Infinity Smashed: Waltzing
Feb. 10th, 2021 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeWaltzing
Series: Infinity Smashed
Summary: Kink and relationship negotiation via dance. Safe for work.
Word Count: 2900
Notes: Takes place after Marked and Gilded. The working title for this was Too Many Doms on the Dance Floor and that really about sums it up.
I was in trouble.
It was one thing to strike up a casual friends-and-fucking arrangement with Grey. But this was getting out of hand; I couldn’t keep my damn teeth in my mouth for a week. Grey was a PIN lifer and never did anything casually; I doubted she’d made an exception for me, especially if she was saying she loved me with that look on her face. Worse, my reaction was, “damn right you’re mine,” not, “if I keep doing this, I’m going to get washed.”
I couldn’t stay here, in this Patriot Act job in this wasteland town. She had to know that; she was helping me prep for the move! But if she was bothered or worried, it didn’t show, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up, so we kept going through my crap, where we found the old photos.
“So this is where they went!” I cried. “I missed these…”
The one I’d found was a black and white shot, taken in high school, me and a kid in a letterman jacket. It was the only shot I had of him, and Su had only gotten it because she’d snuck up on us during lunch; I hadn’t known she was there so was caught in mid-conversation, while he was looking up with a surprised look, sandwich still in hand.
Grey pointed to the boy and looked at me questioningly.
“Arthur West,” I said. “Sweet kid. You could call him my first sweetheart.”
“In high school?”
“Secret star-crossed thing. What about you, did you…?”
But she shook her head. “Just Vicki.”
Then she held out the photo frame she was holding, where my zitty college self waltzed with a tall girl. The fashion was terrible but the photo was good, catching us in the full sweep of motion.
“Oh, that old thing,” I said. “Su snapped that one too. It’s good, right? You’d never guess I was agonizing about my O-Chem project that day.”
“Didn’t know you danced.”
“Oh yeah, up through college. I think we won the one in the picture.”
Grey pointed to the girl and gave me an inquiring look.
I sighed and took the frame from her. “Linda Alagaratnam. Man, I haven’t thought about her or Arthur in years…”
The sexual revolution missed my snotty private high school, and Su and I were brown specks in a Mayflower white sea. She dealt by putting her head down and avoiding notice, but I had limp wrists and a big mouth so got catty instead. It didn’t serve me well. One day, I was getting my ass kicked by a Kennedy when I heard, “leave him alone,” and the next thing I knew, someone was putting my glasses in my hand and asking if I was all right.
Arthur was the kind of golden athlete they put on propaganda posters, but his letterman jacket wasn’t from our school. He was a rare mid-year transfer, had no idea what he’d just done.
I put my glasses back on and said, “You know I’m the class fag, right?”
He smiled. “So?”
Be still my beating heart.
Poor Su must’ve listened to a hundred variations of, “O my agony, how can I share my secret love?” Surely, I thought, there was no way someone so beautiful, so athletic, so clearly heterosexual—
Within three weeks I had him on his knees in the boy’s room.
I don’t remember the details of how we got there, just that I was teasing him, saying he should get down and worship me. Except then he did. I saw his face, realized this big strapping Adonis had a thing for me pushing him around, and discovered my kink on the spot. Blew my teenage fat-boy mind.
We had a lot of fun stealing kisses and more all over campus, but always in secret. His parents had yanked him out of his last school for doing the same thing, and one day, they caught him again, this time with my love (well, lust) letters in his backpack. I never found out what became of him.
Arthur refused to rat me out so I avoided all consequences, but I graduated bitter as hell, determined to smash down the closet door. And I did, the moment I made it to college. Came out, discovered disco, took every drug offered to me, and pretended I hadn’t been a smug atheist since the fifth grade so I could have orgies with guru-chasers who insisted on calling me (and mispronouncing) Babubhai.
I met Linda in 1973 at ballroom dance tryouts, and I’m pretty sure we got paired as a joke. Linda was four inches taller than me in socks, wore all black and a disaffected expression. Side by side, we looked like a geometry lesson, circle and line. We had only three things in common: race (Linda was Sri Lankan), collegiate disdain for most of the human race, and dancing skills. When we figured out we were a dynamite team, we made it our mission in life to crush everyone who opposed us.
Grey’s voice jerked me back to the present. “You liked it?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did for a while.” I put Arthur’s photo on the wall, but recycled Linda’s. “You dance?”
She shrugged. “Parents got me lessons for prom. Didn’t go well.”
“You didn’t like it?”
She glanced at me, then away. “Didn’t like leading.”
Oh. “And I’m guessing it wasn’t girls you wanted to dance with.”
“No.” Hesitant, “Dance with me?”
I thought it over. “Sure, but at your place; you’ve got the stereo for it and I won’t trip you over a box.”
Her face lit up.
The next time we were at her apartment, we rearranged the living room furniture and dug through her LPs until I saw Strauss. “How’s a waltz? That’s easy enough.”
“Won’t be good at it.”
“Don’t worry; I was a good lead once. And my first job was giving lessons.”
After a quick refresher course, the arm of the record player came down with a crackle hiss. I stepped up to Grey, touched one hand to her back and took her other hand in mine. Her free hand dropped to my shoulder.
It’d been years, but my body remembered its frame. Grey stiffened up, though. When I looked up, she swallowed.
“Okay?” I asked as the music started.
“Never had this,” she said. “Been the girl.”
I’d danced with Su, Linda, innumerable other women; I’d also danced with men, including a stolen slow-dance with Arthur in my room while “studying.” Grey had never had the chance.
Well, she did now. I got up on my toes to kiss her. “Dance with me, Grace.”
She relaxed after that. When the song ended, I said, “See? You did great.”
She was beaming—the big, open kind I’d first seen on Valentine’s Day, the kind that hit me in the chest. “Thank you,” she said. And when the next song kicked in: “More?”
“Sure.” And it became a regular thing after that. She’d never be competitor material, but that didn’t matter to her. She just enjoyed dancing with me.
She might’ve relaxed but I held back, focusing on the technicals and keeping her at arm’s length like I was giving her lessons. Grey noticed first, one evening when she tried to move in closer and I snapped, “dance space.”
She looked startled. I grimaced. We stopped dancing.
She cocked her head and tapped my temple.
“Just memories,” I said. “It’s dumb.”
She turned off the stereo, brought me a chair, claimed another for herself, and looked up at me expectantly.
There was no outwaiting Grace. I sat, taking off my glasses to clean.
“You remind me of Arthur. You’re sweet, protective in the same way.”
Arthur had been a big loving puppy. Even as dumb kids who didn’t know any better, we hadn’t hurt each other. Linda, though…
“You remind me of Linda too,” I said. “She was trapped in a box like you, and she found it suffocating, like you. And here I was, a flaming bougie guju in paisley, pissing on her values and running wild.”
Linda and I never slept together; she was holding out for a good Tamil boy. Instead, we started psychologically kinking out together without realizing we were doing it. Not that she knew, but Linda was the dommiest domme I’ve ever met; her looks could cut glass. And she didn’t want an Arthur; she wanted a fight. She brought out the overcompetitive, insecure dom in me and we were forever locking horns, fighting to top each other and never succeeding.
Cosmic balance, I called it once while high. She just laughed at me.
“After I got off the hippie trip, I fucked enough all-American closet cases to form their own football team. I got off on making them roll over for me, being their dirty little secret. Call it a carry-over from high school.
“I was a shit, rubbed it in Linda’s face.” Taking smug pleasure in getting something heterosexual her wasn’t—couldn’t, as long as she was waiting for her good Tamil boy. “The best revenge she could get was refusing to hate-fuck me—and thank god she didn’t, we would’ve killed each other.
“Eventually, though, the inevitable happened and one of my dates caught gay panic. That’s why I don’t like men tossing me around.”
It could’ve been worse; I was able to walk away from it. It could’ve been better; Linda was my closest friend on campus, so I had to go to her, rather than Su (who studied elsewhere). Linda knew my tastes, pegged me the moment she saw me, and finally got her chance to knock me off my high horse. I would never forget her tone when she said, “That’s why you don’t fight nature.”
“You ask me, she was telling herself more than me,” I said. “I knew it even then. But it was still a shitty thing to say, and it worked. We’d been playing power games for years, but that’s when she won.” I chuckled. “You should’ve seen her face when she realized. The fun was all in the fight, and now she’d ruined it. We threw everything into dance, the rest of junior year, trying to get the spark back, but it was too late.”
Even when times were good, we were gold-level asshats. But times were no longer good, and neither of us could admit it, because that would mean it was over. So we just kept trying, harder and harder. The extracurricular arms race took over so much of my life that I almost flunked my junior year, something I’d avoided during my acid-and-orgies period. Hell, I lost weight.
Su had stood by me through my cannonball coming out, my short-lived attempt at free love, all my smarter-than-thou condescension, but now she took me aside and asked, “Do you even like this girl? Because she seems to hate you.”
I scoffed and blustered, but she was right. Without the thrill of combat, Linda and I were just smug, spiteful assholes sneering at each other. That was when I realized it was time to tap out. At least my grades gave me the perfect excuse; Linda never found out the real reason I pulled away. In a frantic surge of coffee-swilling cramming, I squeaked through junior year; Linda graduated and moved to Florida to terrorize the retirees. The moment she was gone and the endorphins wore off, I crashed, quit the dance team and spent senior year with my nose in the books, gaining the weight back.
I was more cautious after that, until I discovered erotic BBS right around the time I first heard about AIDS. No chance of infection, arrest, or assault? Easy escape from the rude, racist, and repulsive? The choice was a no-brainer.
Offline, back up north, I had a semi-regular play partner, a fellow switch named Mindy who was just as fat and relationship-averse as me. We shared scenes, laughs, and take-out; anyone who knocks friendly convenience hasn’t tried it. But then the Smithson West job devoured my life until by the time I moved to Vago, we hadn’t seen each other in over a year.
And now there was Grace. Grace, who bent like she was made for it and smiled like the summer sun and still said “thank you” every time she came. Who’d gone from a one-night impulse fling to this.
“Linda and I were bad for each other, and I never want to repeat that,” I said. “But now there’s you. And… god, but I like domming you.”
“I know,” Grey said.
“Yeah?”
She gave me a wry look, undid her tie, and tugged open her collar.
I coughed. “Apparently I also like hickeying you like a sloppy prom date.”
“Wasn’t complaining.”
I reached over to touch. “Careful. You keep encouraging me like that…”
“So?”
I pulled my hand out of her shirt. “You know I’m leaving when I can, right?”
“Yes.”
“You said you loved me.”
“Yes.”
I waited, but that was it. I spread my hands. “I can’t stay, Grace!”
“You don’t have to,” she said.
She went silent again but clearly had more to say. I waited for her.
“Not… not trying to make you stay,” she said. “Or love me. World’s small. You make it bigger.” She made a sound of exasperation, plucked at her hair. “Didn’t used to matter. Nothing to want. Now there is.” She looked up, hazel eyes fierce and swapped to SGSL. “I want all of it. All of you. Because you’re here now and one day you won’t be.”
I’d never gotten so many words out of her at a time.
“That’s how you want to do this?” I asked. “Go all in, knowing it’ll end soon and hurt like hell? All of me really isn’t worth all of that.”
With her hands, she replied, “Yes, you are.”
There was nothing I could say.
“It’s how I work,” she continued. “I give you today. No forevers.”
It took me a while to think of a response. “Thank you. And…” I glanced at her neck and coughed. “If you want all of me, I admit, I’ve been holding back on the kink. Trying, anyway. Would you want—”
“Yes.”
She’d never interrupted me before. It made me laugh… in part out of relief. I’d been worried that I was getting into another doomed-to-fail Linda situation, even though Grey’s temperament was on the opposite pole. But she’d said what she wanted, she’d interrupted me to say it, and she’d clearly put more thought into it than I had. I didn’t understand what she saw in me, but…
“Tell me three things you won’t do,” I said. She cocked her head. “Humor me. No matter how much I want to do them. Three things.”
She thought about it. With her voice: “Won’t be a man. Won’t use my work gear. Won’t…” she hesitated. “Won’t top you.”
“Do you mean running the kinky activity or fucking me in the ass?”
She turned pink, held up two fingers.
Intriguing. I liked women tossing me around; if Grace was interested—
“Why?” she asked with her hands.
“I just needed to know you’d say no to me.” I put my glasses back on and clapped my hands. “You’ve convinced me, Grace. I’m all yours, for now.”
She beamed. “Thank you.”
Such a polite girl. “You’re welcome. What would you like?”
Grey pulled out her car keys. “Bring your music over. Dance.”
So we lugged my CDs over. She wouldn’t let me sort through them either, just stuck a big strip of packing tape across the racks to hold the cases in place, grabbed them wholesale, and shoved them in the backseat. Once they were in her apartment and parked next to her records, we started layering on discs since Grey’s stereo could be programmed in advance. She let me go first, and I chose a geekwave song that not only had plenty of buffer time but a couple measures of tempo setting. It’d make for a short, sappy waltz, but that was okay, perfect even. I pressed play and went to join her at the center of the room. She was even taller than me than Linda had been, but at least it wasn’t all legs, and her face when I pulled her to me was gold.
“No more suspension bridge,” I said as the audience started chanting “love.” “Dance close with me, kinky girl.”
Back in college, I’d tangoed with Linda, but we’d been competing, focused on perfection—work, not play. It was a different ballgame dancing with Grey’s right hip inside and above mine, leading her through movement and pressure, feeling her bend and give to it while the band sang about human weakness and small cherished things. Grey’s stereo clicked over to the next one—country, of all things, something in 4/4 time about secret love, but we winged it fine, and then it was back to waltz, whirling to beautiful ephemerality and airplanes over the sea, and oh, I had missed this.
We danced to techno and opera and disco and rock’n’roll, fast and slow, apart and together, open and closed. I danced harder than I had since college, and Grey danced harder than she ever had in her life. We broke sweats, and our breaths got short, and I shoved her against a wall and we didn’t stop.
Nobody could stop us.
Series: Infinity Smashed
Summary: Kink and relationship negotiation via dance. Safe for work.
Word Count: 2900
Notes: Takes place after Marked and Gilded. The working title for this was Too Many Doms on the Dance Floor and that really about sums it up.
I was in trouble.
It was one thing to strike up a casual friends-and-fucking arrangement with Grey. But this was getting out of hand; I couldn’t keep my damn teeth in my mouth for a week. Grey was a PIN lifer and never did anything casually; I doubted she’d made an exception for me, especially if she was saying she loved me with that look on her face. Worse, my reaction was, “damn right you’re mine,” not, “if I keep doing this, I’m going to get washed.”
I couldn’t stay here, in this Patriot Act job in this wasteland town. She had to know that; she was helping me prep for the move! But if she was bothered or worried, it didn’t show, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up, so we kept going through my crap, where we found the old photos.
“So this is where they went!” I cried. “I missed these…”
The one I’d found was a black and white shot, taken in high school, me and a kid in a letterman jacket. It was the only shot I had of him, and Su had only gotten it because she’d snuck up on us during lunch; I hadn’t known she was there so was caught in mid-conversation, while he was looking up with a surprised look, sandwich still in hand.
Grey pointed to the boy and looked at me questioningly.
“Arthur West,” I said. “Sweet kid. You could call him my first sweetheart.”
“In high school?”
“Secret star-crossed thing. What about you, did you…?”
But she shook her head. “Just Vicki.”
Then she held out the photo frame she was holding, where my zitty college self waltzed with a tall girl. The fashion was terrible but the photo was good, catching us in the full sweep of motion.
“Oh, that old thing,” I said. “Su snapped that one too. It’s good, right? You’d never guess I was agonizing about my O-Chem project that day.”
“Didn’t know you danced.”
“Oh yeah, up through college. I think we won the one in the picture.”
Grey pointed to the girl and gave me an inquiring look.
I sighed and took the frame from her. “Linda Alagaratnam. Man, I haven’t thought about her or Arthur in years…”
The sexual revolution missed my snotty private high school, and Su and I were brown specks in a Mayflower white sea. She dealt by putting her head down and avoiding notice, but I had limp wrists and a big mouth so got catty instead. It didn’t serve me well. One day, I was getting my ass kicked by a Kennedy when I heard, “leave him alone,” and the next thing I knew, someone was putting my glasses in my hand and asking if I was all right.
Arthur was the kind of golden athlete they put on propaganda posters, but his letterman jacket wasn’t from our school. He was a rare mid-year transfer, had no idea what he’d just done.
I put my glasses back on and said, “You know I’m the class fag, right?”
He smiled. “So?”
Be still my beating heart.
Poor Su must’ve listened to a hundred variations of, “O my agony, how can I share my secret love?” Surely, I thought, there was no way someone so beautiful, so athletic, so clearly heterosexual—
Within three weeks I had him on his knees in the boy’s room.
I don’t remember the details of how we got there, just that I was teasing him, saying he should get down and worship me. Except then he did. I saw his face, realized this big strapping Adonis had a thing for me pushing him around, and discovered my kink on the spot. Blew my teenage fat-boy mind.
We had a lot of fun stealing kisses and more all over campus, but always in secret. His parents had yanked him out of his last school for doing the same thing, and one day, they caught him again, this time with my love (well, lust) letters in his backpack. I never found out what became of him.
Arthur refused to rat me out so I avoided all consequences, but I graduated bitter as hell, determined to smash down the closet door. And I did, the moment I made it to college. Came out, discovered disco, took every drug offered to me, and pretended I hadn’t been a smug atheist since the fifth grade so I could have orgies with guru-chasers who insisted on calling me (and mispronouncing) Babubhai.
I met Linda in 1973 at ballroom dance tryouts, and I’m pretty sure we got paired as a joke. Linda was four inches taller than me in socks, wore all black and a disaffected expression. Side by side, we looked like a geometry lesson, circle and line. We had only three things in common: race (Linda was Sri Lankan), collegiate disdain for most of the human race, and dancing skills. When we figured out we were a dynamite team, we made it our mission in life to crush everyone who opposed us.
Grey’s voice jerked me back to the present. “You liked it?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did for a while.” I put Arthur’s photo on the wall, but recycled Linda’s. “You dance?”
She shrugged. “Parents got me lessons for prom. Didn’t go well.”
“You didn’t like it?”
She glanced at me, then away. “Didn’t like leading.”
Oh. “And I’m guessing it wasn’t girls you wanted to dance with.”
“No.” Hesitant, “Dance with me?”
I thought it over. “Sure, but at your place; you’ve got the stereo for it and I won’t trip you over a box.”
Her face lit up.
The next time we were at her apartment, we rearranged the living room furniture and dug through her LPs until I saw Strauss. “How’s a waltz? That’s easy enough.”
“Won’t be good at it.”
“Don’t worry; I was a good lead once. And my first job was giving lessons.”
After a quick refresher course, the arm of the record player came down with a crackle hiss. I stepped up to Grey, touched one hand to her back and took her other hand in mine. Her free hand dropped to my shoulder.
It’d been years, but my body remembered its frame. Grey stiffened up, though. When I looked up, she swallowed.
“Okay?” I asked as the music started.
“Never had this,” she said. “Been the girl.”
I’d danced with Su, Linda, innumerable other women; I’d also danced with men, including a stolen slow-dance with Arthur in my room while “studying.” Grey had never had the chance.
Well, she did now. I got up on my toes to kiss her. “Dance with me, Grace.”
She relaxed after that. When the song ended, I said, “See? You did great.”
She was beaming—the big, open kind I’d first seen on Valentine’s Day, the kind that hit me in the chest. “Thank you,” she said. And when the next song kicked in: “More?”
“Sure.” And it became a regular thing after that. She’d never be competitor material, but that didn’t matter to her. She just enjoyed dancing with me.
She might’ve relaxed but I held back, focusing on the technicals and keeping her at arm’s length like I was giving her lessons. Grey noticed first, one evening when she tried to move in closer and I snapped, “dance space.”
She looked startled. I grimaced. We stopped dancing.
She cocked her head and tapped my temple.
“Just memories,” I said. “It’s dumb.”
She turned off the stereo, brought me a chair, claimed another for herself, and looked up at me expectantly.
There was no outwaiting Grace. I sat, taking off my glasses to clean.
“You remind me of Arthur. You’re sweet, protective in the same way.”
Arthur had been a big loving puppy. Even as dumb kids who didn’t know any better, we hadn’t hurt each other. Linda, though…
“You remind me of Linda too,” I said. “She was trapped in a box like you, and she found it suffocating, like you. And here I was, a flaming bougie guju in paisley, pissing on her values and running wild.”
Linda and I never slept together; she was holding out for a good Tamil boy. Instead, we started psychologically kinking out together without realizing we were doing it. Not that she knew, but Linda was the dommiest domme I’ve ever met; her looks could cut glass. And she didn’t want an Arthur; she wanted a fight. She brought out the overcompetitive, insecure dom in me and we were forever locking horns, fighting to top each other and never succeeding.
Cosmic balance, I called it once while high. She just laughed at me.
“After I got off the hippie trip, I fucked enough all-American closet cases to form their own football team. I got off on making them roll over for me, being their dirty little secret. Call it a carry-over from high school.
“I was a shit, rubbed it in Linda’s face.” Taking smug pleasure in getting something heterosexual her wasn’t—couldn’t, as long as she was waiting for her good Tamil boy. “The best revenge she could get was refusing to hate-fuck me—and thank god she didn’t, we would’ve killed each other.
“Eventually, though, the inevitable happened and one of my dates caught gay panic. That’s why I don’t like men tossing me around.”
It could’ve been worse; I was able to walk away from it. It could’ve been better; Linda was my closest friend on campus, so I had to go to her, rather than Su (who studied elsewhere). Linda knew my tastes, pegged me the moment she saw me, and finally got her chance to knock me off my high horse. I would never forget her tone when she said, “That’s why you don’t fight nature.”
“You ask me, she was telling herself more than me,” I said. “I knew it even then. But it was still a shitty thing to say, and it worked. We’d been playing power games for years, but that’s when she won.” I chuckled. “You should’ve seen her face when she realized. The fun was all in the fight, and now she’d ruined it. We threw everything into dance, the rest of junior year, trying to get the spark back, but it was too late.”
Even when times were good, we were gold-level asshats. But times were no longer good, and neither of us could admit it, because that would mean it was over. So we just kept trying, harder and harder. The extracurricular arms race took over so much of my life that I almost flunked my junior year, something I’d avoided during my acid-and-orgies period. Hell, I lost weight.
Su had stood by me through my cannonball coming out, my short-lived attempt at free love, all my smarter-than-thou condescension, but now she took me aside and asked, “Do you even like this girl? Because she seems to hate you.”
I scoffed and blustered, but she was right. Without the thrill of combat, Linda and I were just smug, spiteful assholes sneering at each other. That was when I realized it was time to tap out. At least my grades gave me the perfect excuse; Linda never found out the real reason I pulled away. In a frantic surge of coffee-swilling cramming, I squeaked through junior year; Linda graduated and moved to Florida to terrorize the retirees. The moment she was gone and the endorphins wore off, I crashed, quit the dance team and spent senior year with my nose in the books, gaining the weight back.
I was more cautious after that, until I discovered erotic BBS right around the time I first heard about AIDS. No chance of infection, arrest, or assault? Easy escape from the rude, racist, and repulsive? The choice was a no-brainer.
Offline, back up north, I had a semi-regular play partner, a fellow switch named Mindy who was just as fat and relationship-averse as me. We shared scenes, laughs, and take-out; anyone who knocks friendly convenience hasn’t tried it. But then the Smithson West job devoured my life until by the time I moved to Vago, we hadn’t seen each other in over a year.
And now there was Grace. Grace, who bent like she was made for it and smiled like the summer sun and still said “thank you” every time she came. Who’d gone from a one-night impulse fling to this.
“Linda and I were bad for each other, and I never want to repeat that,” I said. “But now there’s you. And… god, but I like domming you.”
“I know,” Grey said.
“Yeah?”
She gave me a wry look, undid her tie, and tugged open her collar.
I coughed. “Apparently I also like hickeying you like a sloppy prom date.”
“Wasn’t complaining.”
I reached over to touch. “Careful. You keep encouraging me like that…”
“So?”
I pulled my hand out of her shirt. “You know I’m leaving when I can, right?”
“Yes.”
“You said you loved me.”
“Yes.”
I waited, but that was it. I spread my hands. “I can’t stay, Grace!”
“You don’t have to,” she said.
She went silent again but clearly had more to say. I waited for her.
“Not… not trying to make you stay,” she said. “Or love me. World’s small. You make it bigger.” She made a sound of exasperation, plucked at her hair. “Didn’t used to matter. Nothing to want. Now there is.” She looked up, hazel eyes fierce and swapped to SGSL. “I want all of it. All of you. Because you’re here now and one day you won’t be.”
I’d never gotten so many words out of her at a time.
“That’s how you want to do this?” I asked. “Go all in, knowing it’ll end soon and hurt like hell? All of me really isn’t worth all of that.”
With her hands, she replied, “Yes, you are.”
There was nothing I could say.
“It’s how I work,” she continued. “I give you today. No forevers.”
It took me a while to think of a response. “Thank you. And…” I glanced at her neck and coughed. “If you want all of me, I admit, I’ve been holding back on the kink. Trying, anyway. Would you want—”
“Yes.”
She’d never interrupted me before. It made me laugh… in part out of relief. I’d been worried that I was getting into another doomed-to-fail Linda situation, even though Grey’s temperament was on the opposite pole. But she’d said what she wanted, she’d interrupted me to say it, and she’d clearly put more thought into it than I had. I didn’t understand what she saw in me, but…
“Tell me three things you won’t do,” I said. She cocked her head. “Humor me. No matter how much I want to do them. Three things.”
She thought about it. With her voice: “Won’t be a man. Won’t use my work gear. Won’t…” she hesitated. “Won’t top you.”
“Do you mean running the kinky activity or fucking me in the ass?”
She turned pink, held up two fingers.
Intriguing. I liked women tossing me around; if Grace was interested—
“Why?” she asked with her hands.
“I just needed to know you’d say no to me.” I put my glasses back on and clapped my hands. “You’ve convinced me, Grace. I’m all yours, for now.”
She beamed. “Thank you.”
Such a polite girl. “You’re welcome. What would you like?”
Grey pulled out her car keys. “Bring your music over. Dance.”
So we lugged my CDs over. She wouldn’t let me sort through them either, just stuck a big strip of packing tape across the racks to hold the cases in place, grabbed them wholesale, and shoved them in the backseat. Once they were in her apartment and parked next to her records, we started layering on discs since Grey’s stereo could be programmed in advance. She let me go first, and I chose a geekwave song that not only had plenty of buffer time but a couple measures of tempo setting. It’d make for a short, sappy waltz, but that was okay, perfect even. I pressed play and went to join her at the center of the room. She was even taller than me than Linda had been, but at least it wasn’t all legs, and her face when I pulled her to me was gold.
“No more suspension bridge,” I said as the audience started chanting “love.” “Dance close with me, kinky girl.”
Back in college, I’d tangoed with Linda, but we’d been competing, focused on perfection—work, not play. It was a different ballgame dancing with Grey’s right hip inside and above mine, leading her through movement and pressure, feeling her bend and give to it while the band sang about human weakness and small cherished things. Grey’s stereo clicked over to the next one—country, of all things, something in 4/4 time about secret love, but we winged it fine, and then it was back to waltz, whirling to beautiful ephemerality and airplanes over the sea, and oh, I had missed this.
We danced to techno and opera and disco and rock’n’roll, fast and slow, apart and together, open and closed. I danced harder than I had since college, and Grey danced harder than she ever had in her life. We broke sweats, and our breaths got short, and I shoved her against a wall and we didn’t stop.
Nobody could stop us.
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Date: 2021-02-11 06:25 pm (UTC)We bodily know how to waltz. Our mom taught us when we were a wee child, so little that she had to waltz while carrying us, but it's a treasured memory. I like the way Grace and Bob figured out their relationship using something that can be super sensual and beautiful.
Also, the three limits thing is a great idea. Seriously, it's amazing.
I'm curious. I now know what Bob's name is short for, but what's Su's full name?
I can relate to cramming while drinking copious amounts of caffeine.
-Meadow
no subject
Date: 2021-02-13 03:15 am (UTC)People seem to think of limits as hindrances, but really, I think they're often beautiful, lovable things. It's our limits that make us human!