Jon Garden had disappeared. No one knew his whereabouts. His family had gone into hiding, having fallen out of favor with the political elite of a corrupt African government. They were being hunted by the authorities.

The belated news came from half a world away, through an old email message in an account I had all but abandoned. The message was sent nearly three years before by his cousin to everyone on Jon's contact list, and had sat unopened in my inbox all that time. Had I not decided to check through dozens of pages of messages before I deleted the account, I would never have received the news. He disappeared nearly four years ago, with no word since, but the tears I shed for his unknown plight were still drying on my cheeks, as I remembered our time together. We were close friends for many months while we were both students at the university, years ago...

Shortly after the fall quarter had started in my second year at Ohio State, I received a message from the chair of the history department, asking me to come to his office. This wasn't too unusual, as I was one of the departmental majors who tutored underclassmen in world history, and helped the instructors as a teaching assistant. The meeting wasn't what I expected, however, and I soon came to understand that it was in the nature of being a request for a favor.

One of the foreign students here at the university was the son of a high-ranking military officer in the Mugabe government of Zimbabwe. His father had sent him to the United States for an education in history and political science through a special arrangement with the State Department, but while he was supposed to be here in Columbus studying politics and history, young Mr. Malembwe had apparently been utilizing his time in America to study interpretive dance in the fine arts department instead.

I had seen him around before, in Sullivant Hall, where the Department of Dance was located, as I had a class there in American Indian studies, and worked in a building nearby on the East Oval as a life-model for a couple of drawing classes in the Art Department. He impressed most everyone as a very affable fellow who spoke English fluently, but with a pronounced east African accent. He was dedicated to dance studies, and not even remotely interested in the disciplines his father had sent him overseas to learn.

Consequently, he had fallen behind in his history courses, and I was asked to tutor him to catch him up. Unfortunately, his stipend didn't provide funds for a private tutor, so I suggested an alternative, in lieu of my usual fee, wherein we could work out a trade. Jon could teach me African dance, in exchange for me tutoring him in history. The arrangement seemed to work out logistically too, as we were in the same building together at the same time, three days a week. I could audit the dance class, while he had daily history classes in Dulles Hall, where we could work in one of the offices in the history department.

The first time Jon and I met, we recognized each other, because we'd passed one another going to and from classes in the same buildings every day, but our first introduction was more than a little awkward. He came to meet me in the art department to pick up my tutorial syllabus, and someone directed him to the classroom where I was sitting in a life-drawing class, in the center of a group of art students, posing stark naked. I saw him looking through the window in the door, staring at me, and I motioned for him to come in.

I had to excuse myself, while I padded barefoot across the cold studio floor, slipping my robe on along the way to the door. He was a bit nonplussed, and apologized for interrupting the class, but I figured it would be less embarrassing to get him on his way, rather than just make him stand there and watch me pose naked for another twenty minutes. He said he was surprised to discover I was his tutor, as he'd seen me around campus and figured I was just another one of the pretty girls on campus that the football team banged, not the academic type. I smiled, and joked that I banged the chess-team instead, then told him where and when to meet me at the history department offices, and sent him on his way with his study materials.

As strange as our initial meeting had been, our first tutorial session together went better than I expected, but we mostly just spent the first hour getting acquainted, as I was interested in learning about his life growing up in Africa. After he got used to the idea that I was a nude model, as well as a history prodigy, I found out Mr. Tinaye Malembwe preferred going by an Americanized version of his name while he was here studying in the states. It was a close translation of his African name, and here on campus, people knew him as Jon Garden. What seemed to interest him most about me from our conversation, was my Native American background, which led us to a discussion about his love of African dance, for many of the elements of the native dances from both our cultures were similar, in as far as their atavistic symbolism.

Because his father wanted Jon to follow him into political aspirations in his country, he had been under pressure from his family to learn as much about history and politics as an American education could bring him, but I was much more enthusiastic to learn what Jon could teach me about dance, than he was in learning world history and politics. I tried to make the subject matter as interesting for him as possible, even if his interest seemed to be centered around our budding friendship, more than his studies. He was gratified to have someone teaching him who understood and supported his preference for the arts, even at the expense of his father's plans.

He certainly reciprocated, as far as teaching dance was concerned. It was his greatest passion, and he was a gifted interpretive artist and choreographer. It seemed a waste to try to force him down another path, but parents were parents. Dance soon became my passion too. After just a couple classes, Jon had me on the boards learning new steps and moves, but it required me to tone up a whole new set of muscles. He put me on a routine of stretches and exercises to build my leg strength and flexibility, which also helped me with my modeling assignments as well.

Jon's body was a dancer's body, muscular and strong from years of physical training. We practiced dance routines together during and after class, and moved our history sessions to late at night, since I had keys to get in the history department offices after hours. It made things easier for him to have the resources of the reference library in the professors' offices available to us. As he trained my body and built up my stamina, I trained him how to improve his study habits, and learn how to do research more effectively. After a few weeks, he began to show improvement academically, and our shared duties as both teacher and student built up our trust in one another.

He wanted me to learn a whole dance routine, and be able to perform it in front of an audience with him, so our practices became more intense. He choreographed a whole performance to a piece of music with a throbbing Native American drumbeat, specifically with my physical abilities and background in mind. As dance partners, we made a striking couple, and even during our practices, we usually attracted an audience. Jon had quite a following in the department, and he was a big influence on a lot of the students studying dance. We honed our moves together and I eventually got used to him lifting, swinging, and catching my petite body without the fear of being dropped on my ass. I developed more and more confidence as a dancer, while he showed vast improvement with his grades.

With a public recital scheduled a week before the end of the quarter, I was letting my apprehension about dancing in front of an audience gnaw at me. While I had complete confidence posing in the nude for a class full of art students, the idea of goofing up a dance routine in front of a large audience gave me the willies! One of our costume designers who had drawn me in art classes, suggested I practice the routine in the nude because I always seemed to command the room when I was posing nude for drawing class, and the primitive motifs of the native dance would seem rawer if my body was raw too. I knew that it was something I wouldn't have a problem with, as I had often presented myself in front of an audience without any clothes on, but I wondered if Jon would be able to keep his cool if we were to actually try it. When we talked about the possibility, his main apprehension in actually going through with it, was his fear of being expected to dance naked too.

When word got around that I was actually considering training for the dance either naked or partially naked, some of the more avante garde among the dance department even got enthusiastic about the possibility of me performing it that way in front of an auditorium audience during the winter dance recital, but the instructor put the brakes on that idea before it got any more press. She was open to seeing Jon and I trying it in a practice, just as an artistic experiment, and she even suggested someone from theater-arts record a video of the experimental native dance.

With this project now becoming the center of artistic attention between several fine arts departments, I decided to have my long brown hair woven into strings of braided beads, so it would swing wildly around my body when I pirouetted and lunged during the routine. Everyone liked the idea, so one of the girls in the make-up department spent the early evening with me, twisting my hair into long, beaded strands, from tight corn-rows around the top of my head. Jon had choreographed my part of the dance into an imaginative meld of Native American and African influences, and the eroticism of the raw, animal-like moves I was performing would be made even more dramatic with my butt-length hair separated into a curtain of beaded strings.

The next afternoon, I doffed my dance leotard for my first nude practice, and walked onto the floor wearing nothing but a skin-toned thong, so just my pussy was covered, leaving my breasts and ass completely exposed. I went through the parts of the routine that I didn't need Jon on the boards with me, and Jon, along with several other dancers watched me try performing the piece practically nude for the first time, to see how well I moved with the long, beaded strings of hair whipping around my head. With my hair swinging in rhythm with my body, the whole experience looked and felt very exotic, and as I turned my head towards the mirror-wall with each spin, I watched myself with as much erotic fascination as did my audience. I knew this would be a dance to remember!

Jon removed his shirt, and wore only tights as he joined me on the dance-floor, and his ripped abs and dark, muscular arms made his body just as attention-grabbing as was mine, but my state of undress seemed to literally throw him off-balance, as he was terribly self-conscious performing moves with me that we had heretofore perfected. His fear of accidentally touching my breasts when he swung me up in a lift, caused him to lose his grip around my ribs, letting me slip out of his grasp, to hit the stage unceremoniously.

That one slip-up set us back weeks. I was bruised, but eager to work through it. Jon seemed incapable of getting past it. It was more than just the accident, I later learned. Misty, one of the black, female dancers told me Jon had been getting harassed by a few racists on campus who had heard of his dance routine with a nude, white girl, and they had made what I hoped were only empty threats against him, but which were crippling his confidence to pull off this very daring artistic endeavor. We made a few more tries during practices with no one around watching us, but Jon began to rethink the whole project.

We had been spending so much time working on my dance, that Jon was falling behind again with his history studies. We were both frustrated and tired, but I insisted he meet me on the third floor offices of the history department, so we could go over the things he needed to catch up on before his grades started to slip. It was late at night, and most of the building was deserted. We met in the lobby, and took the elevator up to three, but the doors opened onto darkness. Down at the other end of the long hallway, some light spilled out through the glass door of the office of the department secretary, which guided us down the long, dark corridor to the suite of professors' offices at the other end.

I unlocked the outer office and one burning table-lamp on the secretary's desk was all we needed to navigate back through the darkened suite of offices of all the history professors in the department. We got to the reference library room on the far side of the office of the department chair, where we usually studied together. We flipped on the lights and tossed our book-bags on the study table, settling into some uncomfortable plastic and metal desk-chairs, presumably designed by the Marquis de Sade.

Jon, usually upbeat and polite, merely looked at me with a distracted expression that said: 'So?' I knew we weren't up for this, but we were here, so I pulled out the history syllabus from my bag, and tossed it on the table in front of him. Jon rolled his eyes and looked out the window into the night. I had never seen him like this. The set-backs in the dance department just turned his mind to the other current problem-at-hand, his set-backs in learning the things his father had sent him halfway around the world to study.

"Hey!" I prodded. "You with me?"

"Yeah, right!" He turned and looked at me. "Twentieth Century British colonialism. Chief Lobengula sure got his black ass handed to him, dint he? What's up with that?" I smiled, in spite of myself, and Jon just watched as I spilled my chin onto my interlaced fingers on the table-top, with my elbows stretched out lazily on either side. I turned my head and looked up at him out of the corner of my eyes.

"What's wrong?" I prompted.

"Everything is wrong," he answered. "We can't do this thing the way you and the rest of the folks down in Sullivant want you to do it!"

"Don't let those racist crackers intimidate you, Jon!" I pleaded, but I knew they had shaken him up. "Its just art. They'll never understand it!" Whatever I said didn't negate the fact that ignorance and prejudice were alive and well at Ohio's biggest institution of higher learning. Some clowns would always be jealous of a black man dancing with an attractive, near-naked white girl, even if they had never touched each other sexually. I thought about that for a moment, unable to fathom such prejudice. Then I got an idea.

"Jon, could you run Steve and Malcolm through the routine to learn your part?"

"Why?" he replied. "Malcolm is as black as I am!"

"Strength in numbers," I said. "Misty and Diana have been learning my part for the past two weeks, but I want to add one move to the number.

I twirled a string of my beaded hair around in circles, slapping the table-top with each orbit to get his undivided attention. Then I explained to my dance-instructor how I wanted to change the routine. After I explained it, he thought the idea was brilliant, but wasn't sure it could be done.

"Well, let's find out right now!" I demanded. Before he could make another objection, I removed my jacket, and pulled my top off over my head so I was naked from the waist up. There was no open floor-space in the small library room, but the old oak study-table was huge, and very sturdy, so I got up on the table-top and beckoned him up with me. He balked at first, but I assured him he wasn't going to hurt me, even if it didn't work. I got in front of him, turned around so my back was towards him, and told him to extend his arms for me to fall into when I fell backwards, so his forearms would catch me under my armpits.

"Okay, now do it," I said.

"Beth, are you sure about this?"

"Just do it, and then swing me around like I told you." I insisted.

I fell back, trusting him to catch me, and felt his strong arms wedge under my armpits. As ordered, he clamped his big hands around my bare breasts and pulled me off my feet, swinging me around in a circle. The heavy table scraped loudly on the floor, shifting with the torque of our twisting weight. I gasped for breath halfway through the arc, and my legs extended out, knocking the book-bags off the table, sending them flying across the room. Jon planted his feet and brought me to a stand-still again, as we both regained our balance.

"Wooo!" I caught my breath, as we looked around the room to survey the damage we had wreaked. The flying book-bags had knocked a row of reference books off a shelf at the end of the room, but nothing that couldn't be righted. We looked at each other in surprise, and burst out laughing. Jon's pale finger impressions were slowly disappearing from my soft breasts as the blood returned to the surface, where his hands had temporarily squeezed it away from my skin. I realized what I had done wrong, and told him we had to try it again.

Jon looked at me like I was crazy, but I reassured him it would work better the next time, so I pushed him back into position in the center of the table, and I turned to try it again. This time, as his forearms lodged beneath my armpits, I clamped my arms down tightly around them, so my weight was supported entirely under my arms instead of being transferred around my boobs as we swung around. It worked beautifully, and this time, I didn't lose either my balance, or my breath.

I looked at my dance-partner, awaiting his verdict, and he agreed that it just might work. We discussed how we'd have to change the order of the steps, and simplify Jon's part while stretching out mine, with Diana and Misty dancing along with me, providing I could talk them into doing the routine topless with me, at least for awhile. I was even thinking of a way to convince the dance department chair to allow us to do the performance in front of an audience, and not just for the videographer, because the dance was about to acquire new meaning.

Jon's mood had brightened, having worked out a possible solution to his concerns about the performance, and since our minds were on dancing, not history, I plugged my brand new iPod into the media center in the reference room, and cranked-up a dance-mix as loud as the small speakers would go, not enough to shake the windows, but loud enough to get our feet moving. I jumped back up on the table and our arms reached for the ceiling as we gyrated around each other, dancing with abandon on the hard, leather table-top.

It suddenly occurred to me that I was still topless, dancing on a table in front of an open window in a classroom building with all the lights on. I turned to see if anyone might be watching us from another building, but unless someone was in the math tower across the courtyard, probably only a janitor or two could see us at this time of night. But for the first time, out of all the times he had seen me like this, Jon was staring at my bouncing breasts with an unaccustomed glint, and it was turning me on!

I danced up close, and wound myself around him like a cat, knowing I was exploiting a moment of weakness in his hitherto honorable demeanor towards me. Jon had been such a gentleman throughout our relationship, and to all the other girls around his orbit as well, even as they admired the considerable swell in his dancer's tights. He had seemed oblivious to their flirtations, and I wondered if he was so innocent as to not even realize what they wanted from him. But I had a weakness for playing the seductress towards guys who seemed inured to my charms, and Jon, with his glinting eye, had, in my estimation, resisted just about long enough.

Once around his hard, toned body, and I danced in front of him again, pressing my bare breasts into his shirt, until I slowly pulled it up, and then they pressed into his steel-hard abs. He closed his eyes, swaying to the music as if lost in another world, while my nipples dragged down his ebony skin, turned upwards against the friction of his flesh, until I was on my knees before him. His sweats fell with a tug, and his thick manhood sprang back in quick recoil. Not that inured, I smiled.

Tinaye meant 'we are with God' in Shona, the language of the Karanga, his people in Zimbabwe. I knew that Tinaye respected me, as both his teacher and his student, even as I received his engorged penis into my mouth, but I was hoping tonight, God was looking the other way. His swaying changed from synchronicity with the music, to that of the rhythm of my mouth, sucking down his enormity, pulling him in and out. His abs rippled above me as he thrust himself forward at the hips in tight, needful lunges. He had a lighter band of skin around the middle of his enormous charcoal cock, just below the head, where he'd been circumcised, and my tongue caressed his thick ridge right at that spot, until I felt him pulsing within my lips.

After a few minutes, I tasted his pre-cum, and swept it off the tip of his head with a flick of my tongue, then fell backwards onto the table, pulling my jeans and panties off my hips as I rolled on my back, and then forward again. He got on his knees between my open legs, after staring at my naked body long and hard. The beads in my hair slid around on the table-top noisily as he grabbed my hips and pulled me to the edge of the table. He climbed down to the floor, with my open thighs around him, and rubbed his bulbous glans between my inner petals, until I was soaked, then gently opened me up with his probing head until he had worked himself halfway inside me. I caught his ass behind my heels, and pulled him all the way in, until I felt my pussy-walls stretched to the limit.

He slowly pumped himself in and out of me until he was sure I was relaxed around his girth, then he began fucking me hard and deep, until I was nearly delirious with the pleasure. He leaned forward, taking my breasts in his hands and squeezed my hard nipples, kneading them between his fingers. It was the third time this evening he had taken my tits in his hands, and the third time was the charm. I tensed up, and my soaked pussy exploded around his cock, as I came again and again, grabbing his cock inside me with each wave of intense ecstasy. I thought about the weeks we had spent together, our friendship changing each day, until we felt a close and trusting bond, which we now consummated with our genitals locked together for the first time.

He pulled me up from the table-top and I wrapped myself around him with his thick cock still buried deep inside me. With his hands holding me up under my ass-cheeks, he lifted and dropped me again and again onto his manhood, as I felt his meaty phallus ram deeper and deeper into me, my arms on his broad shoulders, and my fingers laced behind his neck. We kissed. At long last, we kissed, and my tongue found his, as I dug my heels into him needfully. He turned, and sat on the edge of the table, pulling me along on top of him, never breaking the intimate connection between us. Then he laid himself down on his back, while I sat upright and rode on top of him, feeling the deepest penetration into my tingling innards I had yet felt.

He reached up and fondled my breasts again, and I lost it again, gushing my juices all around his shaft. I lifted up, rolling my pelvis into him, forwards and back, feeling him move around inside me at ever-changing angles, until my oozing cum ran out everywhere, soaking his loins. I lifted, and dropped myself down, forcing him inside my stretched pussy so deeply I nearly screamed! I got up on the balls of my feet and squatted over him, guiding his massive erection back into me as I plunged down, again and again, until my thighs ached. I looked out the window into the darkness, wondering how many people might be watching us, almost hoping we had an audience.

Most of all, I wanted the bastards who had tried to intimidate Jon from dancing with me, to see what he was doing to me now. Jon and I weren't in love, but we had spent so much time together, building a bond of mutual trust and friendship, that this seemed the final step in our deep curiosity about each other. It was something we had to do, in order to know one another completely. This was the ultimate dance we performed together, and I think we both knew it would only happen this once, so we made it last. He stayed inside me for what seemed an eternity, but being a gentleman to the end, asked me if I wanted him to ejaculate into me.

At my bidding, with his eyes glazed over, Jon issued forth a river of cum inside me, which spilled out of me, even as I felt him pulsing still more of his seed into my stretched chasm. My breasts, glistening with sweat, heaved in his two hands, as I felt his massive orgasm subside, emptying himself into my womb with twitching spasms of his prone body. He remained inside me for many minutes, as I leaked out around his girth. It was over, but I was unwilling to break the bond, even as I felt him slowly dwindling inside me. When I finally lifted off of him, feeling his limp snake pull reluctantly out of my hole, I thought about all the students I had tutored in this room, never to this end!

Neither of us needed to speak about what we had just done. It was understood. Dancers dance. We had partnered together, joined, to create harmony and beauty, then separated, just as we did on the dance floor. We would dance again, for the enjoyment of others, but this dance had been for just us. And we had satisfied our curiosity.

Before we left, we had sex twice again, in the little study room we had used so many times before, but we turned the lights out, having risked enough attention for one night. Having had sex with Jon, there would no longer be any awkwardness or hesitation performing the intimate moves choreographed into our dance. No more falls. No more slips. And no more reticence on Jon's part, to touch my naked body in front of others. If for no other reason, our night of intimacy had gotten us past that hurdle.

The next afternoon, I gathered the other four dancers whom I planned to include in the performance, hoping they would be brave enough to perform a few moments of daring, in order to make what was to me, an important artistic and political statement. Jon and I ran through the moves together to show them how it could be done, and a conversation with the make-up department reassured everyone involved that my 'clever' scheme could be pulled off with a bit of practice. Within a week, we were ready, and performed the piece, as re-conceived, for the department chair and the recital director.

We incorporated excerpts from "African Sanctus", a composition by David Fanshawe, along with a native drum score derived from American Indian motifs. Our faces were painted in native fashion, and the other two girls had their hair bead-braided like mine, which hung strategically over my bare breasts at the start of the performance. We wore thongs, under ragged-edged doe-skin flaps, hanging from fine, leather strings tied around our hips. We three girls danced low to the ground, as if searching, side to side. Leaning forward on bended-knees, doing squat-lunges with our legs, our arms stretched out to the sides in exaggerated swings.

Our bare breasts became visible only fleetingly, when we rose up into the spotlights with our hair thrown back. The effect was titillating, as it was so momentary, our movements, fluid and quick. The anticipation of exposure permeated the dance with only the briefest of teases. The three male dancers held their arms high, revealing palms and fingers which were heavily grease-painted, white on Steve's white skin and black on Jon's and Malcolm's black skin. Halfway through the dance, we employed the critical move.

Misty fell back into Steve's arms, while Diana and I fell back into Malcolm's and Jon's. Their hands clamped around our bare breasts as they swung us around in a circle, and at the completion of the move, we were thrown free, with our breasts now covered in grease-paint, in the shape of the hand-prints of the male dancers. Paint now covered our nipples and most of our bare breasts - Diana and I with black hand-prints on our white chests, and Misty with white hand-prints covering her small, black breasts. With our breasts now obscured under paint, we displayed them proudly.

We completed the dance in mostly upright stature, so that our painted 'hand-bras' could be plainly seen by the audience. As anticipated, the unexpected move brought a cheer from our audience every time we performed the piece. The primitive dance was a show-stopper, and the brief moments of nudity were enough to enthrall whatever audience was in attendance, but not overt or sexual enough to keep us from performing it for an open crowd in the auditorium.

While I got what I thought was the better end of our bargain, Jon did get caught up in his history courses by the end of the quarter, and the professors in Dulles Hall never found out the reference room in their offices had been used for not only dance-practice, but fire-hot, interracial student sex as well! Jon and I had brought a lot of attention to the dance department that quarter, and our performance inspired more experiments into indigenous dance by students from other cultures. It was the highlight of my sophomore year, and cemented Jon's position as an honors student in the dance department.

As I reread the old message in my email, I wondered where he was now. I hoped that wherever he had gone, he was dancing, and that he was still creating as much beauty as we had together, years before. I had intended to close the account, and my finger hovered over the delete button, but I couldn't do it. Maybe one day, word would come. This news had taken years to reach me. I could wait a few more years.