Story Notes: This takes place four or five years before they appear on the show.

One thing he loves about dancing that he'll never tell Stella is that he gets to be in control. He raises his arm, she spins; he steps forward, she steps back; he wants to promenade or corte or send them in another direction, she follows his lead. He just has to put the lightest of pressure on her back, or push forward, transferring his momentum to her through the delicious contact of their centers. In the Standard and Smooth dances, you're supposed to be able to put a sheet of paper between your torso and your partner's, and stay close enough that it never has a chance to fall. Since he was thirteen, he's never let that imaginary sheet of paper fall, not when he's dancing with Stella.

In the rest of their lives, it's totally different. She's the smart one; that "J.D." after her name says as much. She was the one who figured out how they could still manage to eat when she was making peanuts from a research fellowship in law school and he wasn't doing much better in his first years on the force. When they finally started making enough money to actually have a choice of apartments, she was the one who called all the landlords to set up viewings, dragging him along behind her so he could offer his opinion. (He didn't care if they lived under a bridge as long as Stella was with him. Well, okay, he needed the stereo so he could dance with her, and bridges don't usually come with electricity, but other than that, he didn't care.) It's not that he's helpless -- he'd survived for her first two years at Northwestern, when she was living in the dorms and he had his own place, and he does his share of the laundry and cleaning and cooking (Stella's a terrible cook) -- but she's really good at figuring these things out, making plans and making them work, and it's just easier to let her take over. Besides, she enjoys all that big-picture stuff; she's always saying, "In five years we'll," or "Ten years from now we should," and it'll be something big, like buy a house or have some crazy amount of money saved for retirement.

He's in charge of the details she'd otherwise let go: he reminds her to eat when she's brought home a thousand pages of case notes to go over, and takes her on night drives with the windows down, so she can feel the wind in her hair. He puts on something with the right beat, takes her in his arms, and dances her all around the apartment.

Another thing he loves about dancing that he tells Stella all the time is that she transforms when she dances. When there's no music, she moves confidently and sexily (there is never a moment when Stella isn't sexy, and if anyone says otherwise he'll kick 'em in the head), but when she's dancing to a rumba or a cha-cha she's hot on a whole new level. Those dances, the Latin ones, basically exist to show off a woman's hips, and she can move hers with the best of them. He doesn't have to do all that much -- most of his steps are just the basic over and over again while she spins and twists and curls her free arm like a charmed snake, all those little details that turn it from just a shuffling of feet into a dance -- so he can spend a lot of time watching her. She mesmerizes him, that's for sure; he leads her into an alemana or sliding doors and barely remembers to breathe, much less what to do after.

He knows the hip motion makes her feel sultry. (That was the word she'd used, back when they when they were teenagers and would spend hours practicing the figure-eight movement until it felt right, that one stretch and flex of the abs translating all the way down his leg, snapping his knee and foot into place for a long, long beat before he rolled his weight back onto his rear leg and did it all again, over and over.) And that sultriness (it's a good word) shows on her face, in the tilt of her shoulders, in the tips of her fingers when she extends them during a New Yorker or a Samba walk. Sometimes she looks at him from under her lashes, just a hint of a smile on her face, and goddamn, it's like having sex in public.

There's a reason he likes the Latin dances best.

Right now, Stella's at the kitchen table, taking notes on her notes on her notes, as far as he can tell, for a big robbery trial coming up next week. She's been at it for hours, and his neck is cramping in sympathy. He walks over to the stereo and pulls a CD from its case, slipping it into the machine. He selects the right track, and Queen pours out of the speakers, guitars and hand-claps setting the rhythm before Freddie Mercury starts singing about a crazy little thing called love. Stella raises her head at the sound.

He hustles across the room to the table and holds out his hand. "Dance with me?"

"The people downstairs are going to hate us, doing swing at ten o'clock at night," she says.

"Song's only three minutes long. Come on, you need a break."

She raises her eyebrow, but tosses her pen on the table and takes his hand.