Spike had been through many things in his life - being a bomb expert he'd taken his fair share of hits on both a physical and emotional level, and being a cop along with that, he was also adept at having relationships as well as friendships go south because they didn't understand the nature of his job.
So why was going out dancing for Wordy's birthday making him feel like he was a rookie facing his first day on the job?
'Because you can't dance for shit, you big fucking sissy-pants,' he told his reflection as he slapped on what his girlfriend lovingly referred to as his 'guido-esque' cologne. 'But you can handle this. This is going to be a fun night out. Just don't think that a few extra drinks will give you a few extra moves, big guy.'
He heard the sound of a car approaching his house, slow down near his driveway. Glancing at his watch, Spike saw it was indeed his own ride come to fetch him. He grinned when he opened the door, saw Wordy wasn't just there to pick him up, but pick him up in style.
'Nice wheels, Officer Wordsworth!' he called out as he whistled at the nineteen-seventy-two Sting-Ray drop-top with its shining chrome and glass and slick Pacific-blue paint job. 'Who'd you have to maim for this?'
'The rental is part of my gift from Shelley,' Wordy replied, slapping palms with Spike when he hopped in the passenger seat. 'She and Sophie are dropping the kids off with our sitter, so we don't have to have them hen-peck you over you and Winnie finally doing the dance with no pants.'
'Why the fuck is everyone so obsessed with my sex life?' Spike blurted out, then hummed when Wordy turned over the engine and it purred like a panther happy from the hunt. 'I lo- I really like Winnie, she means something to me, doesn't it make sense we'd have waited to show each other some respect?'
'Of course it does, because you love her,' Wordy teased him, shifting into first gear. 'On top of which, you reacting like this just makes you a pinata of good times.'
'A pinata?'
'You just keep on giving every time we poke you with a stick. Now that you're actually poking Winnie with your stick, you'll be a little less edgy, too, I do believe.'
'I'm notpoking Winnie with my stick, we have sex.'
Wordy rolled his eyes; clearly Spike was gonna make this harder on himself than necessary. 'Dude, everyone knows that all couples have three grades of intercourse - making love, sex, and fucking. That's a given.'
'I know that, and you're making it sound like she's tolerating it from me. I can assure you, she likes it quite a bit.'
'Alright, alright, point made. New topic.'
'Why of all things do you wanna go out dancing for your birthday?' Spike asked as they turned south on Beverly to head to the Entertainment District. 'Part of your ongoing PT for the PD?'
'Yeah, and combined with this new clinical trial drug my doc's mixed with the Levodopa, I'm feeling a lot better than I have in a long time. Plus, Shelley loves having date night at a dance class twice a week.'
'Twice a week?'
Wordy nodded, breaking for a red light. 'Latin on Mondays, classic ballroom on Thursdays. My teacher, his wife has Parkinson's and you should see the way she moves.'
Spike grinned. It was so awesome to see Wordy this jovial, especially since it was his birthday, sounding like the guy who'd been with him for four years since Spike had been a rookie at the SRU. 'And you wanna go out on your birthday and show off all your sweet moves, huh?'
'You bet. Plus it's fun to get out of the house to do something that isn't related to my neuro-degenerative disease. Doctor's appointments are not a favourite past-time and mine is a right pain in the ass. In a good way mind you, but at the same time, it's irritating to be that guy, you know?'
'Yeah, I do. I'm that guy too, the way everyone pokes at me over Winnie,' Spike reminded him and Wordy laughed heartily.
'Oh, man I miss you, Spike.'
'You should come around more. In fact, I was thinking of having a barbecue thing in a few weeks with Winnie for her brother.'
'I didn't know Winnie had a brother.'
'He's from her dad's second marriage,' Spike explained, 'and she told me how she's doing this Terry Fox 5 kilometre run with him at his school, and I figured we all might be able to sponsor Aaron, that's Winnie's brother, and since he's fourteen, we might do it on a weekend when Clarke and Dean are around to make him feel, I dunno, welcome I guess.'
'Sounds good to me, bro. Plus Carolina is twelve now so she'll be right in that boy-band crush on an older boy phase and that should boost his ego.'
'Cari is twelve? Wow, where did that time go?' Spike shook his head. 'Seems like yesterday we were giving you hell in the station gym about braiding your three-year-old's hair while watching Lady in Waiting with her.'
'Ali is seven now and Gracie is gonna be nine on her first day back to school.'
'Wow.'
Wordy wanted to press the subject, tease Spike about whether or not he and Winnie had had the kid-talk yet but he knew it would push their banter from the funny category to the annoyingly intrusive one so he let it slide for the moment. Instead, he switched on the radio, found the classic rock station. 'Think there's gonna be a line-up at the club?'
'Where are we even going anyways?'
'XS on Richmond, they're having a Latin dance night tonight so it's gonna be great. We've already got our own VIP table set up too, thanks to my rock-star of a wife.'
'Sweet.'
Though Wordy kept the conversation light, Spike couldn't help feel the pit of his stomach sink the closer they got to downtown - he knew he was truly an awful dancer but he usually got by most times with a bottle of beer, some light shoulder swaying and the white-man's overbite. Or in his case the Italian man's overbite which wasn't too hard to accomplish since he did indeed have a rather pronounced natural overbite no amount of retainers and headgear had been able to fix. Now faced with the inevitability that he would have to dance proper he wanted to find a bottle of tequila that, once he'd drank it all, would contain a magical genie that would make him a better dancer than Fred Astaire and Danny Kaye combined.
When they drove up to the club, Spike could see Wordy had called it right - there was indeed a line-up but because Shelley worked her magic, they were able to not only pull up in front of everyone and hand their keys to the valet but they walked right up to the doorman, pointed out Wordy's name on the list and were admitted past the actual red velvet rope into the club. Once inside, the sinking feeling came back a hundred fold when Spike saw the red and yellow spotlights moving over the bodies gyrating on the dance-floor in time to the music. They moved without the seemingly slightest bit of effort, the men in their spiffy dress shirts and polished shoes, the women in their floaty dresses that showed off gorgeous bodies of all curves and angles.
What the fuck was he going to do when Winnie asked him to dance and he looked like a fourth-grader at his first boy-girl party?
'Spike, it's not a terrorist attack, it's just a few dance moves,' Wordy hollered over the music, then slapped his shoulder. 'Come on, this way.'
Spike followed his friend to the hostess podium, watched him speak to her in her ear and the woman, dressed in tight black with silver and red accents, led them to the far side of the dance-floor, just two booths away from the DJ. His nerves frayed further when he caught sight of Winnie, looking like a million dollars in her clubbing dress. Iit wasn't red or black, or even floral like some of the other women had chosen but a seductive sapphire blue, with thin spaghetti straps on top with the scooped neckline and the skirt ending mid-thigh so it showed off her long sexy legs.
She was laughing about something with Sophie, Shelley and Leah, while Sam and Ed had a conversation of their own, and for a moment Spike wondered how the hell he'd gotten so lucky that he could call her his girlfriend, his lover. In the middle of her laugh, he saw her do a double take, uncross her legs and stand up to bounce over into his arms in greeting and plant a hot kiss on his mouth; he could taste the vague traces of raspberry liquer on her lips.
'There's my man,' she managed to purr at him despite the noise level of the music. 'You look so hot, Mike.'
'You look so hot right back, Winnie,' he replied, and Winnie did a little twirl in her high heels.
'You think so?'
'Very much so.'
'Hooray and later...' Winnie trailed off, whisper-shouting in his ear, 'you'll get to see what I don't have on underneath.'
'Hot.'
'You want a drink?'
Winnie laced her fingers through his, dragged him over to have a seat where Spike could see they'd had a platter of test-tube shots along with champagne and a bottle of soft cider both chilling on ice. The test-tubes caught Spike attention the most - there were neon green ones that appeared to glow in the dark, other green somethings that were not quite so bright, something purple, something blue, something red, and something that looked like Coke.
'What the hell are those?' he asked, pointed to the tubes. 'I'm more of a beer and grappa guy, so hard-liquor occasionally goes over my head.'
'Those-' she pointed to the bright green ones 'are Bad Apples, apple vodka, green sour-puss, those are Cookie Monsters-' she pointed next to the blue ones '-which are blue curacao, peppermint schnapps and creme de cacao, the purple ones are Swedish berries, then those are Jagr Bombs, Red-Headed Sluts, and my favourites, Beetlejuice.'
'Those have been treating you well, huh?'
'Raspberry sour-puss, tequila, and pineapple juice with a dash of melon liqueur for colour. I've had four already.'
'Four, and you're planning on dancing in those neck-breakers?' Spike teased her, pointing at her three inch high-heels.
'Yep. Don't worry, Mike, if push comes to shove, I'll be like them!'
She pointed and Spike followed her finger out to the dance floor, where he saw more than one woman dancing in her bare feet, apparently oblivious to the potential for broken toes or broken glass from a dropped drink. 'Just don't hurt yourself, okay?'
'Relax, Spike-elangelo!' Ed, who also appeared to have gotten into the shots a little bit already too, had moved over so he could sit with his friend from the force. 'Thank God you and Wordy got here, Sam's been bitchy as a bulldog with PMS about Jules being out of town. I'd rather listen to you two lovebirds google at each other than another second of him.'
'Be sure to tell Jules that when she gets back,' Winnie replied, then let out a happy little cheer when she heard the open strains of Angela Via's Baila Baila. 'Oo oo oo, I live this one! Come on, let's go!'
Before Spike could stammer out a response, she grabbed his hand and was dragging him out onto the dance floor. He swallowed as Winnie put her hands on his shoulders, began to step and sway her hips in time to the music. No matter how hard he tried, Spike couldn't bring himself to keep from staring at his feet and feeling like such a clumsy idiot. Winnie must have sensed it, because she put her fingers under his chin to lift his gaze from his toes to her eyes.
'Spike, we're not competing here, not everyone is an expert,' she told him over the music. 'It's okay to miss a step or two.'
'Not to me,' he replied, his frustration growing by the second. 'Maybe a couple more drinks will give me some dancing feet.'
'Okay!' Winnie smiled at him, not liking for one moment the sullen look on his face. 'There's plenty of time for dancing tonight.'
Spike nodded, and the moment the song was over, he retreated back to the table for a couple of shots. Every time he watched Winnie move on the floor, skirts swirling as she twisted and moved with Sophie and Leah and Shelley, with Sam and Ed, he could feel jealousy of their moves oozing green as Vulcan blood in his veins and tried to drown it with equally green test-tube shots. An hour and a half later, when he returned from the men's room, he nearly lost his drunken mind.
Winnie was on the dance floor with Wordy, the rest of the gang cheering them on from their dance-floor adjacent VIP booth. He'd pressed himself up against Winnie's backside, his hands on her hips as they swiveled magnificently with the DJ's current selection. He saw the florid flush of Winnie's cheeks and immediately thought of when she'd trembled in his arms as they'd made love the night before. His brain immediately fired off a thousand and one nasty thoughts; when Wordy spun her around and Winnie smiled at him, Wordy smiling back, Spike had reached his limit.
'Tell my girlfriend I went to get some air and I'll talk to her later,' Spike hollered at Ed; without waiting to hear his friend's reply, Spike fought his way through the crowd to the exit. He'd been outside and trying to catch a cab home to sleep it off for maybe ten minutes or so when he heard Winnie behind him.
'Michelangelo Scarlatti, what the hell is the matter with you!'
It wasn't a question, more of an accusation. Wobbly from drinking too much, he turned to see Winnie glaring at him furiously, the same way she'd stared at him when they'd left the Boss in the hospital back in June. God she was sexy when she was angry, he thought. 'I'm saving you some embarrassment.'
'You're embarrassing yourself and making Wordy's birthday party about you, you chicken-head.'
'No, Wordy's birthday party is all about you and Wordy, and him getting his hands all over you.'
Winnie blinked; she knew he'd been drinking but she knew he wasn't drunk enough to actually believe that. 'What the fuck are you talking about?'
'Don't act like you didn't like it, Winnie,' Spike spat. 'I know you, I know your face, when you are enjoying something and when you're really hot for something.'
'You know what I was thinking about when I was dancing with Wordy, whose wife was sitting fifteen frickin' feet away from you? I was fantasizing about you, what it'd be like if you would have just gotten over yourself instead of being such a fucking child tonight!'
Spike huffed out a breath. 'I-'
'I'm not done!' Winnie snapped, walking up to him and drilling her fingertip into his chest. 'Seriously, what did you think was gonna happen with Wordy, that we were gonna go sneak off for a quickie in the men's room then come back to you and Shelley and spend the rest of the night like nothing happened? Me and Wordy.'
Put like that, Spike had only one response - he cracked himself up in slightly sad, pathetic laughter as she put in such glaringly black and white terms. 'No, Jesus, Winnie. I just...I had this fantasy in my head that instead of you being all whatever about me being a shitty dancer, you'd try to actually teach me what to do.'
'I also know that when you get in a funk, it's best to let you ride it to the breaking point. Guess where we are.'
'Richmond Street?'
'Funny.' But WInnie could sense the edges softening and she moved closer, wrapped her arms around his waist. 'Spike, how the hell could you think-'
'I'm sorry.' Spike's brain couldn't get the words out of his mouth fast enough. 'I was an asshole and I'm sorry.'
'Yes, you were and apology accepted. Besides, if you piss off now, there's no way for me to teach you a thing or two. If you promise two things.'
'I'll try.'
'One. You apologize to Wordy in that manly knuckle-dapping way you do for being a jerk.'
'A big jerk.'
'A big honking jerk,' Winnie agreed.
'Done.'
'And two...' She trailed off, pulled him in for a kiss. 'When we get home, we do a little horizontal mambo just for us.'
