Hui extended his hand towards Jia Li and pulled her to her feet. Eric looked at his friend"s intense eyes and the confident move. Suddenly, he felt that maybe he was underestimating Hui"s innate charm and persona. With a naughty grin, he left the two of them and went to seek a partner for himself. Hui raised his left hand and wrapped his right arm around Jia Li, placing his warm hand slightly below her shoulder blades. Then, he guided her to raise her right hand to his left and placed her left arm around him and her hand on his back. In this way, they were mirroring each other"s postures.
"Keep your head high, your spine straight, tighten you core and lift your chest," he told her, reciting it from memory.
At 5"8, Hui wasn"t a particularly tall guy and Jia Li in her high heels was nearly at his eye level. She nodded her head to show her understanding, though she was feeling nervous. The close proximity to him was making her feel slightly awkward but his touch was impersonal enough for her not to feel overly so.
He kept the embrace loose but firm and poised.
"Now, I am going to explain the dance movements to you. I will start by going forward with my right, then my left, to my right with my right, back to feet together, then moving left to meet right. That"s all. When I move forward, you move backward, but with the same foot, my right and yours. Basically, you just mirror my movements, simple?" he moved his feet slowly, matching his words, to help her understand.
Jia Li looked at him in consternation. Did he just speak Greek? She hadn"t understood a single word except that she needed to mirror his movements, but how??? By the time she had looked down at his feet, he had finished talking and moving them.
"Uh, I don"t think that…" she started, apologetically.
"Yes, you can. Don"t get bogged down by the instructions. Tango is all about feeling the beat rather than following it. Don"t give up before you even start," he cut her sentence, antic.i.p.ating her words based on her facial expressions.
Jia Li gave him an uncertain nod. She couldn"t directly say no to his face without sounding impolite.
A second ago when Jia Li had been about to move out of his embrace, he had been tempted to let her go. His biggest fear in the moment was that she would guess his true feelings for her. As per his a.n.a.lysis, his heart was beating away at an unhealthy pace, his pupils were dilated and he was probably few seconds away from possessing sweaty hands. Her nearness and her now familiar citrus essence were not helping the matters. But his brave heart simply wasn"t ready to listen to his cowardly mind. Before his hand could release hers, his lips started to move, trying to convince her to give it a try, give him a try!!
They started to move slowly, with him taking the lead. After a few false starts, Jia Li looked around consciously. She was getting more and more embarra.s.sed as the time pa.s.sed by. Twice, she had ridden his foot. More than once, she had tried to take the lead, nearly banging into the couple next to them. She could see that Mr. Ying was also looking fl.u.s.tered, probably in pain or due to embarra.s.sment caused by her performance. She opened her mouth again to tell him that she was going to quit this time, for sure.
Suddenly, he released her hands and held her face with his fingers. He firmly motioned her to look at him.
"Stop looking at other people, stop thinking about my instructions, stop everything… just listen to the beats. Can you do that once, for me?" he asked, unnamed intensity blazing in his eyes.
Jia Li recalled that he was a perfectionist. Maybe he was unable to accept the fact that he was not doing a great job as a teacher! She thought of arguing back that it wasn"t as easy as he was making it sound, but instead found herself paying attention to the beats. She tried to drown out the unnecessary distractions around herself. Concentrating on the slight pressure that he was putting between her shoulder blades with his hand, she tried to follow it instead of looking down at his feet.
Voila!
Before she knew it, he had managed to escape the entire song without her stepping on his toes or going in the wrong direction. She continued with her fierce concentration on his hand and nothing else through the song. As the song got over, Jia Li gave him a wide, happy smile and squeezed his hands with grat.i.tude before heading back to their table for a break. Eric wasn"t there yet.
Probably, he was still trying to find his rhythm and steps in the now overcrowded room.