Magic of the First Dance

She was the Homecoming Queen. She had been voted Most Feminine in our Senior Class's Who’s Who. She was those things and so much more. President of this club and that club Everyone was her friend and she was a friend to everyone. She had bronze skin that seemed sun kissed even in the depths of winter, inherited from her Mother and the Spaniards who settled southern Alabama centuries ago. She had the Raven black hair of the Moorish conquerors of Spain a thousand years past. Hair that perfectly framed her face and lightly brushed her shoulders. It spoke of timeless beauty, geometric symmetry and proclaimed God’s golden ratio was revealed in its features. The perfection of the eons in her smile, in the distance from chin to lips and lips to nose, all bracketed by a smile from cheek to cheek and shuttered by eyebrows above the windows to her soul, each reflecting purity from their deep brown pools. I would say that she was my dream girl, but I was no fool. I never dreamed God would grant me such a wish, that a girl like her would ever give me a chance.

I was no one. A party boy without ambition or skills or goals. A basketball player at a football school, the team captain who failed his teammates, leading them to twenty-two losses and only five wins. Six foot three but only one hundred and sixty pounds in my winter layers and heavy hiking boots. Ready to be blown one direction and then another by any gust of wind. What was I even doing here? I always felt so out of place, out of my league.

It was Easter weekend, so like good little Christians we were playing Truth or Dare. Trust me, at that point in high school we could have been doing much worse, most of us already had done much worse. It was just a game, so I was sure that she didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t take it seriously either, but I wasn’t going to miss this chance.

We were in the bathroom at my friend’s house. His Dad was a doctor and their multistory home stretched down the side of the hill, with a complete basement spilling out at the bottom into his backyard. There was a living room that opened into a sort of game room with a pool table and a full bar. A perfect place for this kind of adolescent behavior.

The Homecoming Queen and I had been dared to kiss and for some reason we weren’t going to do it in the open in front of everyone. Maybe it was because she had a boyfriend, maybe it was because we were afraid that my friend’s parents would come down the stairs and end our fun, either way I was about to forget everything that had come before we closed that bathroom door. I’d forget feeling like a loser because of basketball, even because of life in general. That entire senior year was about to be rendered pointless in one brief moment.

It was just me and her and a witness, the boy who made the dare, a friend of mine and a friend of hers. I was sure that I would get nothing more than a peck before she ran off to declare to the other girls that I had cooties, so deep was my middle school trauma. But I still wasn’t going to miss this chance. I could survive all the embarrassment, all the bullying, any hardship that the most evil of my classmates could bring, all for this, for just one kiss. I leaned forward, shaking, sweat beading on my brow, palms clammy. She leaned in slowly, nervously, or was it tentatively? Was she scared or just reluctant? She must not want to kiss me. I closed my eyes and stopped thinking. Our lips met, they pressed together, opened, our tongues met and danced. The room caught fire, my cheeks filled with their flames, my entire body erupted as every nerve ending became its own meteor. Time stopped and the heavens realigned, adjusting to the new reality just created. She pulled away and I opened my eyes, I saw all of creation reflected back from those brown pools of unknown depth. Her hands grabbed my face, fingertips below my ear, I felt her fingernails travel up through the hair on the back of my head. I gently brushed those Raven locks back over her delicate ears and pulled her face back to mine. There was only she and I. We kissed again and the world came to an end.

We went back into the other room as if nothing had happened, as if my life had not been forever changed.

“They did it,” our friend announced, “they kissed. And I think they kinda liked it,” he laughed.

I looked at her, trying my best to express everything I was feeling with my eyes. Words wouldn’t have been adequate anyway, even if I could have found them, but I’d thrown the past into the pools of her eyes. All my knowledge, what little there was, went with it.

It wasn’t like it was my first kiss, that had come in seventh grade, nearly five years before that moment. It had been a forgettable kiss, however, but this one had been filled with magic. Not even the year before, when I had declared my love for a different girl, who then turned me from a boy into a man, had I felt such a spark as this. That feeling had been like a bottle rocket, sputtering off into the near distance, popping like the dud they so often were. This kiss would need to be measured in megatons like an atomic blast, sucking all the elements into our lips and crashing them together with our tongues in a solitary explosion not seen since the dawn of creation. What sort of a sorceress was she? Did she -could she- feel it too?

She had a boyfriend, I tried to remind myself in an effort to calm my nerves. She had a future and I had no plans. Figure yourself out, don’t worry about whether or not she wants to kiss you again. She’ll never want you as much as you want her.

I tried my best to let guilt kick in, I encouraged it, hoping it would overwhelm my desires. Her boyfriend was a good guy, how would I feel if I were him? He and I weren’t exactly friends. He was a year older than me so we never had classes with each other, but we were on the basketball team together until he graduated. He was from a good family and I was from a broken home. His father was a respected lawyer, a partner in the town's oldest and most prestigious firm. My father was a truck driver and my mom, who lived five hours away, was a nurse, while his mom got to stay at home. It didn’t matter how I felt, even if I desired to steal her away, she was not going to choose me over him. My mind swirled, like a simulacra of the dance between our tongues, rotating through memories. Her wintergreen breath, the bitter wax of her rose lipstick, the strawberry smell of her olive skin, still on my hands, unwashed, not touching anything else. Time stood still in that cyclone of thoughts even as the clock still ticked forward, second by second until midnight came. It was now Easter Sunday and we all had to go our separate ways. I could not sleep, nor did prayer or atonement stop the vortex in my brain.

I tried to play it cool. I was happy at school for the first time since basketball season. I walked like a man who had accomplished something, instead of like a boy who believed he never would.

My Dad had taken the cover off of our pool, so that next weekend after Easter I invited over a few friends. I didn’t tell her, but she found out and came anyway. She wasn’t invited but she was more than welcome. I could only pay attention to her and thankfully she paid attention to me. We snuck off from the crowd and our lips found one another again. Our tongues danced like they had before, starting fires I could not control. Not one kiss, or two, three or even four, but countless. We danced and danced in the silence, no music was necessary. Maybe she feels the magic too, I allowed myself to think.

I worried that the thrill for her was that of possibly being caught, found out. The fun wasn’t me, but the act, the thrill of the cheat, of deceit. I no longer cared. He wasn’t my friend, just a former teammate. Win or lose, I decided to play the game, to give it my all.

The following weekend was movie night at the house of another friend. She was supposed to be going to see her boyfriend and so she had not been invited. I asked her to come anyway. She did and we snuck off again. Dancing like he had before, twirling in the growing flames. By now I recognized that I was in trouble, that I’d lost control. Why had I given her power over me? Why would I not? How could I not?

The next week was Prom, our dates long ago established, we’d both be going with friends and not each other. She ignored her date and I ignored mine. We were horrible people and so perfect for each other. We danced one way and then another, our bodies pressed close. Nearly a month since that first magic kiss and every one still sparked the same. I allowed myself to start to believe that I could have her as my own.

But she was not mine. Later that night at the after party a friend, that same friend who had started this by a dare, drunk and boisterous he called a group of us together. He was up to something and soon declared that he had an announcement.

“Our Homecoming Queen has been cheating on her boyfriend so she dumped him tonight, and what’s more…”

What is more? I thought, hoping against hope.

“She’s going to announce who her new boyfriend is…” That’s when my friend, the doctor’s son in whose house she and I first kissed, leaned in to kiss her. She kissed him back, but not for long before she turned to look at me.

I cannot imagine what she must have seen. Anger, rage, pain, surprise, shock, fear, or sadness, all burning out of my eyes. Or did she just see that my face went pale, that the fire had gone out.

I was sick. I turned and stumbled away and found a trash can. I puked up the night's drinks and the last month of hope and passion. I wiped my eyes, they always betrayed me and were trying to do so now with tears.

Why did I feel so wronged when I had been just as much to blame? Was it because I’d let myself have feelings for her? Or was it because I now doubted that she ever had feelings for me? What a naive, hopeless romantic fool I had been.

I managed to ignore her the last few weeks of school. She called a few times but I would not let myself answer, no matter how bad I wanted to hear her voice. At least she would know that I was hurt, even if she never knew for sure how I felt when we kissed. I was able to get back on my feet, to become myself again. To hide the pain with false bravado, the lack of confidence with over confidence. I’ve kissed many girls since, I've even fallen in love more than once, but I’ve never felt the same as when I danced in the fire with her.

That fall she and I were at the same college. She had broken up with my friend but I had a new girlfriend. She came to my roommate's birthday party and grabbed me by the arm as I walked by.

“You can do so much better than her,” she said.

“Like you?” I whispered into her ear.

She turned her head, in shame or anger I do not know. I walked away. I never got my answer. Even now when I look into the flames I wonder.