“[…]
“I suppose it would be absurd for me to ask you to dance with me,” Damon said.
Elena looked at him with what she knew were large and puzzled eyes. Despite the low-cut scarlet dress, she didn’t feel like an irresistible siren tonight. She was too wrought up to feel the magic woven in the cloth, magic which she now realized was telling her she was a dancing flame, a fire elemental. She supposed that Meredith must feel like a quiet stream,
flowing swiftly and steadily to her destination, but sparkling and glinting all the way. And Bonnie—Bonnie, of course was a sprite of the air, meant to dance as lightly as a feather in that opalescent dress, barely subject to gravity.
But abruptly Elena remembered certain glances of admiration she had seen directed toward herself. And now suddenly Damon was vulnerable? Yet he didn’t imagine she would dance with him?
“Of course I would love to dance,” she said, realizing with a slight shock that she hadn’t noticed before, that Damon was in flawless white tie. Of course, it was on the one night when it might hinder them, but it made him look like a prince of the blood.
Her lips quirked slightly at the title. Of the blood…oh, yes.
“Are you sure you know how to waltz?” she asked him.
“A good question. I took it up in 1885 because it was known to be riotous and indecent. But it depends on whether you are speaking of the peasant waltz, the Viennese Waltz, the Hesitation Waltz, or—”
“Oh, come on, or we’ll miss another dance.” Elena grabbed his hand, feeling tiny sparks as if she’d stroked a cat’s fur the wrong way, and pulled him into the swaying crowd.
Another waltz began. Music flooded into the room and lifted Elena almost off her feet as the small hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Her body tingled all over as if she had drunk some sort of celestial elixir.
It was her favorite waltz since childhood: the one she’d been brought up on. Tchaichovsky’s Sleeping Beauty waltz. But some child part of her mind could never help but pairing the sweet sweeping notes that came after the thundering, electrifying beginning together with the words from the Disney movie version:
I know you; I danced with you once upon a dream….
As always, they brought tears to her eyes; they made her heart sing and her feet want to fly rather than dance.
Her dress was backless. Damon’s warm hand was on her bare skin there.
I know, something whispered to her, why they called this dance riotous and indecent.
And now, certainly, Elena felt like a flame. We were meant to be this way. She couldn’t remember if it was an old quote of Damon’s or something new he was just barely whispering to her mind now. Like two flames that join and merge into one.
You’re good, Damon told her, and this time she knew that it was him speaking and that it was in the present.
You don’t need to patronize me. I’m too happy already! Elena laughed back. Damon was an expert, and not just at the precision of the steps. He danced the waltz as if it were still riotous and indecent. He had a firm lead, which of course Elena’s human strength could not break.
But he could interpret little signals of her own, about what she wanted and he obliged her, as if they were ice dancing, as if at any moment they might twirl and leap.
Elena’s stomach was slowly melting and taking her other internal organs with it.
And it never once occurred to her to think what her high school friends and rivals and enemies would have thought of her melting over classical music. She was free of petty spite, petty shame over differences. She was through with labeling. She wished that she could go back to show everyone that she’d never meant it in the first place.
The waltz was over all too soon and Elena wanted to push the Replay button and do it from the beginning again. There was a moment just when the music stopped where she and Damon were looking at each other, with equal exaltation and yearning and—
And then Damon bowed over her hand. “There is more to the waltz than just moving your feet,” he said, not looking up at her. “There is a swaying grace that can be put into the movements, a leaping flame of joy and oneness—with the music, with a partner. Those are not matters of expertise. Thank you very much for giving me the pleasure.”
Elena laughed because she wanted to cry. She never wanted to stop dancing. She wanted to tango with Damon—a real tango, the kind you were supposed to have to get married after.
But there was another mission…a necessary mission that had to be completed.[…]” — Lisa Jane Smith- The Vampire Diaries, Shadow Souls (via reby92)

(via thequeenofdrama)