Mistletango

Chapter 2

Chapter 2December 21: Ramon

Angelo Viveros Belmann. Such a f*****g euphonious name. BA-da-da BA-da-da BAH-dah. You could waltz your way right through it. Whereas mine was Ba-DA DAH-da, which was more of a drum-line kind of rhythm. I hadn’t told him yet about my high-school-band experience, or the boy I’d had the worst crush on then, or the night at band camp when we tried something and almost got caught. I hadn’t mentioned the boy in college, or the night after a frat party when we tried something and didn’t get caught. Angie was doing such a good job of not coming on to me that I could almost believe he wasn’t attracted.

Which meant I could almost pretend I wasn’t either. But why pretend? What was the point? If we had a good time here in Argentina, my disapproving family would never hear about it; and if we had a bad time, well, we’d be living on opposite sides of the continent.

I was thinking about that as we walked to dinner. Our pleasantly-lazy hours at the park were followed by a round of showers, getting dressed, chatting idly. He’d asked if I had any plans at all, and the truth was that I didn’t. It was really out of character for me. From the sound of things, he was much more of a let-things-happen guy, but I had to ask. “Did you actually plan stuff for this vacation?”

“I planned two things,” he said, shooting me one of those sideways glances that was mostly a smile. God, he was cute. A couple inches taller than me, with wavy hair and pretty eyes. “I had dinner with some cousins and my last remaining great-aunt, and I have tickets to a show on Christmas Eve.”

“What kind of show?”

“A tango show, duh.”

I laughed. Then I clicked on the plural. “Tickets meaning more than one?”

He shrugged. “The odds favored meeting someone who’d like to come with, and if they didn’t offer to pay for theirs it’s not a big deal.”

“I’d love to go, and I’m happy to pay.” Could I have taken a second to think? Yes, yes I could. But I went with the impulse. “I took my girlfriend to a tango show once and really enjoyed it.”

“Did she like it?”

“She liked going out to shows, period. Gave her something to brag about to her bestie who kept getting dragged to basketball games.”

“Oh my God. I got dragged to one of those one time. Sat there with my e-reader and only looked up when the cheerleaders were on at halftime.”

I laughed again. “Why did you go?”

He shrugged again. “It was something different. The guy said, how do you know you won’t like it, and I’m a competitive dickhead so I was like, challenge accepted.”

“Then I’ll bet he was pissed off that you were reading.”

“Yep. Whining about how I didn’t give it a chance. Whatever. Here we are.”

The restaurant host greeted us as if they’d met Angie before, which they probably had. Two things I already knew: he liked trying new things, and he also liked having a routine. We had both those things in common. I looked around as we were guided to our table. It was a small place, maybe twenty tables, with a full bar just inside the door. The rest of that wall was racks of wine. “Holy crap.”

“Told you more alcohol wouldn’t be a problem.”

I sat down, bemused. We’d already polished off the hotel’s gift bottle of Torrontés, which was more drinking than I usually did in a day. But then, nothing about this day was usual. I participated fully in the wine selection process, letting Angie know that I’d be paying for this dinner and the wine, no arguments. He smiled, looking almost shy, as if people didn’t assert themselves much with him but he liked it. When the bottle came out—Bonarda, which I’d never tried before—we both practically guzzled the first glass, it was so good. Then we sipped like adults as we ate our way through the provoleta (a gooey melted cheese thing with mushrooms and onions, served with bread and balsamic; you would think I’d had enough bread and cheese for one day, but you’d be wrong); potato and egg salad; Caesar salad; and asado banderita. Then instead of dessert, we had coffee, because the night was young.

It actually wasn’t. I could easily have gone back to the hotel and face-planted again. But Angie was going on to a milonga, and I was on vacation, and why not. We strolled along (he knew where he was going, so I paid very little attention) talking about the tremendous meal at first, and then about me.

“I get the idea you’re close with your family,” I said.

“Oh yeah. We see a lot of each other. My parents are still married, my brother and sister are both married with kids, I still have three living grandparents. My Argentine granddad was a lot older than his wife. But enough about me.”

I huffed out a laugh, taking the hint. “Okay. Well, my father is a licensed contractor with a home-improvement business and my two brothers both work with him. They all live in the South Bay. I went to college on scholarship, which according to my brothers made me stuck-up.” I thought seriously about whether or not I should say the next thing. But it was an important thing, because it was the real reason my family and I were estranged. “And when I was in college I fell in love with a boy.”

Angie stopped walking. “You huh?!”

I turned to look at him, half-smiling. “I’m bi. Or maybe pan. I’ve been seriously involved with five people, three girls and two boys. Anyway.” I tipped my head, indicating we should walk on. He trailed along beside me with an almost-visible thought balloon full of punctuation marks over his head. “I was young and idealistic and defiant, so I took that boy home for a holiday dinner and you could’ve heard the fight from space. He was so upset he never spoke to me again.”

“Oh, s**t, I’m sorry. Did he not realize you weren’t out to them?”

“No, and that was a hundred percent my fault. Anyway, after that, I wasn’t welcome to live at home anymore, so I moved in with my mother’s mother. She was mad as hell at my parents, and her house was closer to college. That’s why I have this.” I indicated the sleeve of Sleeping Beauty tattoo art on my arm, which he’d raised his eyebrows at but not asked about. “It was Nana’s favorite movie and we watched it together for her birthday every year since I was ten. She died two years ago and left me her house.”

“God, I’m sorry again. How long did you live with her?”

I turned my head away for a second, biting my lip to hide a smile. Such a sneaky way of asking how old I was. “Thirteen years. I’m thirty-five.”

“How long had you and the white girl been dating?”

Was that a change of subject? Maybe not. “A long time. Four years. I was nearly done with my master’s when we met.”

We walked on for a while without speaking. I could hear the gears turning in Angie’s brain. He had to know that the only reason for me to mention my sexuality was to open a door. When he finally spoke again it was with a lifted hand, pointing to a building down the street. “That’s the place.” People were standing around outside, smoking and laughing. Music poured out the open door.

“Is it going to be okay if I just sit and watch? I don’t know tango.”

“Oh sure. But there’s bound to be people who ask you to dance. Ask them to teach you. Everybody loves a beginner.”

“Really?”

“Well, a beginner who looks like you.” Oh. Oh. We stopped walking again, and he was smiling at me again, a different kind of smile. “You dance, though, right?”

I nodded. “Salsa, merengue, rumba, cha-cha. A little waltz like they do at quinceañeras.” We stared at each other for a second, then I ventured, “I did some Googling while you were in the shower and it said that men can dance together at milongas. Like it’s no big deal. Not necessarily a s*x thing.”

“True, true, and true. They’ll play a set of songs, usually three, that’s called a tanda. You dance with one partner for those three songs, then choose another partner. If you want, you could just watch for the first three and then, maybe, you could dance with me.”

It sounded like a question. “I’d like that.”

* * * *

Oh my God. Oh my God. I knew, okay, I knew that tango was sexy. I knew you could lose yourself in the music, and I knew that Angie was a professional dancer, and if there was ever a combination of circumstances that would lead to a great night out dancing it was this combination right here. But oh my God.

I did as he suggested during the first tanda, watching from the sidelines. Tried to be an impartial observer, studying different couples to see what they were doing with the music, but my gaze kept returning to Angie. As soon as we went through the door half a dozen people came up to him. Shaking hands, kissing his cheek, slapping his back, jabbering in rapid Spanish that I had a little trouble following because it wasn’t quite the Spanish I grew up with. He introduced me to everyone. Made sure they knew I could dance but didn’t know tango. Everyone said they’d find me later, and maybe they meant it.

But I hoped they didn’t. Because after the cortina when Angie came to find me, and after we started to dance, I didn’t want to dance with anyone else. Like, ever.

He was teaching me, obviously, because—he said—when I danced with someone else there were specific things I, as a follower, should know how to read. But maybe because he had all those years of ballroom experience, he used a lot of vocabulary I recognized. Here a cross body lead from salsa, there a hesitation step from waltz; here a series of rock steps as in rumba, there a syncopation like cha-cha.

The killer, though, the killer was the dance position. You can dance tango in an open hold; I saw several couples doing that. Angie didn’t give me the option. He slid his right arm around my back, tucking me so close my face was practically in his hair. “Follow my body,” he said softly.

And I thought, helplessly, I’ll follow you anywhere.

Three dances in a row. He didn’t turn me loose during the cortina. Another three dances, another cortina. Then a set of vals milonga, irresistible music in three-quarter time, and he danced me to the center of the floor, showing off with a mélange of styles. I occasionally stumbled or froze, missing leads or not knowing what I should do when he paused, but he never criticized. In fact, he always apologized, then tried something else. Maybe if I’d had longer to watch him dance I would’ve been less surprised by some of the leads. But I wasn’t watching anything. My forehead was pressed to his temple, my lips inches from his skin, and my focus was entirely on our many points of contact. On how his weight changed, and how his spine rotated, and how his shoulders turned, and how his thigh pushed between mine to send my foot back.

I was breathless, confused, and painfully turned on by the end of that tanda. This time he walked me out to the edge of the floor, found a vacant table, and invited me to sit. I did, dazed, staring at nothing. Music continued, but I didn’t really hear it.

A few minutes later Angie was back with his hands full: two bottles of water in one, two bottles that looked like beer in the other. “I don’t know if I can handle any more alcohol,” I said.

“It’s ginger ale,” he said, setting everything down carefully, then taking a seat with his eyes on the bottles as if to make sure they didn’t topple. “How was that?”

I turned my head and blinked at him, mouth open for a second before words came. “I feel like we just had sex.”

“Oh, s**t, I overdid it, didn’t I?” He slumped back.

My eyebrows shot up. “I didn’t mean that in a bad way.”

He sat forward again, looking relieved. “Oh! So it was good s*x?”

“Amazing. Aside from the part where I didn’t come.”

He slapped a hand over his mouth to mute the gust of laughter. I drank some ginger ale, which was very refreshing, not too sweet. Then I drank some water. He was doing the same, apparently waiting for me to say something else. I didn’t, though, because I needed to let my thoughts settle. My arousal had subsided once we weren’t in contact. My body was now telling me it was tired, and I’d been up for a lot of continuous hours, and I’d been non-trivially stressed for a fair proportion of those, and I needed to sleep. But he’d barely gotten a chance to dance with anyone else. “You should get back out there. Do what you came here to do.”

“What makes you think I haven’t been doing what we came here to do?”

I took note of the plural. Yes: we came here. This was, no doubt about it, a date. If it wasn’t, he wouldn’t have held me like that. “Then get back out there so I can watch you some more. Learn some more, while my eyeballs and my brain are still functioning.”

He drank some more ginger ale, eyes smiling at me over the bottle. Then set it down, arranging the empties in the center of the table in a persnickety way that charmed me, and leaned over to kiss my cheek. “If someone else asks you to dance, you should.”

“We’ll see.”

* * * *

Angie stood, stretched, looked around. About five seconds later a fiftyish woman with a mischievous smile and happy eyes walked up. He led her out onto the floor.

I watched. I learned. An indefinite time later, someone else did ask me to dance. I gamely went with him, apologizing in advance for following failures, but he laughed it off. He was fun, he was nice, he was twice my age and not at all sexy with me. Taught me a few things, his manner somehow both impatient and gentle. He said, over and over again, he couldn’t believe I didn’t know this, but he said it in a way that implied it was his fault for failing to teach me. I liked him. He introduced me to his silver-haired wife at the end of the tanda. She told me to dance with her husband again because her feet were tired. So I did.

At the next cortina, I wandered back to the table where our four empty bottles had been joined by someone else’s empty cocktail glass. I fell onto a chair, suddenly aware that my calves were on fire, my feet felt like bricks, and my head was aching.

“You’ve had it, haven’t you,” Angie said, materializing beside me.

“Give me a few,” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to have an aspirin, would you?”

“Hang on.” A minute later he was back with two more bottles of water, taking a pill box out of his shirt pocket and offering it.

I selected two ibuprofen and washed them down. “Thanks. Can tell you’ve done this before.”

“Not this exact thing,” he said, with an odd little smile. I didn’t pursue it, only waved him away again. A few more dances, time for the painkillers to take effect, and then I’d have some chance of making it back to the hotel on foot without actively crying.

God, he was beautiful out there. I mean, they all were, in their way. I’d always loved to watch people dance. Enjoyed dancing myself. But this was different. This was, I thought, the life-changing experience that a great vacation was supposed to deliver. I was going to make the most of it. The absolute most, saying yes to everything, because the truth was that my life needed to change.

I’d been going through the motions, doing what was expected or what was required, not thinking much about what I actually wanted or how to get it. I could have a very different life now, back in Los Angeles. I wouldn’t be marrying the pretty lawyer, wouldn’t be selling Nana’s house to buy something in a more upscale neighborhood, wouldn’t be settling in to twenty years of raising kids.

It was true, what she said. I’d be a good father. I liked kids and believed in the future. The question hadn’t arisen in a serious way because a new associate’s first few years at a law firm are not the best time to go out on parental leave. It was simply an unacknowledged possibility. Or probability, like the probability of getting married someday.

More truth: being with her, on our best day, hadn’t felt like being with Angie tonight.

“Angelo,” I said out loud, though under my breath. “Angelo Viveros Belmann.” Why in the absolute howling f**k did he have to be moving to North Carolina?