and your heart was an open book, used to say live and let live
Huh. Well. I have no idea where that fight came from, and I need to figure out a) how tipsy he was and b) if or how it's going to get resolved.
But I seem to have gotten slightly better at writing fluff.
Or at least I'm going for quantity over quality.
And... provided that I can make everything work out, this story is almost complete.
45037 / 50000
(90.07%)
Chapter Nine: Oof, I am so incredibly terrible at writing fluff. Possibly because I do not have quite so much fluff of my own to draw on. Possibly also because I’m just terrible at flirting, so I have issues writing it. That would probably make sense, but I’m not positive what’s going to go down, and it just depends on whether I can write what I want to do or not.
Meg watched the Jack and Jill from the door. Only a few more minutes before she would be off-shift and get to join the party, but for now she took people’s money and stamped hands. Luckily there were fewer of them trickling in now - she didn’t have to pay quite as much attention to what was going on at the door, and could pay more attention to the dancers.
She stood in her corner, and felt both a complete confusion and a pull towards the dance floor. No, she had no idea what was going on, but neither had Becky, and she was up there in her shiny silver sequins, dancing away like she had been for years. Meg wanted to be a part of that.
After the Jack and Jill, Meg watched as dancers flew out on the floor, and how the band picked up the music and the energy of the entire party exploded. Even in her remote corner, Meg felt the music, heard the occasional stomps and claps of the dancers on the floor, and could just feel the awe rising from all of the non-dancers hiding in the shadows.
Hopefully the next time that Em came around, she could point out someone who would be willing to teach just a breakdown of the simplest steps. Meg didn’t really want to walk up to random strangers and ask them to dance - that was both against anything she had ever learned about chivalry (wasn’t the boy supposed to do the asking?) and against all her conceptions of what could possibly be right for dancing. Em seemed to have transported them all back in time - Meg had no idea what era this music came from, but it was good, which generally meant it wasn’t from the present day infection of techno pop and changing the voices of everything. It was a live band, they sounded good live, and they clearly knew what they were doing. Peeking at the band, Meg was amazed to see how they were as into the music as the people dancing were, and how the dancers hooted and hollered to the music, and the musicians responded by shifting around the songs a bit, which made the dancers holler more, which made them tweak things just for fun a little more, which seemed to just continue and spin on.
And the dancers - those who knew what they were doing were either spinning in little skirts that flew out to a full 360, or tighter, vintage skirts. It was a spectacular mishmash of colors and shapes and movement, and Meg itched to pull out her sketchbook and start drawing people. There were little poses - a girl’s hand here, flying up and cradling her head, lending her entire body a flirty pause - a guy’s full arm extension here, and the look on his face as his girl spun in an arc too fast to follow, and then pulled her hand out of nowhere with no conceivable look of difficulty.
But her responsibility was the door, at least for another while or so. She backed up into the corner just a little bit more, to try to get a better view of the room while also getting a good view of the door, and bumped into something. She found a stool tucked in the crevice behind her, and pulled it out to sit on. Weird how something like that could hide behind her, but Em had turned down the lights after the Jack and Jill, so everything was still clearly visible but got just a little bit edgier.
Not that the dancing changed overmuch, as far as Meg could tell. But everything just looked a little more intense with the low light, and the music got a little slower, and she looked out on the floor and had to shiver at the beauty of the people dancing in the light that knocked them down from clearly human into shadows, the further away they were.
She watched Becky get pulled back into the dance by one of the guys she had danced with in the competition, and saw Becky introduce him to the other members of her art compatriots when they finished their dance. He escorted Tahlia out onto the floor, helping her to use her hair tie to bustle her fluffy prom dress up to about knee-length rather than floor length, gesturing that otherwise she was going to trip over it. It was a little awkward to see some random stranger tying up her skirts, but there was something to this place that seemed to negate the possible sketchiness of people’s actions. Meg had no idea what was expected, so long as people weren’t visibly hitting on her friends, she wasn’t going to interfere. And when they danced, he seemed to be trying really hard to explain the steps, doing part of the dance next to her so that she could figure out what her feet were supposed to be doing, side by side.
Becky grabbed Trent - despite rather vigorous head shaking and throwing his weight back in the chair - and dragged him onto the floor. Meg laughed as she checked the next few people’s hands, checking the floor to see how Trent was doing. He was super-awkward, and didn’t seem comfortable even putting his right hand on Becky’s back. Meg didn’t quite blame him - she had no idea how she could find the nerve to get up on that floor herself - but she did really want to capture how crazy his face was at the moment, alternating between sneaking glances over at Tahlia, tripping over his own feet, tripping over Becky’s feet, and altogether failing to figure out the footwork.
Trent threw a glance over to Meg at one point, and she could clearly read the “help me, I’m trapped with a girl who thinks I should be able to dance!” face that he was projecting, but she had to shrug and wave her stamp at him towards the door.
He should have translated that as “sorry, friend, I have to mind the door”, but he seemed to take it as a “you should try to run away”, because he seemed to seriously think about breaking off the dance midsong and heading out the door. Becky was having none of it, and danced with him - as best she could - until the song was over. And then Tahlia came over and demanded he dance with her.
Meg was cracking up at this point. Poor Trent! He fit all the awkward white boy stereotypes that so many of the other dancers here had managed to break free of. He just didn’t seem to be able to connect to the melody or the drums, and he didn’t seem to be able to follow the music at all. Tahlia seemed to be enjoying it, though.
And the song slowed down for them into something that Trent could actually dance to - it was closer to a middle school slow dance than any sort of fancy swing, but it made the dance substantially less awkward. As the two of them spun slowly, his hands around her waist, hers around his shoulders, the dancers around them transitioned from swing into something a little grungier, that Meg couldn’t quite put a finger on. It didn’t have the bright innocence that the swing had had earlier. The only thing that it really reminded her of were some of the scenes of Dirty Dancing. There was no Patrick Swayze dancing around to stir up the audience, but the premise was there - there was something more sensual about it.
Watching Tahlia lean in and rest her forehead against Trent’s wasn’t shocking, due to those around them doing much the same, some girls laying their heads against the guy’s shoulder or chest, if he was particularly tall.
Seeing Trent take one of his hands off of Tahlia’s waist and lightly bringing her chin up to his to kiss her was slightly more shocking. Tahlia seemed to enjoy it, though, and Meg was pretty sure that this had been in the works for a while. Props to Em for making him finally declare what he felt! So long as he didn’t then rescind it as soon as they were back at school. For now, though, they could be as happy as they liked.
Meg tried to check the time to see if she would be off, and the fancy watch that Em had insisted that she wear seemed to be confused. It was flitting between 11 and 9, and seemed to be ticking backwards. Oh, well. She determined that she would stay on her little stool until Em came to find her. She needed to give Em the money she had collected, anyway, so waiting for her to come over rather than trying to track her down was not a huge difficulty.
She watched Em announce the finalists for the Jack and Jill - Becky was not one of them, but she didn’t seem particularly disappointed. Em announced that the finalists would dance for the prize in about half an hour, and went to check on the food again.
On her way, though, she swerved by to chat with Meg.
“Hey, honey, how are you doing?”
“I’m good. I want to learn how to do that.”
“Awesome. I’ll introduce you to a couple of people in just a bit, okay?” Em pulled out her heavy watch. “You’re off - you have been for a half hour or so. Have a blast, and pretty much anyone who wants to walk in and hang out can do so now, free of charge. I know of a couple of people who will take me up on that, and may even be lurking around the corner right now. If you don’t mind giving me the chunk of change you’ve got there, I’m going to go lock it up. I’ll see you in a couple of minutes, ok?”
“Sure.”
Meg watched Em disappear into the crowd again, feeling a little bereft that her job for the night was over, and frightened that she now had to go figure out how to ask random people to dance. Becky could probably show her the footwork, but she probably hadn’t picked up the guy’s part yet, and Trent seemed to be otherwise occupied.
She heard a low whistle from behind her, coming from the doorway. She turned, and saw someone in stock-still amazement, the same position she was pretty sure she was holding. With his back to the open door, though, it was hard to see his face. No skirt though, so as heteronormative as it may be, she assumed that he was, in fact, a he.
He moved closer in the night, and Meg was pleasantly surprised to see someone that she recognized (and truthfully, she had hoped would come, but hadn’t for a million years thought he would).
She turned and waved at him, and he peered through the movement and people behind her to try to catch her face. The band was back to playing loud, and fast, and talking over the sounds of the brass members of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy seemed highly impractical.
He came over to Meg and tried to say hi. She answered by standing on tiptoe and greeting his ear, as she honestly had not heard what he said.
“John! Great to see you here. You decided to check it out?”
He took her tactic to actually holding a conversation, and leaned over to her ear to reply “Yeah, you gave a good description. And I was curious as to what a non-school dance actually looked like.”
“Isn’t it amazing? I have no idea what’s going on - I just got off the door - but I cannot believe how awesome this is.”
“Completely agreed. You want to dance?”
Meg nodded. “I don’t know how, though!”
He smiled back and took her hand. Led into the dance floor, Meg hoped that he knew what he was doing and let him move her through the dance.
John held her right hand in his left and reached his right arm around her back. Meg shivered, just a bit. This sort of embrace was relegated to ballrooms and ballrooms implied romance and oh, how she wanted romance!
Meg was a little worried that John would have the same sort of difficulties that Trent had - he was a swimmer, and Kerry always joked that swimmers were terrible at any and all things that could be considered land sports. Generally, Meg thought that Kerry said it because Kerry seemed to always trip over things when she was wandering around campus, even around the track, and there wasn’t really anything to trip over when you were in the water.
But he took sure steps, and Meg felt stable, comfortable in his arms. Granted, there was a lovely frisson of tension between whatever he was thinking about the situation and the fact that the non-rational part of her brain latched onto the idea that he had come to the dance to find her, and that he had asked her to dance, and that he seemed to be a really fantastic dancer. (The non-rational part of her brain was also shrieking incoherently that this boy was amazingly hot and that she should just keep dancing with him forever.)
Each step he took was enough of a change that Meg could convince her feet to catch up to his, and despite her shabby attire, Meg felt like a little girl playing princesses whenever he spun her out or drew her back into his arms.
She heard the song start to wind down, and was amazed to find herself dipped down to the floor without having any idea how she got there or how she was going to get back up. John held her for just a moment, then stood her back up on her feet and shot her a smile just as the song ended.
The band announced that they were going to take a break, and she walked with John over towards the food.
“So where did you learn how to dance like that?”
“Well, I transferred into Manticore junior year. Before that the school I went to had mandatory ballroom dancing classes on top of gym. It was rather hoity toity. But I can’t say I regret it. This band is spectacular, and I see what you mean about the space. From your description, I expected it to be smaller, though. This is awesome.”
“You’re spectacular - thank you for coming and dancing with me!” Meg blushed as she said it - implying that he had come specifically to see her, that he was spectacular for more than his dancing, as well as thanking him for the dance was perhaps too effusive a compliment. But still, it was all true, however he decided to take it.
He smiled, seemed not to notice her blush. “You were doing pretty well yourself! You say you’ve never done this before?”
“Nope. Always the kind of thing that I would have loved to learn how to do, but eh, it never really seemed to happen.”
“In that case, you should dance as much as possible tonight.”
“Sorry?”
“With me, if you want, but the more you dance, the more your feet will figure out the footwork. And the better your feet can figure out the footwork, the more it’ll just become habit, and the more it becomes habit, the easier it will be to dance with all sorts of random people.”
“Not sure I believe you.”
“Well, I’m going to grab something to eat, but when the band comes back, come find me, and we can dance again, okay?”
Meg nodded, and went to find her art friends. She thought she had pinpointed their table, but they were proving a little elusive. She found Becky chatting with one of the people she had danced with in the Jack and Jill, and said a quick hi, partially to congratulate Becky on having the courage to get up on the stage and dance, and partially to ask after Tahlia and Trent.
Becky shook her head, smiling, “I have no idea where they went. They seemed to need a little privacy, though.” Meg laughed.
“I saw.”
“Find me later, and we can walk home together, maybe?”
“Sure, no problem”
Meg wandered off. So. Trent and Tahlia were MIA, Becky seemed comfortable chatting with a random stranger, John was stuffing himself with food - Meg shook her head as she guessed how much food a swimmer boy who had swum a tense meet all day would inhale, even if he had dinner not four hours ago.
She kind of wanted to check in with Em, see if there was anything she could help with for the rest of the night, even if it was just keeping water pitchers filled or something.
Meg walked through the crowd, some standing, some sitting, both comfortably on chairs and the couple of sofas, but also some perched on tables, gesticulating wildly as they made a point about something or another, and some crashed on the floor, leaning against the walls or just sliding down and lying on the floor.
She made the circuit of the room slowly, peeking into the crevices of the building. It wasn’t quite the same as when she had been waitressing yesterday; he guessed that it was some trick of the light to make the place look bigger and have even more crevices than it seemed to want to hold.
And everywhere, people. Meg got almost all the way around the room before she found a crevice that was completely tucked in on itself. A narrow entryway led to a slightly bigger room, and the only reason she found it was because she could hear the voices from inside it as she passed close by the walls.
“Jerry, no. I appreciate you coming, you know that. But you’re not the only person here. I have to uphold my reputation, the reputation of this place, and my integrity of a hostess.”
“So why did I come, then?”
“I thought you came because you still liked to dance. I thought you came because you wanted to get to see me, yes, but also because of the love of the dance. I don’t honestly know, Jer. You’re a nice guy, I know that, but I don’t know why you came tonight. Or why you thought in any remote sense of the word that it was a good idea to spike the punch. That’s something that I would have expected from you in college, and one of the reasons that I didn’t actually want to get to know you better, as all of my friends entreated me to do so.”
“That’s harsh, little miss Study, work, work, study, dance, repeat, never sleep. The fact that you got through college at all was amazing to everyone we knew. We all thought that you were going to burn out within a semester, the way you tackle things. And sure, the way you came out, you came out on top, and don’t seem to have actually gone crazy. But you need to lighten up. You can’t throw a party like this and expect someone to not spike the punch.”
“In college? Sure. But it would have been because you were put up to it by one of the frat boys, and since you would have done pretty much anything to get into their exclusive house, it wasn’t nearly the stupidest thing you could have done.”
He whistled. “Hitting below the belt, are we now, Em? Well, would you like to hear some of the rumors circulating in your own family as to why you disappeared for years? There’s the secretly marrying an old man in order to get all his money route, the descent into drug abuse and villainy route, and the being put away in jail for 5 years route. Which do you prefer?”
“Honestly!?” Meg had never heard quite that amount of ire fitted into a single word. “As I told you, and I’d tell them at the point when I don’t have a struggling business but one that’s actually making money, I was working several terrible jobs at the same time in order to try to finance this place.”
“Sure. And you don’t even have the balls to tell what kind of jobs you were working?”
“You are honestly implying what I think you are implying? Jerry, get out. I expected better of you.”
Meg pressed herself into the wall as she heard someone - Jerry, presumably, stalk out of the room. He appeared too intent on his own anger to notice her there, and she emerged unscathed. She peeked into the nook and saw Em sprawled out on the couch, her hair mussed up and tears in her eyes.
“Em? I heard the end of that. Can I do anything to help?”
Em sat up, flashed Meg a brilliant smile, and shook her hair back. “No worries, honey. Have you gotten to dance with anyone yet?” She got up and steered Meg out of the room. “Let me introduce you to some of my friends from the dancing scene around here.”
“I’d love that, but Em. You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m quite sure I’m not, but no worries. It’ll pass, and for now, we’ve got a party to run, don’t we? The band will be back up in a while, let me see if there are any people around here who I can introduce you to who are your own age.” Em shook back her hair and it fell once more in a glistening wave. She curled it back up and pinned it in place, then grabbed Meg’s hand with a smiling “aha”.
There was a group of dancers chatting by the food table, and Em elbowed her way into the center goodnaturedly. “Hi all!”
They chorused back their greetings, and Em introduced Meg.
“So all of you will dance with this young lady at some point today, right? And introduce yourselves, because otherwise she’s not going to remember your names even if I rattle them off right now.”
The men smiled, and agreed, and there was a lull in the conversation, as the men attempted to incorporate Em - which seemed pretty easy - and Meg - which was slightly more difficult - into their conversation. The musicians clambered back up onto the stage, and did a little bit of tuning. Meg felt a little nervous - it was really nice for Em to introduce her to the dancing community, but she had no idea if she was any good at this or not, suspected that she was not, and really just kind of wanted to hide in a corner and watch.
Meg felt a tap on her shoulder, and turned around to see John standing behind her. “May I have the next dance?” He grabbed her hand and spun her out onto the floor right about the same time when the band started to play again.
She laughed a little as Em sent her a befuddled look - she was supposed to be dancing with one of the eight gentlemen that Em had just introduced her to! - and relaxed as John guided her through the dance.
Meg told John how she had been drawn into the circle, and he laughed with her. “I’ve met one or two of them before at dances, but it’s kind of sad. Unless you try really hard, you end up hanging out with the follows who you’re dancing with rather than the leads. And that’s not a problem at all - especially when you get to dance with beautiful ladies and chat with them - but it does lead to knowing people by face and dancing style, but having no idea what their names are.”
“Honestly, I’m a little scared. They’re obviously good, as Em specially picked them out to introduce to me, and I really don’t think that I know what’s going on.”
“You’re following spectacularly well, Meg. If I didn’t know that this was your first time out on the floor, I would have assumed that you’d’ve been dancing for at least a year.”
“Really?”
“Really.” The song ended, and Meg threw her arms around him.
“Thank you. For the dance, and the pep talk. Now go find some pretty girls to dance with, and maybe I’ll find you again after I dance with Em’s posse?”
“Please do - that was fun. I’ll catch you later for another one.”
Meg walked back towards where the conversation circle had been, and got swooped up by a dancer, who she thought had been in that group, and had a pretty terrible dance. She couldn’t figure out what he was doing, and it was painful to recognize cues late, if at all, and know that she was mangling what would have been a fun dance for him if he had picked any other girl to dance with. She apologized at the end of this one, but he shook his head, thanked her for the dance, and passed her off to another one of the leads in the circle. At the end of that dance, she was back to believing that she could maybe do this, and followed the next lead with relative ease.
A couple more good dances, a couple more terrible ones, and Em called everyone together for the finals of the Jack and Jill. John sat next to her, and they oohed and ahhed along with the rest of the audience as the remaining 4 couples battled it out. They added dips and spins, a couple of lifts and an entire dramatic aspect that Meg hadn’t really seen in any of the dances she had gotten to dance. The follows were flirting with the leads, the leads were going along with it and adding a little more crazy footwork, that the follows occasionally were going along with, and oft-times were building off of. It was beautiful to watch.
When the Jack and Jill was done, some of the best dancers got up to show off some of their moves, and everyone else continued to sit around in a circle. By the end of their first dance, Meg started to feel tired, and by the time that everyone was getting back up to open up the floor to all the dances again, she found her head resting on John’s shoulder, and her eyes barely cracked open.
He helped her up, saw that she was done dancing - her foot had fallen asleep, and she couldn’t even walk correctly at this point - and steered her towards the door.
“You okay if I walk you back to campus?”
“Do I have to?”
“Probably a good idea, Meg. You’re dead on your feet.”
“But don’t you want to stay and dance?”
“eh, I wouldn’t mind another dance or two, but I do have to wake up in the morning. It’ll be good to get some sleep in before then. You have a coat? Where is it?”
John grabbed his own jacket and helped her into hers, and started walking back towards campus. He kept up a running commentary on the way back, steered her away from the trees she seemed to want to run into, and made sure she made it back to her dorm.
She woke up a bit when she had to find the key to her dorm, but was still pretty out of it. He dropped her off at her room and turned to walk towards his own dorm. Meg gave him a hug, dropped her arms before he responded and let the door close.
He grinned, and wandered back to his dorm rather pleased with the night.
The band stopped playing, and Em went to thank them. She put on some slower canned music for anyone who still wanted to dance into the night, but most people were headed home as the band packed up. Most who passed her by had something lovely to say about the place, or the dance itself, or her job hosting it.
Em watched them go, contented with almost all aspects of the dance. Aside from Jerry acting like an idiot (shifting the spiked punch to a non-spiked batch had been tricky with no one watching, and he had been such a child about it). But if she could move beyond being infuriated with him for acting like a moron, the night had gone surprisingly well.
So she smiled as her guests left, helped them to try to find their friends if they had gone missing, and, when Esmerelda’s was empty, she wandered up to her room for some well-deserved sleep of her own.
But I seem to have gotten slightly better at writing fluff.
Or at least I'm going for quantity over quality.
And... provided that I can make everything work out, this story is almost complete.
45037 / 50000
(90.07%)
Chapter Nine: Oof, I am so incredibly terrible at writing fluff. Possibly because I do not have quite so much fluff of my own to draw on. Possibly also because I’m just terrible at flirting, so I have issues writing it. That would probably make sense, but I’m not positive what’s going to go down, and it just depends on whether I can write what I want to do or not.
Meg watched the Jack and Jill from the door. Only a few more minutes before she would be off-shift and get to join the party, but for now she took people’s money and stamped hands. Luckily there were fewer of them trickling in now - she didn’t have to pay quite as much attention to what was going on at the door, and could pay more attention to the dancers.
She stood in her corner, and felt both a complete confusion and a pull towards the dance floor. No, she had no idea what was going on, but neither had Becky, and she was up there in her shiny silver sequins, dancing away like she had been for years. Meg wanted to be a part of that.
After the Jack and Jill, Meg watched as dancers flew out on the floor, and how the band picked up the music and the energy of the entire party exploded. Even in her remote corner, Meg felt the music, heard the occasional stomps and claps of the dancers on the floor, and could just feel the awe rising from all of the non-dancers hiding in the shadows.
Hopefully the next time that Em came around, she could point out someone who would be willing to teach just a breakdown of the simplest steps. Meg didn’t really want to walk up to random strangers and ask them to dance - that was both against anything she had ever learned about chivalry (wasn’t the boy supposed to do the asking?) and against all her conceptions of what could possibly be right for dancing. Em seemed to have transported them all back in time - Meg had no idea what era this music came from, but it was good, which generally meant it wasn’t from the present day infection of techno pop and changing the voices of everything. It was a live band, they sounded good live, and they clearly knew what they were doing. Peeking at the band, Meg was amazed to see how they were as into the music as the people dancing were, and how the dancers hooted and hollered to the music, and the musicians responded by shifting around the songs a bit, which made the dancers holler more, which made them tweak things just for fun a little more, which seemed to just continue and spin on.
And the dancers - those who knew what they were doing were either spinning in little skirts that flew out to a full 360, or tighter, vintage skirts. It was a spectacular mishmash of colors and shapes and movement, and Meg itched to pull out her sketchbook and start drawing people. There were little poses - a girl’s hand here, flying up and cradling her head, lending her entire body a flirty pause - a guy’s full arm extension here, and the look on his face as his girl spun in an arc too fast to follow, and then pulled her hand out of nowhere with no conceivable look of difficulty.
But her responsibility was the door, at least for another while or so. She backed up into the corner just a little bit more, to try to get a better view of the room while also getting a good view of the door, and bumped into something. She found a stool tucked in the crevice behind her, and pulled it out to sit on. Weird how something like that could hide behind her, but Em had turned down the lights after the Jack and Jill, so everything was still clearly visible but got just a little bit edgier.
Not that the dancing changed overmuch, as far as Meg could tell. But everything just looked a little more intense with the low light, and the music got a little slower, and she looked out on the floor and had to shiver at the beauty of the people dancing in the light that knocked them down from clearly human into shadows, the further away they were.
She watched Becky get pulled back into the dance by one of the guys she had danced with in the competition, and saw Becky introduce him to the other members of her art compatriots when they finished their dance. He escorted Tahlia out onto the floor, helping her to use her hair tie to bustle her fluffy prom dress up to about knee-length rather than floor length, gesturing that otherwise she was going to trip over it. It was a little awkward to see some random stranger tying up her skirts, but there was something to this place that seemed to negate the possible sketchiness of people’s actions. Meg had no idea what was expected, so long as people weren’t visibly hitting on her friends, she wasn’t going to interfere. And when they danced, he seemed to be trying really hard to explain the steps, doing part of the dance next to her so that she could figure out what her feet were supposed to be doing, side by side.
Becky grabbed Trent - despite rather vigorous head shaking and throwing his weight back in the chair - and dragged him onto the floor. Meg laughed as she checked the next few people’s hands, checking the floor to see how Trent was doing. He was super-awkward, and didn’t seem comfortable even putting his right hand on Becky’s back. Meg didn’t quite blame him - she had no idea how she could find the nerve to get up on that floor herself - but she did really want to capture how crazy his face was at the moment, alternating between sneaking glances over at Tahlia, tripping over his own feet, tripping over Becky’s feet, and altogether failing to figure out the footwork.
Trent threw a glance over to Meg at one point, and she could clearly read the “help me, I’m trapped with a girl who thinks I should be able to dance!” face that he was projecting, but she had to shrug and wave her stamp at him towards the door.
He should have translated that as “sorry, friend, I have to mind the door”, but he seemed to take it as a “you should try to run away”, because he seemed to seriously think about breaking off the dance midsong and heading out the door. Becky was having none of it, and danced with him - as best she could - until the song was over. And then Tahlia came over and demanded he dance with her.
Meg was cracking up at this point. Poor Trent! He fit all the awkward white boy stereotypes that so many of the other dancers here had managed to break free of. He just didn’t seem to be able to connect to the melody or the drums, and he didn’t seem to be able to follow the music at all. Tahlia seemed to be enjoying it, though.
And the song slowed down for them into something that Trent could actually dance to - it was closer to a middle school slow dance than any sort of fancy swing, but it made the dance substantially less awkward. As the two of them spun slowly, his hands around her waist, hers around his shoulders, the dancers around them transitioned from swing into something a little grungier, that Meg couldn’t quite put a finger on. It didn’t have the bright innocence that the swing had had earlier. The only thing that it really reminded her of were some of the scenes of Dirty Dancing. There was no Patrick Swayze dancing around to stir up the audience, but the premise was there - there was something more sensual about it.
Watching Tahlia lean in and rest her forehead against Trent’s wasn’t shocking, due to those around them doing much the same, some girls laying their heads against the guy’s shoulder or chest, if he was particularly tall.
Seeing Trent take one of his hands off of Tahlia’s waist and lightly bringing her chin up to his to kiss her was slightly more shocking. Tahlia seemed to enjoy it, though, and Meg was pretty sure that this had been in the works for a while. Props to Em for making him finally declare what he felt! So long as he didn’t then rescind it as soon as they were back at school. For now, though, they could be as happy as they liked.
Meg tried to check the time to see if she would be off, and the fancy watch that Em had insisted that she wear seemed to be confused. It was flitting between 11 and 9, and seemed to be ticking backwards. Oh, well. She determined that she would stay on her little stool until Em came to find her. She needed to give Em the money she had collected, anyway, so waiting for her to come over rather than trying to track her down was not a huge difficulty.
She watched Em announce the finalists for the Jack and Jill - Becky was not one of them, but she didn’t seem particularly disappointed. Em announced that the finalists would dance for the prize in about half an hour, and went to check on the food again.
On her way, though, she swerved by to chat with Meg.
“Hey, honey, how are you doing?”
“I’m good. I want to learn how to do that.”
“Awesome. I’ll introduce you to a couple of people in just a bit, okay?” Em pulled out her heavy watch. “You’re off - you have been for a half hour or so. Have a blast, and pretty much anyone who wants to walk in and hang out can do so now, free of charge. I know of a couple of people who will take me up on that, and may even be lurking around the corner right now. If you don’t mind giving me the chunk of change you’ve got there, I’m going to go lock it up. I’ll see you in a couple of minutes, ok?”
“Sure.”
Meg watched Em disappear into the crowd again, feeling a little bereft that her job for the night was over, and frightened that she now had to go figure out how to ask random people to dance. Becky could probably show her the footwork, but she probably hadn’t picked up the guy’s part yet, and Trent seemed to be otherwise occupied.
She heard a low whistle from behind her, coming from the doorway. She turned, and saw someone in stock-still amazement, the same position she was pretty sure she was holding. With his back to the open door, though, it was hard to see his face. No skirt though, so as heteronormative as it may be, she assumed that he was, in fact, a he.
He moved closer in the night, and Meg was pleasantly surprised to see someone that she recognized (and truthfully, she had hoped would come, but hadn’t for a million years thought he would).
She turned and waved at him, and he peered through the movement and people behind her to try to catch her face. The band was back to playing loud, and fast, and talking over the sounds of the brass members of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy seemed highly impractical.
He came over to Meg and tried to say hi. She answered by standing on tiptoe and greeting his ear, as she honestly had not heard what he said.
“John! Great to see you here. You decided to check it out?”
He took her tactic to actually holding a conversation, and leaned over to her ear to reply “Yeah, you gave a good description. And I was curious as to what a non-school dance actually looked like.”
“Isn’t it amazing? I have no idea what’s going on - I just got off the door - but I cannot believe how awesome this is.”
“Completely agreed. You want to dance?”
Meg nodded. “I don’t know how, though!”
He smiled back and took her hand. Led into the dance floor, Meg hoped that he knew what he was doing and let him move her through the dance.
John held her right hand in his left and reached his right arm around her back. Meg shivered, just a bit. This sort of embrace was relegated to ballrooms and ballrooms implied romance and oh, how she wanted romance!
Meg was a little worried that John would have the same sort of difficulties that Trent had - he was a swimmer, and Kerry always joked that swimmers were terrible at any and all things that could be considered land sports. Generally, Meg thought that Kerry said it because Kerry seemed to always trip over things when she was wandering around campus, even around the track, and there wasn’t really anything to trip over when you were in the water.
But he took sure steps, and Meg felt stable, comfortable in his arms. Granted, there was a lovely frisson of tension between whatever he was thinking about the situation and the fact that the non-rational part of her brain latched onto the idea that he had come to the dance to find her, and that he had asked her to dance, and that he seemed to be a really fantastic dancer. (The non-rational part of her brain was also shrieking incoherently that this boy was amazingly hot and that she should just keep dancing with him forever.)
Each step he took was enough of a change that Meg could convince her feet to catch up to his, and despite her shabby attire, Meg felt like a little girl playing princesses whenever he spun her out or drew her back into his arms.
She heard the song start to wind down, and was amazed to find herself dipped down to the floor without having any idea how she got there or how she was going to get back up. John held her for just a moment, then stood her back up on her feet and shot her a smile just as the song ended.
The band announced that they were going to take a break, and she walked with John over towards the food.
“So where did you learn how to dance like that?”
“Well, I transferred into Manticore junior year. Before that the school I went to had mandatory ballroom dancing classes on top of gym. It was rather hoity toity. But I can’t say I regret it. This band is spectacular, and I see what you mean about the space. From your description, I expected it to be smaller, though. This is awesome.”
“You’re spectacular - thank you for coming and dancing with me!” Meg blushed as she said it - implying that he had come specifically to see her, that he was spectacular for more than his dancing, as well as thanking him for the dance was perhaps too effusive a compliment. But still, it was all true, however he decided to take it.
He smiled, seemed not to notice her blush. “You were doing pretty well yourself! You say you’ve never done this before?”
“Nope. Always the kind of thing that I would have loved to learn how to do, but eh, it never really seemed to happen.”
“In that case, you should dance as much as possible tonight.”
“Sorry?”
“With me, if you want, but the more you dance, the more your feet will figure out the footwork. And the better your feet can figure out the footwork, the more it’ll just become habit, and the more it becomes habit, the easier it will be to dance with all sorts of random people.”
“Not sure I believe you.”
“Well, I’m going to grab something to eat, but when the band comes back, come find me, and we can dance again, okay?”
Meg nodded, and went to find her art friends. She thought she had pinpointed their table, but they were proving a little elusive. She found Becky chatting with one of the people she had danced with in the Jack and Jill, and said a quick hi, partially to congratulate Becky on having the courage to get up on the stage and dance, and partially to ask after Tahlia and Trent.
Becky shook her head, smiling, “I have no idea where they went. They seemed to need a little privacy, though.” Meg laughed.
“I saw.”
“Find me later, and we can walk home together, maybe?”
“Sure, no problem”
Meg wandered off. So. Trent and Tahlia were MIA, Becky seemed comfortable chatting with a random stranger, John was stuffing himself with food - Meg shook her head as she guessed how much food a swimmer boy who had swum a tense meet all day would inhale, even if he had dinner not four hours ago.
She kind of wanted to check in with Em, see if there was anything she could help with for the rest of the night, even if it was just keeping water pitchers filled or something.
Meg walked through the crowd, some standing, some sitting, both comfortably on chairs and the couple of sofas, but also some perched on tables, gesticulating wildly as they made a point about something or another, and some crashed on the floor, leaning against the walls or just sliding down and lying on the floor.
She made the circuit of the room slowly, peeking into the crevices of the building. It wasn’t quite the same as when she had been waitressing yesterday; he guessed that it was some trick of the light to make the place look bigger and have even more crevices than it seemed to want to hold.
And everywhere, people. Meg got almost all the way around the room before she found a crevice that was completely tucked in on itself. A narrow entryway led to a slightly bigger room, and the only reason she found it was because she could hear the voices from inside it as she passed close by the walls.
“Jerry, no. I appreciate you coming, you know that. But you’re not the only person here. I have to uphold my reputation, the reputation of this place, and my integrity of a hostess.”
“So why did I come, then?”
“I thought you came because you still liked to dance. I thought you came because you wanted to get to see me, yes, but also because of the love of the dance. I don’t honestly know, Jer. You’re a nice guy, I know that, but I don’t know why you came tonight. Or why you thought in any remote sense of the word that it was a good idea to spike the punch. That’s something that I would have expected from you in college, and one of the reasons that I didn’t actually want to get to know you better, as all of my friends entreated me to do so.”
“That’s harsh, little miss Study, work, work, study, dance, repeat, never sleep. The fact that you got through college at all was amazing to everyone we knew. We all thought that you were going to burn out within a semester, the way you tackle things. And sure, the way you came out, you came out on top, and don’t seem to have actually gone crazy. But you need to lighten up. You can’t throw a party like this and expect someone to not spike the punch.”
“In college? Sure. But it would have been because you were put up to it by one of the frat boys, and since you would have done pretty much anything to get into their exclusive house, it wasn’t nearly the stupidest thing you could have done.”
He whistled. “Hitting below the belt, are we now, Em? Well, would you like to hear some of the rumors circulating in your own family as to why you disappeared for years? There’s the secretly marrying an old man in order to get all his money route, the descent into drug abuse and villainy route, and the being put away in jail for 5 years route. Which do you prefer?”
“Honestly!?” Meg had never heard quite that amount of ire fitted into a single word. “As I told you, and I’d tell them at the point when I don’t have a struggling business but one that’s actually making money, I was working several terrible jobs at the same time in order to try to finance this place.”
“Sure. And you don’t even have the balls to tell what kind of jobs you were working?”
“You are honestly implying what I think you are implying? Jerry, get out. I expected better of you.”
Meg pressed herself into the wall as she heard someone - Jerry, presumably, stalk out of the room. He appeared too intent on his own anger to notice her there, and she emerged unscathed. She peeked into the nook and saw Em sprawled out on the couch, her hair mussed up and tears in her eyes.
“Em? I heard the end of that. Can I do anything to help?”
Em sat up, flashed Meg a brilliant smile, and shook her hair back. “No worries, honey. Have you gotten to dance with anyone yet?” She got up and steered Meg out of the room. “Let me introduce you to some of my friends from the dancing scene around here.”
“I’d love that, but Em. You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m quite sure I’m not, but no worries. It’ll pass, and for now, we’ve got a party to run, don’t we? The band will be back up in a while, let me see if there are any people around here who I can introduce you to who are your own age.” Em shook back her hair and it fell once more in a glistening wave. She curled it back up and pinned it in place, then grabbed Meg’s hand with a smiling “aha”.
There was a group of dancers chatting by the food table, and Em elbowed her way into the center goodnaturedly. “Hi all!”
They chorused back their greetings, and Em introduced Meg.
“So all of you will dance with this young lady at some point today, right? And introduce yourselves, because otherwise she’s not going to remember your names even if I rattle them off right now.”
The men smiled, and agreed, and there was a lull in the conversation, as the men attempted to incorporate Em - which seemed pretty easy - and Meg - which was slightly more difficult - into their conversation. The musicians clambered back up onto the stage, and did a little bit of tuning. Meg felt a little nervous - it was really nice for Em to introduce her to the dancing community, but she had no idea if she was any good at this or not, suspected that she was not, and really just kind of wanted to hide in a corner and watch.
Meg felt a tap on her shoulder, and turned around to see John standing behind her. “May I have the next dance?” He grabbed her hand and spun her out onto the floor right about the same time when the band started to play again.
She laughed a little as Em sent her a befuddled look - she was supposed to be dancing with one of the eight gentlemen that Em had just introduced her to! - and relaxed as John guided her through the dance.
Meg told John how she had been drawn into the circle, and he laughed with her. “I’ve met one or two of them before at dances, but it’s kind of sad. Unless you try really hard, you end up hanging out with the follows who you’re dancing with rather than the leads. And that’s not a problem at all - especially when you get to dance with beautiful ladies and chat with them - but it does lead to knowing people by face and dancing style, but having no idea what their names are.”
“Honestly, I’m a little scared. They’re obviously good, as Em specially picked them out to introduce to me, and I really don’t think that I know what’s going on.”
“You’re following spectacularly well, Meg. If I didn’t know that this was your first time out on the floor, I would have assumed that you’d’ve been dancing for at least a year.”
“Really?”
“Really.” The song ended, and Meg threw her arms around him.
“Thank you. For the dance, and the pep talk. Now go find some pretty girls to dance with, and maybe I’ll find you again after I dance with Em’s posse?”
“Please do - that was fun. I’ll catch you later for another one.”
Meg walked back towards where the conversation circle had been, and got swooped up by a dancer, who she thought had been in that group, and had a pretty terrible dance. She couldn’t figure out what he was doing, and it was painful to recognize cues late, if at all, and know that she was mangling what would have been a fun dance for him if he had picked any other girl to dance with. She apologized at the end of this one, but he shook his head, thanked her for the dance, and passed her off to another one of the leads in the circle. At the end of that dance, she was back to believing that she could maybe do this, and followed the next lead with relative ease.
A couple more good dances, a couple more terrible ones, and Em called everyone together for the finals of the Jack and Jill. John sat next to her, and they oohed and ahhed along with the rest of the audience as the remaining 4 couples battled it out. They added dips and spins, a couple of lifts and an entire dramatic aspect that Meg hadn’t really seen in any of the dances she had gotten to dance. The follows were flirting with the leads, the leads were going along with it and adding a little more crazy footwork, that the follows occasionally were going along with, and oft-times were building off of. It was beautiful to watch.
When the Jack and Jill was done, some of the best dancers got up to show off some of their moves, and everyone else continued to sit around in a circle. By the end of their first dance, Meg started to feel tired, and by the time that everyone was getting back up to open up the floor to all the dances again, she found her head resting on John’s shoulder, and her eyes barely cracked open.
He helped her up, saw that she was done dancing - her foot had fallen asleep, and she couldn’t even walk correctly at this point - and steered her towards the door.
“You okay if I walk you back to campus?”
“Do I have to?”
“Probably a good idea, Meg. You’re dead on your feet.”
“But don’t you want to stay and dance?”
“eh, I wouldn’t mind another dance or two, but I do have to wake up in the morning. It’ll be good to get some sleep in before then. You have a coat? Where is it?”
John grabbed his own jacket and helped her into hers, and started walking back towards campus. He kept up a running commentary on the way back, steered her away from the trees she seemed to want to run into, and made sure she made it back to her dorm.
She woke up a bit when she had to find the key to her dorm, but was still pretty out of it. He dropped her off at her room and turned to walk towards his own dorm. Meg gave him a hug, dropped her arms before he responded and let the door close.
He grinned, and wandered back to his dorm rather pleased with the night.
The band stopped playing, and Em went to thank them. She put on some slower canned music for anyone who still wanted to dance into the night, but most people were headed home as the band packed up. Most who passed her by had something lovely to say about the place, or the dance itself, or her job hosting it.
Em watched them go, contented with almost all aspects of the dance. Aside from Jerry acting like an idiot (shifting the spiked punch to a non-spiked batch had been tricky with no one watching, and he had been such a child about it). But if she could move beyond being infuriated with him for acting like a moron, the night had gone surprisingly well.
So she smiled as her guests left, helped them to try to find their friends if they had gone missing, and, when Esmerelda’s was empty, she wandered up to her room for some well-deserved sleep of her own.