sway with me , - - - [lark]

The voice made his muscles freeze. It was an instinctive reaction, he knew, when one was surprised or sensed danger. There was no such thing as a fight-or-flight response. At least, not technically. The brain worked through three things; first was the freezing reply. If a predator can’t see you move, it’ll move on. Or maybe it’ll just think you’re dead, and none but scavengers would touch an already dead animal. Then, if that didn’t work, you ran—that was the flight the colloquial mentioned. Fighting was the absolute last response. It was the only one that came up only when it was completely and absolutely necessary, when there was no other way out. Knox was not a fighter, and he rarely, if ever, used the last option. When he could avoid it, he didn’t run either. He preferred the first one, hoping people would just move on and ignore him. Life was easier when people didn’t pay attention to you all the time. It was easier to go about doing what you did when you weren’t being scrutinized for the slightest mistake. It was easier to relax.

Dancing, similarly, relaxed him. Although it worked his muscles, it managed to keep him at ease. Dancing was quite the exercise, when you thought about it. It put muscles to sue that a lot of people didn’t employ on a daily basis. First, there was the posture. Most people he knew were horrible at sitting upright and slouched beyond belief. Dancing had taught him to sit with a straight back. In dancing, one also had a hold that usually required the arm to be lifted upwards from the body for extended periods of time, though most dances last 3 minutes as opposed to 3 hours. When combined with the footwork and the necessary hip movements, keeping the arms in position could be quiet challenging. Then, of course, there was the footwork itself. Aside from remembering and carrying out the proper steps, one had to do so in the correct rhythm, at the right speed, and with maximum efficiency and grace. Though Knox wouldn’t judge himself on grace, he felt he wasn’t bad at footwork. The quick step was not, by any means, his favorite dance, but he managed the speed without too much trouble if he had a little while to practice it.

Practice was key to any dance, as far as he was concerned. One had not only to practice, however: one had to practice the correct steps and combinations and movements, so it would be worth anything. After all, if you practice the wrong routine, what was the point in practicing at all? If he were to practice a waltz, for example, for a tango competition, he’d fail miserably simply because he preformed the wrong dance. That was simple enough.

Attempting to react to the sudden presence in the room was not. Still in hold, he tried to make his brain work. He’d definitely heard a voice over the music, though he currently had his back to the door and the apparent speaker. He bit his lip and closed his eyes. This time, the deep breath entering his lungs was for the sake of preventing a panic attack. Someone had seen him. At least she—it had sounded like a she—wasn’t cracking up at him. That was a good thing, right? That she wasn’t laughing? Maybe she’d be willing to keep his curious little secret. He took another deep breath, eyes sliding slowly open. The renewed greeting of light stung for a brief moment. He reached forward to turn the music off and turned to face her, trying to figure out how to explain himself to a complete stranger. That was certainly not his life’s goal. It would have been, if he were able to manage it without stuttering or pausing for minutes at a time before he cluttered out his words.

Ah, the terrible task of vocalizing his thoughts. He cleared his throat, staring at her shoes and not bothering to look any higher. He couldn’t meet her eyes. It would only make talking more difficult, especially if he saw something he’d perceive as negative in them. He took a third breath, this one more shallow and rushed. “It’s… the t-tango… it’s… it’s meant fo-for t-two…”

“My eyes are up here.” He knew, from seeing people interact around him, that the phrase was usually saved for horny teenage boys who happened to be staring at a woman’s chest as opposed to meeting her eyes. Usually, it was snapped, filled with irritation of some sort, because he doubted that most people would be particularly happy with being taken as immediate sexual objects rather than something else, such as real, possibly intelligent, and definitely individual people. Why be viewed as an object when you could be viewed as yourself? So, while he understood the reasoning behind saying something like that, he didn’t quite understand why she had said it. Admittedly, he hadn’t been meeting her eyes, but neither had he been staring at her body in some otherwise lustful manner. He’d just been looking at the floor and everywhere else that wasn’t her. Why was that offensive?

Probably because most people expected some sort of eye contact when you were conversing with them. They wanted to be looked at because that was the polite thing to do, because it helped the communicative process. Not meeting someone’s eyes could be a symptom of lying, of course.

But it was also a symptom of his completely debilitating shyness. If he weren’t so shy… he was pretty sure his daily life would be completely different. His phone would have more purposes than just an emergency contact for his parents or the occasional take-out order. He’d actually text on a regular basis. He’d approach random people in coffee shops and strike up conversation. He might have a boyfriend or a girlfriend he wasn’t actually attracted to. He’d meet people’s eyes when he talked to them. And although there were possibilities, he was pretty sure that life without shyness wouldn’t be as easy sometimes. He felt as though actual communication opened the way for lies and insults and gossip and other things he honestly had no interest in. He didn’t want to become someone who lied half their life away and then didn’t tell someone with whom they were in love just because they were emotionally immature or closed off. But then, he was thinking of things in the ultimate extreme. There were more balanced ways to handle being not shy. Ways he would never approach because he couldn’t picture himself as a not shy person. He was the one who faded into the background, and because he was shy, he was grateful for that.

He liked fading into the background. He liked not being in the spotlight.

And yet, he was dancing. He was dancing in a classroom that had previously been empty, until the brunette in front of him had decided to come in here. Why was she here anyway? His lips parted with the temptation to ask, but instead he just closed his mouth again and nodded to her question. Technically, he’d been doing the male half of the tango on his own, but that was irrelevant. You could tango on your own—most people just had a partner. He didn’t know anyone with whom he could dance. He wasn’t about to ask the girl in front of him either. She was getting closer, though, and he was wondering if she was about to ask him about it some more. The question she had was a simple one. He shrugged. “Practice.” Practice didn’t make perfection. Never. But practice did help make things easier, when one repeated the same one over and over. When you practiced something incorrectly, you were ingrained with that as well. Practice made permanent.

Nothing was ever really permanent though. Permanent marker certainly wasn’t. Everything faded, or just plain out died, with time. Time was the universal killer. In time, the Earth would be destroyed. The sun would collapse or explode—he wasn’t too big on astronomy to remember which. His parents would die. He would die. Sure, maybe someone would remember them. But eventually those memories, too, would fade. It was a cycle of forgetting and of death. In a way, it was depressing. In another, ti was rejuvenating. Eventually, your mark on the Earth would be gone. That could be as much a good thing as a bad one—especially for someone who didn’t like the spotlight. Names were just as temporary. Nonetheless, when she provided hers, he felt obligated to do the same. “Knox.” Two words had escaped him in those few moments, and he’d stuttered neither. The reflection had a pleasing result, in his opinion, even if she grew irritated with his short answers. He wasn’t good at contributing to conversation. He so rarely had anything to say. In the subject of familiarity, he had to agree. She looked just as familiar. Her name sounded familiar, too, especially since it wasn’t the sort one heard every day.

A lark was a bird. Knox just meant darkness.