by Tonya Plank
I didn’t tell Rory this, because I’d thought it better just not to mention them at all, keep them far from her mind. But perhaps I should have, so she’d stop worrying. One night, as I pulled up to her apartment to pick her up, she pointed to a black sedan parked in front of her building.
“That car’s been parked there, illegally, for several nights in a row.”
“Illegally?” I asked.
“Yeah, I mean without a permit, which you need to park here after seven. Parking enforcement is so strict here.”
“Probably just someone who doesn’t have the money for a permit and is willing to take a chance,” I said. “People do that all the time here. Until they get that first ticket.”
“Yeah, but it almost did get a ticket. When I was waiting for you to pick me up the other night, I saw one of the parking enforcement Priuses pull up. But just before it reached the sedan, the sedan’s lights came on and its tires screeched and it pulled away. It kind of freaked me out. I hadn’t realized there was anyone inside the car. But then it was there again last night. The windows are so dark. I tried to peek in to see if someone was in there again, but I couldn’t see. You don’t think it’s Cheryl, do you?”
“Rory, no, don’t be ridiculous. She’s happy at her new studio. She has far better things to do than stalk you.”
“But why is it still there even after the police almost gave it a ticket? And don’t you think it’s weird it pulled away right as parking enforcement approached?”
I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders. “People park illegally in L.A. all the time. Especially in Hollywood. Yeah, it’s nonsensical. But this can sometimes be idiot central when it comes to drivers.”
Still, I looked at the car in my rearview mirror as we pulled away. She was right—you couldn’t see a damn thing through those tinted windows.
“You’re right. I’m being paranoid,” she said with a nervous laugh.
“Well, I mean, keep an eye on it. It’s always good to be aware,” I 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.” I shot her my best boyish smile and caressed her knee between gear shifts.
That was the first and last time I’d ever blow off her worries. As I’d later find out, inside that car was not Cheryl, but someone far, far more sinister.
***
Training was going well. Rory was progressing much more rapidly now that she was dancing full-time. With her ballet training, rumba was by far her best dance. And samba ended up being her most challenging, which also made sense since ballet demanded such straightness in the upper body and that dance required the greatest ability to rotate hips and pelvis fully and quickly. We worked hard on her loosening up her lower body. It was happening, but she needed to gain speed and precision now. Still, she was really blowing me away with the progress she was making. I knew she could do it once she put her mind to it, and once she had adequate time.
But the fact that she couldn’t move anywhere near as fast as I could meant we weren’t entirely in sync. It meant that on the beautifully sexy shadow samba rolls we both so loved, where my arms were wrapped around hers from behind, either our footwork was off and she’d step on me repeatedly, or our hip rotations were off and she was bumping her ass into my crotch. Often both happened. Of course her first instinct was to giggle. And of course I was so hyper-serious, my first instinct was to get mad. But I tried hard to lighten up so she wouldn’t be overwhelmed. Yelling and/or seething wasn’t the way to get things done. I knew that now. It was only one dance we weren’t stellar on, I told myself. And the more flubs we made, the more serious she became about getting it right. In other words, we were working together. We were becoming a true partnership. This was a first for me. Not even Micaela and I in our early days worked together so well.
“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.” I knew she was trying to assuage me. She knew me well.
“Nope. We’re going to be the best in all five dances. Every single one of them,” Rory asserted. “I’m going to nail it.”
Greta worked with her on it. They decided that making her movements smaller was one way to solve her speed problems. They 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. True. I, of course, badly wanted the more flavorful footwork but I recognized Greta was right. We could make things more complicated as Rory’s strengths grew.
We also reworked some of the movement so it would look better on Rory’s body. Greta was a genius at this. After trying different things with Rory, we decided she looked really beautiful doing a stretch upward with her long limbs and straight body. So, we substituted that for the Rio-esque hip rolls she’d choreographed. Those weren’t part of ballroom samba anyway, but were some authentic Brazilian flavoring she’d decided to add. As much as Rory loved them and their cultural authenticity, she decided Greta was right and maybe they just weren’t her. I was fine with it. I just wanted Rory to look and feel her best—the best route to success, I now knew.
But damn, I did like those crazy-fast Rio hip rolls. And I could execute them well.
“What if I do the stretch, while he 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?” Rory suggested, reading my mind. “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.” She cracked up and waved her arm about, making it clear the statuesque beauty thing was a joke.
But I thought about her suggestion. It actually made damn good sense. I looked at Greta. She had the same thought. “I love it!” we said simultaneously.
“Let’s see it,” Greta said.
We did it, everything working it out exactly as Rory had planned.
“Yes, yes, yes!” Greta declared, throwing her arms up. “The dance now shows off both of your strengths, minimizes weaknesses, and tells a sassy little story to boot,” she hooted. “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!”
Rory laughed, but I had the same thought. It was amazing that she came up with that, when she was still pretty much a novice. She really could be a choreographer someday. Yeah, my girl had serious talents.
While I was at the studio, she and Greta worked together to make more tweaks that simultaneously hid Rory’s flaws and made both her body and our partnership look more special and unique. Every day when I got home, they’d teach me the new additions and alterations. I truly thought they were genius.
“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.
Rory had done the routine without any flubs. She was nothing short of euphoric, her euphoria caused by surprise. I wasn’t at all surprised. I knew all along she could do it.
After Greta left for the evening, Rory wanted to practice our samba again. “I want it to stick so much in my muscle memory it’s impossible to get it out of there,” she said. “And, okay, I just want to dance my favorite crazy-mad dance with my favorite crazy-mad beat with my absolute favorite crazy madman over and over! Seriously, Sasha, I’m proud of myself.”
“Yeah, well don’t let it go to your head,” I joked, shooting her my sly, lopsided smile.
So we went at it again. Of course I shouldn’t have said the thing about letting it go to her head because her confidence did kind of get the better of her. We were doing her favorite step—the samba rolls with me
standing behind her like a shadow, and, instead of keeping the hip action smaller like we’d practiced, she got too excited and made hers a tad too large. Resulting in her ass smacking straight into my groin. A sharp pain shot through my balls, and I couldn’t help but tense, very briefly.
“Ooooh, I hurt you,” she said, trying to turn around.
“I am leading smaller steps now. We agreed—? Let’s just finish. We are almost done,” I said, trying to ignore the discomfort and not get worked up over a now-unusual flub.
We resumed, doing our series of rolling-outs, when she rolled out and back into me several times in a row. We were supposed to end with her curled in toward me in a sexy little hug. We ended up right, upper body-wise, but for some reason, probably because it was past our regular practice time and we were both getting tired, she bent her knee. This resulted in another of her lovely body parts ending up in my groin. And that knee, being more bony, was more painful than her ass.
“You trying to tell me something?” I said, untangling myself from her.
“I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened. I d-don’t know…” she stuttered.
I straightened up, the pain gone. We were done practicing for the night. We’d had a good day and now it was time to end it before things got bad. Now was time for fun, in other words. I tried to make myself look as annoyed as possible. “Seriously, that was twice, at once.” I started to walk away, pretending to be annoyed.
“Sasha!” she called out behind me. “I didn’t mean it! Either time. I was just…letting excitement get the better of me.”
I maintained the charade, refusing to turn back. She ran up behind me, reached around me, grabbed my hand, and whipped me around, fast, exactly like I would her during a rumba routine. Giving me a taste of my own medicine, I supposed. I spun around lightning fast, right into her, my defeated groin ending up smacking straight into her hip bone.
“I don’t know…honestly—oh my God, I don’t know how that happened three—”
“See, this is why you cannot ever lead. You will kill me,” I said.
“No. No. It’s not that I can never, ever be a leader. Not in any circumstance whatsoever,” she insisted, shaking her head.
“Okay fine, then. You want to lead so badly? You’re the leader.” I said the last sentence slowly. Tantalizingly slowly. She wanted so badly to be a leader, both on the floor and in bed. Let her try. I could let her. I could follow.
She giggled nervously, knowing full well we weren’t talking about ballroom anymore. “What do you want me to do?”
“As I said, R-r-rory, you’re the leader.” The rolling r’s were obviously intentional.
She looked around, thinking, her cheeks reddening by the second, her eyes widening, her thoughts growing wild. “Okay!” she squealed, placing her hand on the back of my head and pulling it down toward her beautiful face, forcing my lips to press into hers.
After several long, deliciously deep kisses, she transferred her lips to my cheekbone then moved on, tracing kisses to my jawline, my neck, as she ran her fingertips from my shoulders, along down my front side, ending at my waistline, which she fingered the same way I’d fingered the tops of her tights on my ballroom floor not all that long ago. She knew exactly what she wanted from my body.
“I can make it all better,” she whispered, her voice drenched with sex, which made my cock pulse.
I responded with a strong exhale, heavy with expectation. She bent her knees and continued running her hands along the front of my shirt, unbuttoning it as she went along. She traced her tongue from my clavicle down my torso to my navel. She opened my shirt all the way and took my pants down, finally freeing my now rock-hard cock. She licked the tip and traced her fingernails around my hips. Oh my God. I rocked my head back and just breathed as she wrapped those delicious lips around my shaft and took nearly all of me inside her mouth.
Then in an instant she took her mouth away. What? I waited. One second, two seconds, three. I was just about to explode. Then she returned her beautiful full lips to my shaft, swirling her tongue around to trace my balls. Again she took her mouth away completely, making me almost hurt with want, before returning to my head, grabbing my flexed ass and kneading her fingers into my glute muscles. She pulled me toward her and took all of me inside her. The tip of my dick touched the back of her throat. Fuck, that was so amazing, I was becoming unable to control myself. I moaned a deep, guttural groan.
She pulled her mouth away and tore her leotard down to her waist. She grabbed my cock and rubbed its wet tip over her face and neck, then lifted herself up and rubbed it down her chest, lingering over her heavenly nipples. She pushed her breasts together and stroked me with the insides of her breasts. I knew what this meant. She was so self-conscious about her breast size. For her to use that to make me feel so damn amazing was huge.
I whispered her name and rocked my hips. She took me in her mouth again, sucking and licking, until my body twitched with ecstasy and we both collapsed on the floor.
“Definitely worth the pain,” I whispered after we’d both recovered, reaching over and stroking her lips with my thumb.
After catching her breath, she looked down and laughed. I followed her gaze. We were a sight. Her leotard was halfway down but all her other clothes were on. My pants were at my ankles and my shirt torn open. She rocked herself up and took her shoes off, then the leotard and tights. She then buckled her feet back into her shoes.
“What are you doing?” I laughed.
She untied my shoes and took my pants off. “Get up. We need to finish with our rumba.”
“We need to dance now?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “It’s our best dance, and we need to end the night feeling as positive as possible after the, you know, foibles.”
“That’s just an excuse to dance naked.” I laughed, sitting up and taking my shirt off. “We are both naked this time?”
She nodded, a deliciously wicked grin on her lips that made me start to get hard again.
“Don’t look at me like that if you want to dance,” I ordered, brushing my finger down her lips.
But with us both naked, it was impossible to finish the dance. I turned on an über sexy, throaty version of “Bésame Mucho.” I slowed the beat so we’d have additional time on some of our tricks, if we so needed. On the first backbend, I couldn’t help but trace her navel with my finger. She giggled and pulled herself up enough to lightly slap my hand. We were already off the slow-motion beat.
I pulled her toward me with strength I’d managed to refrain from using for some time now. I didn’t mean to overpower her but to pull her body into mine with enough force that her nipples and her pelvic region would engage with mine. Of course I didn’t pull too hard. It worked perfectly. As she began to lift her leg up along my backside, tickling the back of my thigh with her pointed toe, I felt her beautifully opening sex wet my hip. My hard dick was practically plowing into her abdomen. My entire body was pulsating and I knew she could feel it. She fully extended her leg behind me and began to arch that amazingly flexible back, curving her torso toward the floor, her breasts breathtakingly full. I lowered her into our favorite dip. As her fingertips graced the floor when she was down as far as she could go, the music stopped. We were so behind the beat it was laughable.
“Screw it,” we said simultaneously as I pulled her upright and lifted her up onto me, abandoning the routine. She straddled me and wrapped both legs around my back, her sex now creating a deliciously hot pool on my stomach as I carried her 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 superbly well. Rory kept exclaiming that we were looking like a true partnership more and more, our bodies fitting together so perfectly like two proverbial puzzle pieces. And I agreed with her. For once, I really had a true partner. We weren’t fighting each other or trying to outdo each other. And it was due
to the fact that unlike all my prior partners, Rory was a profoundly different dancer than I was. Together we were the lightning-fast Latin man combined with the soft, lithe, beautiful ballerina. And though I’d first struggled to train Rory to be more like me, thinking that was the only way she’d keep up and we’d win, I was supremely glad she and Greta had made me see that wasn’t the way at all. We worked because of our different strengths, not in spite of them. Our partnership was truly unique.
I hoped the Blackpool judges saw it the same way. But in all honesty, I was so happy with the way we looked together, I dare say I was actually beginning not to care. Far from fighting each other, our passion and our love for each other clearly showed. Greta said so. Everyone who saw us practice in my studio said so. But we didn’t need their validation. We knew it because we felt it.
Chapter Seven
But then, on one seemingly very ordinary evening, our partnership, our very lives, took a huge turn. Rory and I were both at Infectious Rhythm. Her advanced Latin class with Bronislava would end two hours before my last private, so she’d decided to walk home, eat a little something, then either drive up to my place herself or call me if she decided she’d rather me pick her up. We’d decided to play it by ear. Greta had the night off and Rory and I had agreed to take it easy tonight, take a break from practice. So if she felt like it, she could go for a swim or a hot bath or use my gym, or we could just snuggle and watch TV. It was unusually cold for spring in L.A. and she was tired. So I told her if she got home and just wanted to stay in, that would be more than fine with me. After all, we needed breaks from each other once in a while to keep our partnership healthy.
But not this kind of break.
I finished my two lessons and spoke briefly with Alessia, going over my group class schedule for the next month. I wasn’t in a hurry to get home since we didn’t have solid plans. I drove up the Sunset Strip to my favorite pizza place and ordered a pizza. When I got home, Rory wasn’t there. I checked my phone but there were no messages or texts. That was fine, I thought; she’d decided to stay in. Because she was tired, I figured she might have fallen asleep, and decided not to call and wake her.