by Tonya Plank
Every time I came home over the next few days it was there, somewhere on my street, parked without a permit. The windows were dim and it was always nighttime when I saw it, so I could never see if anyone was inside.
I pointed it out to Sasha one night as he picked me up. He looked at it in his rearview mirror as we pulled away.
“It’s been there for almost a week, parked without a permit on different parts of the block. One time, just as parking enforcement pulled up to it, its lights came on and it pulled away,” I said.
He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. “People park illegally here all the time. Especially in Hollywood. And this is kind of weirdo central.”
“Yeah, but don’t you think it’s odd someone was inside just when parking enforcement pulled up?”
He shook his head again. “Probably just a coincidence, that one time.”
He looked completely unfazed. He was right. This was Hollywood and I was getting all spooked over nothing. I didn’t bother to tell him I suspected Cheryl. That was just a little too paranoid.
“I mean, keep an eye on it. It’s always good to be aware,” Sasha said. “But I’m sure it’s just someone who lives around here who doesn’t yet have a permit and is trying to get away with it. Don’t worry, sweet.” He shot me that boyish smile that always melted me, and caressed my knee between gear shifts.
Mmmm, made me all gooey inside.
And his words made perfect sense. I’d do what he said—keep aware without freaking out.
***
Training was going well. I was progressing much more rapidly now that I was dancing full time. With my ballet training, rumba was by far my best dance. And samba ended up being my most challenging. I guess that should have been no surprise as it had started out my hardest—and was the one in which I received my lovely Swan Lake Samba Girl moniker from Bronislava. It was just so hard to rotate my hips and pelvis so fully so quickly. I was so straight from the waist down from so much ballet. I really had to loosen up my lower body. I was finally able to conquer the movement and technique, but getting the speed together with the precision just flummoxed me.
The fact that I couldn’t move anywhere near as fast as Sasha meant we weren’t entirely in sync. It meant that on the beautifully sexy shadow samba rolls I so loved, where his arms were wrapped around mine from behind, either our footwork was off and I was stepping on him or our hip rotations were off and I was bumping my butt into his pelvis. Often both. And it meant I couldn’t withstand his strength as well as I’d learned to in the other dances. So it continued to look like he was pushing me around the dance floor. At least it was only in one dance now. So we actually had made loads of progress.
“No couple is perfect in every dance,” Greta assured us. “That doesn’t mean you can’t win the overall Latin if you are perfect—or near perfect since we know there’s no such thing as perfect—in the others.” She gave me a knowing smile on the “perfect” comment.
But I was determined to nail samba. To make it as good as the rest. I made that clear to Greta. And she worked with me. We decided that making my movements smaller was one way to solve my speed problems. We also simplified the footwork, since Greta made clear that excellent technique on basic movement was far better than fancy footwork that the dancer just couldn’t execute properly. The latter would make me stand out like the proverbial sore thumb.
“You know the Olympic figure skater who tries the high jumps with several rotations and then falls is never the one who wins,” she said.
We also reworked some of the movement so it would look better on my body. She tried different things with me and found that I looked pretty decent doing a stretch upward with my long limbs and straight body. We decided that could be substituted for the Rio-like hip rolls she’d choreographed in places. They weren’t part of ballroom samba anyway, but were some authentic Brazilian flavoring she’d decided to add. As much as I loved them and their authenticity, I decided she was right and maybe they just weren’t me. It was a lot easier to work things like this out with Sasha gone. He learned steps so blasted quickly, it was only a matter of showing him once what we changed.
Not that he did everything we wanted without argument. He liked the crazy-fast Rio hip rolls, and we agreed that with his speed and ability and just mad-hot sexiness, they looked too damn good on him to take out. So we thought and tried different things and played around with it.
“What if I still do the stretch, while he still does the rolls, and as he goes faster and faster he gets closer to the ground, like a real samba dancer, all the time gazing up at me stretching up to the sky? We’d still be dancing as partners, connecting with each other’s movement, without doing the same step in tandem. And it would maybe look like his looking up at me while madly shaking his pelvis is expressing his feeling of being awestruck by my statuesque beauty.” I laughed and waved my arm about, making it clear the statuesque beauty thing was a joke.
They both looked deep in thought for a moment, then pronounced simultaneously, “I love it!”
“Let’s see it,” Greta said.
We did it, everything working exactly as I’d planned.
“Yes, yes, yes!” she declared, throwing her arms up dramatically. “The dance now shows off both of your strengths, minimizes weaknesses, and tells a sassy little story to boot,” she said with a firm nod that made her platinum bob bounce. “Rory, I’m so proud of you for coming up with that. That’s quite good. Maybe someday you’ll have a career as a choreographer!”
I laughed. I didn’t know about that, but it was a whole different world learning how to express myself artistically, using my creativity to make something beautiful and meaningful to an audience.
Together, Greta and I found several more spots in the routine where we could make tweaks that simultaneously hid my flaws and made both my body and our partnership look more special and unique. I was beginning to love this.
“I can’t believe it but that was near perfection. It looks absolutely splendid, you two,” Greta enthused after we performed the whole dance for her.
I couldn’t believe I’d managed to do it without flubs. I was euphoric. We went on to the jive—the last of our dances—because we needed work on that as well, albeit not as much.
But the second Greta was out the door, I was so excited about having a samba that actually looked good on me and that I actually could do, and do well, I asked Sasha to practice it a few more times. “I want it to stick so much in my muscle memory it’s impossible to get out of there,” I said.
But more, I just wanted to dance my favorite crazy-mad dance with my favorite crazy-mad beat with my absolute favorite crazy madman over and over. I was Swan Lake Samba Girl—not Bronislava’s dorky one, but the one who, thanks to the ten-time world champion, was somehow able to look both like a balletic swan and a real sambista as I danced with the most serious world contender, and the man of my fantasies. My life was now officially surreal.
And then my confidence had to get the better of me. We were doing my favorite step—the samba rolls with him standing behind me like a shadow, and, instead of keeping the hip action smaller like we’d practiced, I got too excited and made mine a tad too large. Resulting in my rear smacking straight into his groin. I could feel his arm that was holding mine briefly tense.
“Ooooh, I hurt you,” I said trying to turn around.
“I am leading smaller steps now. We agreed—? Let’s just finish. We are almost done,” he said in his commanding tone.
We finished after our series of rolling-outs, when I rolled out and back into him several times in a row. We were supposed to end with me curled in toward him in a sexy little hug. We ended up right, upper body-wise, but for some reason, probably because I was tired and getting out of it by that point, I bent my knee. This resulted in another of my body parts ending up in his groin—this time my bent knee.
“You trying to tell me something?” he said, untangling himself from me.
“I’m s
o sorry. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know…”
His body straightened. The pain seemed to be gone. But he did not look very happy. “Seriously, that was twice, at once.” He began walking away. Was he really mad, or pretending?
“Sasha!” I called out behind him. “I didn’t mean it! Either time. I was just…letting excitement get the better of me.” I would have laughed if I wasn’t worried he was seriously annoyed.
I reached around, his body still turned away from me, grabbed his hand, and whipped him around, fast, like he would me during a rumba routine. He spun around lightning fast, right into me, his groin ending up smacking straight into my hip bone.
“I don’t know…honestly—” I was a bit flabbergasted at myself that this could happen three times in a row.
“See, this is why you cannot ever lead. You will kill me,” he said, all serious.
“No. It’s not that I can never ever be a leader. Not in any circumstance whatsoever,” I said, shaking my head.
“Okay, fine then. You want to lead so badly? You’re the leader,” he said the last sentence slowly. Tantalizingly slowly.
Liquid heat boiled in my belly and made my sex clench. I giggled nervously. We weren’t talking about ballroom anymore. “What do you want me to do?”
“As I said, R-r-rory, you’re the leader.”
Hmmm, I guess that meant…do whatever I wanted. Take whatever I wanted. Okay, I could do this! I placed my hand on the back of his head and pulled it down toward me, forcing his lips to press into mine. After several long, deliciously deep kisses, I transferred my lips to his cheekbone then moved on, pressing my lips to each bone of his marvelously sculptured face. At the same time, I ran my fingertips from his shoulders, along down his front side, ending at his waistline, which I fingered the same way he’d fingered the tops of my tights on his ballroom floor not all that long ago. I knew now exactly what I wanted. I mean, from his body. More than anything else.
“I can make it all better,” I whispered in my sexiest possible voice. He responded with a strong exhale, heavy with expectation. I bent my knees and continued running my hands along the front of his shirt, unbuttoning it as I went along. I traced my tongue from his clavicle down his torso to his abdomen. I opened his shirt all the way and took his pants down. He was fully erect.
He was so beautiful. But that was an understatement, of course. I licked the tip while tracing my fingernails lightly above, along his lower abdomen. He rocked his head back and breathed deeply. I took more but not all of him inside my mouth, licking and sucking lightly.
I took my mouth away just long enough to make sure he missed me, then returned my lips to the shaft, swirling my tongue around to trace his scrotum. I took my mouth away completely again and, before going back to his head, grabbed his flexed ass and kneaded my fingers into his taut muscles. I pulled him toward me as I put my mouth around his head, then took as much of him inside me as I could. He began moaning, a deep guttural groan. I pulled my mouth away and tore my leotard down to my waist. I rubbed his penis over my face and neck, then lifted myself up and rubbed it down my chest, lingering over my pebble-hard nipples.
I loved this man. I wanted him all over me. On every millimeter of my entire body. I pushed my breasts together and stroked his penis, using the insides of my breasts, something I’d never ever done before, since I’d always been so self-conscious about my size.
He opened his eyes, looked down at me and smiled. He whispered my name and began rocking his hips, faster and faster. I took him in my mouth again, sucking and licking, until his body twitched with ecstasy and we both collapsed on the floor.
“Definitely worth the pain,” he whispered after we’d both recovered, reaching over and stroking my lips with his thumb.
I lay with him while he continued catching his breath. I looked down at myself. My leotard was halfway down. Everything else was on. His pants were at his ankles and his shirt torn open. I rocked myself up and took my shoes off, then leotard and tights. I then buckled my feet back into my shoes.
“What are you doing?” He laughed.
I untied his shoes and took his pants off. “Get up, we need to finish with rumba.”
“We need to dance now?”
“Absolutely,” I said, trying to come up with something on the spot, my main motivation being simply to dance with him naked. “It’s our best dance, and we need to end the night feeling as positive as possible after the, you know, foibles.” Okay, pretty good, I thought.
“That’s just an excuse to dance naked.” He laughed, sitting up and taking his shirt off. “We are both naked this time?”
I nodded, a vixenish grin on my lips.
This time, with us both naked, it was nearly impossible to finish the dance. Well, not nearly. It was impossible. He put on this really sexy, deep-voiced version of Bésame Mucho. He slowed the beat to half time so we’d have additional time on some of our tricks if we so needed. The slow-motion rhythm and singing also made the song sexier. On the first backbend, I felt his index finger lightly tracing my belly button. It tickled and I giggled and pulled myself up enough to lightly slap his hand. We were already off our super-slow beat.
Next he pulled me toward him with extra strength he hadn’t used in some time. But this time he didn’t mean to overpower me in the dance so much as he meant to pull my body into his with enough gusto that my nipples and my pelvic bone would engage with his. This was also the trick where I’d kneed him before, and I hadn’t gotten a chance to begin my leg lift before my body crashed into his. So he’d now effectively protected his groin. Of course his full erection would have made the move quite impossible any other way, anyway.
As I began to lift my leg up along his backside, brushing his thigh on the way, I felt my sex wet his hip. His erection was practically plowing into my abdomen. I could feel him pulsating. I fully extended my leg behind him and began to arch my back, curving myself backward toward the floor. He lowered me into our favorite fancy, hot kick/dip trick. As my fingertips graced the floor when I was down as far as I could go, the music stopped. We were so behind the beat it wasn’t funny.
“Screw it,” we said simultaneously as he pulled me upright and lifted me up onto him, abandoning the routine. I straddled him and wrapped both legs around his back, my sex now creating a gooey mess on his stomach as he carried me up the winding staircase.
And so it became our custom to end our practice with samba, followed by naked rumba, which we never finished.
***
Things were going wonderfully well. We were looking like a true partnership more and more, our bodies fitting together so perfectly like two proverbial puzzle pieces. Our artistry together was working well though we were not the same type of dancer at all. We were basically the hot, wicked-fast Latin man, and the soft, lithe ballerina. We were coming into our own and, with Greta, had made our partnership truly unique. Indeed, I began to feel that if we were both balletic types we’d be too soft and light for Latin, and if we were both lightning-fast booty-shakers we’d have that robots-on-speed look I’d seen too often on ballroom dancers. We worked because of our different strengths, not in spite of them. And once we realized this, it was as if no one could stop us. Far from fighting each other, our passion and love for each other clearly showed. That’s what Greta said in our coachings. And one evening when we had a little party at Sasha’s for all of our close friends to watch and give us their honest thoughts—a lovely little group that included Samantha, Rajiv, Kendra, Josie, Paulina, Mitsi, Pepe, all the mambo team members, and even Bronislava—everyone echoed Greta’s sentiments. Not that I even needed people to tell me about the passion thing, though. There was no way it wasn’t there for everyone to see.
***
It was only two nights after the party that it happened. I was walking home from Bronislava’s class. I was thinking of Cheryl because Paulina had just said in class, “If only the biatch consortium could see you now! Ha! I’d really like to see the looks on those fa
ces.”
It was about nine fifteen and dark but very lively on Hollywood Boulevard. Then I rounded the corner to my quieter, more secluded street, and immediately saw it.
The black sedan was back. It had been gone for a good two weeks. Even after Sasha had convinced me it was nothing, my heart still dropped to my stomach when I first spotted it. This time it was parked right in front of my building. Again, there was no parking permit hanging from its rearview mirror. Again, the driver was tempting fate and hadn’t learned his lesson that the parking cops were out all the frigging time.
Had Cheryl somehow seen me or gotten word of our party, I immediately wondered? No, don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. But why didn’t the person just get a permit if they were legitimately here? Or why didn’t they just break down and park in a paid structure? It cost money but was a lot cheaper than a parking ticket.
I stopped when I approached the building next to mine. The car’s lights were off and the windows were tinted, but if I looked hard I could probably make out a figure. I opened my eyes as wide as I could and strained to see if someone was in the car. It was hard to tell a body apart from the high black seats in all the darkness. Oh, where were those parking cops? If they pulled up, we’d know.
Suddenly an eerie feeling crept over me. I wasn’t far from Hollywood Boulevard but it became dead silent. It seemed like the night got blacker in that one instant. I remembered how Jamar had described how he felt the night he was arrested, when he was afraid of Fast’s people coming to get him. But the car he encountered was only a police car. How I wished the police would drive by right about now. Just for my own peace of mind.