Julia rolled her eyes. “And as usual, Tessa, you forgot to mention that your hot doctor has the hots for you. Though he does look like he could show a girl a good time, Sasha. Especially one who’s in the middle of a dry spell.”
Sasha shook her head, causing a couple of corkscrew curls to escape from the messy knot she’d unsuccessfully tried to contain them in. Most days it seemed that her wild, untamed curls had a mind of their own, and attempting to style them in any sort of way was usually an exercise in futility.
“Thank you both - I think - for offering to fix me up with your husbands’ manwhore friends,” she replied drily. “But I’d prefer to find my own man, actually. And this certainly isn’t the first time in my life that I’ve been celibate for a long stretch. Relationships can be complicated, after all, and I’ve made it one of my goals to live as uncomplicated a life as possible.”
Sasha continued to reflect on that statement as she chatted briefly with a few other students, then made sure the studio was neat and tidy for the next class that would be starting in less than a half hour. As she exited the practice room - the largest of the three here at SF Flow, the most popular yoga studio in San Francisco - she noted that students were already assembling out in the lobby for the next class. Weekend mornings were especially busy here at the studio, though nearly all of the classes were well attended and often filled to capacity.
Callista, who worked the front desk on weekends, was busy checking in students but took a moment to smile at Sasha as she approached.
“Well, from the way half your students were practically crawling out of here a few minutes ago, I’d guess you gave them all a good ass kicking this morning,” drawled Callista.
Sasha laughed softly. “Nothing they can’t handle,” she assured. “Hey, I know you’re busy, I just wanted to see if Studio Three was empty for awhile.”
“It’s all yours,” replied Callista. “Nobody’s got anything scheduled in there at all today. So have at it.”
“Thanks.” Sasha gave the clerk a grateful little pat on the shoulder.
Unlike a few of the other teachers here at the studio, who tended to treat the support staff like - well, support staff - Sasha was always mindful of treating everyone with kindness and appreciation. It was just one of the reasons that she was not only the most popular teacher among her students but among the staff as well.
Studio Three was the smallest of the trio of practice spaces here at SF Flow, designed to hold no more than twenty students. The room was used mostly for private and semi-private sessions that some of the teachers offered, as well as the workshops and lectures that were presented on a regular basis at the studio.
And it was where Sasha often retreated for her own personal yoga practice, a place where she could easily spend two to three hours at a time. During the classes she taught, she actually spent very little time actually practicing yoga herself, except to demonstrate a pose here and then. Most of the time she was busy making her way around the crowded room, ensuring that her students were doing the poses correctly, and making adjustments to their alignments as necessary.
These sessions served a dual purpose - not only allowing her to enjoy her own practice, but also to plan out sequences for future classes. Her bedroom at the multi-level Victorian home that she shared with four other roommates was much too compact for the space she needed to do her practice. And there was no other suitable space in the old house, considering that her landlords - married couple Chad and Julio (for whom she’d also been a member of their wedding party) - subscribed to the belief that more must always be better. As a result, nearly every room of the historic old Victorian was crammed full of furniture, mirrors, paintings, and a great deal of assorted bric-a-brac.
And these private sessions were also a time when she could completely immerse herself in the beauty and flow of the ancient practice she’d devoted her life to, accompanied by an inspiring music track.
Sasha would be the first to admit that she was both technologically challenged, and rather hopelessly detached from much of mainstream society. She didn’t own a computer, and barely knew how to send and receive emails on the cell phone she mainly used to store her extensive music files. She disliked most television shows, and the only time she went to the movie theater was to see a documentary or occasionally a classic film. She preferred reading or listening to music or attending art exhibits, in addition to taking long walks and hikes.
As the daughter of a musician - her father Enzo was a member of one of Brazil’s most popular samba groups - Sasha had both music and dance running through her veins. For her yoga classes, she was known to play an extremely eclectic variety of music - everything from Indian classical to jazz to reggae and rock - and her students constantly pleaded with her to post the diverse playlists on her Facebook page or website. Problem was Sasha had neither a Facebook account nor a website, and zero desire to create either one. But she was always happy to share her music with her students and other teachers, and pleased that they enjoyed the variety of genres as much as she did.
As her limber, slender body - toned and strong and leanly muscled from so many years of both yoga and dance training - began to move through the physically demanding practice, she lost herself in the music as one track segued into the next. Anoushka Shankar gave way to Jason Mraz, then to the Gipsy Kings and Stevie Ray Vaughn. And, of course, the tracks were peppered here and there with selections from her father’s vast catalog of songs that he and his band had recorded over the past three and a half decades. She was half-Brazilian, after all, and had spent a good part of her life in South America, so the music was in her blood.
The practice she put herself through was much more difficult and demanding than anything she would actually teach to a class. The arm balances, handstands, intricate twisting and binding poses, and the complex choreography of the flow were all very advanced postures, ones that only a very skilled practitioner could hope to achieve. She preferred to practice with others, thriving on the energy that could only be generated by the shared breath and movement of other practitioners. But since she rarely had time nowadays to attend a class taught by one of her old teachers, or even attend a training workshop, these solitary sessions had to suffice.
A little over two hours later, Sasha was tired, sore, and dripping in sweat, but feeling both exhilarated and blissful. She’d felt the exact same way after finishing her very first yoga class as a girl of fifteen, and more than a dozen years later her practice still felt like the place she had always been meant to be. It fulfilled her in different but equally important ways - physically, emotionally, spiritually, artistically. Considering her background - the gypsy-like existence she’d been compelled to accept until she’d finally rebelled against it as a teenager - yoga had provided a haven, a place where she belonged, something that would always be constant in a life that had never been stable or the same for very long.
She was walking past Studio One, the largest of the three and where all of her own classes were taught, when Micah Walters waved at her from the open doorway. Micah taught the eleven a.m. class on Sunday mornings, and while his class was nearly as popular as Sasha’s, the major difference was in the rather noticeable gender imbalance among his students. All but a handful of Micah’s students were female, most of them young, attractive, and all too eager to flirt and giggle with the handsome, buff yoga teacher. Even now he was surrounded by half a dozen females, all of them wide-eyed and adoring as they vied for his attention. He was admittedly a good-looking guy, not especially tall but extremely fit and leanly muscled. Micah rarely if ever had a shirt on inside the studio, and was more often than not garbed solely in a pair of short, close-fitting athletic briefs. He was tanned and sported more than a dozen colorful tattoos along his back, arms, and torso, a small gold hoop pierced his left lobe, and his dirty blond hair was clubbed into a short ponytail at his nape.
Ever since Micah had joined the teaching staff here at SF Flow a little over a yea
r ago, he’d been trying almost nonstop to get into Sasha’s pants. The fact that she continued to gently but firmly rebuff him only seemed to make him more determined. He didn’t accept her excuse that the owners of the studio frowned on co-workers dating. And while that particular excuse was indeed a real one, the main reason that Sasha hadn’t taken her fellow teacher up on his multiple and very aggressive offers to go on a date was because guys like him immediately turned her off. Micah was too sure of himself, too vain and egotistical, and way, way too much of a playboy for her liking. She didn’t expect a commitment from a guy, especially on the first few dates, but she also refused to simply be another notch on his bedpost, one more female for him to fuck and then forget.
But there was no polite way to avoid Micah at this moment, not when he was making a big show of calling her over. He bid good-by to several more of his overeager “groupies” - as one of the other teachers here had teasingly dubbed his smitten students - and then slid an arm around Sasha’s shoulder, pulling her in close for a hug.
“How’s my favorite goddess on this beautiful summer day?” he murmured in her ear.
Sasha forced herself not to cringe at the combined odors of garlic and sweat that emanated from Micah’s body. She knew that he took garlic supplements as part of his fitness regime, and while she certainly appreciated the various health benefits of garlic, she also knew better than to ingest the capsules before teaching a class of several dozen students all packed into the same heated studio. One of the negative side effects of taking garlic supplements was the way the odor could emanate through one’s pores and sweat glands, and for that reason it was a bad idea for someone in Micah’s profession to use them on a regular basis.
“I’m good,” was all she told him in reply, offering up one of her usual serene smiles. “But I’m pretty wiped out after teaching class and then doing two hours of my own practice, so I’m anxious to head home and relax for awhile.”
Micah gave her a mock scowl. “Ah, and just when I was going to try and convince you to let me buy you lunch. One of these days, sweet Sasha, you’re going to give in and say yes. I’m not going to keep buying that line about management frowning on co-workers seeing each other outside of business hours.”
She shrugged, using the opportunity to slip out from under his forced embrace. “You’re more than welcome to discuss the matter with Serge or Morgana. Though you might want to hold off on that chat for a bit. I understand they’re still peeved at you about that incident with one of your students.”
Serge and Morgana were the married couple who owned SF Flow. Serge still taught classes occasionally, though he devoted most of his time nowadays to his massage practice. In addition to handling all of the bookkeeping and personnel matters, Morgana taught pre-natal yoga and offered monthly workshops for expectant mothers. And while they were two of the most down-to-earth and open-minded people Sasha had ever known, they drew a hard line with any of their teachers dating their own students. Micah usually got around that particular problem by slyly suggesting to whatever pretty student who caught his eye that she should quietly start attending a different class. Sasha had lost count months ago of how many of Micah’s former students had wound up in one of her classes - and how many of them he’d pissed off when things had ended rather abruptly between them.
Micah had the good graces to look sheepish at the reminder. “Yeah, guess I’d better lay low for awhile, huh? No sense rocking the boat. But I’m not the sort who gives up easily, as you know. So, one of these days, Goddess Sasha, you’ll give into me. I had a sixth sense about you from the very first time we met, and those vibes have only gotten stronger over time. It’s fate, sweet Sasha, that we’ll be together one day.”
Sasha resisted the urge to roll her green-gold eyes. It had been very obvious to her from the first time she’d met Micah that he was something of a poser - a spiritual wannabe, in so many words. He’d only been practicing yoga about six years, and while he more or less had the physical aspect of the practice down, he had a long way to go before he fully understood all of the other facets. But he liked to put on certain airs, was wont to talk in New-Age terms, and acted like some sort of modern-day guru at times. To someone like Sasha, who’d not only studied many of those other facets in depth for more than a decade but had lived them as well, Micah’s put-on airs were both comical and mildly insulting.
“Well,” she told him with a mischievous grin, “my sixth sense is telling me that you might have gone a wee bit overboard on the garlic supplements this morning. You might want to abstain for twenty four hours before you teach a class from now on. See you later, Micah.”
As she passed by the front desk, Sasha caught Callista’s eye, knowing that the receptionist would have just overheard the conversation with Micah, and the two women exchanged a knowing grin. As she waited for the bus that would bring her home a few minutes later, Sasha was still chuckling under her breath at the shocked expression in Micah’s light blue eyes at her admonition.
‘That was just a tiny bit evil, you know,’ she scolded herself. ‘And not very kind. But, boy, did he ever deserve it! Maybe now he’ll stop asking you out every time you cross paths.’
But Sasha doubted this would be the end of Micah’s attempts to ask her out on a date, given his massive ego and not especially bright intellect. However, he certainly wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle easily, and she dismissed the incident from her thoughts during the bus ride home.
A couple of blocks from home, the cell phone that she rarely used pinged, signaling a voice mail. Sasha sighed, knowing before she looked at the screen that the call would have been from her mother. These Sunday calls were pretty much a regular thing, unless of course Katya was preoccupied with something related to business, or had to head in for a last minute rehearsal or costume fitting.
Katya Veselov was one of the professional ballroom dancers on the long running TV show Beyond Ballroom. The immensely popular reality show paired professional dancers with celebrity partners, most of whom had little to no dance training, and who were quite often something of a train wreck to actually watch. Sasha’s mother had been with the show nearly from its beginning a decade earlier, and was now quite the celebrity herself. Katya was close to fifty years old now, though she was as toned and fit and stunning as she’d been as a young ballroom protégé in communist Russia. Still, the show’s producers had begun assigning her partners who were closer to her own age as of late, something that Katya frequently raged about. Not, thought Sasha wryly, that her fiery-tempered mother ever lacked something or other to get into a rage about.
During Sasha’s bohemian, nomadic-like childhood and adolescence, the most frequent subject of Katya’s rages had been Enzo - her on-again, off-again lover, and the father of her child. Enzo was every bit as fiery and passionate as Katya, and during the times they’d been together it had always been unclear what was more fervent - their epic screaming matches or their wild bouts of lovemaking. Sasha had often thought that her parents went together like fire and ice, and that the day they had first met must have triggered either an earthquake, a hurricane, or a tsunami somewhere in the world.
They had met in Paris, the city where Katya had defected from her home country. She’d been near desperate to escape not just the oppressive communist regime that had governed Russia at the time, but also her abusive, domineering mother who had pushed Katya into the world of competitive ballroom dance at a very young age. And while she had grown to love dance and competitions and performances, she hated the restrictions placed on her by both the government and her overbearing mother.
The dance troupe that she belonged to was rarely allowed to travel outside of Russia, so when Katya learned about the trip to a competition in Paris she knew this could be her one and only chance to escape. Fortunately, her older sister had herself defected to Paris several years ago and Katya had been able to hide out with Polina until the troupe returned to Russia without her. Katya had been barely twenty y
ears old at the time, but still possessed of a steely determination to make a better life for herself, a life where she and no one else could make her decisions.
She’d been working as a waitress at a neighborhood café, struggling with both the unfamiliar work and her limited command of the French language, when she’d met Enzo Fonseca for the first time. He had been in town with his group for a series of performances, and they stopped in at the café for a late lunch. The attraction between them had been both instantaneous and explosive, and would be the first of many such encounters between them over the next three decades.
Sasha couldn’t recall a time when her parents had actually lived together for more than a few weeks at a time, until one of them stormed out of whatever city they happened to be residing in at the moment in a fit of anger. As her father was fond of saying, he and Katya loved as fiercely as they fought, and at times it was difficult to draw a line between love and hate where they were concerned.
They had never married, of course, even though Enzo had proposed multiple times once Katya had fallen pregnant and given birth to Sasha. Katya had remarked scathingly many times over the years that the two best decisions she’d ever made in her life had been to leave Russia and to remain single. And neither parent, it seemed, was capable of remaining faithful to the other during the times they were apart. Though they had both been discreet when Sasha was around, she’d been well aware from an early age that her parents each had lovers. And because she’d never really known the stability of a normal, two-parent household, or had a real house to call a home, Sasha had never considered the whole situation to be even the least bit odd.
She had lived the life of a gypsy from infancy, especially after her mother took a job with a ballroom dance company based out of New York City. Sasha would spend part of the year in Paris living with her Aunt Polina and her husband Maxim, another few months in Sao Paolo with Enzo’s family, and time in New York with Katya, as well as traveling with each parent during their dance and band tours. She attended schools in three different cities, often during the same calendar year, and had to make the switch between French, Portuguese, and English each time. No place ever truly felt like home, and she learned quickly not to get too attached to a particular place or person, or to accumulate too many belongings because she would more than likely have to leave some of them behind.
Serenity (Inevitable Book 5) Page 6