Paradise Lust (3 page)

Chapter 4

A week and a half in, and Adele was both getting into a groove and constantly surprised by the unpredictable way of things on the island. The chance monsoons, the moody tides, the transient characters, not to mention the changes in her peers and herself—not even a week had passed, and people were sharing deep emotional truths, and performing physical feats they hadn’t thought possible. For Adele’s part, she’d kept the specifics of her emotional baggage to herself, but did feel a sense of calm and a sort of (she felt silly saying it, but it really was the best word) “centering” at her core. Plus she’d been able to hold crow pose for half a minute, something she’d thought impossible just a week ago.

Relationships, too, were changing. Her feelings toward the women around her felt soft and simple, uncomplicated by the normal tensions of female-to-female relationships. Stateside Adele was quick to be annoyed, quick to judge, and yet here, she felt a pure warmth toward the ladies around her. She’d begun to have nightly post-dinner chats with her roommate Diane on their front porch, sipping coconut water straight from the fruit, holding the big, rough spheres in their hands as they gazed out at the ocean.

She’d also begun to feel a shift in her interactions with Ajuni. Beyond the authenticity she felt between herself and everyone in the group, there was an added…intimacy? That word seemed too weighted, and yet, she couldn’t think of another one to describe the feeling she sometimes got from him.

Then again, she wasn’t sure she should trust her own judgment on such matters. It had been two and a half years since her last real relationship, and she didn’t think even that was the best standard by which to measure male-female interactions. She and Jeremy had met in law school, and both been such type A go-getters that their relationship had been based largely on a shared lust for ambition, rather than each other. At least, that’s the retrospective conclusion she’d drawn after document review replaced sex with little grief from either party. The handful of dates she’d gone on since then hadn’t given her much more insight into interpreting signals and gauging chemistry with the opposite sex.

Probably it was the case that Ajuni was just an intimate person. He’d built his life around the concept of transcending borders—between the physical and the spiritual, between living and dying, between one person and another. So it made sense that his eye contact penetrated, that his hands turned a casual touch into a lingering caress, that his words reverberated in your mind, blanketing other thoughts in velvet.

During asana practice that morning, she couldn’t seem to obey Val’s exhortations to “clear your mind and focus on your breath”—that whole don’t-think-about-anything part was still a major hurdle for her—and her thoughts had turned to Ajuni. She watched him weave amongst the bodies, murmuring the melodic names of the poses, the liquid verbs describing each action, the poetic descriptions of body parts.

“Sink your center downward into chaturanga dandasana…sweep your heart forward and up to the sky, coming into urdhva mukha svanasana…blossom open into virabhadrasana 2,” he named each pose as he paced the room with silent feet. His face was serene, but his eyes lit from within, dancing across each body, evaluating, looking,
seeing
. Adele couldn’t help but wonder what he noticed when he looked, what truths that she couldn’t see.

When she wasn’t upside-down or otherwise indisposed, she followed the direction of his gaze to the other women in the room. She watched his expression as he watched them, followed his hands as he touched them.

“Press your chest toward your thighs,” he instructed as they held a long downward-facing dog, and she watched him move toward a young woman named Meghan in the front row. Meghan was voluptuous in every sense of the word—a free spirit, open with her sexuality, alternately round and flat in all the right places. She let her wavy sun-streaked hair fall free during practice, and now it tumbled down toward her mat. She wore a tiny pair of bright green yoga shorts, barely more than underpants, the tanned cup of her bottom just peeking out where they ended. Ajuni approached and slowly, one finger at a time, placed his strong hands firmly on either side of her hips. His palms pressed upon the rounded curvature of each cheek, his fingers gaining purchase on the hipbones on the other side. He pulled toward him, lengthening out Meghan’s spine and allowing her shoulders to relax away from her ears. She let out a low sigh as he removed his hands, grazing her inner thighs lightly (accidentally? On purpose?) as he moved away.

Holding her own downward dog, Adele’s eyes began to wander. Of course, they were supposed to remain softly focused on the spot between her feet, letting all thoughts melt away, but she couldn’t seem to quiet her mind today. The air buzzed with too much
life
. Moving past her mat, past the mat of Karli, the tall German woman next to her, Adele’s eyes travelled outside the room and to the grassy expanse beyond the open doors of the yoga hut. Her smooth
ujayi
breathing stopped short as she saw him.

Danny sat on the grass, legs casually crossed, leaning against a palm tree. To her ongoing disappointment, she hadn’t interacted with him at all since their breakfast banter, and this was her first opportunity to admire him in a long time. He was in profile, the ocean on his right, the yoga hut on his left, and his eyes gazing forward at the craggy green shoreline. A book lay open in his lap, but the focus of his gaze told Adele that it had been long forgotten. Shadow and sun alternately dappled his bare shoulders, and as Adele’s gaze followed the lean lines of his torso down to the sharp musculature just above his shorts, she involuntarily let out a sigh of overwhelming need. As if in response to the sound, though he was far out of earshot, Danny’s head turned toward the yoga hut.

Suddenly filled with panic, Adele almost fell out of downward dog, and quickly realized that everyone around her had long ago left the pose and were now lying on their bellies in a locust series. Scrambling through a vinyasa on her way to the correct pose, she caught Ajuni’s eye. A sly smile played over his lips, and she thought that one eye gave her an almost imperceptible wink.

When they moved from bow back into child’s pose, she was able to glance outside once more. Danny was gone.

After afternoon lectures that day, Adele went for a long walk. She couldn’t shake the strange energy she’d felt during the entire asana sequence. There was a buzz in the air, an agitation of energy that was almost…arousing. The best way to describe it was as if her entire body were being tickled lightly be a feather. The thought crept into her head that it all stemmed from the simple knowledge of Danny’s presence on the island, but she dismissed that notion out of hand.

Leaving the yoga hut, her mat strapped across her back, she wandered aimlessly and far. She would walk her way to calmness.

She wandered up the sloping drive, away from the resort’s thatched-roofed “lobby,” passing the small warungs on her right and hilly fields on her left, cows grazing lazily in the fading afternoon sun, the sparkling ocean behind them. She walked past the one other hotel on this corner of Bali, took the narrow, rocky path that veered away from the main road and down a steep grade, through a grassy ravine, and back up, past a wild grove of untamed and unnamed thorny flowers, around a sea-sprayed outcropping of black rock, to a hidden beach where everything was hushed, even the waves—tumultuous and powerful on all other stretches of the beach, here they rolled slowly and serenely in, gently sheathing the smooth, packed sand with their glistening water.

An hour or more must have elapsed, and the sun was now falling quickly toward the horizon. The hypnotic trance of her stroll broke as she became aware of the dusky light all around her. She turned back and began to retrace her path, quickly this time. It would be dark soon, and she didn’t want to be stranded in a cow field with no shoes come nightfall.

Just where the small side path rejoined the main road, she felt a fat droplet of warm rain hit her shoulder. She looked up and saw a collection of dark, unfriendly clouds that had been nowhere in sight just ten minutes before. The lobby hut was in sight, but a good hundred yards or so away, and her own cabin another quarter mile past that, and already she felt another splat on her arm, then another, then a fourth.

She picked up her pace, trotting gingerly across the roughly paved road. The hotness of the pavement on her bare feet became more pronounced as the rain cooled the air. Within moments, the entire sky had become a deep purple-gray, and she could hear the sweeping whoosh of a torrent of rain being unleashed from the sky. Breaking into a full sprint, she glanced over her shoulder to see a wall of rain racing toward her, a solid sheet advancing.

“Eeeek!” She heard herself shrieking like a teenage girl, then erupted in laughter. Her chestnut hair had come out of its loose bun and tumbled down her neck. The yoga mat thumped against her back—she couldn’t even remember now why she’d brought it with her. Her light pink tank top was plastered against her belly and back, clinging to the yellow sports bra underneath. Remembering that she’d worn black shorts that day—she’d been
thisclose
to a pair of white flowy pants—she looked up to the sky in gratitude and laughed again.

Rounding the final curve before the boundary of the resort, she careened past the lobby hut and off the slate path, onto the grass. The rain-glossed grass was slick, and her mud-covered feet slid out from under her. She leaned dangerously backward, flailing her arms to regain her center, and just managed to bring herself back up to standing.

Panting, hands on her thighs, she stood still in the blanketing raindrops and took a few deep breaths. As she lifted her eyes, she almost fell backward once more—there was someone watching her. Not thirty feet away, nothing more than a dark silhouette in a rectangle of glowing light, a tall figure stood facing steadfastly toward her, unmoving. Adele stood up fully, and her eyes adjusted to the dark. The figure was standing on a covered porch outside of one of the resort cabins, and the light from inside the hut spilled out the open door and onto the porch, framing him.              

Him. Of course it was him. She was briefly shocked that it had taken her so long to recognize those spreading shoulders and sculpted arms, that slim torso, those locks of unruly hair, that confident yet friendly stance. Of course it was Danny.

Acting without any thought, she brushed the wet hair out of her eyes and moved across the wet grass—carefully this time—toward the square of light. The thought
Like a moth to a flame
popped into her head, but she pushed it back. Just this once, she would stop over-thinking, stop narrating her life instead of living it.

“I would say come in before you get drenched, but…” Danny’s voice resonated richly in the humid air, vibrating through the soft night to her ears.

“Ha,” was all she could manage in response. Her bare feet had reached the edge of his porch, and she took the step. Eighteen inches stood between them. When she swayed forward toward him she could actually feel the buzz of his energy increase.

“Hi,” he said, his voice less of an echo this time, more intimate.

“Hi,” she said.

Though the sky had turned completely dark, enough light spilled from the cabin to illuminate parts of him—his shining eyes, the rounded top of his shoulder, the plump center of his lip. Out of her peripheral vision, she saw one arm reach and grasp something, and then he was moving toward her. In an instant, she was enveloped not by his skin, but by the rough, warm embrace of a towel.

“I grabbed this when I saw you coming,” he said. He’d wrapped the towel around her, but was still holding either side with his hands, so they were in a kind of towel cocoon together. She could feel the heat of his chest, and when she allowed herself to look up, to see his body, his face, she felt a pulsing between her legs.

“How did you know it was me?”

He shrugged, moving the towel with his gesture, bringing her slightly—accidentally?—closer. Despite her efforts to stop them, her eyes drifted down to the part of his shorts just below the drawstring. It was difficult to be certain in the dark, but there seemed to be a considerable bulge there. She felt the only dry part of her get wet. He held himself at a distance, gripping the towel tightly around her and yet letting no part of their warm, wet bodies touch.

In a galloping outburst of heartbeats that seemed to erupt not from her chest but her stomach, Adele felt herself falling forward and against his hot, smooth, chest. With instant reflexes, he let the towel fall to the porch and caught her, sliding one arm around to her lower back and touching the other hand to the base of her chin, tilting her head toward his. The hesitation lasted no longer than a fraction of a second but managed to send a rush of blood down to her toes—the moment after he’d lifted her face and before he leaned in, his green eyes sparkling in the moonlight, locking with hers.

And then the kiss. His lips touched hers softly at first, and when he felt her raise her face up, wanting more, he pressed back with more intensity. His pillowy lips were as smooth and inviting as they’d looked from afar, and she had to consciously slow down, reminding herself to move with his rhythm. Her lips parted at the gentle suggestion of his firm tongue, and she surged up against him again. Their torsos pressed together by the abandoned towel, the rain and sweat on their bodies the only thing between them. She established, happily, that the bulge had not been in her imagination.