“No, cannot be tired for that,” she said to herself as she puttered around her bathroom, splashing water on her face to wash off the sea spray and sweat from the day. An unfamiliar bird trilled close by, somewhere in the tall reeds of the field outside.
Her bed had been neatly made by the lovely Balinese woman who did up their cabins every day, and Adele gave a sharp tug to the sheets to loosen the hospital corners, then crawled under the covers. She loved that none of the beds in any cabin had anything but sheets, all year round, and most of the time you didn’t even need those. This was an island of perpetual summer.
The warm breezes and sounds of the ocean waves wafted through the window, and her exhausted body (three hours of yoga plus some serious bedroom exertion will leave you winded) yielded in gratitude against the mattress. Sleep, however, did not come. Maybe it was nerves about the big day ahead in class, or maybe the full-body tingling happiness of her encounter with Danny, but her mind wouldn’t quiet. On the one hand, she felt more fulfilled than she had since she’d first joined GreenGrub years ago, and on the other hand, she felt ravenously hungry for something more. A bottomless hunger.
The only thing she could think of to satisfy it was more Danny, but she knew she couldn’t run back to his cabin now, and even if she could, it would be a bad idea. She needed sleep.
Before she’d even made a conscious decision in her head, she had jumped out of bed and was booting up her laptop. As she impatiently waited for it to connect to the super-spotty island WiFi, the thought came together. If she couldn’t be with Danny physically, look at his beautiful face, feel his body pressing down on hers, she could look at virtual Danny, and eat up every fact about him that existed on the Internet. Because now, she had that one all-important key to the world of online stalking: his last name.
Finally, her computer connected to the Internet, and she pulled up Google. “Danny Andresen…” she murmured to herself as she typed his name and pressed enter. After waiting for what seemed like an eternity for the results to load, she was excited to see that there were, indeed, a lot of results. She clicked on the first one, a page from the website of a company called Propel.
When the page loaded, she saw a picture of Danny, his hair cut shorter, his face clean-shaven, wearing what looked to be a very expensive navy blue suit. He was smiling genially (her stomach fluttered a bit at the charming grin, to be honest), and his hands were thrust casually into the pockets of his perfectly tailored pants. It looked like it had been taken at some sort of photo shoot, with a pristine white background. Next to the photo were three letters: CEO.
“Well then,” Adele said, giggling, a little surprised but tickled at this new business side of her island lover. “Mr. Bigshot, huh?”
Below the photo was a paragraph outlining his background—he’d done the Peace Corps, then gotten an M.B.A. from Wharton and worked for years as a hedge fund manager on Wall Street before joining Propel three years ago. His biography described him as having “an uncanny knack for discerning new trends in the business landscape and pinpointing companies, individuals, and industries on the verge of ubiquity. The Wall Street Journal has called him ‘the crystal ball reader of the business world.’” Damn.
So what the heck was Propel? She clicked on the “What We Do” tab at the top of the page, and began reading.
“Propel is an e-commerce-focused venture capital firm and startup incubator,” she read aloud. “…build successful ventures around the world…Okay, so they fund startups around the world, that’s cool…emphasis on cutting through the red tape that slows businesses down and going full-speed-ahead…and they do it quickly, alright,” she skimmed the rest of the passage and clicked on the “Our Companies” tab.
She scanned the list of companies, all with very “startup”-sounding names. Zitoria, Altify, Tryperion. But then her eyes alit upon one that made her stomach turn into a stone and plummet with its newfound weight: Organify. Organify, the company that had spotted the brilliant idea of GreenGrub, stolen it for their own, completely stripped it of all integrity and depth, thrown millions of dollars at it, and then pushed it out to the public with a marketing strength they knew GreenGrub could never match.
“No,” she said aloud, clicking on the name, hoping to find confirmation otherwise. But instead she found a quote from him, a quote, saying, “‘Organify represents an exciting first step for us, in the direction of sustainability and global awareness of health,’ said Daniel Andresen, CEO of Propel.”
“Oh, bull,” Adele, said, feeling the rock of her stomach turn to writhing anger. She read on: “We’ve always been about bringing exciting new ideas and possibilities to different parts of the world, and to be able to marry that to my personal passion for health and the environment is beyond exciting.”
Unable to read anymore, she slammed her laptop shut, the anger surging through her veins. She was angry at Danny for being the reason her dream company—Kelly McConnell’s vision, his baby—had gone under; she was angry at him for bringing that rage of her past onto this island paradise where she was supposed to be purging herself of it; she was angry at him for opening up her vulnerable heart, for fooling her into trusting him, for allowing him into her, literally and figuratively, and then trampling all over her. Sure, he couldn’t have known that she’d worked at GreenGrub, but honestly, how could he live with what he did to people’s companies, to people’s lives, regardless of whether he knew someone? With Jeremy, things had been predictable and low on passion, sure, but at least he didn’t have some sinister double life he was leading. She thought she’d judged the type of person Danny was, and she didn’t think he was capable of such callousness. She’d been wrong. Now it seemed like she didn’t know him at all.
After pacing the room for countless minutes, maybe an hour, she remembered the inversions tomorrow, the need to be well-rested, and crawled into bed for the second time. Sleep did not come until just before the first flush of dawn.
Chapter 11
Adele slunk into class the next morning. She’d slept three hours, maybe. Plus, she was dreading what lay ahead. Inversions scared her in a way she couldn’t quite justify or describe—it was a visceral fear, like the fear of flying in an airplane, that was perhaps illogical on most levels but came from a kernel of primal and indisputable truth that rendered all the logic in the world useless. Or, at least, not helpful when it came to calming a person down.
Well, she thought mordantly, at least it will distract me from how much I hate Danny!
There was an empty space between Meghan, the sexy Australian woman, and Carmen, a lovely mother of four from Ohio, and Adele laid down her mat between them.
“Hi!” Meghan said, giggling, because she giggled at everything.
“Good morning,” Adele said, smiling. Settling down on her mat, she began pulling her thick, chocolate brown hair into a ponytail.
“Excited?” Meghan asked.
Adele stared at her blankly. She couldn’t possibly think of what she should be excited about. All the strange and unsavory facts of her past two days popped up in her head—the surreal, sexual tutorial with Ajuni, her hot encounter with Danny, her discovery of Danny’s identity—and she couldn’t think of any way in which they were exciting, or any way Meghan could have any idea about them, for that matter.
“Excited?” Adele repeated.
“For inversions!” Meghan said, and clapped her hands together, her curly hair bouncing happily on her shoulders.
In her previous life, such unadulterated enthusiasm would have irritated Adele to no end, but she found that, coming from Meghan, it was somehow sweet. Her quickness to become annoyed had lessened. At least Danny hadn’t taken that away from her.
“Sort of,” Adele said, twisting her mouth into a reluctant smile. “Inversions aren’t really my thing, to be totally honest.”
“Oh you’ll be great,” Carmen chimed in. “You’ve got such good core strength.”
“Thanks,” Adele said, smiling back, though the
encouragement only made her more nervous. Now an expectation had been set. Expectations made failure all the more painful.
A hush began to wash over the room, starting from the center and radiating outward, the sign that Ajuni had decided to begin practice. He never began with a verbal cue, but rather sat in lotus pose in the center of the hut, palms resting on his knees, looking calmly around at the class until everyone had either felt his presence or been nudged by the person next to them and quieted down. Taking the cue, Adele settled herself into a cross-legged position on her mat and looked toward Ajuni, waiting, trying to prepare herself mentally for the three hours before her.
Ajuni’s sweeping gaze landed on Carmen to Adele’s left, and she could feel Carmen straighten her posture, push her shoulders back, and tilt her chin up under his eyes. A moment later, they landed on Adele. Any other day, she would have adjusted herself just as Carmen had, but today, perhaps due to exhaustion, perhaps due to their strange tutorial, she just remained sitting as she had been, and looked directly back at him. She didn’t think about making her face look prettier as she stared, or worry about trying to seem like she was thinking profound things, she just looked at him, as though he were a person like anybody else—which, of course, he was, wasn’t he?
He looked back at her, and she could swear she saw him tilt his head, almost imperceptibly, to the side, a gesture of bemused consideration. He held her gaze for a moment longer than he’d held the gaze of the others, but no more. The next instant, he was looking at Meghan, and a few moments later, he spoke.
“How are we born?” He said in a low and melodious voice, and let a silence linger for so long that a few people began to fidget. Was he waiting for an answer? Just as Carmen seemed poised to give him one, he spoke again. “We were born upside-down, headfirst out of our mothers’ womb, down toward her feet, looking up at her head—this is our origin, this is our truth, this is our first, unadulterated look at the world. And yet, the older we get, the ‘stronger’ our muscles and the ‘wiser’ our brains, the more difficult it becomes to achieve this position, to access this truth. Today, we shall make the attempt.”
In one movement, he stood to his full height. “Inversions,” he declared, his voice now booming. “Let us begin!”
Class was, as Adele had anticipated, incredibly difficult and frustrating. Some of the other women had trouble with inversions, sure, but she was by far the least adept in the class. She’d never been the worst at anything in her life, and this stung. Luckily, her physical exhaustion and the visceral terror of trying to attain the positions overrode most other thoughts, so her wounded pride quickly faded from her mind. It took every ounce of concentration to try to hold a headstand for three seconds without collapsing back against the wall, and when she took a moment to recover, her mind was solely focused on the task her body had just performed, and what it needed to adjust for the next attempt. Thinking about how she compared to Celeste or Priya or Karli barely had time to flash through her mind. Thinking about Danny and Organify? Forget about it.
The class was utterly frustrating and depleting, both physically and mentally, but she didn’t hate it as much as she’d anticipated. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so fully consumed by trying to learn a skill, so in touch with her body and truly focused on the task at hand, without a million thoughts racing through her brain. She worked hard, she sweated, she took pointers from Val and her peers, and she felt herself subtly improve each time. It was immensely satisfying.
Still, as an A+ student who had seen far too many Hollywood movies about underdogs persevering and hard work paying off, she had to admit that she’d half expected to be doing effortless handstands by class end. No such luck. Instead, as the three hours came to a close, she was in a precarious headstand with the wall as a safety net several inches away, tapping one foot against it for balance every few seconds.
“Okay!” Ajuni called from the center of the room, clapping his hands. Hearing his voice, she suddenly realized that she also hadn’t thought about him all class long. Right behind that thought was the realization that he hadn’t come over to “adjust” her at all during the class. Thinking back, she recalled him coming to assist and adjust both Meghan and Carmen. He had explicitly skipped over her. “I’ll see you all at eleven. Today is philosophy, so bring your philosophy readings, and your Patanjali, and of course something to write with. Now go eat!”
And then, just like that, the class she’d been dreading so much had ended.
“Not so scary, right?” Meghan said, giving Adele’s shoulder a squeeze as she headed toward the door.
“No, not so bad at all,” Adele replied, half lying, and then squatted to roll up her mat. She suddenly realized she was starving, and became positively gleeful at the prospect of fried plantains, fresh mangoes, and poached eggs waiting for her in the main area.
Just as she finished rolling her mat, she felt a hot finger touch her shoulder. It was a light touch, but sent shivers through her entire body. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Ajuni standing above her.
“I watched you today,” he said, his face serious.
“You did,” she said, a statement, not a question. She finished rolling her mat into a tight cylinder, and reached for her bag, trying to not get swept up into his strange energy. She wanted to eat.
“You are missing something,” he said.
“Mmmhmm,” she murmured, putting her towel and water bottle into her bag and zipping it shut. She glanced around the room and was displeased to see that everybody else had left.
“Missing something?” she said, and stood up to her full height, a move she immediately regretted. She’d thought that being closer to his level would give her more power, but it only gave him more surface area of her body over which to exert his…his…whatever it was.
“Yes,” he said, letting the “S” of the word linger on his tongue, as if he were pondering the whole concept of “yes.” He kept his hands by his sides, not touching her, and she was surprised to find herself disappointed. “Seeing your practice, I assumed that today would be your day. That you would transcend the abilities of the others. But that was not what I saw.”
“No,” Adele said, simultaneously turned on and annoyed. So much for blissful acceptance, she thought. “I’m not great at inversions.”
“Ah,” Ajuni said, holding up one finger and bringing it within inches of Adele’s lips. “That’s where you’re wrong. You are great at inversions. Your mind just doesn’t know it yet.”
“Pardon?” She could hear the snark creeping into her voice.
“I can see, when I watch you try to come into adho mukha vriksasana, exactly what happens,” he said, referring to Adele’s attempts at handstand pose. “You begin to come into it, your body knows what it needs to do, and then something comes and pulls that knowledge from your body, and you crumble.”
“Really?” Adele said, dropping her annoyance for a moment. Ajuni seemed to see something about her; maybe something that could help her understand herself and her life more deeply.
“Really,” he said, raising his eyebrows and smiling gently.
“What is it? What’s pulling the knowledge away?”
Ajuni shrugged, gave a half smile, and said, “What it always is. Fear.”
Adele paused for a moment to process this, and then all the annoyance flooded back into her. “Well, obviously it’s fear. That’s why most normal people don’t do handstands! They’re afraid they’ll fall on their heads and break their necks. I know that. I know inversions scare me.”
“Ah,” Ajuni said, holding the finger up again. “But the difference is, with most people, it would kill them. They don’t have the bodies to sustain it. They would fall down and rupture their cervical spine. In fact, I see people in this class who are far more fearless than they should be. But I see you practice, I see the awareness you have of your body,” at this, he reached out a hand and stroked the side of her cheek. “I see how you shoulder reacts,” here, h
e gave a gentle squeeze to her shoulder that sent shivers through her torso, “to you stretching out your fingertips.” He interlaced his hand with her left hand, intermingling their fingers for just a moment, then letting go. “I see the way your belly is aware of each movement you do, your navel moving in and out with your breath and supporting every transition,” he placed his hand on her stomach, then let it creep beneath the fabric of her tank top, up her smooth belly, so his finger could tap her belly button as he spoke. “I see how your legs respond to the placement of your feet, your quadriceps contracting exactly when they need to,” and his hand was suddenly gone from her belly, now on her thigh, tracing the outline of her contracted muscle. He locked eyes with her—they’d both been looking down, watching the journey of his hand—as his finger walked their way up her inner thigh. “Your body knows exactly what to do,” he said, his face no more than two inches from hers.
She breathed in deeply, trying to steady herself. He had a power, there was no denying that. She could feel a heat between her legs as his fingers moved closer. She had no idea what he intended to do when they reached the juncture, but she wasn’t sure she could leave it up to him, as much as she wanted to just not think in the moment.
Having sex with Danny was one thing, hooking up her actual yoga guru was another—this would legitimately compromise the mission she was on to achieve clarity and a fuller sense of self through yoga. She was aiming for something higher than getting down with the inhumanly sexy instructor.
As all of these thoughts flashed through her brain, Ajuni’s hand had gotten so close to her crotch that she could feel its heat, and imagined he could feel hers. She felt a sudden urge to grab his hand and pull up an inch. Suddenly aware of the fact that they’d been making eye contact the entire time, a surprised expression washed over her face. Ajuni smiled broadly and pulled back his hand, placing it casually in the pockets of his loose pants.
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