Alien Tango

fitted Armani tux to deal with.
    True to his own hype, Chuckie was a great dancer now. Why he hadn’t shown this to me over the past several years I didn’t know, but he could have made at least the finals of So You Think You Can Dance . Martini had taken me dancing a few times, and I’d relearned how to follow a man’s lead. It was actually fun to be dancing, and I only pretended Chuckie was Martini half the time.
    He was muscular under the suit, but more like Christopher, lean and wiry. He’d bulked up since Vegas, though, that was for sure, which was, as I thought about it, the last time I’d seen him naked. Not that he’d been scrawny then, just less obviously muscular.
    I was having to reassess everything I’d ever thought about him, and my brain wasn’t cooperating all that much. The awkward kid I’d befriended in ninth grade had already turned into someone successful before we’d gone to Vegas together to celebrate his buy-out. But he’d still been a little shy and unsure then.
    Though, as cheerful memory reminded me, not so shy that he hadn’t put the moves on me before the plane was up in the air at the start of that trip. Come to think of it, there was still one place I could have sex that wouldn’t remind me of Martini. Of course, now that my memory had been jogged, it sure would remind me of Chuckie.
    Chuckie was the opposite of awkward, shy, or unsure now. He was smooth, suave, debonair, and, frankly, appealing in a way I’d been unprepared for. I wondered if he’d been this way for the last few years and, like everything else, I just hadn’t noticed. I had a horrible feeling he had been. The realization that I’d put Chuckie into a box in my mind and had never let him out of it, even after having wild sex with him for a week, would have been enough to reduce me to tears if I hadn’t already had enough to cry about.
    And yet, here he was, not berating me for being a moron but instead patiently asking me to finally take the lid off that box and look at him the way he’d always looked at me. In that sense, he was the same Chuckie he’d always been. We still had all the things in common we’d used to, but now we had much more.
    The musical choices were odd. We’d graduated in the late nineties, but the deejay seemed intent on an eighties revival with current hits thrown in. I was reasonably okay with this—I liked music from all eras and genres, after all—until he spun John Mayer’s “Dreaming With a Broken Heart.” It was a slow song, and we were dancing close together. But the lyrics cut through me like a knife, and the tears came. Not too many, but enough to make me glad I hadn’t worn makeup.
    Chuckie noticed, but all he did was wipe them away with his fingertips. Then he leaned my head against his chest, and we kept on dancing.
    We did tango, more than once. It was fun, but it was also sexual and romantic. I was glad I had to concentrate on not tripping, because if I’d been comfortable with all the dance moves, I would have felt worse than I already did. And I felt pretty bad, because a part of me was wondering if it was right to enjoy being like this with Chuckie while I still wanted to be with Martini. The short time in the elevator with Christopher I could put down to lustful insanity and fugly interference. Having the dance equivalent of hot and heavy sex with Chuckie seemed much more . . . intentional. I started working on my acceptance speech for Class Super Slut and went back to concentrating on not stepping on Chuckie’s feet.
    The evening’s entertainment ended, and we wandered outside to one of the pools. There was no moon out, but there were enough lights from the hotel to be able to see decently. I heard a beeping and realized I must have missed some calls. Only one, as it turned out. I dialed. “Hello, I think you called me?”
    “Kitty, it’s Brian. Glad you called me back.” He sounded tense.
    “What’s up?”
    “You’re at the reunion?”
    “Yes. You’re not.”
    “We were coming. Got delayed.”
    “We?”
    “Me and Serene. Don’t say it, yes, I was an idiot, yes, she’s a great girl now that she’s not being drugged, yes, I was acting xenophobic.”
    “Good, good. So, why are you calling?”
    “Serene needs to talk to you.” I could tell the phone was passing from him to her. “Kitty?”
    “Hi, how’re you feeling?”
    “Better. Why aren’t you with Jeff?” Well, apparently she was always blunt, drugged or not.
    “We . . . we