Page 29 of Show Me
“How many is the number of times you want me to say yes? Just tell me so I can go ahead and get it over with? Is it five? Yesyesyesyesyes. Six?” Except, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this. I’d already done a morning workout, and we’d had a strenuous home game yesterday, but I hadn’t been doing anything else that afternoon besides lying on the couch zoning out toSportsCenterwhen Jesse had thundered down the stairs looking purposeful in tight little shorts and a muscle tank that emphasized his lean build.
Yoga seemed like a better way to pass the time than moreSportsCenter. Also, I liked being around him. I never knew what was going to come out of his mouth.
Jesse cut me off with a slice of his hand through the air. “Just checking, because hot yoga isn’t just doing some flexibility stuff in a warm room while watching girls sweat.”
I snorted. “Thanks. I’m not sure if you remember, but I’m asports ballplayer, as you say. I can handle rigorous exercise in the heat.”
But I’d never held a ninety-second-long warrior pose at a million degrees Fahrenheit before.
Ten minutes into the class, I was dripping sweat in time to the plinky nature music playing in the background. Compression tights had been the wrong call. Jesse had warned me, but I’d insisted because I worked out in them regularly. My leg hair was a mat of carpet smothering my skin, and I wasn’t necessarily an overly hairy dude. My balls rivaled Okefenokee at the height of summer.
Diagonally to me, Jesse maintained the pose with little apparent trouble, eyes closed, his expression peaceful. Even the sweat rolling down his face did so at a sedate pace.
He inhaled and exhaled serenely while my quad tried to peel off the bone.
When the rest of the class deepened the stretch, I shortened mine and wrestled off my soaked T-shirt. It hit the ground with a wet plop that cut through the music. The lady next to me flinched, glancing over at me with flared nostrils and a shake of her head as if I’d committed a major faux pas.
“Sorry,” I muttered, which must have been another faux pas because I got more stares, the guy to my left getting in on the action this time with a stern, thin-lipped expression aimed my way.
The instructor, Honora, moved gracefully toward me, laid one hand on my lower back, the other on my stomach, and somehow forced my posture straighter.
From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Jesse’s lips twitch into a smile.
“Breathe from your core,” she suggested. The inferno raging in my thigh got worse as she smoothed down over it and urged me deeper into the stretch.
Not wanting to look like an idiot, I complied. Or tried to. “My rib cage is touching my throat,” I whispered.
“Because you’re not breathing from your belly.” She tapped my thigh lightly. “The shaking is normal,” she murmured. I wanted to tell her I knew all about muscle exhaustion, thank you very fucking much, but I refrained. She smiled gently. “Find a point of focus. It helps.”
What I wanted to find was a massage parlor or an ice bath.
I tried to breathe from my belly and found a place in the mirror to stare at, but my gaze kept drifting toward Jesse.
His movements were poised and smooth as we transitioned from Warrior I into Warrior II. He was lean, hardly what anyone would call muscular, but elegant and taut. A rivulet of sweat fell from a strand of hair to the nape of his neck and funneled down into the gulley of his spine, where it moved in a slow trickle to the curve of his ass. His spandex shorts might as well have been nonexistent the way they cupped his cheeks, perfectly delineating his crack, and the side of one cheek where it shallowed out from the tension in his thighs. It looked rock fucking solid, which was another surprise.
I almost lost my balance when I realized I was getting hard. I couldn’t get hard in fucking compression tights. My dick literally had nowhere to go, and if tossing a shirt and talking was a faux pas, I couldn’t even imagine what popping wood would qualify as.
After sneaking a furtive glance around, I adjusted myself and thwapped the head of my dick for penance to get it back in line. Then I shifted my gaze resolutely to an elderly man. If he wasn’t the safer bet, I had some more questions about myself that would need answering—in addition to the ones popping up with increasing frequency the longer I spent in Jesse’s company.
“So?” Jesse drew the question out smugly as class ended.
I rolled upright from Savasana. “I liked the end.” Honora had instructed us to lie on our backs and close our eyes, then had gone around the room, offering us a tissue with lavender oil on it to lay over our faces while we focused on our breathing. At the very end, she had a small bell she rang three times, and the sound, along with the lavender and quiet breaths of the people next to me, had given me the good kind of shivers. “That has to be the only reason people put up with the rest.” I tried to mop my chest with my soaking T-shirt. I was so drenched I probably needed something that replaced electrolytes.
Jesse laughed. “Too strenuous?”
“It was…challenging.” And I didn’t necessarily mean challenging to my flexibility. I’d tested my mettle a few times by looking over at Jesse again while we moved through the sun salutations. Downward fucking dog had almost done me in, and crow pose, with Jesse’s thighs spread wide apart, his narrow waist, and his asscheeks tense…all of it had been confusing and intriguing.
“But do you think you’d like to come again with me?”
I stared at him for a long second, my head mixing up the sentence to mean something completely different. The cocky half-smile on his face didn’t help matters.
“Maybe?” It was possible the heat had gotten to me. “I need ice cream,” I said abruptly.
“Ice cream?” His brows shot up, and then he considered and shrugged. “Okay. There’s a place right down the street.”
We cleaned off our mats and returned them to the shelves, then walked down the street. I went from sweating balls to shivering in the ice cream shop, but once we had our double scoops and found a bench outside, it was the perfect combo of cold and hot.
“Nice man spreading.” Jesse fixed me with an accusing stare. “Your DP is out of control, by the way.”