by Tressie McMillan
(10/12/05)

How long had it been since she'd danced? That was the question her hips kept asking as they moved to the beat of everything from jingles to the hum of rush hour traffic.

She could wait for her girlfriends, but they all had babies and men to keep. Tonight she would dance alone.

Red might scream look at me, but black says you have no choice but to look at me. Black it was -- a simple knit affair that would've been demure but for the way it hugged every winding curve, threatening to conceal more than it hid, as her generous frame forced it past the limits of Lycra.

Bare legs shaved smooth, toes dotted with rhinestones that never failed to make her smile, strappy high heel sandals that sent everything upward and outward, hair left in its state of curly abandon -- she was ready to dance.

It was just luck of the draw, but those who saw would always believe she timed her entrance to coincide with the exact moment the first chord of Brickhouse shook the walls of the intimate dance club. Eyes swiveled toward the door as her measured stride kept time with the driving funkdified beat. She walked like an Amazon warrior queen, all purpose, and little care to how each step sent the hemline of her dress fluttering to expose dimpled knees and muscled thighs.

The first order of business was a perfectly ladylike Cosmo with extra cherries because, as she told the bartender, "I lost my first one." That won her a second drink and a bevy of smiles from interested suitors. She accepted the drink but ignored the smiles -- tonight she just wanted to dance.

There it was; that beat, that feeling. It swept through her as the second drink warmed the pit of her stomach, propelling her feet towards the dance floor. The DJ was feeling nostalgic -- The Isley Brothers, Frankie Beverly, The Emotions -- it all melded into a perfect mix of sin and revival and she felt like being baptized.

She took up space when she moved. Arms akimbo, hips shaking, legs cocked wide, daring anyone to fuck with her groove. She cleared space on a graceful spin move. A moment later she dropped to the floor, balancing all her lusciousness on those killer stiletto heels. The sight of flexing calf muscles and straining thighs sent men behind her into a frenzy as they angled for a better view, but she didn't care. 'Cause now it was brother Michael, when he was a brother, telling her Don't Stop. And she couldn't, she wouldn't stop. Not when sweat puddled in the valley of her breasts, not as her free form 'fro whipped across her face, not even as her heart raced to keep up. She was too close to the salvation she'd come for to stop.

So she kept dancing, oblivious to the stage she'd made, the audience she'd cultivated. She danced until one brave soul answered a call she didn't even know she'd made.

He didn't sneak up on her from behind like weaker men had tried. He waited until she faced him and then he held her gaze as he made room for his lean, muscled frame. He didn't ask, didn’t allow for the possibility of no. Instead he slipped a large, warm hand around her waist, pulling her towards him as a reggae groove settled softly on top of the funk. It must have taken him at least a minute and a half to accomplish it, but she could only remember a split second. One moment she was alone, immersed in a tepid pool of sweat and frustration. The next she was pressed close against masculine flesh, warmed from the inside out by his arrogant touch, and transfixed by the way he'd done it.

"Don't fight me."

She should have slapped him then, but she didn't. There simply wasn't enough room to argue when he smelled and felt so much like a man. Not overly tall, her head fit perfectly into the crook of his shoulder as her hips fell naturally into a slow, Jamaican wind. Her legs parted as his thigh pressed between them. Those large hands slipped further around her waist, dipping lower into the small of her back urging her closer. Deeper into the reggae riddums the DJ went, and with every passing minute she rode his thigh harder, arched her back closer, sighing as he took her hint to hold her tighter.

She was still just dancing, but this was different. This man held her with a possessiveness that should have made her rebel, but somehow made her feel free.

"You feel so good."

She knew he hadn't meant to say it out loud. It was the way the words rumbled past clenched teeth on an exhaled breath. He felt it too. And he was so right; she did feel good. Better than she'd felt since leaving the cage where pretty girls with brains were kept to protect them from themselves. She didn't want to be pretty or safe anymore. She wanted to feel every messy, dirty emotion she could manage. She wanted to feel just like she did now, only more.

I knew a girl name Nikki I guess you could say she was a sex fiend...

Prince ---the maestro of erotic interludes on wax. If the opening guitar chords hadn't clued her in, the beautiful nastiness of that voice would have. The heat that had simmered since he first touched her threatened to ruin her dress and her decorum as she rode the hardness of his thigh. Each rock pressed harder in time to the building wail of the guitar. The answering clinch of his muscles sent tremors through her belly as his warm breath danced along her ear.

Just as Darling Nikki was leaving her number on the stairs, the question she'd been answering since he first touched her was asked.

"More?"

One word, the answer already a foregone conclusion. A gentleman, he held her tightly as he steered her off the dance floor making certain no one would see her knees buckle. Who knows where he would've taken her if she'd given him the chance. As it was, she barely made it past the front door.

"Now." she whispered. His eyes slanted over her as his wide nostrils flared at the scent of arousal clogging the air between them. God bless him, he would've waited. He would have tried for introductions, a sweet seduction.

"Now!"

She added a warm kiss against his thoughtful frown this time, and just like that he came unhinged. The deal was closed the moment she touched him. It would be right now before she lost the feeling of slow grinding and warm kisses; right now before she lost her nerve and remembered herself. It had to be right now.

In her daytime clothes, under fluorescent lights, surrounded by memories of her favorite mistakes, she wouldn't be caught dead in an abandoned coat room with a sexy stranger. But it was last call and she'd worn her fuck 'em heels and no-history dress. She could be anyone she wanted to be tonight. And who she most wanted to be was a well-fucked woman in an abandoned coat closet with a sexy stranger.

She may have released him with her order, but he knew how to run with her permission. His eyes glittered with purpose as he closed the door behind them and set about honoring every promise he'd made since he'd first touched her. His mouth ran past her false bravado, down the exposed skin of her neck to dip into the lace cups that barely contained her breasts. With a steady hand he ran up her smooth thigh, past the line where her panties should have been, up to cup the full globe of her bare ass.

He ran right through and over the flimsy dress with the heat of his hard body as he pressed her down to the carpeted floor, throwing his coat and shirt down first to protect her. Hard chest to soft breasts, he kissed her everywhere he found a pressure point: the small mole at her neck, the cradle of her ear, the top of a perfectly brown nipple.

That first warm lick shocked her back into an elegant arch that insisted he suck harder and deeper. The nipples that had never been sensitive were burning pathways directly to the spot between her thighs as surprise rolled over her in waves. She gloried in the feel of reckless abandonment, her brain shutting down on one last coherent thought.

This is what it felt like? She couldn't wrap her mind around the sensations pushing rational thought aside like leftover Thanksgiving turkey. Should it feel like this?

"Yes."

A long, shuddered moan that he couldn't have known answered the question she hadn't asked. Yes, it should be all this and more. That's what she wanted -- more -- and so she told him.

He answered with a guttural grunt and a tug that left her naked but for the bra that followed a few caresses after. He answered every need she'd ever imagined with hot words kissed down her stomach, words she should hate but loved. With a breathy "fuck" he tasted the inside of her navel as her walls clenched around the finger he'd used to test her. Having little need for his patience she tested it with a velvet clench of her slick walls...and yet again for good measure. He responded with the sound of tearing fabric as he was finally, mercifully as naked as she.

Later she would regret not having the chance to see him, to test the weight of him in her hands, to taste the evidence of his wanting. But now was calling and she had no choice but to follow. He led her mouth to his for a kiss too intimate for names. He brushed his face along her shoulder telling her how smooth and soft she felt in his hands. He tongued the sweat that beaded like morning dew on the bridge of her nose. He whispered his apologies, his intent to do better by her as he gave in to the need to split her open with his heavily veined dick.

She might have screamed, except the feeling stole her breath. She welcomed it all -- the pain, the throbbing invasion, the warm gush of excitement that eased his next thrust. She forgave him with a roll of her hips. Asked him to do it again with a moist bite at his shoulder. Her nails demanded he not regret a single moment as they carved half moons in his back.

Later they would debate who initiated their first tryst. He'd blame it on her dress and the way she danced. She would play coy and admit to nothing, because he liked to convince her she was wrong.

But in that moment tomorrow hadn't come, there had been no awkward goodbyes, no waiting for phone calls that eventually came, no explanations of desires that sped out of control. Tonight they still didn't know each other's names. So when he scraped his teeth over the nipples that had never been sensitive and shock waves she'd never felt caused her to clench him deep inside her uterus in a heavenly death grip, he wasn't able to tell her to stop. And when he punished her with a damp index finger swirl around the straining bundle of nerves no one had ever before thought to worship and sent her into her very first orgasm, she didn't know what name to cry out.

Though many moons later they'll rewrite the story of how they met for the sake of polite dinner conversation, she'll never throw away the dress, he'll never know that her nipples aren't sensitive, and they will always find time to dance.

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