Sun Salutation, Sound Check Seduction

Eddie was twenty-eight years old and he had come to the conclusion, somewhere around the second month after his divorce went through, that he had never once in his adult life done anything just because he wanted to. He married Reba at twenty-four because it seemed like the next sensible step, and they split at twenty-six because they both realized the sensible step had led them into a house with a sensible mortgage and two sensible cars and nothing to say to each other over dinner. The divorce itself was amicable, which somehow made it worse, because there was nobody to be mad at, and when you cannot be mad at anybody the only place left to point the feeling is inward.

He taught yoga at a strip mall studio in town, five classes a day, six on Saturdays, and he was good at it, calm and patient, the kind of teacher who remembered names and asked about people's knees. It paid the bills. It also, he noticed, felt exactly like being a hall monitor for other people's breathing, and somewhere in there he had lost the thread of why he had gotten into it at all, back when he was twenty-two, a year into T, flexible and sure a yoga teacher was a person with a life.

So when the flyer went up at the studio, a three-day music festival called Dust & Echoes, held out in the dry riverbed past the small desert town nobody drove through without meaning to, asking for a morning yoga instructor, Eddie signed his name on the line before the sensible part of his brain could get a word in. The pay was modest. The hours were early. The venue was a tent pitched between the vendor stalls and the main stage, which meant he would be leading sun salutations while roadies ran cable a hundred feet away. It was the least sensible thing he had done in six years, and he drove out there on a Thursday with his mats and a cooler in the back of his old hatchback, feeling like he had gotten away with something.

The riverbed was exactly as advertised, flat cracked earth and pale gravel, ringed by low hills, with a stage scaffold rising out of it like something a kid built out of erector sets and then abandoned. The heat came off the ground in waves even at nine in the morning. Eddie set up his tent, laid out twelve mats in a grid, and stood there with his hands on his hips looking at the whole arrangement, thinking, well, this is it, this is what reckless looks like, and it looks mostly like twelve mats in the dust.

* * *

His first class was set for seven on Friday morning, before the music started and while the air still had some give to it. He got nine people, which he counted as a win, mostly festival staff and a couple of early campers who wandered in looking for coffee and found downward dog instead. He was halfway through the second standing sequence, talking everybody into a long slow fold, when a woman came through the tent flap without knocking, holding a clipboard against her hip and a radio in her other hand, and she stood there for a second like she was doing math.

"Hi, sorry, I hate to do this," she said, loud enough to be rude in any other setting but somehow pitched so it landed as an apology. "I need you to wrap up early. We've got a band load-in that got moved up and they need this footprint cleared by eight."

Eddie held his fold, peering at her upside down between his own knees. "This footprint?"

"The tent, the mats, the whole zone." She was already scanning the grid of mats, counting heads, doing whatever arithmetic coordinators do. "There's a catering truck coming in that's wider than I thought, which is my fault, I read the spec sheet wrong, and believe me when I say I would rather be anywhere else."

He rolled up slowly, because it seemed like the kind of thing a sensible man would do, and the sensible man in him had been getting a lot of exercise lately. "We've got twelve minutes left."

"I know," she said it like she had already run the numbers and lost. "I'm asking for six."

The nine people in the class turned to look at him, and Eddie, who had spent two years being the kind of man who extended sessions for people who arrived late, heard himself say, "Six it is. Everybody, inhale, come up slow."

She stayed through those six minutes, which he had not expected, clipboard on her hip, watching the class with her weight shifted onto one leg, and when he called the final exhale and people started rolling mats she came over and stuck out her hand.

"Regina. I run scheduling out of the trailer backstage, which means I ruin everybody's morning on a rotating basis."

"Eddie. I teach the mornings, which apparently means I'm first in the rotation."

She laughed, one short bark, and he put her at thirty or so, sun-freckled, hair pulled back in a practical knot, boots with a low heel she could clearly walk all day in. There was an ease to her, the confidence of somebody who had been making other people's days worse on purpose for a while and had stopped apologizing for it somewhere back down the road, though she still said the words sorry and I hate to do this, they just came out at highway speed.

"Two more sessions, right? Tomorrow and Sunday?" she asked, checking her clipboard without looking at it, like the answer was already there and she just wanted to see if he knew it too.

"Both at seven."

"Both at seven, and both likely to get bumped, because soundcheck is when the stage is quiet enough to run and the stage is never quiet." She winced at her own sentence. "Okay, that's a lie, sometimes it's quiet, but not reliably. I'll try to protect you. I can't promise."

"I signed up for a festival," Eddie said, coiling a strap around his mats. "I figured getting interrupted came with the ticket."

"Good attitude. Most people glare at me." She backed toward the tent flap, radio squawking something about a forklift, and she pointed at him with the clipboard on her way out. "You're better than most people, Eddie the yoga guy. See you at seven, unless I see you at six."

He stood in the empty tent after she was gone, in the dust she had stirred up coming and going, and realized he was smiling at nothing, which was a thing he had not done in a while either.

* * *

Saturday morning he had eleven people, the class swelling because word got around that the yoga tent was the only shade on the grounds with no music coming out of it. He was deep into the third sun salutation of the opening series, everyone rising on the inhale, and the sun itself was clearing the eastern hills, coming through the mesh of the tent wall in long dusty stripes, and that was when he saw her.

Regina was standing behind the speaker stack at the edge of the stage footprint, maybe forty feet off, half hidden by the black trapezoid of the cabinet, a coffee cup in one hand and nothing in the other, no clipboard, no radio. She was not pretending to be doing anything. She was just standing there, watching the class, watching him run the count, and when his eyes found hers she did not look away or turn it into a joke, she just lifted the coffee cup an inch, a small salute, and kept watching.

Eddie lost his place in the count, which had not happened since his teacher training, and he covered it by extending the exhale, telling everyone to take their time coming down, and the eleven of them hung there in their folds while he stood at the front of the room with his heart doing something unprofessional and a man named Dale, sixty-four, retired, asked from his mat, "Everything alright up there, chief?"

"Everything's great, Dale," Eddie said. "Breathe."

He ran the rest of the class on autopilot and on pure nerve, and every time he came up on an inhale he checked the gap behind the speaker stack, and she was there for three of them and gone on the fourth, and when he finally looked up from the closing sequence she was gone entirely, just an empty patch of gravel and a coffee cup sitting on top of a road case where a person had been standing two minutes before.

He folded the mats slower than he needed to, thinking about it, thinking about the difference between a woman who runs scheduling and a woman who stands behind a speaker stack at seven in the morning with no clipboard and no reason, and thinking that in six years of being sensible he had never once had a woman watch him do his job and drink coffee about it, and that it was doing more for his nervous system than any class he had ever taught.

Dale paused at the tent flap on his way out, mats under his arm. "That festival lady was watching you the whole time, you know."

"I noticed," Eddie said.

"Good luck to you," Dale said, and left it there, and Eddie stood alone in the shade with the whole day in front of him and the soundcheck starting up somewhere beyond the hills, a bass line thudding through the ground like a second heartbeat.

The supply tent sat between the catering truck and the vendor stalls, a long white pop-up full of folding tables, cable spools, and cases of bottled water stacked six high, and Eddie had only gone in there because the shade by his own tent had been colonized by a family with a collapsible wagon and a cooler the size of a dishwasher. He was rooting around on a shelf for a fresh roll of mat wipes when the flap moved behind him and Regina came in backwards, hauling a road case by its handles, and let it down with a thunk that shook the water stacks.

"Sorry, sorry, don't mind me, I'm hiding," she said, and then she turned around and saw who was in there and stopped with her hands still out in front of her like she'd been caught. "Oh. You."

"Me," Eddie said. He was holding the roll of wipes against his chest like a shield, which he realized a second too late and lowered.

"I swear I'm not here to bump you. Nobody is here to bump you. That's actually the whole reason I came in here, is that there is nobody coming to bump you." She wiped her hands down the front of her shorts and looked around the tent like she was seeing it for the first time, the spools and the cases and the single bare bulb on a zip cord that was doing nothing against the afternoon. "Okay, that's not the whole reason."

"What's the rest of it?"

"The rest of it is I owe you an apology, sort of, about Friday, because I watched the class today from back there and I saw what it actually looks like when I walk in and cut you off at the sixty-fifth breath, and it looks terrible, it looks like I'm yanking the floor out from under people mid-sentence, so." She spread her hands. "Sorry. Professionally sorry. Personally I'm not sorry at all because it got me eleven people today instead of nine, so really you should be paying me."

"That's one way to look at it."

"I have a lot of ways to look at things, it's my whole job." She leaned back against the road case and crossed her arms, and the tent was small enough that leaning back against the road case put her maybe three feet from him, which he noticed in a practical, inventory-taking way, the way he noticed the water stacks and the cable spools. "Also, and I'm saying this as a coordinator and not as a person, your class is the only thing on this grounds that runs on time, and it's making everything else look bad, so there's a faction that wants you gone."

"Is that true?"

"No, I made it up, there's no faction, I just wanted to see if you'd get nervous." She grinned at him and he felt it land somewhere under his sternum, and he thought, not for the first time that weekend, that this was exactly the kind of thing Reba had told him he was bad at reading, except that this time he was not having any trouble reading it at all. "You didn't get nervous. Interesting."

"I've been practicing," Eddie said. "There's this thing where you breathe."

"Get out."

"Four counts in, hold, six out. Very cutting edge."

She laughed at that, a real one, head back, and the sound of it was bigger than the tent, and somewhere out past the canvas the soundcheck bass thudded on like weather. She looked at him for a second longer than the joke needed and then said, "Can I say a thing that isn't about scheduling?"

"You've been saying things that aren't about scheduling since Friday."

"Well, one more. You stood in front of eleven strangers at seven in the morning in a hundred-degree riverbed and you looked calm the entire time, and I run this whole festival and I have not felt calm since Wednesday, and I have been thinking about that all day, which is a strange thing to be thinking about during a set change but there it is," she said it fast, all one breath, the way she gave radio instructions, and then she stopped and looked at the floor and said, quieter, "Anyway. Apology delivered. Faction invented. I've got a band landing in twenty minutes."

"Regina," Eddie said, and she stopped with one hand on the flap. He heard himself ask it before the sensible part of him could file an objection. "Dinner? There's a catering truck. I hear the food is free."

She turned around all the way, and her face did something complicated and pleased. "Yes. Okay. Yes. After the headliner goes on, because before the headliner goes on I am a terrifying person and you would not like me, and after I am a person again." She pointed at him with two fingers, the clipboard gesture without the clipboard. "Nine o'clock. If I'm late, start without me and I'll be jealous about it forever."

She was gone, the flap swinging, and Eddie stood there among the water cases holding his roll of mat wipes and grinning like an idiot at a bare bulb.

* * *

The kiss happened faster than either of them planned, which is how Eddie would tell it later, and it happened behind the main stage during the set change between the second band and the third, in the narrow gravel lane between the stage scaffold and the fence line where the crew stowed empty guitar cases and nobody with a clipboard had a reason to be.

Except Regina had a reason, because it was her job, and that was the joke of it, that the one lane on the property where a person could stand without being asked to move was the lane that