“So you see,” he said. “Your body is not only wiser than your brain, it is wiser than the body of most other bodies. Your fear is not of the handstand—you know that you can do the handstand, you know inside—your fear is of something else. That, I can help you identify, but I cannot help you resolve.”
And with that, he turned and walked toward his private room at the back of the studio. “Go eat something,” he said, not turning. “You look hungry.”
Adele stood, breathing heavily, and watched him go. She felt herself throbbing between her legs, hot and frustrated, and irritated all over again. To make matters worse, she didn’t even feel hungry anymore.
Chapter 12
The rest of Adele’s day went by in a blur, as days are wont to do when one is in a state of sleep deprivation. After the adrenaline of the morning’s asana session, mental and physical exhaustion set in, and it was all she could do to not fall asleep during the afternoon lectures (of course, the humid breezes through the hot yoga studio, and the fact that she sat on a yoga mat propped up by yoga pillows didn’t help her alertness).
As soon as it reached an hour that you could arguably call dinnertime—or at least in the Earlybird Special window—she headed to the main area to grab some food. She wanted to eat something, and then immediately pass out. She couldn’t even begin to process anything emotionally while she was so sleepy.
A grassy field connected her cabin, set back against the beginning of the sloping rise of foothills, to the row of cabins closer to the beach. Crossing the path through this field now, she saw a figure walking toward her, silhouetted against the sun on its downward path to the western horizon. The figure quickened its pace, breaking into a light jog, and she soon saw that it was Danny. Of course.
His face bore a broad, goofy grin, and as he reached her, running at a sprint, he swooped down and scooped her up in his arms, planting a big kiss on her cheek. He pulled his face back, said, “Hi!”, and then promptly kissed the other cheek.
She tried to twist her face into something that resembled a simple smile, but was sure that it looked more like she was in gastric distress. She’d never been very good at masking her emotions.
“Hi!,” she said, overcompensating with a cartoonishly cheery voice.
He cocked an eyebrow and gave her an amused, slightly curious look. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, scrambling a bit in his arms, trying to get down. He immediately yielded, lowering her gently to the grass. She took a few steps back—a safe distance, she thought, immediately followed by the thought, safe from what?—and tried again with the smile. “Yeah, all’s good. Just heading to get some dinner. I’m pretty tired, so I wanted to eat early and turn in early. Not good to be overtired, with all the, you know, all the physical, all the difficult yoga…stuff.”
She grimaced internally at how dumb her words sounded. It was laughable. But then, she’d always viewed it as a merit that she wasn’t a good liar.
As if to underline her thought, Danny laughed gently. “Okay,” he said, and took a step toward her, reaching out to her arm. She clenched her muscles at his touch, and he let his hand drop. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yup,” she said, trying the cheerful thing again. “All good!”
“Well, I was actually just walking to your cabin to say hi, but, if you don’t mind the company,” he lifted his arm again, this time squeezing her shoulder and then sliding his arm around her, paying no mind to her stiffening body. “I’d love to grab dinner together. A little early, but I’m pretty tired, too.”
She could see him looking at her out of the corner of her eye, and knew that he wanted to make mischievous, eye contact, could picture the smoldering, playful look he was giving her, and so she kept her gaze straight ahead. She kept picturing Kelly McConnell, sitting before her, in his still mostly bare office, next to the plant he’d bought for his desk, back when he’d been so hopeful about their future; she pictured him in that setting, with a face of utter defeat, of a sadness and resignation so thorough that she didn’t think he’d ever recover. She had to stifle an audible sound of disgust as she replayed this scene in her head. She didn’t want to talk about this now, not while she was exhausted and reeling from an emotionally and physically taxing day. If she could just pretend everything was okay for the next hour, she could get some rest and address this all tomorrow with a clear mind.
“Okay,” she said quietly, and began walking again. She walked quickly, angrily, and Danny had to jog a few steps to catch up.
He laughed again, an uncertain laugh this time. “You sure sound excited,” he said.
“Sorry, just tired.”
“Yeah, you said that.”
“Still true.”
“Okay,” he said, and stopped, reaching out to grab her again, this time by both shoulders, and more firmly than before. He planted himself directly in front of her and looked her straight in the eyes. “Something is up. What happened between last night and now?”
She stared back at him. She did not want to have this conversation now, not before she’d had a chance to wrap her mind around her discovery at all, before she’d been able to think about what it meant, before she’d even been able to get a good night’s sleep. All she could think to do was shrug weakly.
“Bullshit,” he said, his voice taking on a tone of indignation that she hadn’t heard before. Hearing anger in his voice made the bile in her stomach rise. How dare he be angry with her? He had no idea what anger or betrayal or hurt was. “Something is up, and you know what it is, and you’re not telling me.”
She couldn’t stop the rage from boiling over any longer. She wrenched both of his hands off of her shoulders and cast them to the side.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice taking on a meanness she’d never heard in herself before. “Something is up. Why didn’t you think it was important to tell me that you make a living by ruining people’s lives? Literally? Literally ruining people’s lives. That you live here in some goddamn island paradise, without a goddamn care in the world, and that you can somehow sleep at night with no guilt about the fact that not only are you so creatively bankrupt that all you can do is steal other people’s ideas, you also have to destroy people’s dreams in the process. Destroy people in the process. Nice job. Really nice. You’re a ‘consultant,’ huh? Your job is ‘boring’? Nice story. Try telling that to the people I used to work with at GreenGrub, the unemployed people who saw their life’s work taken away, that you found it boring crushing their dreams and taking away their livelihood. I bet they’d love that. I know I do. But you’ll never tell them, because you hide out here on your beach. You coward. Don’t touch me!”
He’d reached out a hand to touch her wildly gesturing arms, and she hit it away, giving him a look of contempt that she’d never felt her face make before. She shuddered, letting out the audible sound of disgust she’d earlier suppressed. She could only bear to look at his face for a moment, and in that moment saw that all color had drained from it, that his shoulders had slumped down, that he looked like a different person—small, terrified, panicked.
“You know what, I have some food in my cabin. You have a nice fucking dinner.”
Adele turned on her heel and began walking back to her cabin, then broke into a jog, then a run. Danny didn’t try to stop her.
Chapter 13
Perhaps predictably, Adele did not sleep well that night, either. Her outburst at Danny had sent adrenaline shooting through her veins, the lingering drops of rage still pulsating just below her skin. She kept reliving the moment in her head, deriving one part satisfaction and one part misery. Danny’s face—so stricken, so shocked, scared even, like a little boy caught stealing candy from a shop and knows the consequences ahead—conjuring that face in her mind now, her stomach knotted uncomfortably, and she felt a pang of regret. But then she remembered Propel, and Organify, and GreenGrub, and Kelly, and outrage swooped in to take the place of sympathy. It was a tango of the two emotions, plus
a few others, all night long.
By the time she stumbled dazedly into class the next morning, she was so tired and emotionally exhausted that she felt close to nothing. Her head was empty. Her skin felt dull, her body slow and heavy. She walked to the corner of the room where students could store their mats and grabbed hers. Unrolling it in the back of the room (If there was ever a back-of-the-class day, today is it, she thought), a white slip fluttered out and skittered across the floor, landing a few feet away. She leaned to pick it up, and saw that it was a carefully folded sheet of paper, the words “To Adele” written neatly on the front.
She closed her eyes briefly, absorbing this, wishing she had greater emotional bandwidth at that moment. Fortunately, she opened her eyes to see Ajuni in his characteristic lotus position in the center of the room, the signal that class was starting, so she could put off dealing with this until later. She tucked the paper underneath her mat, and then gingerly folded herself into her own lotus position. As she tried as best she could to clear her mind, class began.
Three hours later—quite a long three hours, Adele felt—when class ended, Adele had grown unbearably impatient to read the note. Her feelings had shifted from exhausted apathy to vague curiosity to an overpowering need to know right this second what the note said. She hastily rolled up her mat, all but threw it into the corner, grabbed her bag and the paper, and trotted out of the studio.
Part of her felt that she should go somewhere special, or at least private, to read the note, but she didn’t have time for that. Plopping down on the grass just twenty yards or so from the studio, she hastily unfolded the note and began reading.
Dear Adele,
Yesterday’s confrontation was unexpected and really horrible. I’ve been up all night turning it over in my head, trying to think of some other way it could have gone, trying to figure out what I can possibly do to take things back to how they were just two days ago, and trying to understand why I feel such all-consuming misery that I may have lost a woman I barely know (we do barely know each other, right?).
Twelve hours later and I don’t have any answers.
I’m sorry that I wasn’t up front with you about my job. I kept it to myself not out of any guilt about Propel or a willful desire to deceive, but for the simple reason that I’m not super proud of my work. I happen to be really good at spotting trends and picking out business ideas that will be profitable, and this job allows me to live in Bali and lead the life that nourishes my soul. My work doesn’t nourish my soul, but I’m not doing anything illegal or even objectively immoral. The truth is, we have the resources to take great ideas and make them big, something a lot of small companies don’t have. Most of the companies we model ourselves after would have run themselves into the ground anyway, regardless of Propel. And half the time, we just happen to come up with the same idea as a company that already exists. It’s not as though we’re pinpointing businesses to destroy them. I’ve looked into all the legal implications of this—
Here Adele had to put the note down and clench her fists to stop herself from tearing it to shreds. Yes, she’d looked through all the legal implications as well, and she knew that sure, technically, this was all kosher. But that doesn’t make it right, she wanted to scream.
—and I’m confident that Propel is not doing anything that’s beyond the pale.
All that said, I’m so sorry that one of Propel’s ventures was the cause of your company folding. It truly hurts me to hear the stories of people who have suffered as a result of our success. And the fact that it happened to you—I know that other people’s suffering is equally valid, but still—the fact that it happened to you is making me seriously question, well, everything about my professional life. I wish I could take back your pain, and the pain of all your coworkers. I’m sorry for any part I played in that.
But this is my life. I had a whole other life once. I was married and I worked at an office. One broken heart and crushed soul later, and here I am. I don’t think I could ever go back to the office life, and I don’t know of another job that would allow me to continue living this way. And, like I said, Propel isn’t the most upstanding company in the world, but it’s really not doing anything actually wrong.
Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to make up for the pain I might have caused you. You’ve quickly become important to me—surprisingly important—and I’d like to keep that, if it’s possible. I understand if it’s not.
Danny
She slowly refolded the note and looked out toward the beach. That was not the note she’d been expecting. Not in the least. She’d opened the note imagining a mea culpa followed by profuse apologies and an outpouring of emotion and a promise to shut down Propel the next day. Or, at least the first two parts. Instead she’d found a reluctant “I’m sorry but…” letter, a letter where he seemed more concerned with proving a technical point than addressing the larger moral issue or even the personal pain he’d caused her. Sure, he was sorry that she was hurting, but he didn’t seem too sorry about what he’d done. Although she hadn’t thought it possible, she felt herself becoming even angrier than she’d been before reading the note.
Again, she had to push down the impulse to shred the note. She knew herself, knew that she’d want to reread it later. Plus, if she did tear it up, she’d like to do it with Danny watching. Let him know just what she thought of his “justifications.”
“Guy’s got nerve,” she muttered to herself, then tucked the note inside her asana manual and put the manual into her bag.
Looking up, she almost gasped out loud. Where there had been nobody just a moment before, Ajuni now stood, not ten feet from her. Locking eyes with her, he raised one eyebrow in an inquiring, almost teasing, look.
“Interesting reading?” he asked.
“Nope,” she said, her voice strong and definitive, powered by the anger in her blood. “Nothing worth any mention.”
“I thought about your struggles yesterday,” he said, and her mind filled with confusion. What was he talking about? Did he know about her and Danny’s fight? How could he? “The answer can be found in where your gaze goes. You must follow your eyes to discern the source of the problem.”
At once, the foggy confusion in her head cleared. He was talking about inversions. She’d somehow completely forgotten that entire class, the class she’d been worrying about for a week. It seemed like years ago now.
“My eyes?” She said.
“You need to look where you want to go,” he said.
There he was with the puzzle talk again.
“I’m not sure I know exactly what you mean.”
“I’m sure you do. But I will show you,” he said, gesturing toward the studio.
She knew that she shouldn’t go back to the studio with him. For one thing, she didn’t want to miss breakfast—she’d just barely made it after her last strange after-class session with Ajuni. And for another, she was pretty certain that he wanted to show her more than just eye technique for headstands. Yet, she wanted to follow him. It seemed like exactly the thing to do right now, exactly what her body needed to release the consuming anger it held.
He towered over her, her eyes right in line with his pelvis, and she let her eyes dance over the bulge, knowing that he saw them pause for a millisecond. She continued her gaze up and met his eyes.
“Okay,” she said, and came to stand, her eyes now reaching his chest. The hugeness of his presence had always seemed somehow detached from a physical body, she realized, and only now did she appreciate how truly tall he was. She’d guessed six foot three before, but wouldn’t be surprised if he measured an inch or two over that. She thought of Danny’s once-impressive six-foot stature, and scoffed in her mind. Every quality associated with him had taken on a repulsive tinge.
Ajuni’s fingers grazed her arm, and she was surprised at the softness of his touch. The severity of everything else about him made the gentle sensation stand out in stark contrast. But then his fingers were gone, and he
was walking toward the open studio. She followed him, feeling almost as though she were sleepwalking. The jumble of emotions inside her was difficult to identify, let alone process.
As soon as she crossed the threshold of the studio, Ajuni spun around and grabbed her, clutching her hips with both hands. She took in a sharp breath and looked up at him, her chest moving up and down visibly. This touch was decidedly not gentle, but not aggressive, either. Just…decisive, if a touch could feel decisive. Slowly, his hands began to move over her skin, back behind her to smooth over the curved mounds of her shorts. Clutching her from the rounded bottom of her ass, he pulled her toward him, her pelvis now pressed against his. She moaned softly at the sensation of his rock hard erection against her, and let her eyes lose contact with his, rolling up toward the ceiling.
“Look where you want to go,” she heard Ajuni’s voice say, and she wasn’t sure if he had actually spoken or if her mind was merely replaying his earlier words. Seemingly unrelated thoughts and images swirled through her brain, each flashing for a millisecond before melting into the next: handstands, fear, flying, heat, Ajuni’s biceps, the grass outside, sun salutations, waves crashing, Danny’s back, Kelly’s face, coconuts, rain, sweat, strong hands.
She surrendered, letting the flurry of thoughts flow past her, observing them passively, and then realized she was doing the same with her body. It moved as if without her conscious will. She’d tilted her head back, and now looked directly at Ajuni.
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