What can I say? I have a thing for mechanical women.

I almost imagined that I could hear the faint whirrs and clicks of her arms over the sound of the music, but then again, I would only have been imagining them anyway.  I could only ever hear them when I was in full gear and she was close by.  Still, I’d rarely been closer to her than at that moment, suit or no.

            The music was the standard club fare, techno with a bit of pop and hip-hop thrown in.  The whole crowd was moving and I had already lost everyone in our group but her.  I was a little surprised that she was all up on me even though nobody we knew was around to be her audience.  She also seemed to be laughing less and dancing more.  I gave up and decided that it was all in my head.  We just kept dancing till the end of the song and into the next.  The Jäger had already going to my brain and I was feeling invincible.  I was relaxed, happy, and feeling like no matter what I did life was going to be okay.

            She was dancing really close now.  I could feel her body heat.  I went with it.  The sinuous movements, the arms mostly around each other, it was dancing, just more fun than usual.  I thought about how shocked people were about this kind of thing in junior high.  They described it as sex with clothes on.  The memory made me laugh out loud.  Chopper looked at my face, quizzically.  I leaned in to put my mouth by her ear and yelled over the music.

            “I was remembering junior high.”  I pulled back to see if she understood.  She still looked confused, but she leaned in and replied.

            “You went to clubbing in junior high?”

            “No. No, I was thinking about school dances.  They were so shocked by this kind of thing back then.”  This time she pulled back with a look of admiring surprise.

            “You mean,” she yelled, “You used to bump and grind in junior high?”

            “What? No.”  I leaned in again. “I never went to the dances but that kind of dancing shocked them.  I was the dork of my class and dances would’ve sucked.”

            “I was a dork too.  I was actually shy, quiet, never did anything like this-” and then she held tight with her arms and I felt her lips on my neck.

            I nearly fell over entirely.  I lost focus for a second.  Several muscle groups went all tingly for a moment.  I was lost in that intense, warm, exhilarated feeling until she pulled back.

            I looked her in the eyes for a moment.  She was smiling, but I knew her.  There was a fake confidence in that smile that said “I’m just playing with you”, but it was just a screen.  Below the surface was an uncertainty.  She was afraid that I was going to back off, reject it, run, or at the very least laugh it off as a joke.  I didn’t have any plan of letting that happen to her.  She had just laid her cards on the table, and as shocked as I was, I wasn’t going to punish her for taking a risk.  Not after what I’d said earlier that day.  I pulled her in close, and began the rest of what turned out to be an amazing night.