Afterlife

by Joey W. Hill

Page 5

 

  The ache in her limbs after that sequence and a glance at the clock, showing they"d been going at it for ninety minutes, told her it was time to take it down. She moved them back into a few sun salutation repetitions, then down for some floor stretches, easing into the closing nidra. Her limbs had turned to spaghetti, such that she wobbled when she went from a standing pose into a half-lotus.

  “All right?” He was watching her so closely. That, plus the gentleness of his tone in the quiet room, made her feel like his question was directed to something far beyond her mere physical state. She had to swallow before she answered.

  “Yes. Just overdid a bit. Joints aren"t as resilient as they once were. ”

  “You look superbly flexible to me. But sometimes we push ourselves too hard when we"re trying to outrun things. ”

  He had a way of saying things like that, with such unruffled calm, as if it was completely normal to venture past the intimate edges of a person"s psyche.

  “Like time?” The halfhearted joke, the attempt to turn him away from the sharp boundaries, didn"t do the trick. His attention didn"t waver.

  “Things you"re afraid to want. ”

  Candlelight, heated room, heart rates slowly evening out. At his words, hers stepped up a pace, making her feel a little lightheaded, though she was already sitting down. She made what she hoped was a noncommittal noise, gave him her practiced distant smile that warned he was stepping over a line. As she put her hands on her knees, she adjusted the fake wedding band with one finger, knowing the sparkle would catch the candlelight. When his attention went to it, she shut him out further by closing her eyes, starting their breathing sequence again.

  She kept her ears attuned to it, knew when he was matching his breath to hers, following her deep inhale, the slow exhale. She focused on her posture, on grounding and centering herself. Supposedly yoga practice helped a person connect to divine energies. Today her focus cavorted outside her grasp like a not-so-playful poltergeist.

  The demons she"d hoped to leave behind had only swelled in size, such that instead of peace and calm, her stomach had been invaded by flesh-eating beetles from The Mummy movies.

  All because of one simple, utterly truthful statement. Things you’re afraid to want.

  Damn him. Didn"t he understand she couldn"t afford these types of games? She"d long ago lost her ability to risk the playful nature of romance. Like a child who pretended to play dead during heroic games, but then saw actual death, she knew what such games meant now. The reality of love was dark and damaging, a morass she couldn"t face again.

  When she lay down on her back, straightening out her arms and legs for the savasana, the Corpse pose, the sad irony wasn"t lost on her. She refused to let herself look toward him, until she heard the shifting of his mat. She cracked open an eyelid to see that he"d aligned his mat next to hers and was now lying down, emulating the stretch. His spread fingers were within an inch of hers.

  She wasn"t sure how to react, what to do. He was doing nothing at all wrong.

  Maybe he was inside the personal space margin, considering there was the whole classroom floor to use, but he wasn"t touching her. Not technically. In the space between their parallel bodies, she felt the compressed heat of two auras, and was hyper aware of every long, lean portion of the body next to her.

  “Having trouble hearing?” Another weak joke, delivered with a touch of desperate acid. She wished she could take it back, because she didn"t want to be mean to him. She just needed him to leave her alone. But she also needed him to never stop coming to her class, so she could still have the guilty pleasure of dreaming impossible dreams.

  “I wanted to be closer to you. ”

  She turned her head then, but he had his eyes closed. “Walk us through it like you normally do,” he said. “I want to hear your voice. ” Rachel resolutely closed her eyes. She took them through the steps of putting the body in a neutral position, pushing out the legs, lifting and flattening out the pelvis, softening the groin area. Lifting the skull to push the neck toward the tailbone, then bringing the head back to the floor, in all ways easing the body. Then she enhanced the effect by mixing it with a relaxation exercise. “Starting at your feet, relax your toes, one by one. The arches of your feet, your ankles…”

  She progressed up the body, one muscle group at a time, and for each he relaxed, she was sure hers tensed and quivered further, because her mind was following that progression up every inch of his body. Things were throbbing between her thighs that never throbbed. Or hadn"t in recent memory. She wasn"t going to survive this. She became vicious with herself, imagined the humiliation of jumping him like some sex-starved spinster… She wasn"t able to be anything like what he would want. She wasn"t young, beautiful. Her breasts weren"t bad, but they certainly didn"t sit up high and firm as they once had. She had stretch marks, as well as the soft pouch at her stomach many mothers and post-forty women had, only she didn"t have the child to show for it.

  Most importantly, she wasn"t able to have an orgasm. That cinched it, right? Faking one for her fantasy would shatter her soul.

  Thank God, the five minutes were up. Rolling away from him, she went into the fetal position. It was supposed to comfort, a symbolic return to the womb, a lovely way to finish a practice and come out of it energized, as if newly born. Instead, it reminded her of the many days she"d spent in that position beneath her covers after Kyle was killed, after Cole had left her for good. She hadn"t bathed, hadn"t brushed her teeth.

  She"d embraced her malodorous self. A shower was an offensive mockery, a dead heart pretending to be alive.

  A few more minutes and it would be over. She"d thank him for coming, offer the namaste, say she had an appointment of some vague origin and make her escape. She"d go home to her sanctuary and pull it back together again.

  Then he shifted on his mat. He was right behind her, his arm sliding around her waist, his body curving in behind hers, that incredibly emotional spooning position, her bottom cradled in his lap as he brought his knees up behind hers. His chest was against her shoulder blades, his breath on the back of her neck. He was so close to her, he had to have his other arm crooked beneath his head.

  “What are you doing?” She didn"t pull away, despite the alarm her tone revealed.

  He was firm in all the right places, strong and male. Rather than a frontal attack, a kiss or a pass she could rebuff, he"d chosen this, something warmly intimate. What she"d assumed were fanciful imaginings might be frightful truth—that he could read her needs so easily it was like breathing.

  “What I want. Sssh. Be still. And I mean that at all levels. Still your mind, Rachel, the same way you just stilled your body, one tense bundle of thoughts at a time, and give yourself to me. You don"t need to think. ”

  In truth, all she could think about was that arm around her waist, his hand against her abdomen, the fingers spread so his forefinger rested right below her breast, his smallest finger on her lower abdomen, near the crease of hip and thigh that made a lap.

  With her backside nestled into his lap, she felt the shape of him, the way his cock stirred against her. It made her worry, her hand closing over his anxiously.

  “Sssh. Obey me, Rachel. We"re going to lie here. That"s all I"m going to allow to happen. ”

  Not, “I"m not going to ask or demand anything of you”. This was all he required and would permit. It amazed, aroused and soothed her at once, a peculiar triad that made her hand tighten over his further until he loosened her grip, reversed it so he had her wrist manacled, their two hands tangled beneath her breasts. Then he touched the wedding band. When he pinched it between his thumb and forefinger, taking hold of it, her hand curled into a defensive ball. He stilled.

  “Open your hand, Rachel, and stretch out your fingers. ” A simple command. No coaxing, no reasoning. She closed her eyes. She couldn"t get lost in this. She couldn"t. But her fingers were listening, straightening,
no matter the rapid-fire protestations from her brain. Whoever said the body couldn"t function separately from the mind was full of crap.

  When he slid the band off, she looked down at it. A fifty-dollar wedding band from a jewelry store. Cheap, yes, but she"d still felt like a liar when she"d bought it, knowing it mocked something supposed to be sacred. It was why she"d put her own wedding set away and then ultimately pawned it, though it had torn something loose in her soul when she did it, all that symbolism now up for sale.

  He set the fake ring on its side on the wood floor in front of her. With a deft flick, he sent it rolling. She watched the candlelight flash off it as it traveled a few feet away and then toppled on its side, rocking back and forth, devolving into that tinny vibration as it settled.

  “What do you want, Rachel?” His voice was a breath in her ear. “Tell me. ” Had he known this was the best time to ask a person for a truthful, painful answer?

  There were no lies during yoga nidra, because there was no room for artifice. Of course, what she wanted was a tangled mess. “I don"t know,” was a pitifully inadequate answer, but what she wanted had been buried under others" expectations and her own disappointments. Nearly twenty years of them.

  Yet she knew something was still buried alive under all that. There"d been a time when she"d woken from nightmares, imagining it screaming with terror and need, afraid that it wasn"t being heard or—even worse—heard and ignored. But she"d learned her needs weren"t relevant, and never had been. There was nothing so pathetic as a false sense of importance in the universe.

  Rolling away from him, she got to her feet. As she did, she stepped on the wedding band, which made a harsh squeak against the wood floor. Bending, she picked up the ring. As her fists clenched, it cut a circle into her palm. It was a pose more suited to a self-defense class than yoga, but the body adapted to what was needed, a preservation instinct.

  “I can"t do this, Jon. I appreciate it, but…” She shook her head, started over. “I"ve learned not to want things, at least not so fiercely. I don"t have that kind of energy anymore. ” That kind of strength.