Cat In A Topaz Tango

Topaz Tango

The audience has finally emptied the house, the crew has left, and only the ghost light is on in the wings, along with the soft ambient lighting along the aisles.

I sit center stage. Alone.

Waiting.

At last a lone figure comes slinking slowly down one aisle from a seat on the very back wall of the theater.

Legs longer than yesterday. Doing the model walk, one lean smooth gam crossing in front of the other. Eyes glittering in the semidark, fixed on me, not on the ladder of steps she is descending. The jewels at her neck matching their color and fire.

I was made for nights like these.

I wait. Rock solid, holding my powerful limbs in check, no longer breathing hard from my earlier heroic exertions, breathing hard from expectation.

I wait and she comes to me, crossing the wooden dance floor surefooted, never faltering even on the slippery section.

She walks straight up to me until our blinkless gazes are only inches apart.

At the last second she veers left, brushing my side, coiling her long black train around my powerful shoulder.

I stand and look over my shoulder blade, her head is turned likewise toward mine.

She executes a sudden spin and then stalks close along my side again, brushing her face fast against mine before she is walking away.

I follow with one sharp step forward, catch her passing train and draw my mitt along it. She stops. Makes two dazzling shrugs with her sexy shoulders, then our feet are moving in the time-honored way of our kind, making impatient stuttering, kneading little steps, flicking around each other, between each other.

She lashes her train high, letting it quiver in time with her steps.

Our feet are silent, we are silent. The stage is silent for all the intense motion at its center.

She spins away again, and I follow fast. She turns. I turn.

She suddenly slides close along my side again and we turn and turn, our sides undulating together and apart, together and apart.

After another intense round of these steps, she suddenly executes a slow slide down my shoulder and rolls on her back, her golden eyes never leaving my face, her lithe body curled into calculated surrender.

I know this is the climax of the dance, that we will hold our triumphant pose for a few seconds and accept the silent applause of our kind that our routine has won for centuries.

But this is the twenty-first century. Midnight Louie may be a fearless crime-fighter, conquering hero, and primal tiger of the night but he is also a canny suitor.

I move to the side and pick up the small something I have been guarding ever since the stage finally cleared and I could find it. My many schemes to ID the perp for later plucking weren’t needed when he gave himself away but that is no reason to let a jewel languish underfoot, unclaimed by the jewel to whom it belongs.

I pick it up delicately in my fangs and turn to Topaz.

Those glorious eyes had narrowed at my seeming desertion at so critical a moment, but now they flare with understanding and renewed passion.

She lies still as I approach her supine beauty. I bend down and with the most skilled ministrations of my teeth and tongue, reattach the precious topaz pendant on her collar so the set is whole again.

Now the dance is truly over.

Let the games begin!