Chapter 20: Dance, Dance, Wherever You May Be

I sat on my bed in the shortest pair of shorts I’ve ever worn and a cropped top that could have been a sock in its former life. It was not much more than a band around my chest with spaghetti straps to keep it up. Given that it was elasticized and fitted me pretty snugly, I wasn’t at all sure that the straps did anything. I guess if they weren’t there, the thing would probably crawl its way down my body until it was acting like a belt instead of a top. That would be embarrassing – even more embarrassing than wearing the thing in the first place.

One bad thing about the top was that I couldn’t wear a normal bra under it. That meant that my one little boob was visible – swelling out of my chest like a – well, like a tiny little boob, I guess.

Naked-Bec was leaning against my mirror and laughing her head off. She figured I’d look better completely naked than dressed like this. I wasn’t entirely sure that she was wrong.

I sat on my bed and brushed my hair, bringing it forward over my shoulders so it dropped down and concealed what the top didn’t manage to.

There was a knock on the door and it opened. Dan stood there – filling the doorway.

“Good! You’re ready.”

He smiled at me.

“Come on, then. Stand up. Let me look at you.”

I did what he told me to do. I stood up. I stood beside my bed and looked down at my feet.

“I look like a total slut!” I muttered.

“No! You don’t,” he said softly. “You look fine.”

“If I walked down the street dressed like this, I’d probably get arrested.”

Dan tilted his head to one side and looked at me with a thoughtful expression on his face.

“I think you might be exaggerating how bad the clothes are.”

I looked at Dan for a moment and wondered if that might be true. Then I looked down at myself and dismissed his suggestion. This stuff was appallingly skimpy.

Dan was still looking at me.

“You look very pretty. You’re wearing more than most girls your age would wear at the beach. Lots of teen girls wear that sort of outfit during summer. It’s almost like a uniform.”

I shrugged. He was right about that. A lot of girls wore clothes like this. I’ve never understand how they could do that. All the guys always stare at them. Why would they deliberately dress so that they would get stared at? It doesn’t make sense.

“You look fine for this evening. It’s just you and Tara and Sam. I’ll stay out of your way.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“Hey! What’s not to enjoy?”

I glared at Dan.

“Why did you want me to wear this?”

“You know why!”

“It’s because you’re a pervert!”

“Shh! Don’t give away all of my secrets.”

I sighed. He really isn’t a pervert. He’s the exact opposite of a pervert. Is there a word for people who are the opposite of a pervert?

“You’re right, you know,” I muttered. “There’s no logical reason why I shouldn’t be able to wear an outfit like this in front of you guys without dying of embarrassment.”

“I know that. I’m glad that you know it, too.”

He smiled at me and his eyes sparkled as if he were trying to stop himself from laughing.

“I know this makes me a hypocrite because I’m the one who asked you to wear those things, but I’m going to say it anyway. If you ever even think of stepping outside our front door dressed like that, I’ll tie you up and toss you in a closet myself.”

I nodded. I looked down at myself.

“I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. I’m having a hard enough time stepping outside my bedroom door.”

Dan grinned. “I can help with that.”

He walked over to me, picked me up and slung me over his shoulder. I figured out what he was going to do seconds before he did it. Squealing at him didn’t stop him. It didn’t even slow him down. I’ve got to find a better way to protect myself from Dan than squealing at him. Especially when he’s in that sort of mood.

I was still squealing as Dan carried me out through my door. Naked-Bec was laughing hysterically. I stopped squealing long enough to glare at her and mentally wish she would shut up ... and put some clothes on. Then she was out of sight and I was giggling.

Then I was giggling more because Dan was tickling the backs of my knees. Since I was dangling down Dan’s back, I took the opportunity to slap his backside.

“Stop that, Dan! Bad boy! Ow!”

That last was because he’d responded to what I was doing by slapping my bum. I should have known better. I was being held captive and my bum was thoroughly exposed. It was extra exposed because it was stretched out and sticking up, right beside his chin. And it was wrapped in a pair of shorts that might have looked at home in Angie’s collection of doll outfits.

I reached back and rubbed the spot that was stinging.

By that time we were in the living room. Dan swung me back onto my feet, spun me around and pushed me towards Tara and Sam who were grouped around the TV. Dan backed out of the room and headed back to the kitchen. I stood still and looked around while I rubbed my backside again.

The couch and the coffee table had been pushed back out of the way and the two dance mats were spread out on the floor. Tara and Sam had plugged it all together and were figuring out how to make it work. A naked Angie was trying to help by jumping up and down on random sections of the mats.

Sam turned and looked at me and then he smiled. His eyes twinkled. I think he liked looking at me in my skimpy clothes more than he liked looking at naked-Tara. Now where is the logic in that?

“Dan’s a pervert!” I said.

I was pouting a bit as I rubbed my backside. It wasn’t stinging anymore but I kept rubbing it anyway. My other arm was wrapped over my exposed stomach – hiding it from view.

Tara looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Did he force you to do unspeakable sexual acts?”

“No!”

“Did he expose himself to you and laugh maniacally?”

“No!

She grunted. “Not much of a pervert then. We’ll have to give him pointers on how he can improve.”

“He made me wear these clothes.”

Tara looked down at her own clothes which were identical to mine – except for the color.

“A fate worse than death,” she said.

I pouted.

“He tickled me.”

“What a monster,” she said – sarcasm dripping from every word.

She looked me up and down.

“I think I’m jealous. You look better in those clothes than I do.”

She was lying, of course. She has boobs. She looked stunning and her outfit was practically the same as mine.

“Let’s go,” said Tara.

She hit a button and music started playing.

“You two go first,” said Sam. “I’m going to change into shorts.”

He walked away towards my bedroom where he’d stashed his backpack.

“There’s a tutorial kind of thing,” said Tara. “I guess we should work through that.”

“Good idea.”

So we started the game.

You’re kind of old, Dr K, so I don’t know if you know about the Dance Mat. You lay it out on the floor and it connects to the Playstation games console. The mat has a central zone that you start off in and then a zone in each of the four directions that you can step onto – forwards, backwards, left and right. Then music plays and on the screen you see arrows which tell you which way to step – you kind of see them in advance, scrolling down the screen, and when the arrow hits the line you do the step into that particular zone. I guess the mat has sensors in it so the Playstation can tell if you’ve done the correct step at the correct time. It puts messages up about how close you are to being in time with the music and gives you points for doing a good job. We had two mats connected up side by side so two of us could do it at once. If you do it right, the two of you should be dancing together – synchronized.

The tutorial was kind of easy but then we started on the first real song and suddenly it wasn’t so easy. I very quickly forgot how I was dressed as I concentrated on not making a fool out of myself while playing the game. I’m pretty well coordinated but I’d never done anything like this before. It was hard to get used to moving in the right directions and changing the weight on my feet at the right time. It was challenging but it was fun. Soon the two of us were cheering ourselves when we got it right and laughing at ourselves when we got it wrong.

By the time we finished the first song, Sam had come back wearing a pair of shorts and his t-shirt. Tara sat down and Sam and I went through the first song again. I did a bit better this time. Then I sat down and Tara and Sam tried the second song. We kept doing it that way, swapping after every song and repeating every song twice. It meant one of us always got to do the song twice but that was okay.

We all had great fun. All of us got better at it but Sam was awesome. He was so quick. He moved so smoothly. I told him how good he was and he started smiling so much that his whole face glowed.

We gave Angie some turns but she basically bounced up and down on the spot. She didn’t get the connection between where the arrows were and which way she was supposed to bounce. That didn’t matter. She was with us and being included and getting to jump up and down so she was happy. When she wasn’t having a turn on the mat, she was just as happy bouncing up and down on the carpet near us.

I got tired way before the other two. I’d been dancing at the wedding reception and they’d been hanging around the house. I told them I needed to take a break and wandered into the kitchen to get some juice. Dan had his work spread out in front of him but he had a pleased expression on his face.

“Are you nearly finished?”

“Yep! I have to type it all up, but I’ll do that tomorrow. I’ve got everything I need.”

“Do you want a drink?”

“Sure! Some of that juice would be good.”

I poured Dan some juice and shifted a chair so I could sit down next to him at the table. He looped an arm around me and sipped on his juice. His hand landed on the exposed skin of my stomach. That surprised me. I’d forgotten it was bare.

I sipped my juice while I thought about that. I really had forgotten how skimpy my clothes were while I focused on the dancing. Since nobody had done anything to draw attention to it until this moment, I really didn’t have any reason to think about it. I’d been concentrating so hard on learning the dance moves and getting them right that I’d completely forgotten to be embarrassed.

I sighed to myself. Maybe I worried too much about what I wore inside the house. But I couldn’t conceive of going outside dressed like this. I shook my head and decided not to think about it anymore. At least I wasn’t naked.

I looked over what Dan had been doing. It looked like a mass of diagrams and math.

“So tell me what you’ve been doing,” I said. “What’s all this about?”

“Oh! It’s a project about how much weight a beam can hold up when it’s only supported at each end.”

He picked up a pencil and poked it through an empty coffee mug. Then he held the pencil by each end, leaving the coffee mug to dangle from the middle.

“This pencil can hold the weight of the mug without any trouble. The question is how much more weight can I add before the pencil breaks. That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing except with larger sized beams than this. I have to do all the figures for a bunch of different materials – different types of timber, steel bars of different sizes, different lengths. Stuff like that. Then this week we’ll do an experiment to confirm the numbers.”

“That sounds like a pretty big experiment. Isn’t that kind of expensive?”

“It would be if we did it all. We have a computer simulation set up. We’ll do a couple of real life experiments to make sure we have it properly calibrated and then we’ll run the rest through the simulator.”

“Okay, so how do you calculate it all before you do the experiments?”

“Have you got to the calculus section of your high school math book yet?”

“No! But you’ve talked to me a bit about it before.”

“Well,...”

Dan flipped open his notebook and started showing me the calculations he’d been doing. He showed me the basic information about different materials he’d needed from the textbooks and how that got incorporated into his calculations. I asked a couple of questions when he said things I didn’t understand. He skipped over some of the details but I could see the pattern of what he was doing even if I couldn’t follow the actual steps. It was really interesting. It was also nice because this was something I used to do all the time with Dan but I hadn’t done it much recently.

We got interrupted by the other three coming in to get a drink.

“Hey Bec!” said Tara. “Are you coming back? We finished that level.”

“You should play some more or you’ll get left behind,” said Sam.

“Okay! I’ll come now. I was just talking with Dan about his homework. It’s really interesting.”

“Dan, are you finished? You should come and have a go,” said Tara. “It’s really fun.”

“Yes, I am finished,” said Dan. “And no thanks, I think I’ll pass on the dancing.”

“Come on, Dan!” I said. “Just have a go.”

I grabbed his hand and pulled. Tara got behind him and pushed. At the same time, we both kept talking at him until he finally surrendered. We set the game back to the beginning and I got on the mat next to him and talked him through until he got the hang of it.

Soon the two of us were dancing away furiously and laughing together while the others relaxed on the couch and cheered us on.

At first, Dan didn’t look very graceful doing the dances. It looked more like he was trying to stomp on a bunch of roaches than actually dance. But his athletic ability and fitness meant that he could actually hit the spots pretty well and keep going for a long time. We went straight through about five different songs in a row. I started off getting higher scores but Dan steadily caught up. By the end, he was dancing pretty nicely and I was staggering.

At the end of the fifth song I collapsed on the floor gasping for breath.

“Enough!” I cried out. “I give up!”

Dan laughed gleefully and pointed at the screen where he had finished ahead by three points – which given how big our scores had gotten was nothing.

“I win!” said Dan. He held up his hands in the air and did a little victory dance.

“I am the Lord of the Dance,” Dan sang.

I started laughing at him as he pranced around in his silly victory dance. He can be such a goof sometimes. Tara and Sam groaned and threw cushions at him for his corny song quote.

Then Tara and Sam got up and ran through a series of songs while I lay on the floor and tried to recover. Dan took Angie out into the kitchen to get a drink. Then he came back with a can of soda and sat on the couch and watched for a while.

Angie sat on the floor next to me and made a naked Lucy dance to the music on my naked stomach. It kind of scratched and tickled a bit but not enough to make me want to stop Angie from doing it.

As I watched Lucy dance on my stomach, I felt like something was missing. After thinking for a moment, I realized that I wasn’t feeling horny anymore. I wasn’t feeling so out of control, either. Apparently all that frantic dancing had solved my problem. I figured that was handy to know. If I start feeling all horny and out of control, all I have to do is spend a good amount of time dancing like a crazy person and all those feelings will go away.

Sam won the little competition with Tara. By the time they were ready to stop it was getting close to time for dinner. We decided to take a break for dinner and then after that we would have the dance-off between Dan and Sam to find the champion.

In the kitchen we opened the fridge and looked inside. It was stuffed full with all the ingredients from Tara’s failed sleep-over the night before. They’d been going to make individual pizzas but it never happened because Tara cut her hand and had to go to hospital before they got anywhere.

We decided home-made pizzas would be perfect (not to mention necessary to use up all the food) so we got out all the stuff and spread it out on the kitchen table. That gave us an excuse to make Dan clear his books out of the way. Once we had all the ingredients out of the fridge, we pushed the door closed and it whistled in relief. The poor thing, it was really working hard because of the whole Thanksgiving long weekend and all of the food involved. I patted it and told it the long weekend was more than half over. It sighed in relief.

The dough for the crusts was already prepared and sitting in a big glass bowl. We had to separate it out into portions and roll it out to make a stack of small circular bases. Then we each got our own crust and added tomato paste and cheese and whatever else we got inspired to add. As we told Sam, the only rule was that if you made it, you had to eat it.

I helped Angie but she did a lot of it herself. The cast on her arm made it difficult for her to flatten out the dough properly but she did the rest pretty well. She mostly wanted cheese but she also wanted a face. I helped her add little piles of shredded ham to make the eyes and lines of chopped up vegetables to make the mouth. We finished it off with a little button mushroom for the nose. Angie was happy with the result. I was kind of pleased with myself for making sure that she had a little bit of meat and a little bit of vegetable on her pizza. Health by stealth, Mum always calls it.

There was some tomato paste smeared down Angie’s front. She also had a bit of barbeque sauce on her arm – I don’t know how that got there. It was at this point that I discovered one true advantage of her nekkidity. Cleaning her up was so much easier than normal. Two swipes with a warm, damp cloth and she was clean. No change of clothes required.

Angie clapped and jumped up and down as we slid her pizza into the oven to cook. Dan made three for himself and Sam and Tara between them made one for Mum as well as their own so we soon had eight mini-pizzas cooking in the oven.

We cleaned up the table while they cooked. Dan took Angie to get her into her pyjamas. Angie pouted but Dan said that civilized people wore clothes at the dinner table so she wouldn’t get to eat her pizza unless she was wearing something. That convinced her and she scampered off with Dan. I sighed to myself. If we could have convinced Angie that civilized three year olds ate naked we could have halved the number of napkins we used and sets of clothes we had to wash. I suspect Dad wouldn’t have found that argument convincing though, so I guess Dan was right.

By the time Dan and Angie returned, we had the kitchen looking clean. Angie was now properly dressed in long pyjamas and a robe. We poured ourselves some more juice and sat around the table and talked. Angie kept on looking through the window of the oven to see what was happening to her pizza. It wasn’t very exciting so she would quickly get bored and go running around the house – through the entrance hall, into the living room, into the hallway and back to the kitchen. Then she would squat in front of the oven again to see if anything had changed.

We showed her the oven timer and got her to listen to it ticking away. We told her the bell would ring when the pizzas were ready. She already knew about oven timers but she was excited because it was her own personal pizza that was cooking. She told us three times that her pizza was the one with the face. Sam carefully pointed out to her which pizzas belonged to each of us. That kept her going for a bit because then she came around to each of us and told us which one was ours so that we would know when they came out of the oven.

Fortunately pizzas don’t take that long to cook so the bell rang before Angie got completely frustrated. We took the pizzas out and set them to cool for a moment. Dan decided he should be the one to take Mum’s pizza down to her. I think he didn’t want Mum to see the way we were dressed. He poured a drink for her, put her pizza on a plate and headed out the back door down to the studio.