Shameless

The first thing which you noticed about him was the way in which he moved. Fluid, controlled, as if each shift and ripple of his skin was deliberate. It was almost tight but not mechanical, like the graceful turn of a ballerina in mid-pirouette. Had you been less than fascinated with his form you might have shifted your sight lower, for you were sure that he had the dainty ankles of a true dancer. Many of these seizure-ridden young bodies quaked and writhed with all the abandon of a dying insect, movements wild and jerking as if each nerve were screaming with masochistic pain. But he seemed apart from this mad orgy of hapless movement, his limbs flowing to each beat of the music as if the movements were preordained. You had never before been entranced by the way another being moved for you were a delinquent with as much sexual interest as an infant. Fumbling like a small child yet too young to experiment with the delicious friction of lust. Nevertheless, something about the space between his sharp shoulder-blades (revealed at sudden intervals by forward movements) was drawing tight a string in your stomach.

You had never seen such long, slim arms in your life. His t-shirt hung loose and distracting but you paid all attention to those fucking wrists which poked bony and fragile and brown like sugar into the air as his hands fluttered. Long hands, so thin when they curved that you thought perhaps they were made of paper, dangled from those lanky arms. There were many things they could have done, those willowy limbs. Hung loose and gangling with the awkwardness of a colt or maybe flung at random. But instead they defied the downward pull of gravity in gleeful disobedience. Perfect.

His head would toss every few moments, impatient with the sweat-soaked veil of satin hair (which you thought may have been brown but then again might have been some darker hue) that seemed to fall directly into his eyes. It was not as if he was required to see much of anything so you supposed that the shaking could be due to the irritating brush of hair against his cheekbones. On the dance floor there was a roil of movement and everyone ground against everyone else. For this you were grateful because you suspected you could be jealous if he had been dancing with anyone in particular. Silly, really, to be possessive of an anonymous beauty whose face you had yet to uncover. It would be a beautiful face, you decided, with eyes like polished oak and a smile filled with the promise of apple blossoms. Yet you did not know if this was so and maybe you would never know.

Had you been at home in your skin you would have stumbled your way to the slick green-painted concrete. But you were frightened of losing what remained of your mind and stayed at the counter (not precisely a bar but a long, long table lined with stools) clutching your soda as if it could somehow anchor you to your cracked leather seat. The animals howled in the lighting and for a moment you truly thought that you spied the flash of white fangs. Yet your dancer was still a butterfly shining with the ghastly sheen of human sweat. That wetness like a glossy plastic wrap stretched over skin might have been disgusting if he hadn't been so beautiful. There was something erotic and very natural about sweat born of constant movement.

You laughed and told yourself that you had found the secret to life, stealing knowledge from certain minute intricacies of the breath that thrummed through him. The secret was that everything was beautiful, because your dancer was yet faceless and had dirty fingernails. Let us stay amidst the bottles and contemplate the universe while drinking in the art that was your dancer rather than venturing forth to fall beneath the cloven hooves of the masses. Oh how clever you were as you sipped on a beverage that burned your nostrils with carbonation. How adult. How naïve.

You were not, you thought indulgently, aroused by this dancer. Not because he did not warrant such attention but instead because he was too graceful. Too much like the flutter of homespun black cotton on an April evening or the beat of a lover's heart against one's ear, to be so crude and hot and wanton. Yet you thought perhaps he was trying to be exotic and merely failing, a ballerina fumbling around a stripper's pole. The flickering colored lights added a slow come-hither haze to each and every person that spasmed and shook on the dance-floor. Yet he did not make your secret places stir, not much anyway. He made you want to widen your eyes and never miss a flicker of slim fingers while you captured his beauty onto a moving canvas. But it was like light, you thought, this movement. It could not be stolen and preserved. It could only be seen for the length of time that it was there and anything afterward was a dim reproduction. Did they see your dancer? Was he only heat and rapid breath and skin that made them desperate and needy or did someone aside from you see this dark illumination?

And as a new song clicked into place, a similar fast-paced race of limbs and dizzied body-ripples, your dancer exhaled deeply and dropped his arms to his sides. The conclusion of your observation had come to an end for he was tired and ready to retire. As he passed you caught a flash of one side of his face but it was unclear and fleeting. The soft curve of a brunette cheek flushed with exertion, lips that might have been full and dark with a moist fire, a pert nose that demanded to be ignored. But little else. The heady scent of sweat (and not entirely clean sweat, either) fluttered by entirely unlike the cloud of perfume that the exotic dancers emitted. It battered your senses to attention as you followed his exit with your eyes and you watched as he vanished into the shadowed distance.

Irrationally you wished to leap from your seat and stalk after him. To demand his name and company, possibly a phone number. To see if he did indeed have full lips that curved like like a crescent moon and if his eyes were like polished oak as you had envisioned. But maybe that would ruin the magic, to know him afterward. Perhaps he was just one of those beautiful, special things that one sees and then does not encounter again. Maybe he would remain a rapidly fading memory, the shameless dancer that had never turned his face to you or smelled pleasant but was nevertheless exquisite. Maybe.