Dan Patch doesn't send away for any college applications his senior year. It doesn't even cross his mind. He doesn't have the grades, and he definitely doesn't have the money.

Marti applies to every decent school in the area, and a few that are further away. Dan doesn't ask her how she plans to afford that or why she wants to go to a college that's far away from everyone she knows.

And that's the only time the Dan even thinks about college, until his student adviser calls him into the office to ask him if he knows about cheerleading scholarships. Mrs. Rimini is a petite woman with giant, giant breasts that bounce when she gets excited. They're moving now as she says, "They give full rides to some of the best schools in the state! You should try out."

Dan finds that hilarious. He'd joined the gymnastics team because it was something to do that kept him out of the house, out of the range of an overworked mom with frayed nerves and older brothers with fast fists. He'd kept doing it because girls like trying on his team jacket. But one of the things he's looking forward to about graduating is going to be leaving the cult-like pull of team sports behind him.

---

Marti finds it just as funny as he does. They get drunk in the park, and Marti giggles endlessly over the bottle of tequila. "Cheerleaders need cheer, Dan. And spirit. Team spirit, even."

"I get it," Dan says, but Marti keeps going.

"They need to give a crap whether the football team wins or loses. You, Dan Patch, are not a cheerleader."

She's not wrong.

But Dan's thought about it, and the rest of his life is a long time to be unloading crates. He would only have to fake having S-P-I-R-I-T for four years. So Dan cowboys up, ignores his brothers' drunken laughter, and tries out for every squad in the area.

---

It turns out that most cheerleaders are pretty damn hot. So that's a bonus.

---

Marti's dreams of a scholarship to Lancer don't pan out. She puts on a face like she doesn't care, Marti-style, and accepts a spot at the University of Memphis.

No one is more surprised than Dan when he gets a full cheerleading scholarship to Lancer University. Lancer's blue and yellow don't suit him, and the rich kids at Lancer don't understand him, any more than Dan understands them. The paperwork to withdraw from the University sits unsigned in the first drawer of Dan's desk, and Marti has to talk him out of it twice his first week.

Even Wanda Perkins says something nonsensical like, "In for a penny, in for a pound," and serves him a bottomless glass of beer while he lists all the reasons that he hates it here.

---

In Cheertown he rooms with Lewis, a cool enough guy who doesn't complain when Dan's pile of unwashed laundry gets too high. Cheertown is full of spoken and unspoken rules, like a curfew the night before competitions and game days. Dan's never actually had a curfew before in his life, and Lewis is the one who lets him in through the window after Vanessa has barred the front door.

Alice Verdura, Lewis' ex, is nasty for a cheerleader. Gorgeous, tiny, and angry. Dan's not even sure what it is he did to piss her off. Dan's been hated by a lot of ladies in his time, though, so he decides not to let it bother him. Dan's flyer is a pretty girl named Shelley, who is exceedingly polite even when Dan's own mistakes land her ass-first on the training mat.

---

The first time Dan meets Savannah, she writes cheer on his left arm, in curly block letters. Dan can't stop looking at her.

"Can I give you some advice?" Lewis asks, and doesn't actually stop to wait for the answer. "Team romances are more trouble than they're worth."

Dan raises his eyebrows. "You and Alice?"

Lewis nods his head in agreement. "Perfect example."

"Advice noted, man." Dan doesn't add that he's got an inability to take good advice that's probably genetic.

---

The first time Marti meets Savannah, they try to fight each other. Dan finds the whole incident exceedingly hilarious.

---

Savannah Monroe is not his kind of girl. Marti is the first person to point that out.

"Too religious?" Dan asks, over a basket of french fries, and Marti almost dies laughing.

"No, I was talking that the fact that she speaks in complete sentences. But if she cheers for Jesus, then I say go for it. You're going to lose interest the minute she refuses to put out for you anyway."

"Marti." Dan feigns a disappointment face. "This isn't high school anymore. Maybe I'm growing."

Marti raises her eyebrows, and Dan stuffs a french fry in her mouth before she can make that tired joke.

---

Dan doesn't want to risk breaking the heart of a girl he has to live with. He doesn't want to risk breaking Savannah's heart at all.

Wanda is the one who says, "You waiting for my daughter to wise up? Because that might take a while."

Dan doesn't want to be waiting for anyone.

---

At first, Savannah thinks he's joking. She says yes, though, and Dan is saved the embarrassment of getting turned down while wearing his cheerleading uniform. The entire squad seems to be present for their first date, but it's still not as big a disaster as the first time that Dan meets Savannah's mother.

---

It goes good for a while. Savannah is funny, and beautiful, and not in any way ready to have sex with him. She tries, but she isn't ready, and Dan doesn't want to be the asshole making a big deal about that.

So they wait.

"You're sticking it out, Dan Patch," Marti says. Her skill at backhand compliments remains unmatched, Dan thinks. "I'm impressed."

"By my ability to keep it in my pants?" Dan asks, and Marti grins.

"Basically, yeah."

That lasts for as long as it lasts.

---

No matter how much she worries about it, Savannah isn't the problem.

---

Dan's not cut out for monogamy. He knows that. Not even in the form of sweet brunettes who are unlike anyone that Dan has ever met before. Dan knows better, and that's what makes him so mad at himself, later. He knew going in that there was no way to make this work.

---

"You can't tell her," Marti says, with her mouth still red where he kissed her. But Dan can't be that person who lies to someone who would never, ever lie to him.

His belated attempt at nobility doesn't get very far. And it's lost on Marti, who wants to go back to her sort-of fling with his roommate and pretend that neither of them feel anything.

And Dan's catapulted back in time, to being fourteen and hammered in the back of a Buick with his best friend and a faulty condom. Dan had been carrying that thing around for months, just in case. Just in case he wasn't imagining things, and Marti did like him like that after all.

Sometimes he wishes he'd been wrong, that Marti had shut him down for some geek from the debating club, that they'd never made it as far as they did.

Until Wanda brings it up again, until Marti starts yelling at him, Dan actually thought that he'd been forgiven.

---

They place second at Regionals, seventh at Nationals. Nobody's really happy with either result, and the letters sprawling from the crook of Savannah's elbow to her wrist spell, improvement.

Nobody's really talking to Dan, either. Even Alice seems to have take Savannah's side, something that's probably a first. Lewis doesn't say anything, but he doesn't try to fight Dan either, and Dan's calling that a win because Lewis could kick his ass on any day of the week.

Dan would deserve it.

---

Dan goes back to the docks that summer and endures all the raucous pom-pom jokes with a relaxed grin. He tells anyone who asks that he got into cheerleading for the girls. Even though it's turned out to be just the one girl, who isn't talking to him at all.

Savannah doesn't call, and her mom stands guard at their house in the suburbs like a miniature, dyed-blonde pit bull. Marti doesn't visit, though Dan figures at least that's a kind of answer. He doesn't know which one of them he misses more, and that's the worst thing. He caused all this in the first damn place, and he feels like at least he should know.

---

Dan spends the summer getting sunburnt on the docks. He learns from Wanda, over a beer and a cheeseburger, that Marti spends her free months in the library earning As in her summer classes.

And from the speech Dan gets when he walks into Cheertown in late August, Savannah uses her vacation to make plans.

---

"We need to have a talk," Savannah says. She's standing in the kitchen pinning up the new chore list, looking hotter than she should in a faded t-shirt, cut-off shorts, and rubber flip-flops in Lancer colours.

"Like the one where you slapped me?" Dan asks.

She gives him a sideways look like she might hit him in the face one more time. Then continues, like she hasn't even heard him. "Don't worry, Marti is on her way."

Okay. Dan wasn't expecting that one.

---

When Marti walks through the door, bike lock spinning in her hand, Dan finds that he's still mad at her. Mostly from missing her like hell. Enough that he flinches when she puts her arms around him and says, "Hey, Dan Patch."

Savannah just watches them, waits for them to be listening. She lays out her plan in a few sentences.

Savannah seems to think it makes sense, but it doesn't. It's completely fucking crazy.

---

Marti and Dan both say the same thing at the same time. "Like they do in Utah?"

"That's polygamy." Savannah pushes two identical three-ring binders towards them, across the kitchen table. It contains what look like study materials, and a blue and yellow ballpoint pen for taking notes. "And it's against the law, by the way. Polyamoury is when three or more people engage in a romantic relationship. The definition is right there."

She taps the first page, and Dan can't even work out what to say.

It's Marti who pulls her own binder closer, frowns at the letters, and asks, "Is Jesus going to be okay with this?"

Dan is way more scared of Savannah's mom than he is of Jesus, but he doesn't say so.

Savannah shrugs. "Jesus is okay with love, and that's what we have. I mean," Savannah hesitates, and flushes a warm pink from head to toe, "what we could have. You know what I mean."

"I know what you mean," Marti says softly.

Dan doesn't know what the hell is going on. "So you're both going to date me?" Dan's not sure when he became Hugh Hefner. Not sure that there's any way that this can end well.

Not sure that he's mature enough to turn them down.

Now it's Marti's turn to glare at him. "She just said," Marti's tone is sharp, like a schoolroom teacher's, "it's not polygamy."

Then Marti and Savannah are looking at each other, and something's going on there that Dan doesn't get.

"You two have been in love since middle school." Savannah's voice is clear, soft, certain. "I can't compete with that."

Marti shakes her head. "Well, I can't compete with your cheerleader bond, or whatever. Or the fact that you're prettier than me."

"See?" Savannah asks brightly, reaching for Marti's arm and pulling a Sharpie out of her pocket, uncapping it with her teeth. The marker bears neat label tape: Savannah Munroe. "It'll be better this way. No competition."

For the first time, Dan notices that Marti actually seems upset.

The inscription on Marti's arm says, beautiful.

---

So they're actually going to see if they can make this work.

---

Their first date, all three of them, goes better than Dan's first date with a nervous, drunken Savannah. It goes better than Dan's first time with Marti, though there's hardly any touching.

Marti come over to Cheertown, and the three of them eat takeout and play Scrabble in the living room.

Dan loses, badly. Dan wonders aloud about the wisdom of dating two women that are smarter than him, while Savannah high-fives a victorious Marti over the game board.

"All women are smarter than you, Dan Patch." Marti grins at him.

Savannah reaches out and strokes Marti's hair. And then stops, with her fingers in mid-air, as if she's waiting for something.

"No hellfire," Marti tells her with a smile.

Savannah smiles back, and nods. "I guess not."

Dan pulls Savannah towards him, and kisses her through her giggles. "I still say this is crazy."

It's crazy, stupid, weird. They're doing it anyway.

Savannah reaches for her marker, and Dan gives her his arm without being prompted. Her warm fingers circle his wrist as she marks one short word.

Try.