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"I'm not buying it, Tom" B'Elanna said, pointing her PADD at him over her breakfast tray. "Come on, break it down." She pointed her PADD at each finger as she counted out her points.
"First, you didn't say 'with' you said 'dancing'."
"I thought women liked to dance. Found it romantic or sexy or something?" Tom responded a bit too hurriedly. He got this look sometimes when he was avoiding the truth. B'Elanna knew she was onto something now.
"Likely story," B'Elanna grinned, enjoying how embarrassed Tom seemed. "Next point, you didn't just say 'dancing with' you said 'dancing the Rhumba with'
Tom cringed. his hand moved to the back of his neck. "What? It's a really sexy dance."
How did Tom even know what the Rumba was? B'Elanna hadn't until she looked it up last night. He wasn't wrong. But hang on. Did Tom know how to dance? Oh, she'd be coming back to that later. She would indeed. Once she got this story out of him. Because she could smell a story. And based on his behavior, an embarassing story.
She cleared her throat and shook her head "Finally you didn't say 'another man' or even 'a naked man', you said 'a naked Bolian'. Naked. and Bolian. that's three and four oddly specific parts of a single sentence." She pointed her PADD right at his nose "I've got you now." she declared smiling triumphantly.
Tom tilted his head back and look down his nose at B'Elanna's PADD then back up at her. She swallowed. She could swim in those eyes. He was so distracting. Head in the game, girl she told herself, pulling the PADD back to her chest.
"Got me?" his face wrinkled in false confusion "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It's too specific." B'Elanna said, rolling her eyes.
"So you're saying my example, the one I made up while trying to figure out why you were mad at me for walking into your "super secret" holodeck time even though you were late for aour lunch date is too specific?" He drew air quotes. She loved it. It was something she did too.
She nodded
"So what?"
B'Elanna watched him. He looked away. He wasn't angry, she knew those signs, but he really didn't want to tell her about it. He was cute when his ears pinked up like that. She wondered if her ears did that? She sat on her hands so she wouldn't reach for them, or for her own ears.
"I am saying." What was she saying again? Big. Blue. Oceans. Oh! Right! "Your example was too specific to be made up. It screamed of experience."
Tom stood and started cleaning up his breakfast tray even though his food was half eaten. "Oh would you look at the time. I have to report..."
She reached out and pinned his hand to the table. She was right! Her face broke into a grin. "You were actually caught dancing the rumba with a naked Bolian?" she asked. Perhaps a bit too loudly.
"No?"
"Is that a question?"
"No. I mean... Sort of."
B'Elanna laughed at Tom's discomfort. "Sort of caught? Sort of dancing? or sort of naked?" She let go of his hand before he started to feel trapped.
"It's... complicated." He checked the chronometer.
"You have to report at the same time I do." B'Elanna pointed out. "Spill."
Tom sat back down and sighed.
"You know how there's that big cotillion at the end of each year at the Academy?"
B'Elanna nodded. She also remembered how she hadn't been able to land a date until Burke randomly decided he wasn't going to go stag this year.
"One of the women in my Astrophysics class, Bethany, was a world class ballroom dancer. She was also, for some unfathomable reason, dating me. I mean, she was so far out of my league that she couldn't even remember what it was like to be in my league."
"I told her that I could dance, it wasn't wrong per se, but my childhood foray into it was light years behind her experience." "I mean my best dance was the Texas Two-Step."
Great another dance B'Elanna would have to look up in order to follow this conversation completely.
"So, I had three weeks to prepare, so i went looking for a holodeck tutorial. I didn't find anything. I figured I could write one just as easily. This was before I learned a lot of the tricks i use now. And also before I was willing to let the computer extrapolate as much as i do now."
"So I pulled in competitive dancers and whatever i could find on the best known instructors for each dance. What i didn't do was spend a lot of time on how it looked. I just needed to learn how to lead, how to step, and how to not drop my partner, you know? Anything else was extraneous. At least at first."
"The number three female Latin dance instructor that year was a Bolian; Wyhyta Chata. She had a publicly accessible profile in the system so I set her as the instructor for the Latin styles that Bethany favored. What I didn't do, was take into account that Bolians are shaped a bit differently from humans. So when I did the clothing overlay, it didn't always overlay properly. It wasn't terrible. Most of the time the clothing seemed to cover everything and sometimes when she moved, the clothes wouldn't move quite right. I refused to let the computer extrapolate the clothing overlay. It was good enough and i really didn't care that much. i wasn't going to try to sell the holoprogram, so I just ignored the glitches."
"I mean, dancing is done close and if you look down, you WILL screw it up. It just didn't seem that important to me."
"There's a but coming, isn't there?" B'Elanna asked. Tom nodded.
"Anyway, after the initial annoyance, I stopped thinking about it. I didn't have time to perfect the program, i needed to use it to learn. But by then i'd watched way to many vids of Bethany in competitions and I had decided to learn a more advanced move that I'd seen Bethany use in vids. I mean, i felt like i had to impress her, she was, as I mentioned miles out of my league."
"And I'm not out of your league?" B'Elanna couldn't decide how she felt about that. Did she really care?
"Is that what you think?" Tom asked her, looking truly perplexed. B'Elanna made a face and started to stand up. Tom held out a hand. "Look, let's not go there, ok?"
"Finish your story." B'Elanna said sitting back and crossing her arms.
"So this move i wanted to impress Bethany with. It uses the rumba lines to turn a simple open out into a lift. So starting in the hold, both dancers step out and are facing the same way. Follower slides in front of the lead like sliding doors and the lead I lunges. The follower does a reverse hook over the lead's knee hooks my knee with her close leg and stretches the other toward a split as the lead drops into the lunge. Then she swings her other leg around the front and over the hooked knee so that she's basically sitting in this crossed leg style on the lead's knee facing the opposite direction." Tom was trying to convey the movements using has hands and fingers but B'Elanna wasn't following completely.
I" chose it because it's really sexy and for the lead side, it's not terribly complicated. The lunge has to be solid and the rest is on the follower. I wouldn't have to pick her up or anything. My basic job would be to make sure she had the support she needed while lifting herself up from that low stretched position."
"I almost had it, too. Wyhya did the hook. I pushed into the stretch behind her so she could pull her other leg up when I heard a gasp and looked up. I realized at that moment that i'd been so focused on mastering this dance that i'd missed a study group with Bethany. "
Tom shook his head, embarassed again.
"So there I am in a deep enough lunge to be called a split, connected to a Bolian dance instructor by her knee over mine and a hand on my neck. While i'm frozen, she finishes the movement, her other leg swinging wide facing Bethany."
Tom stopped. B'Elanna was enthralled. Tom was a good story teller. "What happened next?"
"Let's just say neither of us thought to say 'freeze program'."
"Oh, no."
"Yeah. I jumped. Lost frame and Whyhya slipped to the floor, taking me with her.
"Oh no!"
"That's when I noticed a whole lot of swirly blue flesh where clothing should be."
B'Elanna giggled, imagining his face looking much as it did now but without the humor. He'd been trying so hard for this woman. She really couldn't imagine it.
"Wyhyta's clothing had gone a different direction than she had because of a mathematical error in my program. So when she swung her leg up off the ground," Tom held his hands up in a 90 degree angle and pointed the open apex at her. "Bethany saw all the way to Schweitzerland..."
B'Elanna was pretty sure she knew what he meant, but why use such a weird euphemism? Schweitzerland was. What was it again? A tiny member state of the European Union back on Earth nestled in the little curve where Deutschland met... Then she smiled, remembering a children's catcall linking the anglicized word "France" to "underpants". Cute. But "everything" would have been easier to figure out.
It didn't matter. He'd made the story hysterical even with the weird euphemism and she was laughing so hard she was wiping tears out of her eyes.
Between laughs she gasped out: "So you were..." Tom opened his mouth to cut her off "...TECHNICALLY dancing the Rumba with a naked Bolian. How did you get out of that one."
"I didnt. She dumped me."
"No way! After all that work you'd put in?" B'Elanna asked checking the chronometer and beginning to clean up their breakfast trays. Tom took his from her and helped.
"Yep;" Tom made a face as he popped the last p.
"We'll have to fix that. I think i'd rather learn to dance than that godawful Klingon fighting program."
"I'll see what i can do. Then someday I could catch YOU dancing the Rumba with a naked Bolian." Tom and B'Elanna laughed as they passed Baxter in the mess hall doorway
Baxter looked after them, then caught Ayala's eye. "Did you hear that Tom caught B'Elanna dancing the boom bop with a Naked Bolian?"
"What? No way. She's not into him like that, is she?" They both turned to look at Chell as he walked into the mess hall behind them unaware of their conversation.
"What? I haven't eaten a Bolian meal in months." Chell watched them warily then turned and left the mess hall, preferring to use up another replicator ration than face that firing squad.