Surrendering To Noah's Arc

A wrecking ball Fire Sign experiences a blissful taste of trust & surrender

In FMA (Filipino Martial Arts), there is a saying:
SAME-SAME.
And it is.
Dance, martial arts, sex, music, conversation...

LIFE.

Fire Sign crossing paths with the Debonaire Demon

Fall 1998
25 years old

Now this is how it's supposed to feel!

He cues me with only the slightest movement: the pressure of his grip change, a little lean, or the telltale lift of my arm. Noah’s fingertips curl around my shoulder blade to pull me here; the heel of his palm presses to push me there. I don't have to see his expression to know he's about to change. I can feel it even when he's behind me.

Dmitri does all these things, too, but it's not the same. I don't completely understand it. Dem must understand, because when I crashed into him yet again, he decided that this isn't working. We finished out the song and hugged each other, but the tightness in his smile and his shoulders said it all.

He's frustrated with me.

I'm frustrated with this whole swing dance thing. I'm too much of a soloist. "Stop back-leading me," he always has to say, and I truly don't mean to. But this music pumps through me, puppeting me like a marionette the same way all my favorite tunes do. I feel the crescendo. I can taste the impending explosion no matter if I know the song or not and—

I don't know what it is. Dem and I don't feel the music the same way. He's so smooth and subtle and I'm just...

Not.

I want him to push me. I know I can do so much more, but he's right. If we can't flow together on the basics, then there's no way we should be trying fancier stuff. Some of it could get us hurt, or hurt someone nearby.

But when I feel the surge or when those hard off-beats pound or when the music soars to the heights of this ballroom ceiling, the last thing I want to do is continue the same type of footwork that we've been doing for the last thirty-two friggin’ measures. The song demands a change and he doesn't feel it. Instead, he feels it other places, catching me off guard, so I back-step straight into his knee.

CRASH! Ka-jar. Reset.

Or I run nose-first into his arm.

WHAM! Ka-thump. Reset.

Or I body-slam him like I do when we face off in armor.

KA-BLAM—Sproing!

The sproing would be Dmitri, not me. He goes flying off his feet sideways and has to skitter-skitter-reset, because we're the same height. But where he is wiry and limber, I'm a wall of raging fire and muscle with weaponized bellydancer-hips and shit-kicking fighter-thighs. When I crash into him, I'm like a wrecking ball. Our entire rhythm on the dance floor gets blown to smithereens, because I can't figure out how to yield to his cues.

He is such an incredible dancer and an exemplary instructor. Patient, encouraging, detailed, passionate. His feet are like silk across the polished, wood floor. His hands are those of a potter molding clay on the wheel with one fingertip or the slightest shift in pressure.

I watch him with his regular partners, trying to understand what I’m missing. He can twirl and toss those girls anywhere. Even the ones who are taller than he is, because it's not like he isn't also a wall of muscle. His stomach is a washboard and his arms possess bigger guns than anybody would imagine under his slick button-up.

(I know this because I've seen him naked for weeks now.)

As a fighter, he is quick and accurate, agile and fluid. The way he moves when he dances—it’s the same as how he moves in armor. Not me. I get somebody coming at my head and suddenly my body forgets that it dances for a living. Until it remembers. Then out of nowhere, there it’ll be, and suddenly I’m laying waste to big bruisers who outsize and outgun me.

Dmitri’s one of the smaller ones on the field, too. He’s been helping me translate the lessons from my fighting mentors into dancer language. It's gradually taking hold, and I’m starting to feel comfortable going toe-to-toe with him.

But not here on the dance floor. When it comes to synchronizing with my boyfriend, all I do is glub-glub cluelessly in the deep end. In the beginning, when he was purely in Instructor Mode, we were great together. But now that I’m ready to sink my teeth in and be an active participant—now that we’re trying to really just dance with each other?

It’s not working, so he takes my hand and leads me over to Noah, one of the regular gang that hangs out at Dem’s table. "Man, would you do me a favor?" Dmitri asks the six-foot-three debonaire jock. "Would you take my girl for a spin so she can really feel it? I think she just needs a lead she can't overpower."

Noah's brows tic and his head tilts, but he shrugs. "Sure." He uses the rolled-up thickness of his sleeve to mop the beads of sweat trickling down the clean-cut edges of his hair. After slamming down the rest of his water, he adjusts his suspenders, then offers his hand.

Mine transfers from Dmitri’s to Noah’s. I let this towering stranger lead me out into the flurry of spinning, bouncing, jumping bodies. Noah doesn't stop walking to face me and set up. He isn’t cautious and questioning. He just jerks me into him and goes!

Noah-While-Dancing is a completely different animal from Noah-Kicked-Back-At-The-Table. He is a scorching, dapper demon, so much more than the sweating muscle, soaked cotton, and sturdy bone before my eyes. His presence could engulf this dance floor if it wasn’t all focused onto me.

Being up next to him, I can feel when he's about to shift by the way his energy coils. His legs hunker. His shoes swivel and bap out the rhythm. When he explodes, it's right with the music—exactly when I feel it. He pulls me into him, whips me back out. I recoil and return. My hands land inside his and our eyes lock. The question fires out from his face—do I know this step?

I shoot back a grin. Indeed, good sir, I do.

His smile flashes and his eyes leave mine again. With his gaze hazy out over my head, I know where he's gone. The same place I am when my eyes glaze through his chest.

We’re both inside the music. The movement. The moment.

I don’t need to watch him. I only need to feel. We sync like breathing. There's no hesitation in him, which leaves no room for any in me. When our eyes do meet, it’s usually to share a grin of, “Hell, yeah!” or say, “Here it comes/I’m ready.”

He spins me around. I move to recoil—

"Mmm!" he barks, clamping me inside his frame. He breathes down my neck like a suave gorilla-jailor. The elated smile breaks across my face because I am not going anywhere. He keeps me there as long as it pleases him, then finally releases.

The second time he has to wrangle me back into his rhythm, I’m the one who boomerangs and goes sproinging—straight back into his clutches, and that's when it happens.

Complete and utter

The Unexpected Surrender of a Wrecking Ball

Euphoria rocks me. My feet move without me telling them. It’s more like he’s telling them. I spin in and out, over here, yonder there. I am anything but a limp noodle. Anything but passive, yet all my insides open to him. That place where the music usually marionettes me—now it's cradled and kneaded and wielded by Noah's huge, sensitive meathooks.

My breathing comes in rapturous gasps. This is it! This is what Dmitri is always trying to get me to do.

Noah's hands land on my hips. There's an abrupt halt in the music that I never could have anticipated. But he knows this song like his pulse, and in the silence I arc out into the air. BLAM! My feet thud down as the beat booms out, and then we're off again. Pressed close. Whipping out. Yanked back in and laughing together. Our eyes lock. His grin is as big as mine.

"Oh, my God!" I say. "Now I get it."

In his enthusiastic nod, I can see—he wholeheartedly agrees, and I am on the fucking moon!

And just like that, it’s over.

On the final note Noah lands us toe-to-toe. I look up at him. He looks down at me. If I wasn't his friend's girlfriend and if he wasn't my boyfriend's friend, this might be the moment. But I am and he is and so the moment is all we have. My cheeks flare hot for a reason that has nothing to do with our exertions, so I focus on the periwinkle button undone below the hollow of his throat. At the same time, he looks out over my head again. “Thanks,” he says. “That was fun.”

“Oh, no,” I return. “Thank you.”

His head dips. “Pleasure.”

We both keep our smiles in check, and such respectful restraint makes him a thousand times more attractive—as a dance partner only, or as something more? No clue. We could have no way of knowing unless we took each other for a spin off the ballroom floor, but that’s not what matters. I’ve been waiting for weeks—in reality, for years—to feel that kind of synchronization with someone while dancing together.

I yearn to dance with him again and again. Now that I get it, I want to finally learn. I ache to sink my teeth into everything that I've known this dance style would be. Everything I know is inside me, if I only had the right partner.

I don't ask him for it and he doesn't offer.

We walk side-by-side back to Dmitri, who's been watching us instead of dancing. My boyfriend's eyes glow with approval and the satisfaction of seeing that his suspicions were correct.

He and Noah shake hands. Dem adds a clap of the palm against one of those meaty biceps that flung me around like a devoted rag doll. "Thanks, man. That was great.”

Noah dips his head. “Anytime.” He nods at me, then disappears into the throng with a new partner. I am more disappointed than I want to admit, considering the immense guilt I feel over being able to mesh so seamlessly with a stranger, when I keep colliding and straining against the man I'm inviting into the deepest of my intimacies.

Dmitri’s really great. He’s wonderful. But he constantly seems frustrated by me. Sometimes, even annoyed. So often there is this…thing in the back of his eyes. Like he was just starting to think he wanted to get up close and intertwined with me—until he has to jump back out of my way to keep from getting creamed by my most casual, joyful stroll.

Even our most impassioned sexual exploits don’t thrum and hum the way this one dance with Noah did. It was like playing flute duets with Janelle in the echoey stairwell. Our notes would integrate so completely. The round fullness of two separate entities becoming One. The pulsing vibration between them. The circle drawing closed, made more than whole by such Union.

Harmony.

There is no other sensation like it.

"That was it," Dmitri says, with an eye-flick toward the dance floor.

"Yes," I say, breathless and still a little high. "That was it."

Unfortunately, my epiphany doesn't transfer to any of the next dances with my boyfriend. I’m able to relax more and we have no further mishaps, but only because I restrain myself and pay keen attention to his every nuance instead of truly dancing. This is different from what I experienced with Noah. It’s back to being a mental exercise, a familiar mode of operation I have enacted in many kinds of relationships for my whole life.

It’s the boxing up of myself.

It’s the capitulating choice to move in someone else's rhythms that do not jive with mine in order to keep from stepping on their toes and body-slamming them across the floor.

It's still loads of fun. But it’s not synchronized harmony, fully engaged yet fully surrendered as I hand over the reins to my partner—not because he’s the man and therefore the lead, but because I’m certain that he's going to lead me exactly where I want to go in the moment when I want to go there, and then he’s going to show me where I never knew I wanted to go.   

That’s how it felt with Noah.

To my supreme disappointment, I never get to dance with the debonaire demon again, because a week later Dmitri drives the three hours down to see me—we alternate most weekends. After that night on the dance floor when we both got to see what I’m like in the arms of a man who isn't overpowered by the storm surge of me, but can instead instinctually wield all my energy as easily as his own…

I think Dmitri knew that night at the club. I definitely did, no matter if I wanted to admit it or not.

I am the ocean.

I am the firestorm.

It is a rare pair of hands that has ever been able to hold me and inspire my surrender. That’s why I’m a soloist.

On Sunday morning, Dmitri and I mutually and affectionately agree that we should break up for the exact same reasons that he placed my hand into that of another man.

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