Shayde’s first day taking dancing lessons.
[AN: Shayde’s first dancing lesson was when she was a 5YO Katie Walker…But I’ll take ‘modern’ 25thC dance]
“And left… No, the other left. Stage left!”
“Ow!” Shayde flinched away. “How’s someone so skinny so darn heavy?”
“I’m denser than I look.”
“Ye can say that twice,” Shayde muttered. “Why do we have tae learn this thing? Isn’t it designed fer people wi’ four feet?”
“Why did you have to sign me up as your plus one?” countered Rael.
“I think yer cute when you’re flustered?” she suggested. It wasn’t a lie, exactly. More an evasion of the truth.
He was getting used to those. And they always cropped up when he was the topic of discussion. “It’s a formal Gaux event. Dancing is mandatory and so is this dance in particular. And since you already submitted the RSVP…”
“I get it, I get it. It’s all my fault. It’s just..” she wrestled both with her emotions and her flyaway hair. “I thought it’d be nice. A little dinner. A little dancing. I didnae think it’d be the crosswise hopscotch frug…”
Rael snorted. Shayde and her antiquated expressions could be both intentionally and unintentionally hilarious. “Do you even know who the Gaux are?”
“Some… planet we have tae play nice with?”
“They’re heavy-worlders. The ones that sort of look like… headless rhino-centaurs, if I remember your terminology.” And that terminology was why she wore a black-and-silver fan as a brooch most times. As a warning to others that she may be accidentally insulting.
“Oh, is tha’ them? And they dance?”
“The Gaux have a great appreciation for fine things, including the art of body movement.”
“But we only have two legs. Or I do, at any rate… You can just grow another pair.”
“Yes, but it isn’t comfortable.”
Shayde was frowning. Always a bad sign. Either she was angry and about to happen to someone… or thinking and about to happen to him. “This place has a holographic interface, yeah?”
“…yes…?”
“So can we get it tae show us how two Gaux’d do it. I always learned better from watchin’.”
Now that was almost obscene in the wrong mind-set. Rael wondered if it was his association with her and her dirty jokes or something… more internal that had his mind headed towards the gutter.
He did his best to keep his mental depravity to himself and dialed up two Gaux dancers on the holo-playback.
Shayde stood roughly inside the female projection and learned by trying to stay inside. “I get it. Two times the gravity… ye got tae be careful. Arms’d be a bother, so it’s in th’ shoulders.. C’m on then. Join in…”
He did his best, matching his recalled lessons to the Gaux hologram.
“Watch his feet an’ match yours,” instructed Shayde.
It wasn’t precisely easier… merely less troublesome to recall.
She had a warm smile, even with the fangs. “Na, don’t we look charmin’?”
Rael decided on diplomatic silence.
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