Surreal
4.11.06
The beat of the music is warm, swelling, and she steps forward, raising a hand in his direction. Why they are dancing in an empty classroom after hours is beyond her; she dances anyway, clasping and unclasping hands, spinning, twirling, bending, swaying. His face is unreadable, so she doesn't know if he's enjoying this as much as she is. They separate and twirl away from each other.
"What do you get when you cross a pig and a frog?" he asks her unexpectedly as they come together again. This abnormal question throws her beat off, and she stumbles around for a bit before she grasps his hand again. His face is perfectly serious, and she wonders absently if this is some sort of personality test.
She thinks.
He dips her down and pulls her up again, and she twirls in his arms. "I don't know," she tells him seriously. "What do you get?"
Left foot forward, back, twirl. "A hamphibian." He says, just as serious, a playful challenge in his eyes. She smiles, silently accepting.
The room is cold as snow falls outside the windows, and she finds she is thankful she had thought to wear a sweater. Otherwise she might have tried to hug him, and that would have been too degrading. She is only here to practice, really, and…
No. No, she's here to dance.
"How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?" She demands.
Pause. Stomp forward, clasp hands. He quirks an eyebrow skyward. "What's a lightbulb?"
She hums a bit to the music. "It's a machine that sheds light, like a candle." She has chosen this joke specifically because she knows he'll appreciate it; He actually spent time paying attention in their recent section on surrealism in Muggle Studies.
He nods, stepping forward and wrapping an arm around her waist as the music changes from brisk to slow. "How many?"
The waltz was one of the first dances she ever learned. She falls into the familiar sound of the opening notes and stares up at him. "Two," she replies, letting a pause insert itself to make the finish more dramatic, "One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools."
He throws his head back and laughs. She's slightly alarmed for a moment, and then she chuckles a bit herself, her feet still moving and her hand still clasped tightly in his. She watches him laugh for a moment, highly amused.
He calms down a minute later, and she can hear the waltz again, its notes poignant and punctuated every so often by belated chuckles from her dancing partner. Finally, he's silent.
The music is filling her soul as she dances with him, and the steps that she has known for so long are strangely exotic to her. This is different from when she had danced with the miscellaneous partners at dance classes when she was little. This is more personal, more emotionally attached. The feeling thrills her, and she unconsciously shifts a little closer to him.
He notices, and grins. "Knock, knock." He twirls her out, around, and back into his hold, purposefully and oh-so-subtly positioning her closer to himself than she had been before.
She closes her eyes. "Who's there?"
"Ila." His voice is low, almost husky. Internally, she squirms a bit, even as her whole body grows warm and butterflies begin their own version of a very, very fast waltz in her stomach. This all feels so surreal, she thinks, reminding herself of the joke.
"Ila who?"
He stares down at her as the music slows to a halt. She's biting her lip, eyes wide, and somehow he knows that somehow she knows what he's going to say, and furthermore he knows that she's not dreading it, at all. He does his best to quench the growing feeling of hope that's welling in his chest. Pulling her close so she's pressed against him he whispers in her ear, "I lahv you."
They stay this way for an hour, not saying anything, reveling in each other's warmth, even as the music stops and silence fills the room. Finally, finally, he thinks, his chin resting on the top of her head. And her thoughts echo his as they stand together and snow falls outside the windows.
--Checkerboxed
("Lahv" is pronounced like "love". My friend couldn't figure this out.)
HahaHA! I woke up this morning thinking, "I just have to write a Lily/James story today!" So I did. The first two jokes are the two that I carry with me at all times... the first one is a sort of inside joke... you might recognize it from the Snapple bottles a long time ago. The Knock-Knock joke was pathetic, I know, but I don't care. Hope you enjoyed!
And for those of you who couldn't figure out the surrealist joke: Surrealism is sort of taking something recognizable and twisting it. So, for instance, Salvadore Dali's painting of the clocks, which are melted over things, in the shape of a horse's saddle or something. So its sort of twisted reality.