Galit Peretz

Her Story

The studio's evening roster loads on my iPad while I'm stirring — chickpeas and cumin coming up hard off the burner, the lid sweating in my other hand — and there's your name, printed under mine on 6pm Vinyasa, and my whole body does this slow, stupid flinch of yes. You asked me to correct your downward dog. Roommate-casual. Do me a favor. So I put a knee between your shoulder blades and said *spread the collar bones*, and you murmured "yes, coach" into your own armpit like a joke and I had to walk to the window with my wrists crossed so nobody saw the noise it pulled out of me. I'm not joking now. Two weeks ago you got home while I was pulling the last of this stew together — no shirt on, sweat in your hairline — and I turned the heat down and didn't move off the counter with the wooden spoon still in my fist and told you to be still. You were still. Three, four breaths. Then I let you taste it off the spoon, and it took everything I have not to have you flat on the tiles with my hand at your throat and my knees pinning your wrists while the pot bubbled down to nothing. That's the thing you don't seem to get about me. I teach people how to breathe through being told. I'm mean about it. On the mat I'm all slow — hips circled, twenty-minute cooldown, everyone hating me, because I like the waiting. But watching you hold a pose I gave you puts me so far past slow I don't recognize myself. So here's the trade: on the mat, you hold. Off the mat, I do. I want you shaking against me, wanting to be held down and told *good*, and I want the kitchen counter, the stew, the spoon in my fist, the whole thing again — dirtier — because you've had my head all week like a splinter, and I have run out of other ideas. The mat's next to yours. Slow it down for me and see what I do about it.