in my ear, “Come upstairs with me?”

My heart started to beat a couple hundred beats a minute. I wasn’t sure she had said what I thought, until she went on, “My roommate is going with her boyfriend ... and I’m on birth control ... spend the night with me?”

Oh my God! Those were words I hadn’t even dreamed of ever hearing. She took my hand and led me upstairs, right in front of her dorm-mates. I might have been embarrassed about that but was still too shell-shocked ... and horny.

Once we were inside her room, and my whole body was shaking with nervousness, fear, excitement, lust, and other emotions I didn’t even know existed, she turned around and started to unbutton her dress.

I’d describe the rest of that night, but this story isn’t about me, or even about me and Elena. It’s about my friend, Chris. Suffice it to say that it was the most pleasurable night of my life, by a factor of about a thousand, and that if I hadn’t been in love with my girlfriend before that night, I certainly was afterward.

The following week was finals week at the end of the fall term, then our three-week Christmas vacation started. I knew that by the time that school started again, I’d be out of my mind with missing her and wanting to repeat that fairy-tale, heavenly night.

We did see each other quite a bit during finals week, but only as study partners. I think she made an effort that week to be as unsexy as she could in order to keep our minds on studying, rather than what we both wanted. It didn’t work. Every time I saw her it was a supreme effort to think about anything other than holding her and making love with her.

Thankfully, we were both prepared for the tests even without the last-minute studying. I ended the semester with two A’s and four B’s. Elena’s grades were all A’s, most likely the top of every class.

At home during Christmas break, I told Chris all about Elena; well, maybe not ‘all’. He didn’t need to know about that night after the party. He was more than a little impressed when I showed him the pictures I had of her. I was still wishing that he’d get over his shyness at least a little bit and find a girl he liked. It certainly hadn’t happened yet.

My parents, too, were more than interested in Elena. I definitely didn’t tell them about that night. They were anxious to meet her and I was just as anxious to bring her home. I really wanted our relationship to be permanent as I admitted to myself that I was madly in love with her.

Our high school sponsors a Christmas basketball tournament every year, the weekend before Christmas Eve. Up to that point our team had been undefeated and Chris was the biggest part of the reason why. He was averaging twenty-six points and eleven rebounds a game. It was a four-team tournament and, as expected, we won both of our games to keep the championship trophy at home. Also as expected, Chris won the most valuable player award. I wished that I was half as good as him in sports.

It was a long three weeks at home away from Elena. We talked on the phone nearly every night, but it wasn’t the same as being with her at all. At least her sweet, sexy voice on the phone let me know that she hadn’t forgotten me.

I went back to Corvallis the day after New Year’s Day. Winter term started the day after that. The evening after I got back to Corvallis, Elena was already there since she lives a couple hundred miles closer. The first thing I did, even before unpacking the car, was to pick her up. Our meeting was everything I’d hoped for. We kissed for what seemed like only a moment, but when I looked at my watch, realized we’d been making out for over an hour. There wasn’t anything I wanted to do more than go to bed and make love with her again, but unfortunately, we already had school the next day so agreed that we were off limits to each other until the weekend.

On weekends, we had three options: her dorm room, mine, or the car. We tried to make love at least one night every weekend, but given our housing limitations, it wasn’t always possible. Our first time after Christmas break was, if anything, even better than our first time. Maybe because neither of us were quite as scared or nervous, but it was incredible, fantastic, unbelievable, and any other adjectives I could think of.

By the end of March, when spring vacation started, I had fallen so madly in love with her that I didn’t even want to go home. Our families -- and Chris -- would have been devastated if we didn’t, though.

By then, Chris had gotten his acceptance letter from Oregon State. He had actually gotten a basketball scholarship offer from a small college, but his goal was to attend OSU and play for them. His team had come in third in the State, losing one game by a single point. He was determined to get a walk-on scholarship, or even play without one. He just wanted on the team and was convinced he could make it.

Chris and I had talked about his visiting the University at the end of April, and I told him he could stay in my dorm room, even if one of us had to sleep on the floor. Fortunately, Zachary, my roommate, said he could go home for the weekend so Chris could have his bed instead of the floor. I was anxious to show Chris around the college and especially for him to meet Elena. I hoped that maybe she could help him get over his shyness, at least a little bit.

I told Elena all about Chris, about our long-term friendship, how close we were, and how shy he was. When I suggested to her that, hopefully, she could help him with his shyness, she was agreeable that she’d try. Actually, she was eager to meet my friend.