To "trip the light fantastic" is to dance nimbly or lightly, or to move in a pattern to musical accompaniment.
***
It doesn’t happen the way it did when
he remembered the bat swinging at his head.
Then it was like being caught in some kind of mental super-storm - his mind
tossed by gale force emotional winds, scorched by the lightning strike of
traumatic images and assaulted by thunderbolts of remembered pain. This time he
just wakes up one morning hearing a voice in his head (a voice that sounds a lot
like Vic’s for some reason) saying something about “tripping the light
fantastic” and the words conjure an image of him and Brian dancing together.
They’re not dancing like they do at Babylon - where he writhes and swivels his
hips in time to the music, while Brian does that weird-assed scrunched down
thing he does jerking awkwardly around in a way that would be totally laughable
done by anyone who wasn’t Brian Kinney. It’s not even the other way they dance
at Babylon, when their bodies sway so closely together that there’s no room for
anything else; not even the music blasting from the sound system can force its
way into the world they inhabit at those times, so they dance to the tunes that
are in their heads and their hearts and their cocks, the tunes no one else can
hear, and then it’s not like they’re dancing as much as they’re fucking with
clothes on, and fucking they’ve always been good at.
The image he sees, while those words float again through his mind, isn’t like
those dances at all. There are no flashing lights and they’re not surrounded by
hot horny men. They’re not wearing their clubbing clothes, designed to display
and tantalise, they’re wearing black suits and a white scarf floats around them
- now caressing Brian’s neck, now softly draped round his own. The music isn’t
the relentless thumpa thumpa of Babylon’s techno-dance beats, it’s a more
mellow sound, with a slightly Latin feel. And there’s nothing even remotely
awkward about the way Brian is moving.
He leads Justin confidently round the floor, and it’s like they must have
rehearsed this a thousand times, they’ve got the moves down so smooth and
natural. The first twirl is easy, faultless, and then they move into a sequence
of three or four, one after the other. Then they sway together again, their
bodies moving effortlessly together in time with the music in a way they’ve
never done at Babylon.
Justin feels again the joy and the pride and the … the fucking sureness, the
absolute confidence in what they had together that he’d felt when he slid his
hands down to unbutton Brian’s jacket, and Brian had let him slide it off his
shoulders, let Justin symbolically strip him right there on the dance floor;
that surrender saying more about Brian’s willingness to accept Justin’s place in
his life than anything else could possibly have done.
And then they’re moving together again and after a long sequence of twirls,
where it feels like Brian is displaying him, showing him off, showing them off,
Brian pulls him close and dips him. Justin’s body remembers, an intense muscle
memory, exactly how that felt, and his leg moves, bending at the knee, mimicking
the way it had slid up round Brian’s hip to anchor them both. Then, just as he
comes upright again, Brian pulls him even closer, and lifts him, spinning them
both round and round till Justin’s not sure if the giddy sensation he feels
comes from the spins or from the kiss that goes with them; the kiss that seems
to go on for ever, sucking all of the air from his lungs and replacing it with a
sense of joy that is so intense it seems like it’s all he’ll ever need to
sustain him.
Justin lies there for a moment, not stunned exactly, just a little surprised at
how easily the most “ridiculously romantic” moment of his life had been
recaptured. He figures it was like that damned butterfly metaphor - for months,
years even, he’d fought to regain that memory. Finally, though, he’d let it go;
there had been so many good memories since, it seemed like he no longer needed
the reassurance of his place in Brian’s life, in Brian’s heart, that one
particular memory might have once represented.
So he supposes it figures that once he’d stopped chasing the memory, it had just
crept up on him, and settled lightly into his brain, like it had never gone
away, just like the fucking butterfly of happiness or whatever the hell it was.
Of course, maybe the conversation (read argument) they’d had last night with
Linds and Mel had helped to trigger it. The one where Brian had dug his toes in
over the munchers wanting to enrol Gus in the dancing classes that JR had
started taking.
“But Brian,” Lindsay had urged, “Gus really wants to do this. He got very upset
this week when we took JR to class and he couldn’t join in.”
There had been many mumbles about “turning my son into a fucking lesbian” and
the like, which Justin had thought at the time stemmed more from Brian’s own
lack of dancing ability than anything else, other than needing a little time to
get his head around the idea. Now, the memory of that dance so fresh in his
mind, Justin’s not so sure.
He becomes aware of Brian stirring beside him, and turns towards him. Hazel
eyes blink at him, and he grins at his partner, slithering closer, his leg once
more repeating that well-practiced, freshly remembered, slide up and over
Brian’s hip. As their cocks brush together, and their morning ritual begins, he
pauses in his nibbling of Brian’s earlobe.
“Maybe we should help the girls pay for those dancing lessons for Gus as well as
JR,” he says. “You never know when he’s going to want some guy to save the last
dance, and he needs to be able to dazzle him by really knowing how to trip the
light fantastic.”
Brian’s response indicates that he has other priorities right at that moment,
but Justin knows that eventually the words will sink in, and Brian will realise
that he’s remembered.
Being Brian, he probably won’t say anything.
But Justin’s ready to bet that Gus gets his dancing lessons.
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