Paradise Lust (11 page)

To Adele’s horror, she felt Danny shift beside her, and his voice reverberate through the cavernous silence that Ajuni had so carefully constructed.

“A plank,” Danny said, his voice devoid of any sort of clever inflection or veiled arrogance. Involuntarily glancing his way, Adele saw his frank and cheerful face, and felt a surge of protectiveness for him. “A plank, right? Straight line, shoulders to feet. Two points.”

Ajuni spun on his heels to face Danny, his eyes austere but his lips curling up into a smile that was either friendly or threatening, depending on how she looked at it.

“A plank,” Ajuni said, his eyes locked on Danny, “is exactly the pose I was speaking of.” He shot a quick glance to Adele, a glance that made her heart rate double, and then returned his gaze to Danny. “Such a simple pose, that so many of us—yogis or not—assume we have it mastered. But so few do. A line!” He spun on his heels again, facing the room, once again embracing his guru status, “How simple, right?” Ajuni had made his way to Meghan, and as he said the final word, he cupped her chin in his hand, bringing his face within inches of hers.

“But it’s shocking to realize how few of us execute the pose correctly,” he continued. “And so it takes attention from an outside observer to truly master this most fundamental of poses.”

Ajuni strode once again toward the front of the room, coming to stand directly to the left of Adele’s mat. “So now greet the outside observer you have selected,” he continued.

Unable to put it off any longer, Adele let her eyes lift up to meet Danny’s.
Outside observer
. She turned the phrase over in her mind. How strange to think of him, he who had been inside her, as an outsider. But wasn’t he?

Before she could pursue the thought further, Ajuni was issuing instructions, and pairs around the room were beginning the exercise.

“I think I should go,” Danny said.

The words took Adele off guard. “Go…?”

“Go first,” he clarified, a slight smile curling his lips. “I figure your plank form will put mine to shame, so I should go before the expectation is set.”

Adele surprised herself by laughing, and relished the tension-breaking sensation through her body.

The next moment, Danny was on his hands and the balls of his feet, in perfect push-up plank position. One look at his incredible surfer’s body should have told her that his plank position would be perfect.

“Horrible,” she said quietly, so that only he could hear. The wave of laughter had released her, and she wanted to keep riding on that feeling. “Worst plank I’ve ever seen,” she said, and her voice broke into giggles. Danny began laughing too, and his form wobbled a bit as his stomach contracted with the laughter. Seeing the rippling of his muscles in response to her stupid joke made Adele’s stomach clench in a different way, and suddenly humor was the last thing from her mind.

“Switch!” Ajuni’s voice resounded throughout the room, and Adele realized that she’d momentarily forgotten his presence.

Adele lowered herself onto the mat just as Danny pushed himself up, not wanting to break the light mood they’d set by making eye contact again. Once she was settled in what she thought was a pretty impeccable plank, Ajuni’s voice rung through the room again, instructing the observing partner to work on “adjustments” to the other’s plank form.

He told them to focus on the hips, to locate the hip bones and physically move them into alignment if they were out. And then, Danny was crouching beside her, his tanned, shirtless body squatting at eye level just in her peripheral vision.

“Your form is pretty great, so I’m not sure there’s much to—”

“Practice these adjustments
even if you don’t think your partner needs it
,” Ajuni’s voice boomed through the room, as if he’d been eavesdropping on Danny’s words. And he very well could have been, as the next moment, he, too, was crouching beside Adele, on the other side of her. She kept her eyes on the mat straight below her, trying to not let them dart to the left or right, to these two tanned, half-naked, and confusing men.

“Why aren’t you adjusting her,” Ajuni said, and it was clear that it was a command, not a question.

“I didn’t see much to adjust,” Danny said, a touch of defiance in his voice. There was a lengthy silence, which Adele could only assume was filled with some sort of staring contest, and then Danny was moving down her body, toward her hip bones. Ajuni, too, adjusted himself, coming to sit cross-legged directly in front of her, making it even more difficult not to look at him.

Danny’s fingertips touched her left hip bone, and her entire body became rigid.
That touch
. She breathed deeply, trying not to let her reaction show.

“Straddle her,” Ajuni said, and the words were so jarring that Adele couldn’t help but jerk her head up to look at him. He didn’t really say that, right? When she looked up, she saw that Ajuni was already looking at her. His lips turned up into that inscrutable smile, and he spoke again. “She’s small enough. Straddle her with your legs so that you can touch both hips at once, symmetrically.” He didn’t break eye contact with Adele as he spoke, and she was so perplexed by the situation that she continued to return his gaze.

And then she could feel the heat of Danny’s thighs inches away from her hips as he followed Ajuni’s instructions and positioned himself over her in a kneeling straddle. Indeed, she was small enough that this was possible, but it was a tight fit, and she knew that if she moved an inch or so in either direction, her hips or ass would graze his inner thigh. At the thought, she felt her arms waver, and looked down.

“Now grab her hips,” Ajuni said, and there seemed to be something strangely sinister in his voice, though Adele couldn’t be sure.

Danny grabbed her hips. Her heart raced.

“Move them where you want them.”

Danny’s fingertips lightly drew her hips upward by half an inch or so. She wanted to continue raising them all the way up, up to meet the juncture of his legs…

“Too far,” Ajuni said. “Down.”

Danny lowered her hips down almost imperceptibly, and Ajuni quickly corrected him. “No, do not use her hips to draw her down, only up.” And then she felt four hands on her, Ajuni’s hands guiding Danny’s from the sides of her hips up over the rounded slope of her ass, so that the two masculine sets of hands both curved around her—one Danny hand and one Ajuni hand on each side. This was surreal. Then Ajuni’s hands were gone, and Danny was lightly pressing Adele downward into proper alignment, when Ajuni spoke again.

“Check her core, is it engaged?”

Silence once more.

Ajuni gave a sigh of weary annoyance and moved to Adele’s side.

“Like this,” she heard him say, and suddenly one of his hands was on her stomach, palm pressed lightly onto the flesh just above her navel. A light sweat broke out on her forehead. And then Danny’s hand, too, was on her belly, palm up, just over her navel. More beads of sweat popped up on her upper lip, her forearms, and she felt a different kind of moisture suddenly between her legs.

And then, Ajuni’s hand was gone and his voice was ringing through the classroom again instructing both partners to stand up. Adele collapsed down onto her knees, only in that moment realizing how exhausted her muscles were from holding plank for so long. She spun around to face Danny, who was still kneeling on the mat, and when their eyes met, they both exploded into giggles—which they immediately swallowed after Ajuni shot them a sharp glance.

Still, huge disobedient smirks kept creeping onto one or another’s face and provoking small outbursts as Ajuni gave his end-of-class monologue. She wasn’t quite sure she could identify
why
they were laughing, except that it felt not too dissimilar to the kind of laughter that infects you after a scary roller coaster ride, or during a horror movie, or after a good long cry. A cathartic laughter. Healing even.

At that thought, Adele felt a chill set upon the warm fuzzy playful feeling inside her.
Healing.
The word reminded her that there was much to heal, that things were not at all okay with Danny, that one wild—and okay, she’d admit it, super hot—shared experience did not make everything okay. She made herself picture Kelly at his sad GreenGrub desk to strengthen her resolve.

Ajuni had finished speaking, and the yogis were rolling up their mats and streaming out the door. Adele could feel Danny looking at her, smiling expectantly, could almost hear him about to start speaking, but she didn’t look up to check. She hurried toward the door with her hastily rolled mat before he could utter a word. She didn’t look back once on the walk to her cabin.

Chapter 16

Danny lingered at the restaurant for a long time after he’d finished his lunch. Absently pushing around the last remains of veggies and peanut sauce from his
gado-gado
, he stared out at the sea. The sun traveled through the sky, the day moving from early afternoon to mid afternoon, and finally to the warmer glow signaling the oncoming evening, and no clarity came with the time’s passage.

What had happened? The question turned in his mind, and not only did he remain answerless, the question itself seemed to have procreated, spawning myriad offshoots: what the hell had been going on with Ajuni in class today? Why had Adele suddenly turned cold at the very end, right after she’d seemed to be warming up? What had she thought of his letter? And, maybe above all, why did he feel so stricken, so existentially lost, over her rejection?

In the distance, two unidentifiable bodies emerged from the waves, tucking their boards under their arms and wading up the beach. Seeing this, Danny suddenly realized that he hadn’t gone surfing today, missing his first day in months. This observation compounded his anchorless melancholy and seemed to underscore the need to answer that last question.

Well maybe let’s start with an easier question, he thought to himself. What was the deal with Ajuni’s strange instructions in class today? There had undoubtedly been something strange going on there, some strange sexual energy mixed with a clear need to flex his power muscle. But where was the sexual energy directed? Did he want Adele? Or want to see Danny with Adele? Or just get off on being able to control people in such sexually charged ways? Or, did he want
Danny
? Was this his first step toward orchestrating a threesome?

Danny shook his head to get the confusion of thoughts out. No, he was overly complicating it. When he was in class, with Ajuni instructing him on how to touch Adele, he’d felt it clearly: Ajuni wanted
her
, and he seemed to get off on being in control of how another man touched her. Letting things get sexual, but not too sexual.

Thinking of it that way, Danny felt anger fire up in his belly. Ajuni had been thinking of Adele as though she were an object, a prize to be won—and
his
prize, at that.
Well, he might be her instructor, and he might be some wise guru who can levitate or whatever, but I’ve slept with her, kissed her, brushed her hair from her face, laughed with her…

An involuntary groan escaped Danny’s mouth, and he let his forehead thump down into his hands.

“Hey mate,” a friendly voice called out from somewhere behind him. “Doin alright over there?”

Danny lifted up his head and turned to see J.T., the beefy Australian surfer, sitting at the bar. He was sipping a comically elaborate drink, complete with a tiny umbrella and a skewer of pineapples and cherries.

“Oh hey J.T.,” Danny said, turning in his chair to face the bar. “Yeah, I’m alright.”

“Not from the looks of it, you aren’t.”

“Astute observation,” Danny laughed.

“Come have a drink with me, mate.”

“Nah, I’m fine. Thanks, though.”

“No, come have a drink with me. Not for your sake, for mine,” J.T. said, and the big grin across his sunburnt face was infectious. “Not gonna sit here getting bloody knackered on my own.”
              Danny laughed, stood from the table that he’d apparently been sitting at for close to four hours, and joined J.T. at the bar.

“Care to unload your mind?” J.T. asked, silently gesturing to the bartender to bring another of his drink of choice for Danny. Before Danny could protest that he’d rather just have a beer, the bartender was off to make the fruity concoction.

“To be honest,” Danny said. “Not really. I don’t even know if I could if I wanted to. Everything is just a…just a…”

“Bloody mess?” J.T. offered helpfully.

“Yeah,” Danny laughed. “That pretty much describes it.

“Well,” J.T. said, and slid Danny’s drink over to him as the bartender placed it down. “Cheers to that.”

They raised their glasses, and Danny took a sip of the drink, which seemed to be a whole lot of rum mixed with pure sugar and a hint of pineapple juice. He grimaced at the taste, and J.T. laughed.

“Eh,” he said. “You’ll like it in a minute.”

Danny took another sip, then shook his head, laughing. “No,” he said, “No, I really don’t think I will.”

An hour later, as Danny sipped down the last bits of his second tropical cocktail, he had to admit that the taste had grown on him.

“You know what,” he said, turning his stool to look more directly at J.T.. “Let me ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

“You’ve been around here for a while, right?”

“I have.”

“You’ve seen a bunch of these yoga teacher trainings come through?”

“Yup.”

“A bunch with this guy, Ajuni?”

“I have.”

“So,” Danny said, emboldened by the rum. “What is his
deal
? Like, there’s something weird going on, right? Am I right?”

J.T. laughed deeply from his belly, laughed so hard he had to put his drink down on the counter for a moment. When his laughter quieted down, he spoke.

“Yeah mate,” he said. “You’re a bloody Einstein. Ajuni is an odd duck.”

Danny mock-punched J.T.. “Okay, yeah, but what is going on with him? It’s just…what’s his agenda?”

“You really don’t know?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Oh come on,” J.T. said, rolling his eyes. “You’re making this too complicated.
Girls
. That’s his agenda. Well, I guess it is a little more complicated: girls and power. Not so hard to figure out.”

Danny turned this over in his head, and suddenly felt ridiculous at how much thought he’d been giving the whole thing. It was all much simpler than he’d thought.

“Yeah,” he said, laughing at himself. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

They both sipped their drinks and chuckled, though it was a strangely mirthless laughter. After a beat of silence, J.T. spoke again.

“He likes to put girls under his spell,” he said, looking down into his glass. “Make them think that he’s this savior, or guru, something better than all the rest of us wankers, and so when he decides to
let them
have sex with him, they feel like it’s some special bloody gift. And then he uses that power however he wants.”

“You’ve seen this happen a lot?”

“Enough,” J.T. said, nodding. They sat in silence for a moment, then he continued. “You know Val?”

“Yeah. I actually surfed with her yesterday. Cool girl.”

“Very cool girl. Used to be much cooler, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” J.T. said, and drained the last bit of drink in his glass, signaling to the bartender for two more. He looked at Danny and continued, “So she’s been on three or four of these, she gets to come for free because she’s Ajuni’s assistant or ingénue or whatever. And a year or so back, she and I, we…” J.T. struggled for words, making vague motions with his hands instead.

“You guys hooked up?” Danny guessed.

“Well yes,” J.T. said, blushing. “But more than that, too. We really liked each other. Or I really liked her, and it seemed like she liked me. But then all of a sudden she has no free time. Ajuni is having her stay late every day for what seem like bullcrap reasons, and when I say that she defends him and tells me how I don’t understand because I don’t have the
clarity
or
mindfulness
or whatever other catchphrase of the moment. And eventually she admits to me that she’s slept with him. But she says that’s not happening anymore, and you know what, I believed her, but at that point it didn’t even matter.” J.T. paused for a moment to lift his new drink to his lips, then abruptly put it down before taking a sip and continued. “It wasn’t so much about the sex, y’know mate? It was the idea that some other person had this strange…power over her, like he was just always
there
, even when it was just the two of us. Does that make sense?”

“Sure,” Danny said. After what he’d seen at class today, he could definitely imagine how a dynamic like that could come to exist.

“So eventually I just told her I was done,” he said. “It was hard, because I still thought—still think—that she’s great. But it was just too fucked up. He likes to manipulate women, and she fell under it. I think she’s still under it. I don’t think there’s anything physical between them anymore—I know he’s been with lots of other girls since her—but the mental manipulation is still there. Bloody shame.”

“Bloody shame,” Danny echoed distractedly, wondering if Adele was one of those other girls. The image of her laughing face, open and sweat-speckled and free of makeup, popped into his mind. His stomach clenched at the thought of Ajuni manipulating that.

“But truly, mate, can’t be bothered,” J.T. said, raising his near empty glass and gesturing for Danny to do the same. Danny obliged, and when J.T. drained the remainder of his glass, Danny followed suit.

Why the hell not
, he thought.

As J.T. gestured to the bartender for another round, Danny opened his mouth to protest, but J.T. shushed him with flapping hands before he could get out a word.

“Quiet, mate. I can tell you’re in bad way. The only thing to do is get knackered,” J.T. said. Seeing that Danny was unconvinced, he continued, “C’mon. It’s my shout.”

“Your what?”

“Shout! My shout! I’ve got the tab, mate.”

“Speak English,” Danny said, laughing now, and accepted his new drink from the bartender with a smile. J.T. was right—if Danny didn’t get “knackered” tonight, he’d spend the next eight hours miserably picturing Adele with Ajuni.

“Ah, shut it,” J.T. said, and took a sip of his drink.

“Screw mindfulness,” Danny said, raising his glass again.

“Bloody oath,” J.T. said, touching his glass to Danny’s and nodding in assent.

“Bloody oath,” Danny repeated, and drained half his drink in one long sip.

When Adele got back to her cabin after class, she didn’t stop to unpack her yoga bag as she always did, didn’t drink her customary glass of coconut juice on the porch, didn’t even splash her face with water to wash away the sweat. Instead, she went straight into her bedroom, shut and locked the door and closed the blinds, and fell onto her bed.

The confused and frantic energy of the asana session—Danny’s touch, Ajuni’s touch, the words, the heat, the tingling, the sensation—coursed through her in overpowering and chaotic waves. She needed a release. With trembling hands she tugged off her tiny shorts, bringing her G-string with them.

Sliding her fingers inside herself, she felt immediate delivery. She worked her fingers, pressing down with the weight of her wrist on her front as she nimbly caressed the inside. Moaning softly, she moved around her clit in slow circles, gradually increasing the pressure until she thrust up against her own touch in a steady rhythm. A tingling coursed through her toes; a warmth glowed in her abdomen; and as she felt herself getting close, her mind grasped for something to focus on, something to project her climax toward.
Attachment
, she thought hazily,
why this need for an object?

The thought shot out of her mind as soon as it appeared, and was replaced with the image of Danny’s face. She was imagining him hovering over her, that her hand was his, and before she could even take in the details of his hallucinatory face, she was bucking against her hand, emitting one last, long moan that faded to silence as she fell back on her sheets.

As soon as the last blissful pulses of her orgasm faded, a curtain of sadness descended upon her. Sadness mixed with confusion. Did it mean anything that she’d pictured Danny? Besides the fact that he was an attractive guy, that is. Ajuni was attractive, too. But only the image of Danny made her heart thunder, her stomach flutter, her skin tingle.

But he was gone. That was over. She’d made her choice.

She felt one hot tear spring from her eye and slowly roll down her cheek. When had she become so emotional? This wasn’t like her.

Despite her intellectual protest, the tears came, hot and fast, in a long stream, and she eventually gave in. It was too sad to fight. She wanted Danny to be holding her so badly, it was the only thing that felt clear anymore. And yet the wrong he’d committed was too egregious, too huge, to sweep under the rug.

Wasn’t it?