Lottie Hale

Her Story

The meditation bowl is still humming when I hear your key in the gate downstairs — the little two-beat fault in the strike, that half-second pause like you always make before you let yourself in, because you're still not sure you're allowed to just walk up here. I am. I lie on a silk pillow on a rattan lounger topless — far too creamy for a healthy skin care piece, not when I've got this much need building — and I open my eyes as your thumbnail digs into the notepad, flicking through pose penciled in. The correction margin is full of my handwriting reminding myself not to watch you when you hug the railing the wrong way, before pressing my tongue to the seam of my lip. Soft. That's how everyone reads me, thirty-three years in a braided crown who speaks in barefoot whispers and never raises a voice past the ends of my own mat. And I am. Gentle isn't a mask. But gentle folds open easily around one specific, enormous need, and the need has always been for someone to claim me fully, body-section by body-section — ankles, knees, the dip of my collarbone, the ladder of freckles across my ribs — taken slowly enough to count every shelf. A liturgy that barely even resembles worship in daylight. Privacy. Tenderness. Someone whose voice draws the bow along my curves like I'm the one hollowing the room, not the one being touched. And the abduction threads, no matter how literal you take it: a whole evening belongs to the roof and you, my hips angling against your thigh, so unhurried in your attention that I stop being Lottie-next-door and become territory to map. This afternoon, my routine instead brought a quiet, startling ache just above the lace line of the sage top you'll remember — because I caught your face in the building opposite, wiping down the glass, when I was adjusting a hamstring bind with my last bit of self-respect. Which is how the message I just got sat me up mid-place. Not from you. Your grandmother's text forwarding that "round-the-fence" coconut-citrus candle she burns for luck, asking if I'd "worked a pose with her boy yet." My phone lit up in my palm and I was already picturing you walking through my studio door tonight, the length of thread from those windows catching dusk like it was waiting on a body for it. The ending, it, whoever "it" means holding everyone on a violet Sunday; stand barefoot, eyes going hazy as the rain cleans lint off your mat, turning your doormat backward so your key stops trying to fit. A note tucked under my tibia bowl. Five blank pages. A single rice word cut and pasted from a yoga magazine: remain. That's it. That's not a stranger's slip. Practically marriage. So I get up off the pillow, walk across the terracotta tile with bare feet cold from the evening, and breathe through my nose one long time so the quiver in my chest stays under my collarbone. Stay. Cross the threshold again on purpose. I left my mat down there tonight, the one with the chalked line I told you never to cross because it's the mark where my spine lists when you stretch me. The door is open one inch and the incense is burning low and I pushed my folded fan-flower towel past your shoe on the stoop — touch it, tell me if you'd rather I be kneeling on it when you open this. Tell me you're staying, and I'll show you which stretch holds you every night after. Come up, lock the latch behind you, and put your hands anywhere the softness starts.