hers, a place where she isn’t a wife or ex-wife, a mother, an assistant, but Kit.
Just Kit.
She can’t help but sneak a peek at the stranger. He is, just as Tracy described, adorable. But more than adorable, the phrase that Tracy used recently comes to mind: tall, dark and dangerous.
He glances up from Downward Dog to find her looking at him, and she blushes furiously and looks away, not before he smiles at her. A sweet smile. Shy, almost. Embarrassed.
The lovely thing about yoga, Kit thinks, as the class ends and they bow their Namastes to one another, is that it forces you to switch your mind off for an hour and a half. It becomes more than exercise, it becomes a meditation; all you are able to do is concentrate on your poses, your breathing, being in the present.
She watches the stranger walk over to talk to the teacher, thank her, explain that he has had some problems with his knee and could some of the poses be modified. Kit rolls up her mat and leaves, wanting to strike up a conversation of some kind, but not having the slightest idea how to start.
She had met Adam so young, had been married so long, she never thought she’d be single at the age of forty, never thought she’d have to meet men, tell her stories, be vibrant and fun and interesting in a bid to attract someone who may or may not turn out to be her soul mate.
She sees others do it, put profiles up on Match.com, give their business cards out to men in bars. Business cards? Why would she have a business card? She has had a handful of dates, less perhaps, since the ending of her marriage, because she just doesn’t know how to do this whole dating thing.
She has been set up, from time to time, but that is usually awkward, and although she never expects them to be interested in her, they usually call her afterward, and she doesn’t know how to tell them she doesn’t want to see them again, so she procrastinates, or avoids picking up the phone, screening her calls until they get the message and go away.
“You’re gorgeous,” Charlie always says. “They’d be lucky to have you.”
But Kit doesn’t see gorgeous very often these days when she looks in the bathroom mirror. Mostly she sees tired. She sees gray in her hair and bags under her eyes. She sees washed-out sallow skin and a deadness to her face.
Sometimes she looks at the old pictures, from when she and Adam were married, and she barely recognizes the girl in them, not because much has changed—same hairstyle but more gray, same figure, just slightly more padded—but because the bloom of youth, already fading when she gave birth to Tory, disappeared swiftly and suddenly when she went through her divorce.
Other things disappeared just as swiftly and suddenly. The ten pounds she had been wanting to lose ever since she gave birth to Tory, fell off her frame. She still has no idea how she did it, doesn’t remember not eating, or dieting, but the stress seemed to make it melt away.
Occasionally, she can make herself look like the girl of old, the glamour girl she used to be when she was married to Adam. Like when she goes out with Tracy and Charlie, when she makes an effort, straightens her hair, brushes on blush and lip gloss, concealer on the shadows under her eyes, spray-tan to give her body a healthy glow she doesn’t usually feel. But most of the time she can’t be bothered; she runs around town with hair shoved back in a ponytail, practical and no-nonsense, certainly not wanting to be mistaken for one of the glamorous, scary mothers at school who look down their noses at Kit (or at least did, until they discovered she works for Robert McClore).
Today, for yoga, she may not have managed the lilac pants—they weren’t dry in time—but she wore the chocolate brown ones that are pretty nice, with a sky-blue tight vest. She washed her hair and blew it dry, then decided it was too over-the-top for a yoga class, so drew it back in a tight, swinging ponytail.
Adam always loved her hair back in a ponytail like this. He said she looked both elegant and young, and with her hair off her face you could actually see how pretty she is, how high her cheekbones, how full her lips.