Long and Dirty Night

by Celia Styles

  “No, no, really, I will wait until I can get out by myself. I don’t want to be any trouble.” He shook his head, sitting down on the couch and shaking off his jacket.

  “Come on, eat something. The last thing I want is you getting ill while you’re here.” I snapped, walking through to the kitchen. The urge to protect him and look after him was overwhelming; white saviour complex, they’d have called it in a psychology paper. My brain was conflicted; I didn’t want him to stay, but I didn’t want him to leave, either. Pulling out some bread, I made us a round of bacon sandwiches, serving them on separate plates.

  “Sorry it’s not any of your burrito-taco-diarrhea food,” I said as I handed him his food.

  He looked at me as I walked round the couch, eyebrows raised. “I know what a bacon sandwich is, David.” His English was surprisingly good for an illegal immigrant. It was time to revise my assumptions, I supposed.

  I shrugged grumpily, taking a large bite of my sandwich. “Whatever. Just eat.”

  After he was done eating, I showed him to the bathroom and insisted that he bathe. I didn’t want a filthy immigrant, however good-looking, living in such close quarters with me, for however short a while.

  He stepped out of the shower with just a towel around his waist, and I checked out his abs rather shamelessly. Boy, he had a delicious body.

  Delicious body or not, I didn’t sleep as restfully that night as I usually did, my brain thrumming with the knowledge that an illegally gorgeous (and illegal) stranger was sleeping under my roof. I woke up to go check on him at least three times, afraid he would make off with some of my stuff. But I found him peacefully asleep every time. He didn’t even register that someone was shuffling around him.

  It amazed me that he trusted a complete stranger in a foreign country enough to just go to sleep in his house.

  The next two days went by in a strange, quiet sort of domesticity. I’d come down the stairs in the morning to find him leafing through my books, an English –Spanish dictionary next to him as he ploughed through Stephen King and Ray Bradbury and all the other American classics I had on my bookshelf. I didn’t like people touching my books, and illegal Mexican immigrants definitely didn’t feature in my list of ideal book borrowers, but I knew already that it was beyond me to deny him anything.

  When his third morning came, he didn’t bring up the possibility of leaving and neither did I. I would go out to work in the morning, and he would clean the house and read during the day. We would talk about my books when I got home, and I would cook us up a meal of something delicious and unhealthy

  We gradually, carefully, began to open up to each other, one little secret at a time. He had come to America on a whim, because he didn’t want to be stuck in his small rural Mexican town any longer. I told him about my parents and how they had died in a subway accident, my brother and how he had gone hiking to Europe and never came back.

  He was extremely intelligent, and followed arguments easily. Thanks to his stay with me, his accent was increasingly losing its Mexican touch and sounding more, well, American. Unwittingly, I started picking up colloquialisms in Spanish I had never heard before. I could feel myself warming up to him, our conversations flowing easily. Staying up late nights talking to him had become the new normal routine for me, and I found myself living my days for those long, warm evenings.

  Around a month into our acquaintance, we got to discussing US immigration policy, and all the things that I’d been tacitly taught over the years- that I should see these people as the enemy, and not as human beings- started to dissolve. It was impossible not to feel guilty about all the people like Gabriel who’d come over here not to cause trouble but to find a new start, the people I’d coldly turned away or cruelly thrown out. My worldview was shifting, inch by inch, and it was a liberating experience.

  My unabashed physical attraction for him had, unbeknownst to me, given way to an emotional connect, and I forgot what it had been like to have a house without him in it. Cheesy though it sounded even to my own mind, I couldn’t imagine living without him. He had proved every single stereotype about his people wrong.

  Taken by Two Tango Dancers

  By Celia Styles

  Chapter 1

  “Roni!”

  “Hmm?” Roni looked up from her computer to find three of her friends—and co-workers—crowding the entrance to her cubicle. She pulled her earbuds out of her ears and stared at them. “What?”

  Jane laughed. “We’ve been trying to get your attention for five minutes! What are you so engrossed in?”

  “It’s YouTube,” Callie, one of the other girls, said. “She’s watching those dance videos again.”

  “You’re obsessed,” Sue—not only her co-worker, but her roommate—said.

  “I’ll admit that,” Roni said, her gaze moving back to the computer screen. “Who wouldn’t be? The tango…it’s so elegant, so beautiful. And Nicolás is so—”

  “Oh, God, stop her now,” Sue said. “If you don’t, she’ll go on about his virtues for the rest of the day.”

  The others laughed, but Roni just shook her head.

  “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “We’re missing lunch is what we’re missing,” Callie said, tossing Roni’s bag at her. “Come on, let’s get out of here before one of the supervisors begins to think we’re volunteering to work through lunch.”

  Roni reluctantly logged out of the computer and followed, slipping her bag over her shoulder. She tried to pay attention to the conversation going on around her—something about the new head of personnel—but her thoughts were still firmly wrapped around Nicolás Aguirre. He was…she had never seen a man who was more beautiful, but so masculine…She came across him quite by accident. She took a dance class in college—just as an attempt to fulfill her physical education requirements without having to run—and she was horrible. They learned everything from ballet to tap to the mashed potato. Roni hated the class and was glad when it ended.

  But there was one dance that just seemed to speak to her soul.

  The tango.

  The instructor brought her husband in one afternoon and they danced the tango in an attempt to inspire the students. Most of the other students spent the five minutes it took them to perform checking their email or working on assignments for other classes. But Roni was fascinated. She couldn’t take her eyes off of them.

  It was so beautiful, the way their bodies worked in perfect sync with one another. And the way he touched her, his hand resting lightly on her back, then sliding over her abdomen…it was like watching two lovers indulging in an erotic display of foreplay. By the time it was over, Roni was head over heels in love with the dance.

  Ever since, it’d been her secret indulgence. She searched the internet almost daily for videos of couples dancing the tango. That’s how she found Nicolás…she just stumbled onto one of his competition videos one day and she was hooked.

  Nicolás Aguirre was one of the world’s premiere tango dancers. Together with his many female partners, he’d won tango competitions all over the world. His movements were so full of grace and the way he responded to his partners—the closeness of their bodies, the suggestion of intimacy—inspired the most intense thoughts...

  Sue teased her for her fascination. But she only knew half of it.

  Nicolás had a studio downtown. Roni looked it up and she was shocked to realize he lived in San Antonio when he wasn’t flying off to Buenos Aires or Italy to compete. She went there sometimes and sat outside in her car, watching him through the huge windows that comprised the front wall of the studio, watching as he tried to teach housewives and executives the beauty of the tango as well as other Latin and ballroom dances.

  None of those people could ever really appreciate the true art of the dance.

  As she watched, Roni would often imagine what it would be like to dance in his arms. How amazing it would be to feel his touch, to be that close, to move with such elegance. But then she’d com
e back down to Earth when she remembered that she could hardly walk across a room without tripping over her own feet.

  “We’re here,” Callie said, grabbing Roni’s hand to drag her out of the car.

  Roni looked up at the restaurant and laughed.

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s your favorite.”

  Sue slipped her hand through Roni’s arm. Callie took her other arm and Jane took hers. Together, the four of them marched up to the front of the Dairy Queen, laughing like a group of teenagers instead of the twenty-something computer system analysts they were.

  “How can you not love a BeltBuster?” Roni asked Callie as she picked at the limp salad she’d ordered.

  “Oh, I love cheeseburgers. But cheeseburgers don’t love me.”

  “It’s my birthday…calories don’t matter today.”

  “For you.” Callie picked up one of Sue’s fries and threw it across the table at Roni. “For people like you who could eat like this every day and never gain an ounce, it’s fine. For me…it would take me a month to work off all those calories.”

  “Yes, but wouldn’t it be worth it?”

  Roni took a big bite of her burger and Callie cringed. Then she reached over and stole a handful of Roni’s fries.

  “Good girl,” Sue said, adding a few of her own to the pile.

  “So, how does it feel to be twenty-five?” Jane asked.

  Roni groaned. “I don’t feel a minute over sixteen.”

  “You don’t act it, either,” Sue said.

  “It would be sad to be too responsible. Then we’d be our parents.”

  They all groaned. And then fell into a gale of giggles again.

  As they were finishing their meal a few minutes later, one of the employees brought over four small Blizzards. Roni clapped her hands, eager to dig right in. Jane kind of looked at hers like it was an alien she didn’t understand while Sue and Callie looked at theirs with longing.

  “What flavor is it?” Jane asked.

  “Birthday cake, of course!”

  They all laughed again, causing a couple a few booths away to get up and move. Roni pressed a finger to her lips, indicating the couple with a movement of her elbow.

  “I guess we should try to act a little closer to our ages. Otherwise, we might get ourselves tossed out of here.”

  They grabbed their desserts and stumbled out the doors, still laughing for reasons they probably couldn’t quite define except that they were happy. What was there to not be happy about? They were young, healthy, and single. The world was theirs for the taking.

  Sue blasted the radio on the way back to the office, rocking the car with songs by everyone from Bruno Mars to The Weekend to Taylor Swift. And, the sad thing was, they knew every word of every song.

  Roni was exhausted by the time she was back behind her desk, a dozen emails waiting for her immediate attention. Jane dropped a birthday card on the corner of her desk and Callie slipped a small box into her hand before she rushed off to get back to her own cubicle. Roni didn’t even have a chance to thank them for the gifts—an Amazon gift card and a new cover for her cellphone—but they knew her well enough, a funny email was more than enough.

  She got a call from her mom almost the moment she walked through the doors of her apartment, Sue right behind her. They talked for a while, mostly about her brother’s inability to grow up and get a job. Her mother had been set to retire from her job as a high school principal two years ago. But then her dad died suddenly of a heart attack and Sean, Roni’s brother, decided to have a midlife crisis at the age of twenty-two. Roni did what she could, sending money to her mother every month, but it never seemed like enough.

  “Love you, Veronica,” her mother said. “Go out and have some fun tonight. It’s not every day you turn twenty-five.”

  An image of Nicolás crossed Roni’s mind. That would be her idea of having a little fun. Dance lessons…his arms around her. But, even if she had the coordination, the cost of the lessons was more than she could afford. It was never going to happen.

  But she couldn’t tell her mother that.

  “I will, Mom,” she said. “I’m sure there’s some club just waiting for Sue and me to come and stir up a little trouble.”

  As Roni hung up, she caught Sue watching her from their small, galley kitchen, chopping onions for whatever concoction she was making for dinner.

  “She worries.”

  Sue nodded. “She wants to tell you to stop sending all that money, but she relies on it too much.”

  Roni dropped into a chair and kicked her shoes off. “Well, I had a good time at lunch, so I wasn’t really lying. I just wasn’t completely honest.”

  “Your birthday isn’t over. I’m making that soup you love so much for dinner.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to. And I have a gift for you. It’s over there in my bag.”

  Roni glanced at her. “Now, you really didn’t have to do that. Putting up with me every day is gift enough.”

  “You’re telling me. If you leave your shoes in the middle of the living room again—I nearly broke my ankle trying to get a glass of water last night.”

  “Sorry.”

  Sue shrugged. “It’s the white envelope on top.”

  Roni got up, making a show of picking up her shoes and tossing them into the corner as she did. Then she pushed the flap back on Sue’s purse and spotted the envelope immediately. She assumed it was another birthday card, another gift card tucked inside, but then she saw the logo on the top left corner of the envelope.

  “Oh, no, you couldn’t have!”

  Sue was watching her, a satisfied smile on her lips. “I knew you would never do it for yourself.”

  “But it’s so expensive.”

  “I make good money.”

  Roni opened the envelope and stared at the certificate inside. His name was written across the top, tucked into the logo of his dance studio.

  Nicolás Aguirre.

  “It’s enough for a week of private lessons,” Sue said. “I would have gotten you more than that, but they wouldn’t do it. Something about Nicolás not wishing to waste his time on those he doesn’t feel meets his requirements.”

  “You met him?”

  “His assistant.”

  Tears filled Roni’s eyes. It was the most thoughtful gift anyone had ever given her. She rushed into the kitchen and threw her arms around Sue.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!”

  Seduced by Two Magicians

  By Celia Styles

  I fluffed my hair in the mirror one last time, and dabbed at my lipstick with my ring finger; well, I might be hitting the town without my fiancé tonight, but at least I looked damned good.

  My heart did a little, unhappy leap when I remembered that Victor and I wouldn’t be spending our big, make-or-break trip together; that said, it could hardly come as a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention over the last few weeks.

  Victor and I had been together for two and a half years when he’d proposed. And it had been as romantic and perfect you could hope for; after a quiet dinner, on a bridge, in Paris, where he’d swept me away for a short surprise break last year. And of course I said ‘yes’; this was a guy who I’d been in love with for years. There was no way I was going to turn down the chance to make him mine for life.

  And then came the commitment phobia. I guess that a lot of people would argue that, since Vic proposed to me, he had quite the opposite of commitment phobia; to those people, I say it’s amazing what the prospect of actually marrying your girlfriend will do to a man. And it wasn’t as if he’d hired a bunch of prostitutes and fucked them in my living room (though sometimes I wish he had, just because at least then it would have made a good story). No, it was nothing as interesting as that. But Victor started flirting with my friends whenever they came over, spending more money that he specifically had on drink and pot, and generally doing all the low-level shitty thin
gs that dumb fiancés who haven’t thought about how their future wives might feel about all this have been known to do. And, though before I had consoled myself with the knowledge that I could get the hell out whenever I wanted with no real kickback, it was different now. I had officially said yes to spending the rest of my life with this.

  There was a nagging little voice in the corner of my mind that told me I shouldn’t have said yes, but that voice became pretty insistent by the time I picked up Vic’s phone to answer it and heard an unfamiliar woman on the other end. That in itself wouldn’t have been so bad, but the look on his face when I went to pass on the message was enough to tell me that he felt guilty, even if he hadn’t actually done anything yet. Her name was India and he had met her through his work as a music promoter; she was a singer-songwriter, he was the skeevy older man who kept his number on his phone a little too long.

  I’m sure you can picture what came next for yourself; screaming, yelling, shouting, bawling. There was a falling out. There might have been some storming-off and some slamming of doors (guilty as charged). But it wasn’t long till Vic had convinced me to let him take me on an all-expenses paid trip to Atlantic City, courtesy of the label he was working for. He got to poke around a few new bands, I got to soak up the sun, sex, and gambling of this knockoff Las Vegas. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the best reason to give the relationship one last parting shot, but hey, it was a holiday. So I booked the time off work and hopped on a plane, letting Vic book up an expensive hotel on the label and ordering champagne through room service as soon as we walked through the door.

  Then, of course, the reality of actually trying to pull off a make-or-break holiday set in. Within minutes, Vic was out the door and on the phone while I sipped on the cheap champagne, wondering if we would get to have make-up sex on the hotel bed. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to or not, but felt like I probably should.

  Then, of course, Vic came wandering back in, shoving his phone to the bottom of his pocket, with that look of “oops-I-did-something-bad-ask-me-so-I-don’t-have-to-bring-it-up” I’d seen only a few days before.