“You know it’s one thing to learn this from TV but it’s quite another to do it in person.”
“You’re doing brilliantly,” he says and I think I find it adorable that he keeps his chin lifted like the professional dancers do on Strictly.
“Want to move a bit more? Do a bit of progressive?”
“Jesus, Charlie, you know the words for the steps?” I exclaim and I’m mystified why this sends some heat burrowing into my stomach, or maybe, possibly, a little lower than my stomach.
“Here we go,” he says, and he applies a bit more force to his next step, sending me backwards. I stumble once, twice, but eventually find my feet. I relax into letting him lead and before I know it, we are moving in a waltz from one side of the dance floor to the other.
Now it’s impossible not to see the other guests.
“Shit, everyone’s watching us,” I whisper through my teeth, fixing my eyes back on Charlie.
“They’re jealous, Mina.”
“Of what? Two bisexual millennials doing a centuries old dance.”
“They’re jealous of me dancing with you,” he corrects me, and it also silences me. And now there’s no denying it. The heat is very much pooling in my cunt.
For fuck’s sake.
I’m about to open my mouth and tell him we should stop, when he lifts his arm up and nudges me with the hand on my back. It takes me half a second to catch on but as soon as I realise he wants me to go under his arm, I do. I completely lose my footwork, but as Charlie steers me back into place, I find it again.
“Half a box to turn,” he says but my brain doesn’t catch up and again I stumble through changing direction.
I part my lips again to tell him this is getting too much for me, but then I hear the music change. The pace is slower, the tone a bit more melancholy and it’s not until the singing starts that I recognise it as Paul Weller’sYou Do Something to Me.
“This has a perfect waltz beat,” Charlie tells me excitedly, and I know there’s no getting out of it now. He hasn’t stopped smiling since we started dancing and I can’t bring myself to make that stop. Instead, I pin my eyes straight ahead, on Charlie’s chest, on the pastel pink of his shirt, and I focus really hard on not losing my step as I let him lead us through a few more underarm turns and progressions across the floor.
“Look up, Mina,” Charlie says some moments later. I do. He’s still smiling. “Look around you.”
As my eyes roam the crowd, I see other couples dancing the waltz like us. Some are good, really good, but others are just as stunted and awkward looking as I suspect we are. A few seconds later, I spot Cameron and Bruno dancing on the opposite side of the room to us. Actually, they’re not dancing, they’re more swaying side to side on the spot. Still, it makes me smile.
“We started that!” I exclaim and my voice is full of something it so rarely is. Delight. Glee. Joy.
“Yep,” Charlie says proudly.
As we dance for the rest of the song, we start interacting with the other dancing couples around us. There are smiles, nods, knowing looks of enjoyment. We also hear compliments from party guests who aren’t dancing and at one point as we glide past Charlie’s mother, she raises her glass to us.
But then the music changes. A harsh electric guitar rift blasts out of the speakers and while I recognise the song immediately, I also instantly know this is not a song you can waltz too. It seems Charlie realises the same thing.
“Lenny Kravitz,” he says.
“Are You Gonna Go My Way,” I add the song title.
“We can’t waltz to this.” Charlie’s eyebrows wrinkle and he looks almost sad.
“No, but we can still dance,” I say, wanting to smooth that frown away.
“We can?”
“Yeah.” I step back further from his embrace, and right as the percussion kicks in, I start to throw my head around and start playing air guitar.
It takes a few beats, but eventually, I see the corner of Charlie’s mouth pull up and a second later he starts moving, also head-banging and pretending to play drums with his hands a cute little pout of concentration on his mouth.
And that’s what we do for the remainder of the song. We play all the instruments we hear, we shout out the lyrics to each other, and we keep throwing our heads around like they don’t contain our brains.
Every now and then I slow down because I feel dizzy and that light-headedness reminds me only too much of a possible oncoming migraine but I ease up enough to let it pass and then I go back to being the best rock chick I can be.
