back doors that open onto one of the fields. This one is dark and empty, not used as often as the main training field, which is a replica of Santiago Bernabéu stadium, right down to the grass.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been out here like this,” Alejo says, looking around in awe. “It’s like a totally different animal.”
The field is lit up only faintly where we are standing from the lights of the building, but as we walk off across the field to the opposite side, it grows darker and darker until no one would be able to see us at all.
The moon is out, almost full, providing us with just enough illumination, and the air smells sweet, like grass and the night-blooming flowers that line the property. There’s a light, warm breeze, and every now and then there’s a roar of an aircraft from the nearby international airport. We stop walking and watch as the plane’s lights soar high into the star-spangled sky.
Alejo looks at me, and I see something simmering in his eyes. Maybe it’s the moonlight. Maybe it’s the last two weeks of unsaid words, of putting up walls, of trying very hard to pretend that something very big almost happened between us.
I give him a hurried smile and take the mat from him, unfurling it so it’s flat on the ground.
“Sit, legs straight out.” I gesture to it, trying to ignore the heat in my core, the flutters in my stomach.
He reluctantly tears his gaze away and does as I say.
“How does that feel?” I ask him.
“Fine,” he says.
“Okay, good. So what we’re going to do is work on modified poses so that you get all the benefits but at no cost to your knee.”
He glances up at me. “You sound like a yoga instructor.”
“Well, I was a yoga instructor once upon a time.”
“When?”
“Before I was hired by LA Galaxy. I worked part-time for the Seattle Sounders, just trying to get a leg up, pun intended, and I taught yoga in my spare time.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re impressive?”
I laugh. “Not enough. Okay, so you know what? Let’s start with downward-facing dog instead.”
If he’s not looking at me with those magnetic green blue eyes of his, then I can do my job a lot better.
“And how do I do that?” he asks.
Right.
I hold out my hands and help pull him back to his feet.
Then with my hands still on his forearms, his very strong, muscled forearms, I push him back so he’s standing at the end of the mat.
I then go right beside him and demonstrate how to do a downward dog, which is pretty much your body shaped like a jackknife, and one of the easier poses.
He attempts to do the same, except his lower back is arching.
“You need to have a flatter back,” I tell him, and when he doesn’t seem to quite get it, I get up and go over to him. I place one hand on his lower back and one hand on his abs and pull up gently.
Damn these abs are the definition of washboard.
I shake the thought off, but my hands still have work to do.
I correct his hamstrings.
I correct his shoulders and arms.
Then I tell him to breathe through it.
“Am I not breathing?” he gasps, trying to look up at me.
“No. Not really. You’re not yoga breathing.”
He starts huffing and puffing, exaggerating, and in the moonlight I can see his face going red.
“Okay,” I say slowly. “So, yoga breathing is the opposite of hyperventilating.”
I then try and get him to walk his feet up slowly to the front of the mat, then gradually rise up halfway and come down in a fold.
That also doesn’t go so well.
“No, you’re not folding,” I tell him.
“I am, too. I’m folded like a paper airplane.”
He protests in such a way that I have to laugh. I think he’s a lot like me; he gets frustrated if he doesn’t get things right the first time. It’s probably why he’s so good at his job and why I’m not so bad at mine.
Still, I come up right behind him, my hips pressed against his ass, and reach down his sides, making sure his knees are bent as his arms come to the sides of them.
“This is an extremely sexual position,” he says.
I bite my lip and smile. “Not when I’m doing this to you.”