Chapter 7
Despite her spirited jog across the beach, Adele was late to class. Less than two minutes late, but late still. And to Ajuni, who viewed his classroom space as sacred and read meaning into even the most insignificant actions, this was not something to be looked upon lightly.
When Adele skipped into the room, slightly short of breath, he greeted her with a guarded stillness that struck her as both hostile and strangely intimate. As the rest of her peers settled themselves onto the floor, positioning pillows and unfurling mats, pulling out pens and rifling through paper, Ajuni came to a complete stop in what he was doing. He became a statue in the middle of the room—his striking tallness and chiseled features contributing to the effect—frozen mid-action, one arm poised to write something on the white board, his torso turned back to look at Adele. Their eyes locked, and a laser of focus seemed to cut through the room, silencing the rufflings and movements of everyone else there.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Adele managed, needing to fill the thick silence.
Ajuni said nothing in response, merely continued to gaze at her with a look that was not so much angry as penetrating. Then he raised both eyebrows in what she read as dismissive contempt, and turned back to the white board.
Realizing she’d been holding her breath, Adele exhaled deeply and looked around the studio, expecting everyone to be staring at her, and was surprised to see that nobody had seemed to notice the exchange. She padded quietly to an open spot on the floor and sat down cross-legged on the hard wood, with no mat or pillow. She set down her manual and pulled her spiral notebook and a pen from her bag.
Class was otherwise uneventful. Adele, as she’d predicted, did what she could objectively call a great job on her presentation of pratyahara, the fourth limb of yoga. Ajuni still projected an uncharacteristic severity toward her, but even he nodded approvingly during her presentation and, afterward, called out to the class some particularly insightful points she’d brought up.
Three hours later, after a final group meditation, class ended. A flurry of mat-rolling and pillow-stacking ensued, people laughing and chatting as they cleaned up and filed out. Adele started trotting toward Priya, a sweet girl who lived in the cabin next door to her, so that they could walk back together. She was about to call out to her when she heard Ajuni’s voice from behind her.
“Adele,” he said, his voice quiet and commanding. She froze and turned back toward him. “Please stay.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.” Her voice sounded tiny. Suddenly, the yoga hut was empty, and she marveled at the fact that so many people had managed to fit inside before, Ajuni’s presence now so huge that she felt there was barely room for her.
“Please come here,” he said.
She crossed the room, holding his gaze as she walked, knowing somehow that averting her eyes would signify a weakness that she wasn’t ready to admit.
“You were late,” he said when she reached him. He stepped closer to her and she could almost feel his bare chest moving in and out as he breathed. She had to crane her neck to make eye contact with him.
“I know,” she said. “I’m really sorry, I totally lost track of time and I was all the way down the beach studying, and I ran to get here but—”
In the face of his imposing presence, she became aware of how fragile her voice sounded, then became self-conscious and stopped talking. He looked at her appraisingly, his face stern, but one corner of his lips curved mischievously upward. She felt a rush of something (nerves? Adrenaline?) course through her body.
“A truth about time,” he said, “is that even when you ‘lose track’ of it, it remains. Time will not be forgotten.”
He spoke in such puzzles, a pretentious habit she felt he adopted to add gravity to his persona. And yet, despite her awareness of it, it worked.
“No,” she said. “I suppose it won’t.”
“It can be made up, however.”
“Made up?”
“Time.”
“Time.”
She had no idea what he was talking about.
He raised his right hand and hovered it just above the curve of her softly toned shoulder, so close that her hairs pricked up at its heat, but not quite touching. His hand formed to the shape of her body, a gentle inverse cup beneath which her skin tingled.
“It’s not flat,” he said, and at the final word, she became acutely aware that he had two hands: she suddenly felt the second one hovering similarly to the first, though this one was completely flat, the open palm parallel to her taught stomach, an imperceptible distance away. The tingling spread from her abdomen downward.
“It’s not,” she whispered, vaguely hypnotized. Hearing her own voice jerked her closer to reality and she blinked her eyes, hard, to snap back to herself. “Wait, what’s not flat?”
Ajuni smiled, his teeth sparkling against his caramel skin, his dimples perfect grooves in an otherwise utterly untarnished complexion. The thought that she had no idea how old he was floated abstractly through her mind.
“Time’s not flat,” she said, answering herself. Her voice was a mellow liquid, her entire being yielding to whatever was happening. The heat of his two hands not touching her was driving her wild.
“No,” he said. “It’s round.”
And with that, the hand by her stomach swooped behind her and curved to form around the lowest part of her back—okay, it was her ass, his hand was definitely at least half on her ass—just as the other hand pressed firmly around the sloping rise of her shoulder. The warmth she’d felt a moment ago became a white hot heat.
Just as suddenly as he’d touched her, his hands were gone, and he was then standing several feet away, his back to her as he strode toward a notebook on the floor. She watched him scratch at the bare small of his back with a nonchalance that made her think she’d imagined the last two minutes.
Picking up the notebook and spinning to face her, he began speaking again, as if their conversation hadn’t been interrupted. “And because time is round, rather than linear, we have control over the weight of moments, over the length that each moment takes, over which moment we occupy at any given moment.”
She nodded. That was about all she could figure out how to do right then.
“Which means…?” He looked at her expectantly, one eyebrow raised—flirtingly? Teasingly? In annoyance?—and she struggled to parse the meaning of his riddle.
“Which means,” she began, “that if we imbue any moment we choose with the proper intention and mindfulness”—those buzzwords were bound to win him over—“then it can truly become any other moment in time. So if we treat this moment as the two minutes of class I missed, it becomes that moment. Those moments.”
She finished, feeling both satisfied with her response and completely unsure of what the hell she’d just said. To her mild surprise, Ajuni raised his eyebrows in approval and nodded soberly. The thought I wonder if he’s bullshitting, too flashed briefly in her mind, but evaporated as his hand touched her chin, tilting her face toward his. She hadn’t even noticed him walking back toward her.
“Things must be balanced,” he said, his lips inches from hers. “So let us balance.” He dropped his hand, stepped quickly away, snapped back around, and said, his voice like a drill sergeant, “Utthita hasta padangustasana, right leg.”
It took her a moment to absorb the barrage of sounds before she understood that he was commanding her, in Sanskrit, to come into what’s called Extended Big Toe Pose in English. The pose is a moderate to advanced one, and requires, as Ajuni indicated, a great deal of balance, as well as a fair amount of bodily exposure given the fact that she was wearing a dress.
Feeling no other option, she nodded, shifted her weight onto her left foot, and slowly raised her right leg. Reaching down with her right hand, she grasped her big toe with two fingers (her “Peace fingers” as they called them in class, though peace was one emotion she decidedly did not feel at that moment) and gradually extended her leg out straigh
t in front of her. Locking eyes with Ajuni, she rotated her leg out to the side, so she stood, balanced on one foot, clutching the other firmly with her hand, her legs spread wide. Mercifully, her dress had fallen in such a way as to maintain some measure of modesty. She was wearing a lacy thong that wouldn’t leave anything to the imagination if the fabric of her dress shifted in the wrong direction.
Ajuni strode toward her, nestling his body in front of hers, framed by the acute angle of her outstretched leg and upright torso. Again, the heat of his body pulsed toward hers. He must have been no more than five inches from her, as they stood face to face, stomach to stomach, leg to legs. She fought the reflex to glance down and see how close he really was, knowing that the move would throw off her balance. Instead, she met his gaze and looked back at him.
His dark eyes seemed wet and endless this close up, his smooth lips impossibly soft against his unwrinkled but beach-weathered tan skin.
What a strange, beautiful man, she thought, and the thought itself somehow threw her balance. She made a small hop and leaned wildly to one side to regain her center, and when she looked back up, a smile tickled the corners of Ajuni’s lips.
“Focus,” he said, and his voice was like velvet, so soft that after he’d spoken she wondered if she’d imagined the word.
And so she did. She met his gaze, and drew in her belly button, and stood with a steadiness that she felt she could sustain for hours. Their eyes interlocked, and they breathed, and time passed.
Every once in a while, a thought along the lines of This is so weird would pop into her mind, but mostly she just sunk more deeply into her body than she ever had before, and felt she was experiencing another human’s body perhaps more deeply than she ever had. At one point, she thought she felt a light push against her crotch, something firm and hesitant, but it disappeared as soon as she’d perceived it, and Ajuni’s expression did not change at all, and she decided her mind had been playing tricks on her.
Finally, after an indeterminate amount of time—two minutes? Half an hour? Long enough that her standing leg had started to tremble—Ajuni gave her a slight nod and stepped backward, a sign that she intuitively knew meant that she could release the pose. With a control and poise that surprised her, she lowered her right leg back to the floor. A rush of blood came into it, and she suddenly became aware once again of her body and how long she’d been exerting it. She felt suddenly exhausted, and relieved that it was over.
Glancing up, Ajuni was looking down at her, his gaze as hot and intense as if their eyes had never broken contact.
“In the name of balance,” he said, his lips curling up again into that hint of a playful smile. “We must do the other leg now.”
Chapter 8
Even a full day after her strange and sexually charged “detention” with Ajuni, the unreleased sexual energy of the encounter coursed through her veins. She had wanted to release it herself, but exhaustion, anxiety about sound carrying, and too many mosquitos had thwarted her efforts.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the sexual energy found a point of focus not in Ajuni but in Danny. While Ajuni had lit this fire within her, she found that it was Danny’s scruffy face and sun-red nose and—yes—perfect dick that she craved. Sprawled on a towel in the small lawn of her cabin, catching the last rays of sun as she tried to focus on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, she turned the notion of Danny over in her head. Why had she been so terrified of their encounter? Why had she decided that self-discovery and connection (sexual and otherwise) with another person needed to be mutually exclusive? Wasn’t this adventure of reinvention and inner exploration enhanced rather than hurt by exploration of another person? After all, she’d closed herself off to any sort of real romance after Jeremy—with the excuse that she needed to focus on turning her career around—and that hadn’t brought her any closer to enlightenment.
In a flash of decisiveness—or horniness?—she shut her book, jumped up from her towel, and yanked her little sundress over her bikini. A moment later, she was jogging toward Danny’s cabin.
Just as murmurings of hesitancy and second-guessing began to roll into her mind, his hut came into sight, and she knew it was too late to change her mind. He was sitting on the porch, rocking back and forth lightly in the bench swing, and she could tell by the way he moved his head that he saw her. Resolved, she quickened her pace and was at the steps of his porch in a moment.
“Hey,” she said, slightly out of breath, as she stopped on the grass below the first step.
“Hey yourself,” he said. He smiled. She melted. That smile, those dimples, even the sunburnt crinkles on the bridge of his nose—it was too much. An insuppressible grin spread across her face.
“Unwinding after a rough day?”
He laughed richly, and answered “Yup, really needed to just take some time for myself. It was a tough one, what with all the cloudless blue skies and the sound of rolling waves in the ocean and the smell of lotus flowers. Plus I had to surf for three hours and then eat fresh papaya and fish caught in front of me.” He looked down, shaking his head ruefully, then looked back at her. “It’s been a doozy.”
She met his laughter with her own, letting her hair tumble across her face in a way that she thought—hoped?—looked carefree and sexy.
“Can I come up?” she asked after a moment.
“By all means,” he said, shifting a few inches to one side of the bench to make space for her. Butterflies surged in her belly as she did so, and she pushed them down as schoolgirl’s silliness.
“So,” she said, settling herself next to him on the bench. She looked out at the horizon, the pinks and oranges of sunset playing off the rippled water, but she could feel his gaze on her. She knew she’d just need to blurt this out or she’d start doubting her decision or lose her nerve. “So I’m sorry for just running out the other night.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him turn his head toward the horizon as well and nod slowly. “It’s cool,” he said.
“No,” she said, turning to him. He looked back at her. “No, it wasn’t cool. It was weird and shady, and you deserve an apology and an explanation.”
His response was a laugh and a gentle smile, and then, “Okay.”
“I just…this whole thing, me being here, it’s sort of the result of a…” she paused, searching for the right phrase. “Of the beginning of a new chapter in my life. I had a, I had….an unexpected transition a few months ago, and this trip is sort of a way to reflect, you know? To really think about what I want, and what’s possible, and decide what my next move is. Does that make sense?”
Danny nodded.
“And I felt like, when you and I…” she trailed off, suddenly embarrassed to articulate what had happened. “I felt like that was somehow undermining my whole mission, that I really needed to focus on myself and not get caught up with a guy, and I just sort of panicked in that moment and decided I needed to leave.”
“Okay,” Danny said again, his eyes locked on hers.
“But I was thinking about it today,” she continued, and turned again to the sea. “And I think that’s kind of idiotic and a very limited way of thinking about things. Self-discovery doesn’t mean isolation. And if it does, then that self-discovery isn’t going to fare very well when you test it out in the real world, where there are, you know, people.”
Danny laughed again, and rested a hand lightly on her thigh. The butterflies surged again.
“Well,” he said. “I couldn’t agree more. And I’m really happy that you decided that.”
She looked back at him with an open smile. “Me too.”
“You know what, let’s celebrate your revelation,” he said, standing up from the bench.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said, and she felt an inexpressible tenderness to see the childlike happiness in his smile. “I’m gonna go get us some coconuts from the main hut. Stay here.” He pressed both hands to her legs and leaned forward to peck her on the cheeks, then was gone. She watc
hed him jog across the grass toward the thatched restaurant, smiling and giddy.
When he was far enough away that she could no longer discern the tanned ripples on his back, she turned her gaze away from him. It was a really lovely little porch, she noticed for the first time. The only one she’d seen on the resort with a hanging swing bench, and big double pocket doors that always stood open, letting in the ocean breeze and salt. Always stood open, that is, except for at least once, she thought with a mischievous grin. A small blue rectangle caught her eye on the bench next to her, where Danny had been sitting. It was his passport—must’ve fallen out of his pocket when he’d sprung up.
Before she could stop herself, Adele had picked it up and was flipping through the pages. It wasn’t that she was seeking anything, or snooping, she told herself, she was just so curious about this wonderful man suddenly in her life. She wanted to know everything about him, to soak him all up the same way she soaked up the equatorial sun’s rays on the beach. The pages were many—he must’ve gotten extra ones added, she’d never felt a passport this thick—and covered in stamps of countries she’d only seen on maps. Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chile, Peru, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Russia. Wow, this guy had travelled. Briefly noting the years on the stamps, she raised an eyebrow at how much traveling he’d done in such a short amount of time.
With no more pages left to flip, she paused at the beginning, holding the passport open to his photo and personal information. Daniel Andresen, American citizen. Somehow thinking of him as Daniel made him even sexier. His age slightly surprised her—32, a bit older than she’d imagined—but also seemed perfectly fitting. He had a worldly knowledge. Place of birth, Chicago. It hadn’t occurred to her yet to imagine his previous life, his upbringing, what had brought him here, and yet being from Chicago seemed just perfect.
His photo—taken four years ago—was no less endearing than all the other seemingly mundane facts on the page. His hair was cut shorter, and his face more pale, giving him the look of a sharp businessman rather than a Zen-ed out surfer dude in Bali. His lips pressed firmly one against the other, as if someone had told him he should look serious in the picture, but the left corner of his mouth had crept up into the hint of a smirk. She smirked back at the image.
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