My Friend's Mother’s Yoga Changed That Summer

I’ve known Bruno since we were both wearing shorts and fighting over the same video game. He’s that lifelong friend with whom you collect stories you then tell at every family dinner to leave everyone speechless. We’d go out until impossible hours, drag ourselves back to his place, and sleep in until late morning before each of us returned to our life until the next weekend.

His parents split up when he was very little, so Bruno grew up alone with his mother. Her name was Marisol, though everyone in the neighborhood knew her as Mari. She worked shifts at a clinic and was almost never home, which, when we were teenagers, had given us free rein to do whatever we wanted. But this story I’m about to tell didn’t happen back then. It happened later, the summer I was already twenty-two and had come back from my student flat with a dead week stretching ahead of me.

Physically, Mari had always been a sight to behold. Even today I think Bruno’s father was an idiot for letting a woman like that go. Long, straight black hair, dark eyes, defined eyebrows, wide hips, and firm thighs of someone who took very good care of her body. She had a deep, calm voice that wrapped around you before you even noticed. As a kid, she made me nervous just by talking to me. As an adult, I should have known how to control myself better. I didn’t.

My parents had gone on a trip using their vacation time and, since I no longer had anything to do with that plan, Mari offered to let me stay at her house with Bruno for a few days, like when we were kids. I agreed without thinking. August, heat that stuck your T-shirt to your back, the pool in the yard, and the console until late. A perfect plan and, in theory, an innocent one.

The first morning I woke up early. Bruno was still snoring in his room, so I went to the bathroom, splashed water on my face, and walked into the living room half asleep. And there she was.

Mari was lying on a mat on the floor, following a yoga video on the television. A soft voice repeated breathing instructions. She wore tight gray leggings and a loose tank top, and she moved with focused slowness, as if I weren’t there. I froze in the doorway, not quite sure what to do with my hands.

“Good morning, Mari,” I said at last.

“Good morning, honey. Were you able to sleep with this heat?” she replied without even opening her eyes.

“So-so. I think I’m sweating through my elbows. You, on the other hand, are already up and at it.”

“I like taking care of myself, you know that,” she said, and for the first time turned her head to look at me.

I didn’t know how to keep the conversation going. My gaze was caught by the way she held herself up on her forearms, by the line of her back, by a pose that my twenty-two-year-old brain stubbornly insisted on reading in the worst possible way. I cleared my throat and fled to the kitchen.

“Help yourself to whatever you want, there’s everything in the fridge,” her voice reached me from the living room.

I poured myself some juice and grabbed a few cookies and ate standing by the counter, pretending to look at my phone when in reality I was spying on her over the screen. Every new posture was a little torture. She’s Bruno’s mother. She’s Bruno’s mother. I repeated it like a mantra that did absolutely nothing.

I finished, left the glass in the sink, and passed in front of her to head back into the hallway. Mari, who at that moment was sitting cross-legged with her arms stretched out, looked up and gave me a smile that was not entirely innocent.

“Do you want to do yoga with me?” she asked.

“Now?” I blurted out, alarmed.

“Now. It’s the best time, before the heat gets worse. And it’ll do you good; you look tense,” she said, barely holding back a laugh.

“Well. I suppose it can’t hurt.”

I took my place beside her on the rug, trying to hide the obvious fact that I’d been noticing tension in places I shouldn’t have for too long. She straightened up with a smooth movement and began to guide me.

“Stand here, next to me, and copy what I do. It doesn’t have to come out well, just breathe,” she said.

I tried. I laughed at myself; she laughed at me too, heartily, every time I got tangled up or lost my balance in some ridiculous pose. Little by little I began to fall into her rhythm. The breathing, the stretching, the silence between one instruction and the next. For a while I almost forgot how awkward the situation was and simply followed her movements, attentive to her voice.

“I need your help with the next one,” she said at one point. “Stand behind me and hold my hips to keep my balance.”

“By the hips?” I repeated, my mouth dry.

“Yes. I’m going to bend forward with my hands on the floor, and I need you to hold me so I don’t fall. Ready?”

“Ready,” I lied.

***

I knelt behind her and put my hands on her hips. Mari bent slowly, shifting her weight back, and suddenly her lower back was pressed against me. The contact stole my breath. Nothing else was needed. The thin fabric of the leggings, the warmth of her body, the way she settled against me without pulling away: everything lined up so I completely lost track of what I was doing.

“Hold me tight, don’t let go,” she murmured.

“I’ve got you,” I answered, my voice rough.

I don’t know exactly when the pose stopped being a pose. She didn’t move away and I made no move to create distance. My fingers closed more firmly over her hips. Mari let out a long, low sigh, nothing like yogic breathing, and turned her head just enough to look at me over her shoulder.

“Are you okay?” she asked, and the question sounded like something else.

“Not really,” I admitted.

“I can see that,” she said, and smiled.

She was the one who finished erasing the distance. She straightened slowly without separating from me, until she was standing with my chest against her back and my hands still on her waist. She tilted her head back, resting it on my shoulder, and let me breathe in the smell of her neck, a mix of cream and warm sweat that finished clouding my judgment.

“This is insane,” I whispered against her hair.

“It is,” she replied. “And I don’t feel like stopping. Do you?”

I didn’t answer with words. I moved her hair aside and kissed her neck, slowly, and felt her skin prickle beneath my lips. Her hands found mine and guided them, one to her stomach, flat and firm, the other sliding just under her shirt. Marisol had been alone in that house for weeks, maybe months. She didn’t need to tell me; I understood it in the hungry way she pressed herself against me.

We turned until we were facing each other. I kissed her on the mouth at last, and it was a long, hungry kiss, the kind that leaves no room for turning back. She dug her fingers into my hair and I held her by the waist, pressing her against the living room wall, away from the picture window, in the corner where no one passing by in the yard could see us.

“The hallway,” I said between kisses. “If Bruno wakes up…”

“He won’t wake up before noon, I know him,” she replied, laughing against my mouth. “Shut up and keep up.”

***

Marisol had that confidence only years can give, the confidence of a woman who knows exactly what she wants and has no hurry to hide it. She took my hand and led me to the sofa, nudged me gently to sit down, and stood in front of me, watching me with a slow smile before climbing onto my lap astride. The warm weight of her body on mine, her black hair falling over her face, her wide hips molding to me. It was my teenage fantasy made real, multiplied by ten, because now she was the one setting the pace.

“Easy,” she said, stroking my jaw. “Don’t rush. We have all morning.”

I kissed her neck, her collarbone, while she moved with a calculated slowness that had me on the verge of losing my mind. Every time I tried to speed things up, she stopped me, held my wrists, made me wait. She enjoyed the control, watching me hold myself back, rationing pleasure like something valuable. And I, who had come into that house convinced I knew something about life, discovered within minutes that I knew nothing.

“Like this?” she asked in my ear, in that deep voice.

“Better than good,” I gasped.

“Then hang on a little longer,” she said, and laughed, delighted by my desperation.

When she finally stopped torturing me, she did it completely. She moved against me with an intensity that changed the entire mood of the living room: there was nothing left of yoga or guided meditations, only two bodies finding each other with an urgency that had been bottled up too long. I held her back, she clung to my shoulders, and the whole morning was distilled into that sofa, into her broken breathing, into the way she kept saying my name as if she were discovering it.

We both finished almost at the same time, exhausted and tangled up, with summer light pouring in through the picture window. She collapsed onto my chest, sweaty, and stayed there for a while, listening to my heart pounding at full speed. I stroked her back. We didn’t say anything for a good while, and the silence, far from being awkward, was the best part of all.

“Good thing your son sleeps like a log,” I said at last, laughing softly. “If he had come downstairs, I don’t know how I’d explain this.”

“Good thing, yes,” she replied, kissing my chest. “Though something tells me you’d have been able to make something up. Come on, help me tidy up before he shows up.”

We got up laughing, rearranged the sofa cushions, folded the mat, and left the living room exactly as it had been, as if absolutely nothing had happened there. I took a shower, got dressed, and went back to Bruno’s room with my heart still racing and a smile so big it barely fit on my face.

I found him sitting in front of the computer, just awake, his eyes half-open.

“Have you eaten breakfast yet?” he asked without turning around.

“Yeah, yeah. I ran into your mother in the living room,” I replied, trying to keep my voice normal.

“And how is she?”

“Fine,” I said, and couldn’t help smiling. “She really likes yoga.”

Bruno nodded without giving it any importance and turned back to his screen. I flopped onto the bed, staring at the ceiling, knowing that this was going to be the longest and most interesting week of vacation in my life. And that, from that morning on, I would never hear the word “yoga” the same way again.