Strangers in the Night

His sweat dripped upon her like forgotten sonnets, a sweetness only she had known, raw and rhythmic, with love brimming beneath every elongated vowel. So much life, she thought, he kisses me as if every touch were his last, his eyes covet mine as if eternity were never enough. No one had looked at Nasrin that way. 

Not since she stopped dancing.

Strangers in the Night, she silently sang the half-remembered lyrics to her grandmother’s favorite song. That’s what she called the man behind those longing lips: her stranger in the night. That handsome smile, which quelled her embarrassment when her prosthesis collapsed under the torque of the black ice, that heroic arm, which rescued her from the drunken crowd quietly decrying the shame of her wasted beauty. 

“I had one of those once,” he had whispered, “though it was the other leg, and made of wood.” She didn’t find it terribly funny, but found it terribly charming and laughed anyway. The kind of laugh she only gave the men she wanted to stick around.

“You’d think I’d get the hang of it by now. I’ve had it since May. Let me buy you a drink,” she had said, pointing to the green entrance of the dive bar she had stumbled out of.

“Could have sworn I just saw you leave the place.”

“What’s your name?”

“Leofric,” the stranger had replied. “But all the girls I help off the ground call me Leo.”

“Well, Leo, that is the shittiest bar I have ever been in. But,” she had said with the emphasis of an overzealous high school teacher about to demonstrate the laws of gravity, “if you go in there with me, it just might be the coolest bar in the city.”

“This isn’t a city.  And I’m flattered, but I don’t drink…alcohol.”

“Of course you don’t.” 

Before she knew it, they were sitting atop the hood of his car, staring into the starry sky that draped over the Minnesota farmland. She told him about her brief stay in Minneapolis, her plans to move to New York, and the BMW that took it all away from her. 

He had listened and told her she was beautiful.

And four hours…or four minutes…or four seconds later, she was naked and beneath him, and feeling whole. His tongue danced on her nape as she threw her head back in ecstasy. His gentle nibbles climbed her collarbone to the spot on her neck that made her melt.

“Leo—,” she moaned as her eyes rolled behind their lids.

She didn’t feel his kisses cease, nor his hand leave the fold of her breast, yet when she turned her head, he was standing naked by the window.

“Come,” he demanded more than requested. “Follow me.”

She grabbed his hand.

Nasrin didn’t remember getting dressed or getting in the car, but she remembered getting out of it. “You doing a midnight run for more skinny jeans?” She japed while taking in the sights of the generic suburban shopping center. “Why are we here?”

“I have a surprise for you.” He extended a soft hand that shimmered in the moonlight. 

The doors opened at their presence with an air of majesty that would put other automatic doors to shame. Lights greeted her from every elevation: the giant atrium ceiling, the four levels of glistening storefronts, the unnecessary spotlights that illuminated the coin fountain.

The air was strong, filled with the slightly higher dose of oxygen deployed by casinos and capitalism. She was more awake than she had ever been and overtaken with excitement. Excitement as Leo placed a palm on her hip, and another in her hand. Excitement when she saw the window display of Callagio’s: a petite mannequin of a child ballerina, complete with small pink slippers.

“Can we go in?” she bounced and begged.

Leo extended his arm invitingly and followed her down all her favorite aisles. A small, tattered, maroon bench sat before a mirror across from the shelves labeled ‘three-to-five-year-olds.’ She plopped on it, just as she did with her mother twenty-two years earlier, in a Callagio’s just like this, her tiny feet swimming in the smallest ballerina slippers they had—but loving every moment of it. She pranced down the showroom then, as she did now, seeing audiences where there were shoeboxes, hearing orchestras where there was hipster pop. Dreaming of a future that would never come.

Sadness took her, and she promptly left. “Let’s just go to whatever store you wanted to go to.” Her tongue flung the words like a wet dog shaking out the rain.

“This way.” Leo’s stare was hypnotic, making her forget where she had just been, or, more accurately, how it made her feel. She was led by his eyes, and she trusted her feet to follow. But they betrayed her once again, leading her to a sea of white gowns and veils and an assortment of pale rosaries. She picked up an abbreviated wedding gown, much like the one she wore for her first communion, the last time she saw her grandmother. Memories of wrinkled hands spinning her on the dancefloor, and a proud smile praising her talent, caused Nasrin’s eyes to swell. She never saw me dance, not really, not competitively. She lamented in her mind, yet Leo held her, as if he heard every word, felt every thought.

He ran his fingers through her long, black hair and placed a soft thumb upon her chin; his Nordic complexion making her olive skin look a shade darker in comparison. He pulled her close, swallowing her slight dancer’s frame between his massive shoulders, filling her with warmth, like a ray of sunshine peeking through the end of a dark tunnel. And then, much like at her First Communion, he spun her down the walkway and waltzed with her past a pantheon of neon signs. He tap danced with her up the escalator, like he was a dapper Bo Jangles, and she, an innocent Shirley Temple.

Awaiting them on the second floor, tucked away in the far corner, was a tattoo parlor; a little more discreet than the other stores—the kind of place that looked the other way when sixteen-year-old girls flashed their fake IDs. She dragged Leo to the wall of designs: there were tigers and dragons and skulls and Chinese characters that looked ominous but likely translated to something innocuous and nonsensical. 

She pointed to the depiction of a red flower with a curved stem and asymmetrical, overgrown leaves. “That’s the one I got on my thigh,” she explained. “My…other thigh. My mom freaked out, but it was high enough up that it would be hidden from the judges, no matter how risque the outfits were. She was mad all the same. But I just had to get it, it’s a—”

“—Wild rose,” the stranger in the night grinned. “That’s what Nasrin means in Farsi: a wild rose.”

“Yes.” She was lost in his baby blue eyes, eyes that somehow shared in the sorrow of something forgone. “I’ve been so selfish. You came here for a reason, and I’ve just been focused on myself.”

“It can wait. Besides, I find your vitality…intoxicating.”

Nasrin stole a kiss and spotted a Hoveround nestled in the beige hallway by the janitor’s closet. She leaped into the seat, told Leo to hop on, and put the pedal to the metal. He clutched her hips, though she knew it wasn’t out of safety, and they sped down the halls, doing three laps around the food court and a fourth one backwards, for good measure and just to hear that annoying beeping sound. Nasrin hadn’t laughed that hard since she pulled the same shenanigans with her friends in college. Luckily, a few twenty-year-olds with the toned bodies of competitive dancers can temper the anger of Mall Security with a pouty face and a batting of the eyes…though her friend from Vegas was willing to take things further if need be.

She parked the stolen vehicle at Dance Depot. “The cheap stuff is up front,” she told him, “but the real treasures are by the changing rooms.”

A mosaic of sequin tops and lace skirts encircled them, suffocating her with their beauty. “This one.” She pointed. “And this one. And oh my God, this one.” She’d worn half the costumes at one point or another, and probably tried them all on during the weeks leading up to competitions. But the dark blue one with the bedazzled cream collar and black lapels, and the short skirt with a complementary orange and gold trim—that was what she wore when she won Showstopper Minnesota. The money didn’t matter to her; it was the way her mother cried, it was the way her father called her a champion.

Nasrin fell to the ground. Her heart was being pulled in two directions: toward the sweetness of her achievement, and toward the fear that it would be the last time her parents would ever be proud of her. Last May brought tears to her mother’s eyes, but of a different sort, and her father traded champion for cripple.

The lights in the mall began to flicker, and she began to realize that no one else was there. No patrons, no workers, no smells of fast food or kiosks of competing perfumes. The ambient music she thought she heard was now silent. All that was truly there was Leo.

“It’s time to show you what I wanted to show you,” he said, walking away expectantly.

She pursued him down an escalator—and then another. And another. And another—more escalators down than they ever took up. The air grew colder, damper, and stale, and modern walls gave way to old stone, devoid of color. And in the center of a cavernous basement, sat a coffin.

When Leo turned back to look upon her, his blue eyes took on a reddish hue.

“Are you...Are you going to kill me?” she asked calmly.

“My dear, you’ve been dying for quite a while. Let go.”

“—you’re hurting me.” She finished her sentence, her eyes still rolled behind closed lids, the stranger still planked above her in thrusts of passion, though she now feels that his kisses have become teeth, burrowed into her veins. A million memories drained from her like blood: slippers and dances and friends and trophies and hope and disappointment and that stupid fucking BMW that crashed into her mid-stride, wedging her leg between its bumper and her car door. The way men looked at her, like she was damaged goods. And that night. Just a few hours ago, when she found the one man who didn’t. 

When she found the one who made her feel alive.

Nasrin knew when she was dead.

And she knew when she wasn’t dead anymore.

Leofric sat at the edge of the bloodstained bed. His muscular back to her, a reddened towel beside him. “Welcome back,” he said without turning around.

“Fuck you,” was all she could muster. “I’ve lost enough, and you took what little I had left.”

“Did I take?” He asked slyly, ripping the bedsheets off her. “Or did I give?”

She looked down to see that her amputated leg had returned. She leapt up and inspected herself; the leg wasn’t limber, but it was a limb.

“Nothing about you will truly live again. But nothing about you can truly die either.” Leo grabbed her by the shoulders. “I saw you. I really saw you, my stranger in the night. There are a million things we cannot do in this world now. But we can dance.”

Nasrin stared at her pale hands and placed them on his chest. She kissed him as if every touch were her last; she coveted his pulsing eyes, as if eternity were never enough. And as the moonlight christened her new life through the motel window, she danced. 

She danced. 

She danced.