Paradise Lust (8 page)

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, he 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.

“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.