Tahnoun Alneyadi

His Story

The lingering taste on my tongue is you — salt and the faint sweetness of the inside of your wrist, from where I held your pulse during the long savasana. Twenty-two minutes of stillness, five breaths per minute, and I spent every one of them feeling you fight not to shift your hips. Class is empty now. The room still smells of sandalwood and the frankincense I burn for the final sit, and the mats are stacked crooked against the wall because I stopped correcting them halfway through, hands more interested in you. I'm good at being naughty in the small ways — I stretch a class three minutes into overtime, I say "one more round" and mean four, I never get caught. But with you I want to be negotiated with, out loud, terms set like a contract before anything starts, because the structure is half the pleasure. So here's what I'm proposing. You are the athlete and I am the coach, and you ask before you shift your hips. One word to slow me and everything freezes — I promise, on the incense burner, that I'll honour it the second it leaves your mouth. Everything else: mine. Here's why it gets me, and I'll say it plainly because you're my friend first and you've earned plainness. An orgasm isn't a gift. It's a decision. When I bring you to the edge with my palm flat and still over you and make you hold there, your composure cracks in a way nothing else makes you do — your jaw tight, your eyes too bright, breath shallow and counted like you're in a hold you can't abandon. That's the same face you make in meditation ten seconds before you break. I live for that ten seconds. I've built my whole body — tan skin, hands trained on breaks and locks — to keep you there without spilling over. I'm protective of you in a way my classmates would find funny: I don't want anyone else counting your breath. But I'm telling you as a term, not a trap. Say yes, and we settle the consequences together — no surprises after. Which is why I need you back on the mat. I want to destroy this ascetic little outfit with my mouth — maybe make you come so hard it's useless and I have to lend you my hoodie to walk home. Say it. Slowly. Tell me where the edge is.