“No one ever taught you?”
“No,” he hedged, squinting one eye and twisting his face. “I was taught. Repeatedly. My dad’s a high school basketball coach, and my twin sister played in college. I just never could get the hang of it. My buddy Eric asked me to consider just keeping stats for our rec league instead of actually playing.”
My lips turned up at his story, and I had to hide my amusement. Something about the image of my tall, broad companion missing shot after shot from the free-throw line eased my mind. More than the image making me smile, his ability to admit it, to just put his shortcomings out into the world to make me feel better . . . that was unexpected.
“Did I convince you to dance with me?”
I raised my arms over my head, positioning my hands the way my dad had taught me in my childhood driveway, and mimicked shooting a basket. “Nothing but net.”
Do something embarrassing. Here goes nothing.
He reached for my hand, lacing his fingers with mine, and we walked together toward the crowd, where the music blared from large speakers, the percussion and horns building a palpable energy around us. Jake gripped my hand tighter as we ducked through the throng of bodies.
Onstage, a man with a microphone instructed the crowd. Near us, a middle-aged couple in matching blue T-shirts and jean shorts held each other, and two women in their seventies juggling brightly colored cocktails and pretzels ignored the instructions and made up their own steps.
The voice boomed from the stage. “Okay! Let’s get going, now that we’ve learned the basic steps.”
“We missed the beginning already,” I said into Jake’s ear.
He shrugged. “We’ll catch up.”
“Jake!” I hissed again, a touch of panic rising in me, not knowing what would come next. I looked at the couples near us to see their movements, trying to memorize how they moved to the loud beat.
“We’ll be fine,” Jake encouraged as he slid his arm around me, his palm resting against a shoulder blade. “Follow my lead. I’ll step forward and you step back, and then the other way.” His lips grazed the top of my ear, and I willed him to trail down to my neck again to that spot that had made me shudder in anticipation the night before.
From the stage, the voice boomed through the microphone. “And one, two, three.” Around us, the crowd undulated like a wave.
Jake pushed toward me gently, stepping forward with one foot, but I was focused on what the woman next to me was doing and I didn’t move in time, so his body collided with mine. He chuckled and spread his fingers across my back, which felt amazing, and I got distracted and stepped with the wrong foot the next time, bumping into his chest again. My gracelessness knew no bounds.
How does everyone else already know how to do this?
I growled at myself, huffing out a heavy breath and pausing my movements to catch back up to the beat. All I had to do was step forward and back, right? I have a flippin’ PhD. I can figure this out.
“You’re doing great,” he encouraged, squeezing my hand.
“You’re a bad liar,” I returned over the music, taking a successful step forward but then second-guessing myself on the next beat and stepping on Jake’s foot. It’s literally counting to three and knowing left from right.
“Here,” Jake said, pulling me flush against him, our thighs touching, chests against each other. Sandalwood and soap filled my nostrils, and my frustration about dancing ebbed into more memories from the night before. “I’ll push my leg against yours, and we’ll step together, okay?” He nudged my left leg with his right on the beat, and our hips twisted in unison, then back, and I followed his movements, relishing the roll of his body against mine as we moved with the music. The crowd fell away. There was only the beat and him. I stopped worrying about the steps and followed his lead. A minute passed, the music swirling around us, our bodies still flush.
“Don’t overthink it.” Jake spoke near my ear, his hot breath stroking my skin, and I stifled a sigh, a tingle zipping through me. “Trust me, okay?”
He has no idea what he’s asking. I’d never been a good dancer, but I had been an eager dancer for most of my life. Not knowing the steps and being hopelessly without rhythm had never stopped me from getting on the dance floor until Davis told me I was embarrassing him. By the time he stopped telling me and started showing his disappointment or anger, I’d long since stopped dancing.
“One, two, three,” the man onstage counted, and he and his partner demonstrated some kind of complicated spin as we rocked back and forth. He said something about the left foot—or was it the right? Crap, I’d missed a few key details. I was comfortable with the step we’d been doing—that was my dancing sweet spot, and I worried if I broke the rhythm it would never come back.