Love at First Dance

When she first joked about it, I dismissed it as a fleeting urge; a curiosity that wouldn't kill the cat. Then she insisted. She implored and cajoled me, piercing me with her hazel eyes and coaxing me with her caustic voice. 

Being in this dingy alley leading to a flight of stairs up to a small door that struggled to let out the deafening music and the stench of revellers shook the very foundations of my masculinity. She held my hand and dragged me up the stairs. My masculinity pulled the eject handle and deserted my body quicker than a fighter jet pilot in distress. As we climbed up, we bumped into tall dark figures in wigs and thongs, their guttural chants sharply contrasting their outfits. At the entrance, we paid the redeemable entrance fee and I thought 'there's no turning back now boy'.

For 10 pm, the club was too fully packed. We got stools and sat at a corner near a subwoofer, using the vibrating contraption as a table. The ground beneath me was shaking and the chapo beans I had stuffed in my gut threatened to flow right out of my bowels. I could control it. I wondered if the people around me in thongs and heels could say the same. 

On the adjacent table, a couple were already slathering each other with sticky kisses and using their hands in ways that could make a nun perform a signum crusis. At the counter, a lousy old man with a distended belly and porcine eyes added a shot of whiskey to a boy's glass. Poor boy downed it in one gulp and the man whispered something in his ears.  The next second, they walked away hand-in-hand, the man signaling me to watch over the half emptied bottle of whiskey. On the adjacent wall, I read a sign; 'Only one person allowed in the washroom at a time.' My piercing gaze caught their backs as they made the last turn to the lavatories.

I was lost. I took a swig of the whisky in my glass and the people around me began spinning  in perpetual revolutions. I looked at the lady across from me and her face was a beautiful , wobbly microcosm of the little universe around me. Reaching out for her hand, I lifted myself off my stool. In her face was plastered a puerile grin; a coquettish desire to pry into the debauchery of the other side. She wandered off in her quest.

I was left alone in a sea of humanity drenched in  ineffable shame. I noticed a few piercing stares directed towards me, each of them laced with feral licentiousness. At one end of the dingy club, a couple were all over each other, gyrating their ample bosoms to 'Hozambee'. At another end, I could make out a silhouette of what looked like a man, ignobly bent over, twerking his waist numb to a burly figure astride.

My first instinct was  get out immediately, but my chum had been swallowed by the sea of humanity. I left my table, whiskey in hand, wandering off in an apoplectic gait in search of her. Every inch of the club was thronged with ecstatic revellers. The air was hazy with shisha smoke and heavy with the smell of fish, possibly from the air ducts of the adjacent kitchen; or perhaps the ladies were culpable, if the rumours are true. As my inebriated brain tried to decipher the redolence, a damsel (not in distress) grazed my crotch in a life-changing, fleeting whine. I stood there, my body charged with electricity. Suddenly, I became aware of the blaring music. I caught a wink from the mysterious lady and followed her in quick steps to her table. She leaped gracefully over a stool and fit her petite frame in between a bevy of lasses. She turned and scanned my face in one sweeping incendiary glance that left my swarthy cheeks flushed  aubergine. I eyeballed her, devouring her with my eyes. There were at least three heads perched on her neck, oscillating rhythmically to the beats. The heads merged into a beautiful, genial face intermittently. I felt my body shudder in response to the loud music; performing a grotesque parody of the popular 'anguka nayo' dance. If there were any sober person, I'm sure they would have called an ambulance for an emergency case of an epileptic convulsing on the dance floor. 

As the infamous banger hit crescendo, the hype man grabbed a microphone and whipped the crowd into a dancing frenzy. Like a robot that had suddenly been switched on, my girl stood up mechanically, her alabaster skin glowing with surges of electricity. A moment later, she was swaying before me in electrifying gyrations. The people around morphed into and obscure blur. It was only the two of us on stage and the blaring music. I danced myself lame, exhausting all the moves I had practiced in the shower. At that moment Nasty C's intro to Particular ' ain't nothing cooler than the wrong moves when you make the to the right song' came on speaker. That was all the motivation I needed to invent novel dance moves for the rest of the night.

At dawn, when the party had simmered down to a chatty shindig, we sat down. We could finally ask each other names; perhaps exchange contacts. She pinned her elbow on the table and plunked her chin on her palm. I extended my arm and mopped her sweaty brow with my paws. I waxed lyrical about myself. My achievements, good traits, and a few bad boy tales to spice things up and sound less garish. She proved to be an open book that I gladly read through and left the pages dog-eared. Unlike her friends, she was attracted to men (based on her obsession with my chiseled body and her indifference towards the other revellers). Luckily for me, I was one of the few men there who found the delicate curves and bumps of the female architecture aesthetically pleasing and irresistible. I was certainly the most charming of the few (don't tell me otherwise). In a moment of serendipity, we had bumped into each other at the most unlikely place. At least my masculinity would be pacified at last. 

I demurely asked her to come home with me,  trying to conceal the lecherous intentions that pervaded the proposal. Her countenance was suffused with an 'I-know-what-you-mean' smile. At five in the morning, her friends came looking. Studs dragging their damsels in hand, hurling threats, daring me to take their friend home for them to 'trace' me and 'teach me a lesson'. To me they were just that; toothless threats. The threats grew teeth when I refused to let their friend go. They disappeared and came back with two jacked bouncers. To avert the impending tragedy, my girl took my phone, thumbed her digits in it and kissed me goodbye. I remained at the table, a smug look on my face. Someone had just cracked an egg on my face. I looked at the unsaved number on my dial and tried to recall the name. As a last resort, I typed in 'shawty for whines' and stuffed the phone in my pocket. 

Outside, the darkness made way for a bright morning. I suddenly remembered I had been accompanied by someone. I walked delicately past the bodies sprawled, in stupor, on the coaches . At a corner, my companion was flanked  by a bevy of drunken dames, avowing their undying love. "Shake them off; time to bounce." One pertinacious girl stuck to her like a tick to a fattened cow. In her quest to win her newly-found love, her friends had left her behind. "I have an ample crib that could fit a small crowd, if you don't mind?" the words came tumbling out of my mouth. 

My ringtone startled me awake at noon. On the screen 'shawty for whines' looked up to me for recognition. It took ten long seconds before I could get the hang of it. I slipped away from the two figures purring softly on the bed. As I swiped up to receive the call, I reminisced about the whine that had borne the eponymous epithet on my screen. 'Love at first dance' I thought as I answered to a soothing voice.