and nature scenes—and also in my car while it was parked near the back of a Target parking lot. It was kind of incredible how fast I got used to him filming me jerk off. And it wasn’t just that I got used to it, but it turned me on, too.
Another plus was that Jesse was easy to get along with. He had good ideas, and he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind if something wasn’t working or looked bad. Sometimes I got the idea that people blew smoke up my ass, either because of football or because of how big I was. Not Jesse, though, and his honesty put me at ease.
“Sure you really want to do this?” Jesse cast me a skeptical glance as we stood outside the door of the hot yoga studio on a Sunday afternoon.
“How many is the number of times you want me to say yes? Just tell me so I can go ahead and get it over with? Is it five? Yesyesyesyesyes. Six?” Except, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this. I’d already done a morning workout, and we’d had a strenuous home game yesterday, but I hadn’t been doing anything else that afternoon besides lying on the couch zoning out to SportsCenter when Jesse had thundered down the stairs looking purposeful in tight little shorts and a muscle tank that emphasized his lean build.
Yoga seemed like a better way to pass the time than more SportsCenter. Also, I liked being around him. I never knew what was going to come out of his mouth.
Jesse cut me off with a slice of his hand through the air. “Just checking, because hot yoga isn’t just doing some flexibility stuff in a warm room while watching girls sweat.”
I snorted. “Thanks. I’m not sure if you remember, but I’m a sports ball player, as you say. I can handle rigorous exercise in the heat.”
But I’d never held a ninety-second-long warrior pose at a million degrees Fahrenheit before.
Ten minutes into the class, I was dripping sweat in time to the plinky nature music playing in the background. Compression tights had been the wrong call. Jesse had warned me, but I’d insisted because I worked out in them regularly. My leg hair was a mat of carpet smothering my skin, and I wasn’t necessarily an overly hairy dude. My balls rivaled Okefenokee at the height of summer.
Diagonally to me, Jesse maintained the pose with little apparent trouble, eyes closed, his expression peaceful. Even the sweat rolling down his face did so at a sedate pace.
He inhaled and exhaled serenely while my quad tried to peel off the bone.
When the rest of the class deepened the stretch, I shortened mine and wrestled off my soaked T-shirt. It hit the ground with a wet plop that cut through the music. The lady next to me flinched, glancing over at me with flared nostrils and a shake of her head as if I’d committed a major faux pas.
“Sorry,” I muttered, which must have been another faux pas because I got more stares, the guy to my left getting in on the action this time with a stern, thin-lipped expression aimed my way.
The instructor, Honora, moved gracefully toward me, laid one hand on my lower back, the other on my stomach, and somehow forced my posture straighter.
From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Jesse’s lips twitch into a smile.
“Breathe from your core,” she suggested. The inferno raging in my thigh got worse as she smoothed down over it and urged me deeper into the stretch.
Not wanting to look like an idiot, I complied. Or tried to. “My rib cage is touching my throat,” I whispered.
“Because you’re not breathing from your belly.” She tapped my thigh lightly. “The shaking is normal,” she murmured. I wanted to tell her I knew all about muscle exhaustion, thank you very fucking much, but I refrained. She smiled gently. “Find a point of focus. It helps.”
What I wanted to find was a massage parlor or an ice bath.
I tried to breathe from my belly and found a place in the mirror to stare at, but my gaze kept drifting toward Jesse.
His movements were poised and smooth as we transitioned from Warrior I into Warrior II. He was lean, hardly what anyone would call muscular, but elegant and taut. A rivulet of sweat fell from a strand of hair to the nape of his neck and funneled down into the gulley of his spine,