A Taste of Chi

  Alison Tyler

  I’d been with Andrew for seven years—and we hadn’t made love once. You would think two expert yoga instructors would have incredible sex, but he believed it was a waste of chi, a loss of vital life force. And slowly he made me think the same way, taming the sexuality that was once so fervent in me.

  Then Cormac Smith walked into one of my classes. Suddenly seven years’ worth of pent-up emotions and sexual frustration stirred, making me realize just how much I had sacrificed—and what Cormac could give me instead….

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  Sound effects did not go off when he walked into the studio. No golden lights flared in my head. And if his body looked leaner or more attractive in his black sweats and plain gray T-shirt than the rest of my students, I didn’t notice. He was simply one more man in an overheated room.

  No, sir, I didn’t imagine him fucking me up against the tapestry of the goddess Kali, right there, in front of eleven other pupils. I did not envision him ripping aside my pale turquoise yoga pants and pulling down my lilac bikinis, before dropping to his knees and pressing his face to the split of my body. I never considered gripping into his thick curly hair and holding him to me as I ground my pussy against his face until I came, so hard and so fiercely that I could not even remember my name.

  Please believe that I did not think of him touching me, touching me, touching me until I begged him to stop, until I told him if he kept licking me like that even after I’d already come twice, I would wet myself. And I assure you, I didn’t fantasize about the look in his dark brown eyes, the glitter swirl within them as he said, “Go ahead, doll. Then wet yourself.”

  It would take a dirtier imagination than the one that I possess to describe all the different ways I didn’t think of him fucking me.

  He was simply a man. A man who chose a position in the rear corner, back near the wall, who spread out his navy blue mat like every other student and looked expectantly in my direction.

  I nodded to him, the way I nodded to each of the other participants in my beginner’s yoga class, and then I closed the French doors and started the class. I didn’t gaze at that man in the rear of the classroom more than half a dozen times as I led the students through the motions.

  Well, maybe I glanced at him seven times.

  But who’s counting?

  Look, I’m not someone who will go down in history as having known how to relax. I have always been tightly wound, highly strung. I went to yoga in the first place to figure out how to let loose, how to release my inner chakras. But I wound up giggling half the time. The names of the poses themselves were comical—the scorpion, the cow, the happy baby, the camel. Then I took a class that Andrew was teaching, and suddenly I thought I would catch on. I thought that perhaps, if I was lucky, some of his peace would rub off on my mind… Or at least, something of his would rub off on something of mine.

  God, I thought of Andrew all the time. Rubbing me, stroking me, bending me into the free-flowing forms that I knew only he could do. In class, as I did downward facing dog, I would imagine Andrew pulling my hair and doing me doggy style. And then, there was seal style, a pose I’d never heard of before. As a yoga position, the stretch was inspiring. As a sex position? Maybe I’d invented it myself, but I could easily envision the two of us together, barking and slapping.

  My fantasies ran away with me, as slippery and rampant as the perspiration that pooled at the back of my neck and slid down my spine. Did other students know that under all that sweat, I was also wet? I didn’t care. Back then, I only cared about Andrew.

  I’d be his tree and let him cut me down.

  I’d be his dead man and let him practice necrophilia.

  I’d be anything and anyone he wanted.

  Andrew would end all of his classes with the same instructions, “Don’t breathe the breath, let the breath breathe you.”

  And I’d think, “Don’t fuck the teacher, let the teacher fuck you.”

  But that was a lifetime ago. I was such a neophyte. Now, I can do even the most difficult positions. After years of studying, traveling each spring to India with Andrew to learn at the feet of the masters, creating videos, audio tapes, even sponsoring our own line of clothing, I am limber in both body and mind.

  Yet the beginners touch a soft spot in me. They call out in their creakiness, in the way their joints snap, in the flush of embarrassment when they bend to try to touch their palms flat on the floor, and find that they can barely touch their knees. But if anything stood out to me about the stranger, it was that he was one of the worst of the new students. He had no visible grace, no ease with his body. He seemed a jumble of limbs, and I saw a look of frustration creep into his face rather than a flicker of calm.

  Soon, I found myself at the back of the room, with my hands on his shoulders, moving, gently, until he could feel the correct posture. I nudged and maneuvered. I gave quiet encouragement, and I kept my eyes on him when I moved to the next position.

  Looking back, was there something between us that first day? The answer is a resounding “No.” I only was doing my job. I only wanted to help.

  “Namaste,” I said when he left.

  “See ya,” he responded.

  I swear to you on my stack of yoga manuals that there were no bells and whistles. No OMs like angels singing in a heavenly choir. But maybe I didn’t feel anything because I hadn’t felt anything for so long.

  Not a twinge. Not a clench. Not a fucking thing.

  If Andrew had been teaching the class, would he have sensed something that I missed? Without a doubt. Because Andrew is in a heightened state of perpetual overload. He notices the most minute switch in the color of the sky when the pulse changes from scarlet to cobalt light, senses a difference in the way the birds’ song shifts from a low warble to a flat out mating call. He sniffs the air and notes the day when the pale white blossoms begin their ever so subtle shift to fruit.

  And this is why we never fuck.

  “Excuse me?” my therapist asked, shocked into a harsh cough rather than her standard sweet-and-low murmur. She wasn’t accustomed to hearing me use four-letter words.

  “This is why we never fuck,” I repeated slowly, making each word separate, seeing the string of words hang in the air between us.

  “Do you mean that you ‘make love’?” She was hoping I suppose, for me, for Andrew, and even for herself that the two of us did something physical together. Hoping the way the masses hope that Angelina and Brad have a rollicking sex life, because this gives the punch-a-clock workers something to fantasize about.

  In our small universe, people have to believe Andrew and I are electric together. I know that. I can bend myself into a pretzel. He can twist himself into a curly fry. Together we must fuck like junk food on acid. We must stay up all night in sweaty embraces. His lingam and my yoni. His yin and my yang. His total, unshakeable…

  “…belief that it’s a waste of chi,” I explained to Melinda as patiently as I could.

  Her blank stare forced me to continue.

  “Andrew doesn’t want to lose any bit of his vital life fluid—”

  “I’ve never heard it called that before,” Melinda said.

  “He is a follower of a specific type of yoga,” I explained, wondering why I felt embarrassed, as if the fact that Andrew didn’t want to sleep with me was somehow my fault. That if I were prettier, or sexier, or maybe if my aura were a little bit cleaner, I’d be able to change his mind. “He doesn’t think sex will hurt him, but that physical coupling is just not necessary.”

  Her look of noncomprehension continued.

  “Andrew believes that if he reaches the peak, he will spill precious…” I trailed off. All right. Here’s where I admit my own deep, dark secret. I’d never fully understood what he believed, the reasons behind why he didn’t want to have sex, to screw me, to fuck us both into Nirvana and back.

  But if I were unable to put his rationale into words, at least I should have been able to explain myself, right? I mean, why would I have hooked up with someone who didn’t want to go all the way? Why would I agree to step back into those high school days of almost reaching it, of petting to panting, of going just so far before stopping? And worse than that, we didn’t even pet.

  Some might think it’s because I’m one of those girls who doesn’t like sex. But that’s a lie. Sex has always been important to me—at least it was up until Andrew and I got together. Even during my single times, I visited toy stores, read erotica, touched myself in the shower using my most fantastically effervescent handheld nozzle.

  What would make me forgo earthly pleasures?

  At first, I think, I was simply charmed by Andrew’s faith, fascinated the way any good pupil would be. His glow is like a halo. You can see that he believes inside and out that his way is the only way. To further tip the scales in his favor, Andrew possesses the type of matinee idol good looks that make women drop their spoons in coffee shops. I’ve had my own share of admirers to know that I can cause a spoon to hit the floor as well. Or a tree to bear fruit. Or whatever the hell Andrew would say in his poetic way to make the female students (and a few of the males, as well) tremble and lose their balance, just so he will go and help straighten a spine, or stretch a tight muscle, or caress a rumpled…

  How do I know his techniques so well?

  Because I was one of those women in his class who would get her toenails done right before yoga, so that even my feet were pampered for him, adorned with sparkly che rry colored nail polish. I even added a gold-and-garnet toe ring and an ankle bracelet made of semiprecious gems. The rest of me, I clad in nearly nude stretchy Lycra clothes that showed off my trim figure to the extreme. When I sweat—as everyone did in the saunalike atmosphere—I knew that my clothes would become almost transparent. If Andrew glanced at me quickly, he might actually think that I was naked.

  I wanted him to think of me naked, the way I thought of him naked. The way I pictured the two of us, doing all of those moves together, but moves that I had magically transformed into naughty sex techniques.

  After class, I would fall into my car and touch myself, imagining him. I always parked in the far corner of the lot, and I prayed nobody else knew what I was doing, hoped that people simply thought that I was having a few Namaste moments of my own.

  I was. If Namaste is code word for earth-shattering climaxes.

  Andrew was the best looking man I ever met, but that’s not the only reason why I wanted him. I mean, I might not be deep like my man, but I’m not as shallow as the gazing pool outside of our yoga studio. There was a connection between us, I have to say it. I don’t care how e-Harmony-dot-com cliché it sounds. He met my eyes, and I felt the muscles in my stomach tighten. He gave me a passing glance as he strode among the pupils, and I thought I might faint.

  “It’s the heat in the room,” I told myself. The yoga Andrew favors is often practiced in a fire-and-brimstone environment.

  But even I knew I was lying.

  Andrew felt the same way I did.

  First sign was that he never touched me. Not once. In essence, this was the opposite of the way you could tell boys liked you back in grammar school, when they’d pull your hair or pound you on the back. Andrew never laid a finger on me. He moved from student to student, but only stroked me with his gaze. I knew my posture was acceptable, but not perfect, not ace enough for him to have no need to offer constructive criticism. How odd that he wouldn’t use his hands on me.

  They weren’t hands I would have expected. Not big and strong, but shapely and elegant. A pianist’s hands. An artist’s hands. I found myself fantasizing about his fingertips, thinking what they would feel like on my spine, or under my collarbone, or in my panties. Oh, they would twirl there, just the tip, around and around. He would do all those limber moves he taught the rest of the class, but he’d use his middle finger alone, dipping into me, pushing up, finding the rhythm that I so deeply craved. He would instruct my body with this sole finger, the way he instructed the students, positioning me, directing me. And I would come balanced on the tip of this single digit, orgasm with the type of shattering climax reserved for only the truest practitioners of the art of fucking.

  The fact that he never touched me at all—although I would have paid double if he had—made me feel as if I’d put him off guard. As if I’d shaken him up. I could tell from the way that he looked at me that I had a bit of power over him. And that warmed me inside even more than Mercury in retrograde. I was hot for him.

  When we initially got together, the way Andrew gazed at me was enough. I could feel the way he wanted me.

  We went out, to all the places good yogis go. We had raw food together at a chi-chi place in Marin. We collected polished sea glass and talked about our preference for firm tofu over the slimier semifirm.

  For weeks, I wondered when he’d make the first move.

  He never did.

  As the time passed, we slept in the same bed—I say bed, but really a traditional futon, shipped from Japan—without ever touching one another. And we hit a point in which I realized we’d gone through a door, crossed over a threshold, reached a higher plane—Nirvana.

  With no fucking bliss.

  I started to think that I was too slutty. That he had sensed what I did in my shower, all by myself, and that even though I was bathing under the hottest water, I wasn’t clean enough for him. Somehow, the fear of hearing an answer like that kept me from asking the question. I simply let us progress, from friends to cohabitants, hoping that at some point he’d touch me. He’d put out his hand and run his elegant, eloquent fingers down between my breasts, over the basin of my belly, to the split of my legs. He’d make spirals with his middle finger—that’s all I would need, that’s all it would take—and I would come, shaking and dripping and finally cleansed.

  Or if I was not cleansed, then maybe he would be a little bit dirty. We’d even each other out. Yin and yang, like they say. I would return the favor. I would go on my knees—fuck the yoga mat, right there on the hardwood floor. I would pull down his drawstring one hundred percent cotton sweats and release his hard-on. I’d part my lips and draw him in, swallowing him, showing him exactly how good I could make him feel. We’d reach that state together. That state of transcendence.

  If he could touch me like that with his eyes alone, wouldn’t he be surprised what could happen when we actually met flesh to flesh?

  We were moving in together before he finally explained. As I boxed up my belongings and brought them all to Andrew’s, I asked myself question after question:

  Why should sex be so important?

  Was I so superficial that I couldn’t understand that bond Andrew and I had together? We were best friends (without benefits), the closest of compadres. He knew what I was thinking before I opened my mouth, knew the food I wanted to order at our favorite vegan restaurant before I even cracked the menu.

  When I moved in, he helped me unpack; carefully hanging my clothes in his wardrobe, all cotton, nonsynthetic, no animals were harmed to make these outfits. He’d taken my box of toiletries to the bathroom. I wasn’t thinking about anything sexual when I heard that familiar buzzing sound.

  “What’s this?”

  There he was, standing in the doorway, holding my big purple vibrator in his hand, like a divining rod, but instead of water the thing was oscillating as if in search of a wet pussy.

  I swallowed hard. Did he really not know what it was? Or was he using the sex toy to broach the subject of our chilly sex life? Did he maybe want to use the toy on me, or have me use it on him? I started to get flushed, and I realized how long it had been since I’d had a good, hard fucking. Months. Months of celibacy. If someone had told me then that those months would stretch to years, I would have run screaming from the building.

  “Vibrator,” I said, cheeks turning the same shade of the violet toy.

  “You don’t use it, do you?” Judgment. I heard that tone in his voice.

  That’s when Andrew explained to me that although he did not believe sexual release harmed the body he did not find it necessary to engage in that sort of activity.

  That sort. What sort? The X-rated, twist us up together into double knots. I mean, we could look like an X if we tried, his body over mine, his cock at the center of my moon chakra—or sun chakra—or some chakra. I never really got the theory of the chakras and nadis and pranas and chi/ki. To his benefit, Andrew gave me the books, but I didn’t have the stomach to learn the meridians—I’ve never had a very good sense of direction.

  “I’m talking about hatha yoga,” he said finally. “About sublimating the sexual desires in place of an even higher state of arousal.”

  My eyes must have started to glaze as he explained in the most matter-of-fact way possible, “Look, it’s just a waste of chi.”

  So when Cormac Smith entered my realm of vision, why didn’t I catch the signs right away?

  I think it was because my radar was so unused, I had no idea what the signs even were. Like an alien visiting from another planet, who would have no idea what a red or yellow light meant in significance to green. My aura had been cleansed, yes. There was no toxicity left in my body, and my chi circulated regularly in a golden spring. What dirty thoughts I might once have had when faced with such an interesting male specimen had been demolished, reprogrammed, cut down at the source.

  Not only did I no longer feel attractive, but I didn’t even feel fully female. I simply was. A teacher, a partner, a student. But not a woman. I experienced not a twinge between my legs when I watched Andrew showering. I felt no sense of impending pleasure when I saw him undressing. There was nothing between us—not as if a spark had been extinguished, but as if we were simply the ocean and the sand, there was a sense of eternity to our movements, and yet erosion will slowly wear down a coastline.

 

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