For the past year, he’d been a constant presence in her life, whether in her mind or physically in her class. A presence she anticipated like buried treasure, rediscovered every week for an hour or two. She remembered everything. The way he laughed when the other women teased one another or him. The intent way he looked as he did the postures. The way he focused on her.
She slowed that thought down, replayed it. Every moment he’d been in her class, he’d had his attention on her in some way, big or small. It had made her feel better about…everything. Now that she’d seen the way he looked at her when his desire was completely unleashed, she couldn’t help but recognize traces of it earlier. That desire, that total attention, had been simmering in his gaze from the first class. It had been given wings the moment she asked him if she could touch him, and he’d given her permission.
He hadn’t come back weekly because of his desire to join a yoga class. He’d come for her. Only for her. And she’d grown addicted to him long before he’d found out she wasn’t married.
“Oh Jon.” Her hands, pressed in prayer mudra in front of her sternum, turned and curled against her aching heart. “I can’t give you what you want. Though I want to. I really, really want to. It’s too late.”
“No, it’s not. Because you already have given me what I want.”
She opened her eyes, somehow not at all surprised to see him leaning in her doorway, wearing the familiar tank and cotton trousers for his practice. The sight of the leanly muscled body, the serious set of his mouth, those silken dark strands of hair that fell over his high forehead, were all capable of making her breath hitch, but it was the look in his blue eyes that took it away entirely.
“Did you kidnap Mrs. Hannenburg?” Though she wanted to sound calm, her voice was barely a whisper. His eyes dwelled on her face, the gemstone color so deep and still she could feel it reach out to her, draw her in, so that she didn’t really want to speak. Or move. Or do anything but gaze at him avidly.
“Ben is taking her out for coffee and homemade pastries even as we speak. She seemed willing to be kidnapped, particularly when we told her we were surprising you for your birthday.”
“My birthday isn’t for some time.” She tried to remember she couldn’t have him, and all the reasons why. “And I try not to notice it anyhow.”
“Well, that’s going to change. Because I intend to celebrate every year you’re a part of my life. It also depends on how you define birthday. For some people, it can be the day they decide to embrace something new, take their life in a whole new direction.”
“Jon.” She looked down at her hands, despairing. She wanted him so badly the need ached in her joints like a flu.
“You really pissed me off the other night. And you scared me.” When she lifted her gaze, she saw he was masking nothing. His expression reflected those volatile feelings, their aftermath. And something deeper, that came through now in the roughness of his velvet voice. “If you ever tried to hurt yourself, sweet girl, I don’t know what I’d do.”
A lump formed in her throat, and she looked back down, curling her fingers together. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I should have explained more…but I was so tired, and embarrassed and surprised that you knew. That day I did that…the day the gun went off…” She sighed, closed her eyes. “You know they say women do poison or something like that, something that won’t destroy their face, because we’re vain, even in death. But at the time, all I thought was that I wanted to destroy my face, because even that wasn’t pleasurable to him anymore. Or to me. I saw a mother who wasn’t a mother, a wife who wasn’t a wife. I thought, ‘I’ll just destroy it all’.”
She shook her head. She could feel his increased concentration, the fierce emotions her words were stirring in him, but he stayed silent, let her say it. “It was soon after my son’s death, and I was…in despair. But whatever angel guided that bullet, told me I still I wanted to live.”
Taking a deep breath, she lifted her attention to his face. What she saw there—anger, compassion, love—nearly stole her voice, but she had to say the rest. “You know what the best day of my life was? I was at the beach with my son. He was two. I played in the surf with him, sat in wet sand and dug in it with a little plastic shovel. He painted my calves with splotches of it while sand got into our swimsuits. I cherished every move, stored every laugh in my heart.” She paused, swallowing the ache. “I brought our chair down to the tide line and held him in my arms while he fell asleep against my neck, and I dozed with him, amazed that Cole and I had created this perfect thing, to house this precious little soul…”
She stopped. There was no way she could go from there to what had happened to that perfect creation, that precious soul, but fortunately Jon knew, and she could leave it. But her mind wouldn’t. She remembered Kyle’s soft baby hair, and the horrific moment at the funeral home, when his body had been delivered there in the sealed casket. She’d screamed at Cole, beaten on him because she wanted that casket opened and he didn’t. She had to see his body, no matter how mangled or decomposed, so she could stroke that soft hair from his forehead one last time. They’d both cried, even as Cole held her at arms’ length, not able to bear holding her, even then.
“I know I’ll never be that happy again, I’m sure of it…” She swallowed against the far too familiar dull pain in her heart, tasting her tears on her lips. “When I finally realized that, I could accept all the rest. It didn’t matter. And I knew I’d never try to take my life again.”
Jon cocked his head, his blue eyes bright with pain for her, but his mouth set in a determined line she knew too well. “And yet, despite your acceptance of that, I not only feel your body yearning but your heart and soul as well. There’s more, Rachel. There’s more and you’re not giving it to yourself, because no mother who loses a child thinks she ever deserves happiness again.”
She shook her head, more vehemently. “There’s a rhythm, a natural energy that moves through us, a natural order, and you see it around us all the time. I feel it when I do a particularly good yoga session. But it doesn’t mean we’re special or unique in the universe, magnified under some cosmic being’s glass. It just means that life goes on, and you can make the most or the least of it. Your choice. There isn’t a grand scheme. What you get is what you get.”
“But you haven’t chosen.” His voice was soft, but relentless. “You can’t not choose, Rachel.”
“I’m afraid of any more choices.” Her voice cracked. “I’ve made all the wrong ones. I have to just stay…on the same track, you know?”
“Remember that day I had you close your eyes and tell me the age you always feel, no matter what you see in the mirror?” At the reluctant lift of her shoulder, he took a step into the room. “Close your eyes now. And when you do, I want you to imagine the type of woman you think would suit me best. Who do you see, Rachel?”
She couldn’t resist the edge of command in his tender voice and he knew it. Just as he knew when she closed her eyes, she couldn’t see him with anyone but her. She could tell herself that merely meant her mind was being a willful child, refusing to let go of the candy the adult part of her knew wasn’t good for it. But if she tried to see him with someone else, like one of those girls at the coffee shop, it wasn’t only anger and jealousy that made it hard to envision. It felt wrong.