Excerpt: The False Rose

It started out fine and pretty much normal - at least, as normal as it gets when you're dancing the tango with a guy you've never met before. The sounds of the violin and bandoneon covered the room, and he began slow and easy - testing me - just the basic steps forward, backward, around, keeping the steady eye contact that the tango was famous for. He was a lot taller than I could have hoped; usually, I had trouble finding partners taller than me. I got bored with the basics, though, and performed small add-ins: head snaps, golpectios - toe taps, amagues; then, after only a few bars of the basic stuff, he started to improvise, and things started to finally get interesting.