Page 22 of On the Edge

“What’s wrong?” I ask, turning and running backward in front of her so I can see her face.

With each step, she winces. “Sciatica.”

“This is a thing that happens now?” I ask, slowing my pace, knowing she’ll slow down or risk running right into me.

“It happenssometimes,” she grits out, one hand pressing into her glutes near her tailbone.

“You need to breathe,” I remind her, slowing down even more.

“Hard to through the pain,” she grumbles.

“What causes this?”

“It started happening after my second surgery,” she says as she slows to a walk. If she’s surprised that I nod in reaction to her surgery, surprised that I know what each one entailed, she doesn’t let on. “There’s scar tissue that presses on my piriformis, so sometimes it spasms and pushes on the sciatic nerve.”

“Why don’t we stop so you can stretch it out?”

“All right,” she concedes, and when she stops she squats into the same position she was in before we ran.

“Breathe,” I remind her as I hold out my hands so she can take them for balance. She surprises me by sliding her palms against mine and gripping my wrists, then leaning back further into the stretch. I try to ignore the electric current that’s pulsing there between us, running along the warm slickness of our skin. I can’t help but wonder if she feels it too. She looks down at my feet as she dips into the stretch even further, her upper body coming to press against the flat space made by her right leg bent at an angle and resting on her left knee. I watch in amazement as her body bends further than seems possible.

“How are you this flexible?”

“Yoga,” she says without looking up. “I wish I could do Sleeping Pigeon right now, that helps more than anything.”

I have no freaking idea what Sleeping Pigeon is. “Why can’t you?”

She stands, releasing my hands, and looks down at the path we’re running on before using her shoe to sweep away the small pebbles of tar and the sand that litters the pavement. “I’d have to basically lay my whole body face down on the ground with my leg curved under me, and this is just,” she says with a shake of her head, “not an ideal place to do it.”

“You can lay my shirt down like a yoga mat,” I offer. “Would that help?”

“Always trying to get naked, huh?” she says, then quickly looks away as the pink creeps into her cheeks.

If she’d have laughed or winked after that comment, it feels like it could’ve been a moment where we might have broken through some of the walls she’s built around herself. Instead, I can already see the defenses going back up—the stiffening of her spine, the pursed lips, the way she’s turned her head away, the refusal to meet my eyes.

“How about we walk back to the Center and you teach me a little yoga? I’m sure it’ll help me stretch out from my workout and this run.”

“You want to learn yoga?” she asks, skepticism coloring each word.

“Why not?” I shrug.

“Josh used to always say that real men didn’t do yoga,” she tells me, and I realize he must have been an idiot, because how could he not want to see her bending into all kinds of crazy yoga poses.Oh yeah, he’s married.

“I hear it’s becoming pretty common for athletes. There are football teams bringing in instructors and doing sessions a couple times a week. I suspect they’re still real men, even when they finish doing yoga. Besides, how hard can it be?”

* * *

“I’m pretty sure I’m dead,” I tell her as I lie in a puddle of my own sweat in the corner of the gym.

I look over at her sitting cross-legged on her yoga mat, and I watch her throat move up and down as she takes big gulps of water. A trickle of sweat makes its way down her neck and I want to run my tongue along the path it just traveled, right back up to her jaw.

“Pro tip, buddy. Never utter the words ‘how hard can it be’ to your physical therapist,” she says, setting her water bottle down and bouncing up off the ground to a standing position with minimal effort. She’s soaked through, too, her entire body glistening with sweat and her damp hair is piled into a bun on top of her head. But she doesn’t seem like she’s dying. In fact, she seems reenergized.

“I don’t think my body was supposed to move like that,” I tell her. Already there are muscles I didn’t even know I had that are sore. But the bigger muscle groups I worked out earlier feel stretched, and strangely relaxed.

“Everything we just did will help prevent injury. Learning to stretch everything out like that will build strength and flexibility so that when something bends in a way it shouldn’t, you’ll bounce back much more quickly.” She bends in half to spray her yoga mat, giving me a clear view of her cleavage. As much as I don’t want to, I look down right as she glances over to hand me the spray bottle.

I roll over onto my stomach then lift up to my hands and knees before I reach over and swipe the bottle out of her outstretched hand. “I think it’d be better to just throw this away,” I tell her as I eye the mat. I didn’t know I could sweat that much.

---