Author: Akiko

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The rocks were still warm from the day, sharp under my bare feet. I picked my way out along them with my margarita held high like a torch.

Ana was on the last flat boulder, hands in prayer position above her head, the sun burning down behind her. She wore leggings and a sports bra, and a sheen of sweat across her stomach. She didn’t turn round.

“You’re two minutes late for sun salutation,” she said.

“I’ve been told that before. By the Canadians.”

She laughed, low and warm, and turned. The lotus tattoo showed above her waistband. A single drop of sweat ran from her collarbone down between her breasts. I watched it go.

“I teach on the beach most evenings,” she said. “Nobody comes out this far. It’s the one place I can think.”

“Sorry. I’ll go.”

“Don’t.” She said it quickly, and touched my wrist, and left her hand there. Her palm was dry and very warm. “I was hoping it’d be you. Sophie, I’ve been trying to work out for three days how to ask you for a drink without it being a conversation about stretching.”

I held up my glass. “I have a drink.”

“So you do.” She took it out of my hand and sipped, eyes on mine over the rim, and the last of the sun slid under the sea. The rock felt very small and very private. My heart was a trapped bird.

“This is the bit where you tell me what you’d like,” Ana said.

→ I kiss her, now, with the sun going down

→ I ask her to teach me a pose, on these rocks

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I put one finger on Lou’s lips. “Not yet,” I whispered. “I want to see you two first.”

Lou’s eyes went huge, then dark and delighted. She looked over her shoulder at Gary. “Did you hear that?”

“I heard it,” he said, a bit strangled.

I took my glass and a lounger and sat down in the shadows beside the pool like a woman at the theatre. Lou climbed out of the water, slow, dripping, golden, took Gary by the hand and led him to the wide stone edge, ten feet from me.

She kissed him. It was nothing like a stranger’s kiss. It was ten years of knowing exactly what the other one liked. He peeled her bikini bottoms off, and she knelt on the warm stone with her back arched and her eyes fixed on mine, and he knelt behind her, and put his hands on her hips.

“Look at her, Gary,” Lou said. “Look at her watching us.”

He pushed into her with one long groan. I heard the wet sound of it. I watched her face go slack and her breasts swing and his thick cock disappearing into her over and over, and my hand had found its way inside my wrap dress and under my bikini before I even decided to do it. I was soaked. My thighs were trembling.

“Sophie,” Lou gasped, between thrusts. “Love. There’s room.”

The whole villa smelled of chlorine and sex and prosecco. My fingers were slick. The moon had come out over the palms.

→ I stay in my seat and enjoy the show

→ I stand up, flustered, and tell them I need to go

← Back

I put my glass down, slid into the water and pulled her against me.

It was warm as a bath. Lou’s body was strong and soft and slippery, and she made a low pleased noise into my mouth as I pushed my fingers into her wet hair. Her hands found the tie on my wrap dress and then I was just in a bikini, and then I wasn’t. My breasts were against hers. Her nipples were hard as pebbles against mine.

“Oh, you’re gorgeous,” Lou breathed. “Gary, isn’t she gorgeous?”

“Christ,” said Gary, from the lounger. “Yes. Sophie, you’re unbelievable.”

I glanced across. He’d stripped off his shorts, and he was sitting with one hand round a very large, very red, very interested cock, stroking lazily, watching us with his mouth open. The sight made me gasp. Lou smiled against my throat.

“He’s allowed to look,” she murmured. “Looking’s his favourite thing. Joining in is his second favourite.”

I turned Lou around and sat her up on the edge of the pool and kissed down her breasts and her stomach, and she spread her thighs for me like she’d been planning it. She was smooth and swollen and so wet it was running into the pool. I put my mouth on her. She moaned and gripped my hair and I felt the water shiver around us.

Across the courtyard Gary made a sound I can only describe as a prayer.

Lou lifted her head and held my eyes. “Sophie,” she said, hoarse. “Tell me what you want him to do.”

→ I tell Gary to get in the pool and join us

→ I tell Gary to stay put and watch, because Lou is mine tonight

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Ana’s day off began on the back of a battered green scooter with me clinging to her waist and my sunhat in my teeth.

We rode forty minutes down a road cut through jungle so thick it felt like driving through green wool. She parked by a hand-painted sign, led me along a path of crumbling limestone, and stopped at a hole in the ground the size of a swimming pool, a hundred feet of turquoise water, roots hanging down through the daylight like curtains. Nobody else. Birdsong. Dripping.

“A cenote,” she said. “Where I go when I need to remember I’m small.”

She pulled off her T-shirt and shorts and dived in wearing a black bikini. I stood on the edge in my sundress with my heart thudding, watching her surface and flick her braid back, laughing up at me.

“Come in, Sophie. Nobody here but fish.”

I took my dress off. Cold water closed round me and I yelped, and she swam over, grinning, and caught my hands to steady me. Her legs brushed mine as we trod water. I could smell her sunscreen and the green mineral scent of the cave.

We talked for an hour with our arms resting on a ledge. She’d grown up in Oaxaca, taught in Barcelona and Goa, loved the sea. I told her about the ten years, and about the last eleven months of nothing. She went quiet.

“You haven’t let yourself be touched in a long time,” she said softly.

I looked at her wet mouth and my stomach turned over.

→ I swim to her and kiss her

→ I tell her the whole sad story, and cry

← Back

I stayed on my mat. I told myself it was to rest. The honest answer was my legs, my pulse and the lotus tattoo.

“Hips,” said Ana, when the last Canadian had gone. “You carry everything in your hips. Roll onto your back.”

I did. She knelt at my feet, took my right ankle, and folded my knee slowly toward my chest, then out to the side, one hand firm on my thigh. The deck was warm. The sea sounded miles away. Her fingers pressed into the crease where my leg met my body, a hair’s breadth from where I was suddenly, painfully wet.

“Does this hurt?”

“No,” I said. It came out a whisper. “God, no.”

She stopped moving. The thumb on my thigh stayed exactly where it was. She was looking at my face, my mouth, the damp shine on my chest, and slowly the corner of her mouth went up.

“Sophie,” she said. “I’m going to ask you something directly. I’d like to kiss you. And then, if you like it, a good deal more. But you can say no, and we go and eat pancakes and I’ll never make it strange.”

My throat had gone dry. I had not been wanted like this in years, and certainly not by a woman who knew exactly where my hip flexors were. The studio was empty. The door was shut. The sun was high through the slatted roof, striping her shoulders gold.

I looked at her, and I knew what I wanted, and the only question was where.

→ I pull her down and kiss her right here on the mat

→ I tell her to come to my cabana tonight

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Gary reached us first, a tote bag over one shoulder and a burnt nose glowing in the lantern light. Lou was next, in a sarong, barefoot. And behind them, with a lantern in one hand and a rolled yoga mat in the other, was Ana.

“Moonlight stretch,” Ana said, deadpan. “I found these two attempting a handstand in the surf.”

“It was going well until the wave,” said Gary.

I was lying in the sand with my bikini top askew and a bartender’s hand halfway up my thigh. Nobody pretended not to notice. Lou took one look, bit her lip, and grinned.

“Oh, love. We’ve interrupted. We’ll go.”

“Do not go,” said Mateo, sitting up, hair wrecked. “Please, nobody go.”

Everyone laughed. Lou sat down on the sand beside us and opened the tote bag. Prosecco. Strawberries. A string of condoms like bunting. “We were going to invite you up to the villa. Hot tub, six people could fit. Well. Five. Who’s counting?”

Ana set her lantern in the sand and looked at me, calm, dark-eyed, undeniably interested. “I’ve been thinking about you since sunrise class, Sophie,” she said. “I’d like to be counted.”

Mateo’s hand was still warm on my leg. Lou’s knee pressed against mine. Gary was visibly, enthusiastically trying not to cheer. All five of us were adults, wide awake, and all of us were looking at me.

“Everyone says yes, or nobody does anything,” Lou reminded us gently. “Soph? Your call.”

My pulse was in my ears.

→ I say yes, all of us, right now

→ I say thank you, but not tonight, and send them off

← Back

Cabana 12 sat right on the sand, with a thatched roof, white gauze curtains and a king-size bed that had been very wasted on me for three nights.

I didn’t turn the light on. The moon did the job. Mateo stood in the doorway, shirt open, the sea breeze lifting the curtains round him, and I thought: right, this is happening.

“Last chance,” he said, smiling. “To be sensible.”

“I’ve been sensible for ten years.”

I pulled his shirt off. His chest was brown and hard, with a dusting of dark hair, and my mouth was on it before I’d thought about it. He undid the knot of my bikini top and let it fall. His hands were warm and slightly rough and he cupped my breasts like they were something precious and rubbed his thumbs across my nipples until I whimpered.

He laid me back on the bed and kissed down my stomach, slow, slow, slow, pulling my bikini bottoms down my legs with his teeth. Then his tongue was between my legs, flat and wet and patient, finding the exact place and staying there. I clutched his curls and arched up off the sheets and came almost embarrassingly quickly, a long shuddering gasp I felt in my toes.

He came up, lips shining, and grinned. I reached down and wrapped my hand round his cock, thick and hot and rock-hard, and he shut his eyes.

“Sophie,” he said, a bit roughly. “I start at six. Tell me what you want. Tonight only? Or something longer?”

→ I tell him tonight is all I want, and I want all of it

→ I tell him I’d like more than one night

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I put my glass down in the sand. “Mateo. How long is your break, really?”

He looked at his watch, then at me, and a slow wicked grin spread across his face. “Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. Nobody checks.”

“Excellent,” I said, and kissed him.

We fell back on the sand, under the shadow of an upturned catamaran, with a beach towel half pulled over us. The sarong went first, hitched up around my waist. His shorts came down. I took his cock in my hand, hot and heavy, and he pressed his face to my neck and whispered a string of filthy Spanish I really hope was a compliment.

“Quiet,” I whispered. “People are walking past.”

“You’re the loud one.”

He disappeared under the towel and I felt his tongue go to work on me, flat and slow and so good that I had to bite my own wrist. Footsteps passed. A couple walked by, arguing about dinner. Mateo never stopped, and I came silently, rigid, shaking, thighs clamped round his ears, while a stranger said, “Look at that sunset, darling.”

Then he rolled on a condom and slid into me, and we fucked in the dusk in total silence, in tiny hard thrusts, mouth to mouth, sand in places no one should have sand. I came again. He came with his face in my hair and a stifled groan.

Nineteen minutes, give or take.

He smoothed down his shirt, stood up and strolled back to the bar. I found sand in my bikini for four days. Every time I did, I smiled.

Ending 16 of 16: Sand in Everything. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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I looked at the sea. It was a whole lot of nothing, and I’d never wanted anything more.

“Tonight,” I said, “I think I just want this. The sunset. The mezcal. Me.”

Mateo nodded slowly. He didn’t sulk. He didn’t push. He picked up his glass and touched it to mine. “Then I will drink it with you, in silence, for ten minutes.”

We did. It was glorious. The last of the light slid under the horizon and the first stars came out, and the sea breathed in and out, and somewhere behind us a waiter was setting tables. Something enormous and lonely and kind of wonderful unclenched in my chest. I’d got through it. The solicitors. The empty flat. The look on Rob’s face when he told me.

At the end of the ten minutes Mateo stood up. He brushed the sand off his trousers and took a napkin out of his pocket, scrawled something on it, and tucked it under my glass.

“My number,” he said. “In case the sunset isn’t enough, some other night. No pressure. My break is over.”

He bent down and kissed me. Slowly, deliberately, one hand cupped round my jaw, his tongue just brushing mine for a heartbeat. I felt it from my scalp to my knees.

“Goodnight, Sophie.”

I watched him walk up the beach and I didn’t regret one thing.

Back in Cabana 12 I slept like a stone, alone and content, with a phone number on the pillow and a smile I couldn’t have scraped off with a spoon.

I called him on the Thursday.

Ending 15 of 16: Table for One. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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I held up a hand. “Right. Teach me something. I’m told I have terrible hips.”

“Terrible. Come here.” Ana laughed, stood me on the flattest rock, and said, “Tree pose. One leg. Foot on the inside of the thigh.”

I tried. I wobbled. I flapped. Ana stepped behind me, put her hands on my waist and said, “Look at the horizon. Breathe. Feel your standing foot.”

The only thing I could feel was her breasts against my back. My foot slipped. I flailed. She grabbed for me, missed, and the pair of us went off the end of the rock into the sea with a shriek and an enormous splash.

I came up spluttering. Ana’s braid had come apart. She was laughing so hard she had to hold on to my shoulders to stay afloat, and the margarita glass was bobbing between us like a tiny boat.

“Worst student I’ve ever had,” she gasped.

“Best teacher. The pose was flawless.”

“The fall was flawless.”

Still laughing, she pulled me close. Our wet bodies pressed together, my legs went round her waist, and the laughing slowly stopped. She kissed me, salty and warm. I kissed her back. We stayed there, kicking gently in the waves, until her hand slid down inside my bikini bottoms and found me, and my breath turned to a gasp.

I came in the sea in the last of the light with her fingers inside me and my teeth in her shoulder.

We swam back to the beach and split a towel.

She made me promise to come to class. I made her promise to never teach me tree pose again.

Ending 14 of 16: Beginner’s Pose. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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