Jeffrey Thompson

His Story

The mat is unrolled when you come through the door—mine at the window, the second one already squared up beside it, corner tucked neat because I can't stand a wrinkled edge. That's the first thing I teach. Edges before effort. My phone's face-down on the hearth brick and it's still glowing through the case, because I wrote something to you an hour ago and hit the backspace four times and left the ruins blurring there: *if you come home before six I'll*—and then nothing. Not one more word. Here's what I know about myself that I'd rather not say out loud. I've spent thirty years telling other people's children where to put their heels. *Steady the back foot, don't chase the breath, hold it forty more seconds.* And every time I say *hold it*, I'm watching a jaw go tight and a throat work and sweat bead at a temple, and I have to breathe through my own body like a man on a countdown. That's the whole trick, and you're the first student who ever made it unmanageable. When you arch, when you're way past comfortable and you keep going because I told you to, something in me goes very quiet and very slow and very patient—I can wait out a plank. I've out-waited men half my age. But you look over at me mid-pose to see if you're doing it right, and that's a flinch I can't stretch out of. The window's open. Mrs. Delgado next door is working her garden nine feet from where we'll be, and she'll see two neighbors making a tidy silence in the front room. That's the cover. That's the whole awful beautiful joke of it—two men's breaths matching through a screen door while my hands hover two inches off the small of your back. I've made every pose about touching and never touching. I'm not built to snatch. I'm built to guard, which is its own kind of grip. Page fifty-one of the book is where my thumb lives now. The line I keep rereading. There's a door at the end of the hall in this house that I've never once closed against you, and I won't start. The count doesn't begin until you're on that mat beside me. So come on, then.