AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Tucking them under an arm, I click off the light and head back inside, where I find my mom and Ruby chatting animatedly in the kitchen.
“There he is.”
Ruby looks over her shoulder at me and smiles, and just like yesterday, that simple look about knocks me off my feet.
“I thought you might have overslept,” she says. “Or changed your mind about doing yoga.”
“Not a chance. I was grabbing mats from the garage. Don’t write me off so fast, missy. I’m all in.”
My mother steps up next to me and pats my shoulder, her eyes connecting with mine. There’s a look there I recognize from when I was younger, this specific way she’d purse her lips and wrinkle her nose when she thought I was getting myself into a bit of trouble.
Be careful.
That’s what she’s saying.
“Have fun, you two. It was nice to meet you, Ruby.”
And then my mom is shuffling out of the kitchen and over to the den, where she’s likely going to turn on the morning news and play on her iPad.
I look back at Ruby and grin. “Let’s head outside.”
* * *
Thirty minutes later, I am having serious regrets about agreeing to do yoga with Ruby this morning.
It’s not because I don’t enjoy it—I’m actually surprised I’m liking it as much as I do. I’ve always been a solo-sport kind of guy. Swimming. Running. I learned to play tennis and golf in college. Something like yoga should be on my radar, whether or not it’s labeled as a fairly feminine exercise.
So it isn’t that I’m not enjoying the yoga. It’s that I’ve been forced to watch Ruby ‘getting all bendy’ in front of me for the past thirty minutes and fight off the arousal that is simmering on low at the base of my spine.
“Keep your shoulders over your hips and bring both arms up,” she says, her voice like butter, calm and soothing. “Bend your right knee a little bit and stretch out that hip. Inhale deeply and stretch, and then as you exhale, open to Warrior Two.”
I follow her motions, even if my body does feel—and look—significantly more clunky than hers.
Everything about the way she leads me looks like waves, fluid and undulating without any strange hitches or trip-ups. I can’t say the same about myself. I might like the workout and stretch I’m getting right now, but that doesn’t mean I’m very good at it. I’m man enough to admit that.
I’m also man enough to readily welcome the way Ruby helps to gently correct my mistakes, sometimes with a soft direction, sometimes by exiting out of her own stance and coming over to shift my hips one way or tilt my head another.
It really is amazing how different my body feels once she helps me make those little adjustments.
I also don’t mind her hands on me in the slightest.
We continue on for another ten minutes or so before she has us shifting into cooldown positions and lying flat on the mats, making me thankful that I brought us off of the wooden deck and down to the soft, grassy area that leads to the water.
As we lie in what Ruby called Savasana, she asks me to gradually relax every single muscle in my body. We start with toes and ankles then move up the legs. She takes a while to go through the cooldown, a component of exercise I’m prone to move through rather quickly, and I’m shocked to find just how relaxed and mentally calm I feel once we’re done, like I could literally melt into the ground.
“So what did you think?” she asks as we roll up our mats.
The smile on her face is tentative, almost like she’s worried I hated it and might shove her down the bank and into the water.
“I’m going to be honest,” I say, dragging it out a little bit and watching as she bites her lip, waiting for me to spit it out.
Then I return her smile. “I loved it.”
“Did you really?” She almost goes up on her tiptoes with excitement, her expression morphing into one I wish I could kiss right off her face.
I nod. “Really.”
Ruby does a little hop-skip as we head back to the house, practically radiating joy.
