Silent Treatment

Colin Banks was a software analyst and his job was as exciting as it sounded. Which was to say, not very. He had no regrets regarding his career choice (for it was, most certainly, a career), and he even enjoyed his work more often than not. But it was not exciting. The field attracted a certain type of person and Colin was that kind of person. He was neat and tidy, tall -- very tall -- and thin, usually quite direct. He believed in systems. His postgraduate brain had absorbed the concepts of minimalism, informed atheism, and lifestyle design with all the efficiency of a shammy cloth and he had become, now in his late thirties, a man who was spare in all regards.

His clothing, while finely made and meticulously clean, was colorless. It reflected his view of the world: black and white with maybe two or three shades of gray. Rule follower. He owned a gray chore coat that threatened a greenish tint, and he felt uncomfortable in it. But he wore it anyway. He believed it was good to be uncomfortable, in controlled situations. Stretch his comfort zone, and the like. You know the bit.

His apartment lacked the charms of daily life-- the bathroom baseboard paint worn thin by a beloved house cat's rubbing, or family photos and wedding invites on the refrigerator, or even a kitschy collection of coffee mugs. Colin Banks had two coffee mugs, because he never had more than one person over to visit and never in the morning.

For all his solitude, he was not unhappy. His days consisted of routine and work. He woke every morning at five am, did 25 pushups, ran between 2 and 6 miles, did another set of 25 push ups, an 18 minute stretch, and then showered under a scalding spray of high pressure water.

He drank his coffee black, ate his oats with rice milk and walnuts. He always had a bag of apples in the refrigerator. Sometimes after dinner, he'd walk to the pie shop around the corner for a slice of chocolate silk, if he was feeling wild. More often than not, he'd chew a square of seventy percent dark with grim satisfaction and wonder why he didn't allow himself more sugar. Sometimes, he had a woman over after a few internet dates. Never lasted.

One day, as Colin ran around the pond of a nearby park, he listened to a podcast extolling the virtues of yoga. He'd dabbled, like any cosmopolitan young professional, but it was one of those time and place instances where one is unusually receptive to an idea, and he became convinced that yoga was something he actually needed.

Maybe, after thirty six years of life, he wanted to dip a toe into the spiritual, but Colin thought it more likely he just needed to switch up his workout routine. Routine, he knew, was stagnation for a cynic. Colin wasn't a cynic, but he did want a bit of a change.

On his jog home, Colin stopped by his gym and perused the notice board. There, nestled between business cards for personal trainers and dozens of leaflets for the latest health pyramid scheme, was a flier for acroyoga. Colin didn't know what it was, but he liked the way it sounded when he said it under his breath. It sounded contemporary and more Western than its vinyasa, astanga, or kundalini counterparts. He was comfortable with that. The only thing that gave him pause-- a short pause, mind-- was the small disclaimer of 'singles welcome!' (nearly invisible) at the bottom of the pictureless advert.

Had there been a picture, or had Colin been feeling a bit more his methodical self and given acroyoga a quick Google, or even used context clues for goodness sake, he would have discovered that it was a couples class. He did precisely zero research, called the number at the bottom of the flier, and signed up for a class the following week. The woman on the line sounded pleasant and detached, and Colin liked that and so he was satisfied.

During his weekend, Colin prepared for his new yoga class. His eighteen minute stretching routine became a thirty minute stretching routine, and he found that very pleasant. He was filled with a quiet, simmering anticipation. Not enough to distract, not enough to even pinpoint the cause, but the result of his low-grade happiness was that Colin nodded and smiled to his local barista, and she noticed and when she said, 'have a good day!' she tagged his name to the end ("have a good day, Colin!"), and offered him a slightly awkward smile. He liked it.

It wasn't until the day of the class that Colin bought a yoga mat. He bought it at a shop down the road from his second story apartment, and the woman who checked him out asked about his plans for the mat. "Acroyoga class this evening," he said with a note of pride in his usually mild voice. She looked up from the bag she was packing his purchases into -- he'd ended up with a strap, block, and bolster as well-- and met his eyes. She took a moment to study his face before asking, "who's your partner?"

And just like that Colin knew he'd made a huge mistake. Alas. He felt foolish for a few slogging seconds and replied, "I don't have one."

Surprise! He'd fucked up.

"You want one? I'm free in half an hour."

Colin stared blankly into the queerly passive face of the woman behind the counter. She tilted her chin up a bit, in question.

"Just say yes," She said.

"Yes," Colin said.

***

Her name was Georgia, and she was 29 years old. She worked 18 hours a week at the hip sports store, re-stocking cycling socks and keto protein bars, and that kept her in fun money. Her real job, her vocation as she called it, was as a freelance writer. She wrote mostly for AP, and hunted down stories all over the city. She liked the sports store and she liked writing and often she could write at the front desk in between customers. "It's like a secret hack!" she said excitedly as they walked down the road towards the yoga studio.

It was off the beaten track, and Colin felt vaguely uneasy, and a little bit like he'd duped himself. He was raised by polite, midwestern parents, and though the thought of telling Georgia, "just kidding" and calling the studio to cancel had crossed his mind, he had an ingrained fear of disappointing people. Any people. Strangers at the yoga studio, even. So he kept his appointment and walked down the scuffed sidewalk of the more industrial part of his neighborhood, an enormous, extra-thick paper bag stuffed with his kit.

As they walked, Georgia talked, and her voice was quiet and musical. Colin noticed a tendency to start a thought with a long and drawn out "We-eelll," that gave the word an extra syllable. She made easy eye contact, and when Colin looked away he felt her eyes still on him. But he was okay with it, she was clearly one of those that studied without judgment.

Georgia was a short, soft woman who walked quickly and spoke with her hands. Her deep olive skin glowed in the setting sun and Colin wondered how to ask her where her family was from. There was a coarseness and blackness about her hair that could have indicated anywhere from Egypt to Greece. It was clear to Colin that this woman belonged in other spaces. He looked down at his workout shorts and wondered what it was like. Hard, but warm, he thought.

He had the gym, and his office buddies. His mother called him once a week. His father was dead, and Colin was allergic to cats. He looked at the woman to his right and felt uneasy. But not unpleasant. If Colin had been thinking, he'd have identified the feeling as anticipatory. Excited. Not, poor Colin, uneasy.

***

Colin had made a terrible mistake. Not life changing, but he was annoyed with himself. There were couples everywhere. The light was dim. In the sheltered, modest corners of Colin's brain, this was halfway to an orgie. He felt perverted and acutely aware that his lack of comfort around these people (working professionals with extracurriculars and enough bandwidth to maintain a social calendar) said something unsavory about him.

There was a pair of women near the middle of the class and the closer of the two, short and straight as a pole bean, rhythmically beat her partners back, one foot planted on either side squatting over the prone woman. He felt himself flush. Something indecent about all of this, he thought, and chided himself. He should be okay with this. Casual touch. But it felt so exposed, and Colin plotted a graceful exit.

As Georgia settled their things and chatted with the couple to their right, an enormous man with the confused good looks of Lyle Lovett walked in followed by his equally tall and equally striking partner.

The woman wore a sports bra and a pair of leggings with stirrups (Colin's mind kept supplying holsters) and Colin couldn't help but stare. She was the most sensual in a room of effectively naked women, and Colin starred. He could smell her as she settled behind Georgia and himself. Sunscreen and something musky.

His mouth went dry. It was her feet. The stirrups forced a look at her feet.

Not only her feet, but her elegant, almost architecturally perfect arch. Her manicured toenails were short and polished with some iridescent shade that Colin couldn't quite make out in the dim light. And then! A secondary thwap of interest? Her height. She was tall. Much taller than any woman he'd ever seen, perhaps six foot two or so. Her calves were long, lean and covered in some thin -- so thin -- fabric that clung to her as wet seal skin clings.

He followed the line of her legs with cautious but persistent eyes, up and up to the dramatic bulge of her hamstrings and her high, round ass and Colin could feel himself staring -- his base operating procedure today-- and he thanked god (goddess?) it was dim and he overcorrected-- the way one does when they feel they've been caught doing something they ought not-- and he whirled around to find Georgia glaring at him with mixed annoyance and amusement. Like she'd discovered him doing something quite dirty and she was about to announce her find to the whole class. Colin swallowed and sat down. Hard.

***

And now, Colin was hard.

The class, although filled with the types of beautiful and lithe people that one expects to find on gym brochures or supplement clickbait ads, was for beginners. Colin felt more and more that there should be a word preceding 'beginner.' It wasn't the stretches or the movements that were making him uneasy, but the touching. The strange forced intimacy of it all. Colin had been, for as long as he could remember, someone to whom touch-- casual touch-- did not come naturally. Intimate touch too, by degrees.

He held Georgia's hands in both of his. As he faced her, he tried very hard to maintain the eye contact they'd been asked to make. It was perhaps nine seconds in when Colin felt his stomach drop and his palms prickle with the first threatening beads of sweat. His toes, defrocked of his usual runners tab socks, flexed feebly on the well worn floor of the studio as he tried to ground himself. 'Compassionate gaze,' my ass, he thought, this is torture.

Georgia looked up at him and he felt wholly scrutinized. There were small flecks of amber and cordovan in her dark eyes. He realized with some measure of dismay that his penis was heavy in his shorts. The beginnings of what he had called, in his hormone drenched adolescence, a 'blush boner.'

He was embarrassed, and some deep part of him liked it. He wanted to beat that part of him upside its penis-shaped head.

Georgia squeezed his hands and he refocused on her. There was something about her face. Her eyes were wide-set and rimmed in long, thick lashes. Almost too wide to be pleasant, but only almost. He had to bow his head to look at her and her lifted chin and upturned gaze felt preternaturally sensual. The absurd part of his brain asked, "because she is looking up? That's why you're half-chub?" and he mentally flogged himself. The instructor cleared her throat and called time and Colin lifted his head with mixed relief and shame. He felt like the friend in a group that leaves the party early, and nobody is surprised.

Georgia squeezed his hands again before gently releasing, and the corner of Colin's lips twitched with self-reproach. He realized he'd been clutching at her. He wiped his palms against his thighs.

Their teacher was named Anna and she spoke with the slightly uncanny phraseology of those who learn English as a second language. Eastern European, or maybe those near mythic countries such as Norway or Iceland. She had no accent, and somehow, combined with low light and the smell of sweet sweat, her presence added to Colin's now fully realized sense of unreality. No accent, but unfamiliar.

He felt well beyond his limits, like a buoy out to sea. Tethered to something deep below, but bobbing, and decidedly alone. He was feeling a lot.

"And now we take our partner to the mats and lay along the side. Face your partner as you lay on side, tucking arm below the head, and placing hand in between, just touching fingers."

Georgia peered around the room and got a handle on the assignment before Colin's sluggish brain could compute. His shorts felt too small, and he considered feigning a bathroom emergency again. Laying down next to Georgia seemed like a dicey move. But he did, and as he sat, he stealthily tucked his erection into the waistband of his shorts, peering up through his lashes to spy possible witnesses.

Georgia adjusted her mat, aligning it edge to edge with his, and sat. She settled on her side, pushed her considerable dark hair over a bare shoulder, and tucked her forearm under her left ear. They faced each other, laying side by side like so many young lovers do, and as she reached her free hand towards him he heard her say in a just-audible whisper, "I saw that." The line of her sight dipped, suggestive.

Blood pooled in his hot lap and he swallowed hard.

Her fingertips found him and she placed his palm flat on the junction of their mats. With a move both utilitarian and sensual, she wetted the first two fingers of her free hand with parted and (how had Colin failed to notice?) beautifully full lips. As Anna droned in soothing, uncanny English about the importance of feeling your body in all its stages, and, leaning into discomfort, and, breathing into your partner, Georgia placed her spit-slick fingers, one and two, in the spaces between his index, middle, and ring fingers. There, she stroked, with implausible slowness, to the top of his hand, from sensitive webbing up to the nobby ridge of his wrist bone and back down. She dipped her wet fingertips into the valleys between planted digits. Colin did not speak, or move, but just watched as the pads of her fingers left a spit shine trail along the boneyard of his hand. He couldn't breath, and his chest felt tight with anxiety and joy.

Yes, joy, for our Colin.

***

Later, in his apartment, Georgia undressed with a casualness that he'd only ever seen once. In a figure drawing class he'd audited in college. A lark. Lasted one day. When the paunchy older man had dropped his robe, a younger Colin had dropped his head, responding to the weight of shame the old man appeared not to feel.

Now, in his apartment, Georgia shimmied out of her yoga kit with the same detached clarity. She was here, it seemed to Colin, to do a job.

He watched her with uneasy anticipation. All through the class, she'd pushed him in increasingly unusual (although never conventionally sexual) ways that Colin found exhilirating. Over the ninety minutes, his unease had slowly melded with a frenetic and heady lust for the woman who had sold him nearly three hundred dollars worth of yoga accoutrement. A bounty that he was sure-- yes, sure-- he would use again.

She'd said very little on their walk back from the class. What she'd said had been softly spoken, and commanding. She'd said, "I'm coming home with you," and Colin had nodded, feeling as though his head were attached with thin, invisible cables, and some grand puppetmaster was chuckling to herself. Colin's pace quickened from stroll to trot and Georgia matched time, her hips swaying with purpose.

***

Looking back, things had finally clicked for him at about the seventy minute mark of their class. That it took such a show made Colin feel embarrassed, in retrospect. Everything about the whole acroyoga class had rendered him an idiot. Sometimes it's just like that.

Colin lay, his back on the mat, and his legs raised to about forty-five degrees. A human obtuse angle. It made a kind of sense, really. Georgia, standing before his up-raised legs, guided his feet to her hip and settled his arches over the slight mounds of her hip bones. Colin bent his knees to accommodate her height.

Anna encouraged the standing partner to place their hands on the calves of the laying one, lean forward, and get used to the 'grounded support' offered by their partners feet and legs. Georgia had for a moment, leaning forward and allowing Colin to take most of her weight-- nearly floating, balancing on his feet-- but then she'd stood, and adjusted him.

She'd put her warm, dry hands on top of his cold feet, moving them away from the strong, bountiful flesh of her thigh and hip juncture. Just a few centimeters down and then in, so his toes and the balls of his feet rested below her hipbones and unequivocally on the radiator warm expanse of her pubis.

She was hot-- that pillowy part of her body warmed the soles of his feet. And when she pressed her fingers into the tops of them and spread them, just a bit wider, he saw her expression change from sheltered mischief to soft eyed pleasure and he knew she was-- in some strange, public way-- masturbating. He could feel the rolling muscles of her lower abdomen as she clenched and released and the slightest sigh escaped his mouth and with electric fast reflexes, Georgia repositioned his feet back into the instructed, but still intimate, juncture of her hip-bones.

Now, as he watched her undress with solemn dignity, he was having a hard time reconciling this woman with the one who had, with an audience of thirty people or so, leaned her hot pussy into his willing feet. She looked up at him with the same strange mixture of mischief and defiance as she unclasped the Fort Knox of sports bras to reveal large, coffee colored breasts. Her nipples were small and hard, and Colin felt his throat constrict. He was anxiously drumming his fingers against his kitchen counter as he filled a glass with water. Offering a beverage seemed like the polite thing to do. Absurd, in the presence of bared breasts. Absurd was the word. Of the day.

She walked to him, now only in underwear and a cloth headband, pushed his glass aside, and turned off the water.

"Do you have any beer?" she asked. He did, and opened two. She took it from him and clinked, drank deeply, finishing nearly all of it, and set it aside. Her eyes never left his face. He looked everywhere but her beautiful, available breasts. She was shorter than him. By a lot. The top of her head just reached his chin, and as she gazed up and into his face, her mouth fell open into an inviting and wet 'O.' She licked her lips and said, "What do you think?"

Colin wasn't thinking. He was watching her. His usually avoidant gaze was now fully engaged in the curve of her waist, the sturdiness of her legs and the tempting roundness of her soft belly.

Her body looked like a long forgotten idol of femininity. One smoothed with hard-won satisfaction and persistent labor. One that loved food and family and knew that gossip was its own form of care.

She looked like a woman and Colin, who thought he could not get any more needy, heard a sound escape from him that could only be described as a mewl. He was a child, a hungry, hungry, kittenish child, tired, and crying for suck.

She gazed at him, her expression morphing into a sort of triumphant hunger. Even as his mind felt itself fracturing ever so slightly-- to accommodate his widening understanding of this strange world-- even as it stretched he knew from the first exhausting moments of his evening with Georgia that she was more controlled than he could ever fully know. When he would reflect on this night, the many days and months and years later, he would wonder how he knew what was coming. But he did, and his body-- usually regimented with Pavlovian regularity-- responded to his mind's secret knowledge with delightful results. He won a 27 minute battle with his body, more or less.