Page 19 of The Pucking Wrong Man

The performances continued and finally...it was the last one.

I’d dozed through the last few, but the energy in the room seemed to shift as the stage went dark, like the entire audience was holding its collective breath for what was about to happen.

I sat up in my seat, wondering what I was missing. Surely the cloggers weren’t getting this reaction. No offense to anyone who clogged.

A single spotlight lit up the stage.

And I saw her.

Her.

A vision that I wasn’t sure was real.

There were other dancers around her, but she might as well have been the only person left in the world.

Her body moved with a fluidity that defied description, commanding the attention of everyone in the audience as she danced. Each movement was a fucking revelation, changing my life and my focus with every step she took.

I tracked every sway of her hips, every twist of her torso. I memorized every step she took, knowing that it would consume my thoughts until maybe the end of time. The music swelled around her, every gesture imbued with emotion and intention. She danced with a fervor that seemed to consume her, her body a vessel for the raw passion that seemed to be flowing straight through her veins.

With each leap and turn, she cast a spell.

My life changed.

There was only before her, and after her.

And I was solidly in my “after her” era, a world I didn’t recognize. My pulse was racing, my heart beating out of my chest. I was afraid to blink because I didn’t want to miss a moment of her.

“She’s good,” Geraldine said, her hands clasped in front of her as she bobbed along with the music.

“Understatement of the century. She’s incredible,” I whispered.

I could feel her eyes boring into the side of my face, but I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the sight in front of me.

The dancer’s long, white-blonde hair cascaded down her back, swaying with each graceful movement as if it were a part of the dance itself. With each step, it felt like she was casting a net, taking me and everyone else in the audience captive.

Her movements seemed effortless. Every extension of her leg, every point of her toes, drew me in until I was forgetting basic things about myself...like how to breathe.

As a professional athlete, I’d thought I knew what passion looked like...certainly what it felt like.

But she was blowing my mind.

I’d never seen so much passion in a human being, it seemed as if she would die if she wasn’t out on that stage. Instead of dancing to the music, the music was playing for her. Like it was made for her.

Or something like that.

I’d never been a particularly fancy-worded guy, eloquent I guess was the word? But I was sitting here waxing poetic about this girl like nobody’s business.

She danced the same way I played hockey.

As if, nothing else mattered to her in the world but that dance.

Except, decades of me feeling a certain kind of way about hockey seemed to be fading as I sat in that seat. And I wasn’t sure what to think about that.

She threw back her head, her entire face visible under the lights...and holy fuck.

I thought I knew what pretty was. Beautiful girls were throwing themselves at my feet constantly—I wasn’t being a shitty prick when I said that. It was just facts. When you had a face and a body and a job like I did, it was kind of par for the course.

But fuck.

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