Eventually she gets us to stand. Oh. The room is definitely warm now. When I glance around, most people are wearing a lot less than I am. Women in sports bras and tight shorts. The men around me are in loose cut out tanks. One guy even has his shirt off. He has to be at least sixty, and his skin is flushed pink, but he arches back with a control that says he does this often.
In my T-shirt and old basketball shorts, I feel like a mummy, and as we work through the positions, I realize my mistake. Sweat is flowing down my face and back. Everyone around me has brought what must be a gallon of water, and all I’ve got is the Captain America water bottle we bought for Jacob’s lunches that we had to stop using because it leaked if you didn’t keep it standing all the time.
“Now wheel around and look over your other shoulder,” the instructor says. It takes me a minute to figure out what she means, but after I watch the people around me, I adjust the placement of my arms and legs before finally turning my head so my chin is in line with my back shoulder.
My sweat freezes when my eyes meet Brady’s.
3
Brady
Holy fuck. It’s Nash. Nash is in my yoga class.
Hot yoga is my Saturday morning retreat. Technically, we’re on call 24/7. No one told me when I started my own business that I’d basically be sleeping with my cell phone. But Saturday mornings are off-limits. Ramona gets to carry the nuclear football phone—the after-hours phone that never leaves our side—on Saturdays while I run errands and maybe have lunch with my dad, then I get it back for the rest of the week.
I started hot yoga about a year ago, when the anxiety dreams—the ones where clients never pay their bills, or demand laptops that don’t exist, or refuse to admit that I’ve already delivered the same phone twice—became so chronic I was only getting a couple hours of sleep a night. These Saturday morning sessions are a chance to wipe the slate clean and let my body and brain go blank. If I squeeze in a little meditation a few other times a week, I can get four or five hours of sleep most nights, instead of two or three.
Hot yoga is a place for me to forget about work, and now I’m staring down the client I most want to avoid.
I noticed him, of course. It’s the dead of summer, so only the really regular people are showing up for classes, while everyone else is at the cottage or chasing their kids around. The new guy on the mat in front of me stood out, particularly because he was dressed for a game of pickup basketball and only brought a tiny Captain America bottle for water. Still, he’s fit, with nice calves and a great ass. The hair on the back of his head is dark brown, with flecks of silver in it.
I’ve been into older guys lately. I mean, in theory I’ve been into older guys. My schedule hasn’t really set itself up for any kind of love life. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m working so much, while most guys my age are still navigating first jobs, or talking about going back to grad school, or still living in their parents’ house while they save up for a mortgage. And I’ve got employees—well, I’ve got Ramona—and clients, and I may never be able to afford a mortgage, because right now I’m just trying to get clients to pay me in a timely manner. I don’t have much in common with the other twenty-somethings I know.
So, maybe, instead of focusing on my breathing and finding the length in the pose, I think about the guy in front of me. About those strong calves and the swell of his ass as he stretches one leg out behind him. His hair is cut short as it fades to his nape, and I picture the feeling of it if I were to brush my fingers along it.
And then he turns around, and it’s motherfucking Nash O’Hara, and all my peace and mindfulness dissolves into a puddle of sweat.
I almost run out of the room, except that won’t be obvious at all, will it? The way his eyes widen and his nostrils flare shows he’s just as surprised to see me. His face is flushed, and his hair is matted down onto his forehead. His scruffy U of T T-shirt is mottled with sweat, and now I’m thinking about his chest and whether he might be hairy and—oh God—whether that chest hair might be a little silvery too.
Before I can smile or say hi, or apologize for objectifying him on the phone yesterday—oh my God, was that only yesterday? The universe is fucking with me—Fiona, the instructor, sends us into a tree pose that has him turning back toward the front.
He’s strong. His foot is up in the crease of his groin—don’t think about his groin, don’t think about his groin—and he doesn’t even wobble. The line of his spine is straight, accentuated by the way his shirt is sticking to him. His left leg, planted on the floor, is a solid pillar of muscle that would make my throat dry if it weren’t already parched from the heat in the room.
My concentration is shot. No matter how many times I try to find the balance point, I’m hopping around on my mat like a pogo stick. It’s a relief when Fiona lets us out of the pose, except then she sends us into another sequence of standing warrior poses, and Nash seems to flow through them like water. His whole body melts from one posture to the next, and I don’t know if I’m centered or grounded, or even still on this planet, because all I can do is watch the way his body moves and stretches, highlighting the tension in his legs or the veins in his forearms.
Fiona approaches him and gives him a smile. “Can I make a small correction?” she asks. He nods a little, so she gently puts her hands on his hips, and I watch, mesmerized, as she gives them a soft push, turning him more fully into the pose. And I can’t help myself when I think about my hands on his hips, turning him the way I want to, fitting him just so, so that his muscles are straining as he sinks into—
I’m hard. Holy shit, I’m wearing stretchy shorts and a tank that leaves more of my body open than covered, and now I have a motherfucking erection in the middle of hot yoga and—
I drop to my knees so fast that pain radiates up my shins. Abandoned marionettes have more grace than me right now as I curl in on myself, trying to hide my raging hard-on while wearing next to nothing.
A hand settles on my back, and I flinch, but it’s Fiona’s voice that says “Brady, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I say hoarsely. “Just a foot cramp.” I curl my toes under my feet as if I might be stretching them out.
She rubs a little circle on my damp shirt. “Okay. Stay in child’s pose if you need to. And remember to hydrate. Cramping is a sign of dehydration.”
And the ache in my dick is a sign I have lost all self-control. I need this yoga mat to melt and swallow me up.
I try to calm down, pressing my forehead into the floor. But, without the visual stimulation of Nash's long body in front of me, my brain gloms on to the sound of him breathing. Of his soft grunts as he settles from one posture to the next, and oh, Jesus, that is so not better than watching him move.
Get it together.I am not a teenager. Awkward public boners are not a thing I should be dealing with anymore. I can get control of this. When I was in high school, I’d think about sports or the smell of the henna my mom would boil before using it to hide her grey hairs. Now, I think about work. About clients calling to complain their internet is down, even though I can’t do anything when the provider has announced an outage throughout the entire southwest end of the province. But that train of thought leads me to the way Nash growls my name on the phone when he’s pissed and about how much I’d like to hear him growl my name in other contexts, ideally while he pulls on my hair and—
In total, I stay on my knees for about twenty-five minutes of the hour-long class. Fiona comes by every so often to ask me if I’m okay, and I nod or give her a feeble thumbs-up. She asks if I need water, and I somehow manage to take a few drinks from my big two-litre bottle without drowning myself or getting off the floor.
But there’s no plausible way to stay on my knees when she tells us all to lie down and begin to relax. I’ve gotten my erection under control, although I don’t trust that control will last, but really, if I stay locked in child’s pose while everyone else is spread out on the floor, Fiona will worry.
I cover myself in a blanket I always bring and never use, because the room is kept at thirty degrees, and who wants to be warmer than that after an hour of exerting themselves? But today, modesty and a giddy sense of losing my grip on reality drive me to cover myself, even though the blanket plasters my clothes to my skin.
