The Secrets of Attraction

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

[dedi tk]

Cover

Disclaimer

Title

Dedication

One Madison

Two Jesse

Three Madison

Four Jesse

Five Madison

Six Jesse

Seven Madison

Eight Jesse

Nine Madison

Ten Jesse

Eleven Madison

Twelve Jesse

Thirteen Madison

Fourteen Jesse

Fifteen Madison

Sixteen Jesse

Seventeen Madison

Eighteen Jesse

Nineteen Madison

Twenty Jesse

Twenty-One Madison

Twenty-Two Jesse

Twenty-Three Madison

Twenty-Four Jesse

Twenty-Five Madison

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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“BREATHE,” LEIF COMMANDED.

I reached out from my waist, hips aligned, then leading with my right hand, tilted toward the ground, forming a perfect triangle. Trikonasana was
my
pose. I was a statue. A rock. My feet firmly planted on my sticky mat.

Leif, a.k.a. Hot Yogi, stalked the room with his hands clasped behind his back. Slouchy black pants, gray tank, dark eyes looking at everyone and no one.

It was hard not to picture him naked.

“Trikonasana is a full-body opener. Spiral the femur bone inward, feel the stretch across the front of your chest, same as cobra. Imagine yourself between two panes of glass.” His gravelly voice echoed all the way down to my root chakra.

Between two panes of glass.

With you, Leif.

Wren looked over her shoulder and wiggled her fingers in greeting as she reached toward the ceiling. We'd been taking class on Thursday nights at Namaste Yoga along with my mom since November. Mom took it to stave off her midforties. When she asked me to join her, I begged Wren to come along so at least I'd have someone to snicker with. Turned out, we both enjoyed the chill feeling we had after class. I also liked it because I was height-challenged, but after an hour of stretching, I felt about six feet tall. (Okay, maybe more like five foot six—still, taller.) For the first month a pear-shaped, aging hippie named Lena taught the class. Her ample booty defied gravity but halfway through January she herniated a disc in her lower back and took a leave of absence.

In walked Leif.

The class had started out with fifteen women. After word of the Adonis in yoga pants, it doubled in size. Wren and I were the token high schoolers. The majority of the class was made up of moms and twentysomethings. There were a handful of guys who either came to class with their wives or seemed to know Leif from the other studio where he taught. I'd never wished for an hour to feel longer in my whole life. He made Sanskrit sexy.

Leif stopped beside Wren and touched the spot between her shoulder blades, then leaned down and whispered something to her. She lengthened into the pose, reaching upward with her outstretched arm. Her fishtail braid slipped from her shoulder as she looked toward the ceiling. The side of her mouth curled in an almost imperceptible grin.

“Nice,” he said, before walking over to the next mat.

The thought of royally screwing up so Leif would come over and adjust me crossed my mind. On the other hand, I wanted him to notice how effortless I made every pose. I was beginning to defy gravity myself. I took a breath and settled into stillness. Leif moved past me. For the barest of seconds, my eyes met his.

“This is an active pose. Feel the energy shooting out from your fingertips.”

In that sip of a moment, energy shot through more places than my fingertips.
Zowee
. I wobbled.

In our next downward dog, Wren peered at me from under her armpits.

Omigod
, she mouthed.

Bitch
, I mouthed back, but smiled.

We'd had a bet on which one of us Hot Yogi would adjust first. I owed her an after-class chai latte. She shook her head and smiled as we moved forward into warrior one.

“Breathe.”

All the reminders to
breathe
used to get on my nerves; as if breathing was some airy-fairy cure-all and not something you did automatically. One little pause, though, was sometimes all it took for me to refocus—even off the mat.
Breathe
. When I wondered how I'd scrape up the money to go to the summer arts program at the NJ Design Institute.
Breathe.
When Zach kept bringing up the subject of getting serious.
Breathe.
When sometimes it felt like it would be years before my life really began.

I dreamed of building something beautiful. A tree house. A home. Hell, a skyscraper that glowed purple at night. And the journey of a thousand steps toward my dream was a summer program to gain some practical experience so my résumé would stand out. I'd wanted to go to Pratt's summer program, but NJDI was more in my price range. And if I kept my GPA over 3.8, killed it on the SATs, and had a portfolio to die for—Pratt could be my future. Whenever anyone tells you to shoot for your dreams, though, they never mention the
cashish
involved. Buzzkill.

We moved down to the floor series, ending with happy baby, a pose that required you to grab the outside of your feet and pull downward so your knees opened wide and your hoo-ha was presented to the world like a bouquet of flowers. So okay, I got the baby thing, but doing this pose felt far from innocent to me.

“Happy Grayson,” I whispered to Wren.

That was all it took. She snorted. Her belly convulsed and she lost her grip in the pose. She rolled to her side, hands over her face, body rocking with laughter. One of my greatest pleasures was making her lose it. She scurried from the room and didn't make it back for Savasana. As the final “Om” sounded, Wren crept back in to roll up her mat.

“Mads, I'm freakin' mortified.”

“Come on,” I said, folding my mat. “That was pretty good.”

Hot Yogi was suddenly in front of us. Wren's face flushed.

“I'm, um, I'm so sorry, for um, laughing like that, it wasn't—” she stammered, her hands gripping into her rolled-up sticky mat.

“Hey, that's what yoga is for. Release. Laughter. Tears. No judgment,” he said, looking from Wren to me.

The two of us were mute, but I swear I could hear Wren swallow as the word
release
crossed his lips. The kind of release that came to mind had nothing to do with laughter or tears.
Whoa, breathe.

“I hope you two are comfortable in the class. You know they have one with music for teens on Sunday nights?”

“This fits better in our schedule,” I said, bummed that he noticed how young we were. Up close there were fine lines around his eyes, but he couldn't have been more than, say, twenty-six was my guess. That would make us ten years apart. Maybe a world apart at this stage, but someday . . . hmm.

“I think it's awesome you're here. If I had practiced in high school, I might have had an easier go of it,” he said as my mother sidled up to us.

“Thank you, Leif. I'm always ready for a good night's sleep after this class,” she said as she ran a hand through her sweaty bob. Even my mother was not immune to Hot Yogi's charms. Every week, she freshened up her pedicure and put on tinted anti-aging moisturizer before leaving the house for class. Seeing them together I realized that she actually could go for it, if she really wanted to, but that would have been so, um, ew, to be crushing on the same guy as my mother.

Leif smiled, clasped his hands at heart center, and gave us a small nod. “Glad to oblige.”

He turned away and was approached by two women who gushed about how their shoulders had never felt better since coming to this class. Right. Their shoulders felt better. The subliminal undertone of this whole exchange was almost too much to bear.

Wren pinched me. “You owe me a chai.”

Mugshot was the coffee shop next to the yoga studio. It was a little place that was always jam-packed after class—whether it was because of the tool behind the coffee bar messing up orders or that it was the one place aside from the diner where you could hang out for the price of a cup of coffee, I wasn't sure. The line was slowly strangling my yoga buzz.

“So, details, what was it like?” I asked, stepping closer to the counter.

Wren's eyes grew wide. “What do you mean?”

“When Hot Yogi touched you.”

A glow rose in her cheeks, and she looked over her shoulder to inspect the line. She stepped to her other foot.

“He didn't
touch
me, it was an adjustment. I was focusing on my ocean breath.”

“Wait, there was a touch and a whisper. What did he say? C'mon, something worth a chai.”

Wren bit back a smile, leaned toward me, and said in a breathy voice by my ear, “‘Tighten your core.'”

“O . . . em . . . gee.”

She laughed. “And then when he put his hand on my back? There was nothing, you know,
sexy
about it, but damn, I sort of felt it . . .
everywhere
.”

I thought of the jolt of insta-lust I felt when my eyes met Leif's. I'd probably just melt into a puddle if he ever gave me an adjustment.

“Everywhere?”

“Well, for a split second. Then it was just weird. My mind went into overdrive, like, Did I remember to put on deodorant? Would Gray be pissed? I couldn't concentrate after that. Yoga's supposed to leave you calm, right? I miss Lena.”

“Are you insane? Lena was awesome, but really, no comparison.”

“I didn't feel like I had to put on lip gloss for Lena.”

“Amen,” said the girl behind us. We both turned. I recognized her from class; she always practiced in the front row, near the corner, and could do sick arm balances for what seemed like hours. She leaned toward us and whispered, “When he demonstrated scorpion last week—”