A Final Dance

Act II

"27Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: 28But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

Matthew 5:27-28 KJV

I don't understand. It's not fair. How can such intense beauty be so wrong to look at? This was hopeless.

The week following that first class gave me time to reflect. Time to decompress. Time, in fact, to wonder what this life is all about if one's not allowed to enjoy such simple pleasures as viewing a pretty girl. That was wrong. That I even asked such questions was wrong. I should not have taken pleasure in such things. I was supposed to be about the business. Focus on technique. If you like a girl, ignore her. Pretend you don't.

But why?

The teacher, sorry her name was Ms. Rousseau, it's good to say their names. Anyway, she'd given me some moves to practice and some basic exercises to do. I did them. More than I was allotted to do, in fact; she'd said all I needed to do was half an hour every other day, but I ended up spending over an hour each and every day.

For the wrong reasons.

I was more afraid of embarrassing myself in front of all those girls again than I cared about being a better dancer. And that was wrong. That shouldn't have been the reason. It should have been about the thing I was supposed to be doing which was dancing, and the girls shouldn't have been part of that equation. Which was an odd line of thinking considering the whole reason I was taking dance was because of the girls. Which was the wrong reason to be taking dance lessons.

So when am I allowed to think about girls? Maybe if there were some designated point in life when I could think about girls without feeling like I have to chastise myself for thinking about girls, I wouldn't be thinking about girls ALL THE TIME. I could probably squeeze it in right after brunch, but would have to cut it off at eleven I have to go to a meeting. So let's pencil this in for Tuesday 10-11, thinking-about-girls time.

May need some extra resources on that. Circle back to me on Friday.

Will do.

And while the cloud of whether or not one should take girls under consideration when deciding whether or not to do such-and-such an action floated through my brain raining getting the tracks wet and threatening to derail my train of thought, the more imminent question was approaching me like a similar kind of train, and I was tied to those very same tracks while a little man in a black cape with a pencil mustache rubbed his fingers together and cackled in silence.

That's a fancy way of saying: what was I going to do about this evening?

This evening, I was going to go back to that dance studio and try once again to control myself and not act like an animal. I had it all figured out. All I had to do was simply not look. That should have been easy, right?

If you look at a pretty girl, she will think you a creep and a pervert and you will make her uncomfortable, which is borderline sexual misconduct and is adultery for which you will burn in hell for all eternity. Worse, she won't want to have anything to do with you. So don't look at her.

So simple.

Those girls at the dance class, they weren't all that, anyway, were they?

And when my mom dropped me off, you might guess how far that train got.

"Hey!" That was Rachel.

"Hey," I replied back, far more casually than a guy like me had any right to be addressing this girl. For, Rachel wasn't just hot; she was excruciatingly beautiful. She probably had some pacific islander in her pedigree somewhere as her handsome face held an exotic look with high, flat cheeks and large brown eyes. Her tawny skin glowed like a summer sunset and her body was about as built as one could imagine a seventeen-year-old girl's body could be. A guy like me trying to talk to a girl like her should not have been able to form words. And yet, she tapped the concrete bench right next to where she sat, smiling at me to come over. So I did.