Paradise Lust (5 page)

Chapter 6

After that horrible afternoon with Kelly in the GreenGrub conference room, it hadn’t taken long for Adele to crumble. As someone who had always prided herself on her emotional resiliency, who rarely cried and always focused her attention on finding a solution rather than wallowing in pain, this crumbling surprised her. But in some ways, it made sense: she’d kept a stiff upper lip (and stiff power suits, stiff shoulders, stiff everything) during her years in corporate law. She’d done the things she was supposed to do, had paid off her law school debt and made her billable hours (90 hours a week? No problem!), and had been about as tightly wound as one of Val’s perfectly rolled yoga mats. GreenGrub had been the thing that had reignited the soul, the passion, the vulnerability that she’d pushed deep down sometime in high school.

So when GreenGrub collapsed, she was left not only without a job, but also lacking the emotional defenses she’d spent over a decade cultivating.

Within a few weeks the offices were shuttered, and Kelly had returned to Ireland to spend an indefinite amount of time with his extended family. Adele had quickly fallen into a daily ritual almost indulgent in its dreariness—she would wake up sometime before 7, her veins coursing with stress, then frustrated anger, then deep sadness as she lay awake in bed, eyes squinched shut, half trying to fall back asleep and finally giving up at around 10. Then she would get up, put on her yoga clothes, stare at her yoga mat, and then grab her laptop and bring it over to the couch, where she’d remain for most of the day. She mostly read business and tech articles about the startup scene, learning about more companies like Organify, as well as a whole slew of just plain dumb apps and mobile games making billions and billions of dollars, and would become increasingly depressed with each one. She thought about texting Jeremy but, even in her compromised emotional state, knew it was a bad idea. He’d thought she’d gone insane when she left corporate litigation and ended their relationship; this would only support his point. The only things that broke up her day were opening the door for the delivery guy and watching episodes of
Scandal
.

After four or five days, she began to tire of the articles (or, more truthfully, had quite literally run out of them), and started to peruse other corners of the Internet. While on the website of a nearby yoga studio, looking at the schedule for a class that she had no real intention of attending, she noticed a brightly colored box advertising “Newly Opened Spots in Bali Yoga Teacher Training Program! Limited Availability!” Behind the text was an image of a golden sandy beach leading to a cerulean sea.

She clicked.

It made no sense to go. It was a six-week course (
Well, it’s not like I have anything else to do
), it would cost thousands of dollars (
I do still have some leftover funds from my corporate days
), not to mention the fact that she wasn’t really even all that good at yoga (
I mean, I guess it’s time to develop some new skills
). It would be insane to do this.

Two weeks later, Adele was on a flight to Bali.

Danny had gone to bed almost immediately after Adele left. The fact that he drifted off to sleep the moment his head touched the pillow testified not to his peaceful inner state, but to a rare skill he’d developed. In truth, Adele’s abrupt departure had been jarring, if not painful. But Danny’s life had been filled with enough anxiety, upset, and disappointment that at a certain point his body had adapted to the emotional pain, and he’d learned to simply shut off his brain when he wanted to sleep. It was a unique ability, and one he was grateful for, because Lord knows he had enough things to keep him up all night if he wanted to indulge them. But tossing and turning in bed never solved anything. Plus, early to bed meant early to rise, and there looked to be some good swells in the early morning hours.

Indeed, the next morning Danny woke at the first hint of dawn’s light, the salty, rain-cleaned air already humid with the coming day’s heat. He pulled back the sheet and stood up, still naked from his encounter with Adele, and stretched hugely, taking in the new day. That was another helpful technique he’d learned—start each day with a big stretch and a bigger smile. The lingering scent of Adele’s cocoa butter lotion on his skin caused a brief pang in his chest, but he stretched deeper, smiled harder, and it passed.

He pulled on some swim trunks, rubbed sunscreen over his stomach and chest, and smeared balm over his sun-pouted lips. Grabbing the surfboard that stood by the door to his porch, which still stood open (another pang), he headed down to the beach. Diving into the waves, the thoughts melted away once more, as in sleep, and he surfed away the early morning, riding the waves in the blissful Zen of nothingness.

Hours later, as the heat of the day began to truly rise and the rest of the world was beginning to wake, he emerged from the waves. Drops of seawater dappled his tanned shoulders and chest as he splashed through the shin-height water, his board tucked under one arm.

He was starving. Glancing up at the sun, he began calculating what time it must be. Past nine, at least, which means the kitchen would be open. Bringing his eyes back down to earth and happily fantasizing about fried eggs and fresh mango, he saw her.

She was barely visible, perched inside a little hollow in the rocky cliff at the edge of the beach, and yet his eyes went straight to her. Leaning against one side of the tiny cave, she had what looked like a large book propped up on her bent legs, and seemed to be intently focused. One hand absently twirled a lock of hair as she read. She was wearing a bright white sundress that had tumbled down her thighs to the crease of her hip because of how she sat.

As Danny reached the water’s end and began walking on dry sand, Adele’s head suddenly snapped in his direction. Though she was still far enough away that he couldn’t make out the details of her face, he saw her body stiffen. She made a few awkward adjustments to her position and then turned her head back to her book.

Always one to try to smooth over awkwardness rather than avoid it—another little skill he’d picked up—Danny continued to stride toward her. He forced a big grin across his face and walked confidently. This was no big deal. This was a cute girl he’d slept with the night before, and that was it. He was just walking over to say hello, because why wouldn’t he? It was sex, nothing more, and they were both adults.

“Hey there,” he called out as he came within earshot of her cave. He waved with his free hand and was displeased to feel his stomach dropping out from under him as she turned her face toward him again. She had somehow gotten more beautiful overnight. He smiled wider and added some extra swagger to his step.

“Hi,” she said, her voice friendly but guarded. She straightened out her legs in front of her and smoothed her dress back down over her thighs. Danny suppressed the urge to smirk at her sudden modesty.

“I see you’ve upgraded from your cabin?” he said, gesturing toward the rock hollow in which she sat.

She looked around her little cave, and he was happy to see her lips turn up in a smile that seemed genuine. “Yup,” she said. “I said give me the Luxury Jagged Rock Suite or I’m walking.”

“A woman who knows what she wants. I like it,” he said, realizing after the fact the connotation that could have. They both looked down for a moment.

“How’s the surf?” She asked.

“Really good today. Perfect, actually. I don’t even know how long I was out there. What time is it?”

“Almost 9:30,” she said. “I need to head back to the studio soon for class. Just doing a little last-minute studying now actually. We’re giving little mini presentation things about the eight limbs of yoga.” Her hands moved wildly as she spoke, gesturing toward the barely visibly yoga hut, then her asana manual, and Danny noticed that her words came quickly and her voice betrayed an edgy tremor.

“You nervous?” He asked, belatedly aware once again of the connotations the words could carry.

“For the presentation? No. Not really. I’ve always been pretty good at school. Probably the main reason I went to law school, to be honest.”

“Interesting,” he said. A few silent moments passed. “So, do you think you’ll teach? When you get back to the States?”

“Not sure,” she said. “I never really envisioned myself as a yoga teacher. But, I mean, I never really envisioned myself living in a hut on a remote beach in Bali either.”

They both laughed, though it really wasn’t very funny, and were happy at the tension laughing seemed to dispel.

“What do
you
do, by the way?” Adele asked, her voice returning to its normal cadence, her posture relaxing. “I mean, you’ve gotta support this surfer bro life somehow, right?”             

She smiled at him, her face open and curious, but Danny felt his stomach tighten. Work. He didn’t want to talk about his work. Usually he tried to avoid having this question come up at all, as he still hadn’t found a good way to answer it without inviting more inquiry.

“I’m a consultant,” he said vaguely, trying to make his voice off-handed and casual, hoping to convey that it was a boring topic.

“Oh, interesting,” she said, and the knot in Danny’s stomach grew harder. “Here in Indonesia? Or back in the U.S.?”

“Kind of everywhere, mostly in the U.S., but I can do it all remotely, so I decided to live here. I have an apartment in south Bali—Seminyak—and come over to these parts now and then to get some better surf. Just need Wifi, y’know, to do work. Digital age and all,” he said, hearing himself ramble. Now it was his turn to speak quickly and avoid eye contact. It’s not that he had anything to hide, he just wasn’t very proud of the truth. He just wanted to talk about something else. “It’s pretty boring stuff, I mainly do it so I can buy shiny new toys,” he said, gesturing toward his surfboard, hoping to change the course of the conversation.

But Adele’s eyes didn’t follow his gesture, stayed trained on his instead. “Do you consult on anything in particular?”

“Nah,” he said. “No specialty.” He glanced up the beach, and was deeply relieved to see that people were migrating toward the yoga hut. “Hey, looks like people are heading to your class. Do you need to get up there?”

She peeked out of her cave and craned her neck to see. “Oh shit,” she said. “Yeah, I gotta run.”

She closed her asana manual and hopped out of the little cave and onto the sand, landing directly in front of Danny. She looked up at him and laid a hand lightly on his forearm. He felt the touch reverberate all through his body.

“I’ll see you later,” she said, her voice lower and softer than before.

“Yeah,” Danny said dumbly, unable to think for a moment.

Her hand dropped, and then she was gone jogging lightly down the beach away from him. He was happy to feel all real thought melt away at the sight of her gorgeous ass lightly bouncing with each stride.

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 straight 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.”