Sandra loved to dance. Unfortunately her husband had been born with two left feet and absolutely no sense of rhythm, so for the twenty years of her marriage she had had to content herself with dancing with her children around the living room. She had tried line dancing and even country dancing at the local village hall, but energetic as that was, there was something missing. What she really craved was the feeling of being held in a man's arms and being swept off her feet in a whirlwind of passion. However, one day when she was shopping for clothes in the nearby town she saw a poster in a window advertising tango lessons. She noted the telephone number and as soon as she was home she rang up and booked a lesson the following week.
The teacher was a handsome young man of twenty five whose mother had escaped from Argentina during the military dictatorship when her journalist father disappeared and sought asylum in Britain. She had married an Englishman and Antonio was their only child. Antonio had trained as a ballet dancer but fractured the bones in his foot in a freak accident, and had been forced to become a dance teacher instead.
Sandra had learned traditional ballroom dancing at her girls school where, because she was quite tall for her age, she had often had to take the part of the man. For the first few sessions with Antonio she was awkward and found the moves of the tango difficult until he explained that one should dance the tango as if one was making love to one's partner. With this knowledge her technique gradually improved, and she rapidly discovered the thrill of being transported by the heat and passion of the music, a thrill that was disturbing in its sexual urgency.
After several months of growing excitement she realised that she was physically attracted to Antonio and that part of her desired to make their pretend lovemaking real. She had never before had any inclination to be unfaithful to her husband, who she loved as a caring husband and devoted father. However, she needed more than cosy domesticity and to her surprise recognised that she was prepared to find fulfilment elsewhere. If only her husband had been able to dance they might have rekindled the passion of the early years of their courtship and marriage, but despite some pangs of guilt, she knew she would not deny him if Antonio attempted to seduce her.
One day in the spring Antonio gave her a leaflet at the end of her lesson containing details of a pro-am tango competition that was going to take place in a few weeks time. He said that she had improved so quickly that she was now far and away his best pupil and that he would like to enter them for the competition. When she told her husband he just nodded and said that if it made her happy she could enter, and went back to reading his newspaper.
The competition was to take place over a weekend at the Blackpool Tower Ballroom. Blackpool was nearly two hundred miles from where she lived, but Antonio said that he would deal with all the arrangements. When they arrived at the hotel on the Thursday evening she discovered that he had booked a double room rather than two rooms as she had expected.
"My dear Sandra," he said, "if we are going to have any chance in this competition we must become real lovers. Only then can we truly capture the passion and eroticism of the tango together, and it must feel as if I am moving inside you when you are in my arms."
She was about to protest that she was a respectable married woman who was almost old enough to be his mother when he continued, "to win this competition I need you to discover the supreme heights of sexual passion and translate that into your dancing. Only then can the movement of our united bodies as we dance, ascend to a climax with the earth shattering intensity of the orgasms of our nights of love. That is how our performance will achieve perfection."
"But Tony, I have had a perfectly satisfying sex life with my husband," she replied, "I cannot see how allowing you to make love to me could make any difference."
"I'm sorry to say this," he said, "but I must disagree. You were so wooden when you first started dancing with me that I knew you had never known the sublime ecstasy of real passion. I will transport you to the exquisite heights of rapture and light a fire in your soul that will carry us to victory."