Chapter 13: The Third Option
The first pale light of dawn was just bleeding into the studio when Maria sent the text. Her thumb had hovered over Joe’s name for a full minute, her breath fogging the chilled screen of her phone. Then she’d swiped, found Sasha, and typed three words without letting herself think.
I need to forget.
The reply was almost instant. Studio. Now.
Now she was here, rolling out her mat in the silent, half-dark room. The space held the morning chill, smelling of clean wood and the faint, lingering ghost of yesterday’s sandalwood. She had changed into leggings and a tank top, her skin prickling with goosebumps. She wasn’t sure what she was doing. This was a controlled burn, a deliberate distraction. She told herself that made it safe.
The front door clicked open. Sasha slipped inside, her hair a messy blonde knot, a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. She didn’t speak. She just looked at Maria, her gaze stripping away the pretense of a normal morning practice. She dropped her bag, toed off her shoes, and walked to the center of the room.
“Warm up,” Sasha said, her voice low and devoid of its usual playful lilt. “Sun salutations. Don’t think. Just move.”
Maria obeyed. She fell into the familiar rhythm, the stretch and pull of muscle, the push of palms into mat. She tried to lose herself in the breath, but her mind was a riot of images: Joe’s text glowing on the table, the weight of his key in her hand, the quiet understanding in Sasha’s eyes as she walked away.
“Faster,” Sasha commanded, moving alongside her, mirroring her poses but with a sharper, more aggressive precision. “Don’t hold. Flow.”
They moved in synchronized, punishing waves. Chaturanga to upward dog, downward dog, jump through. Again. Again. Maria’s breath became ragged, her muscles burning with lactic acid. Sweat dampened the back of her tank top.
“Good,” Sasha murmured, close now. “Now stop thinking about him.”
“I’m not—”
“You are.” Sasha moved behind her as Maria folded forward into Uttanasana. Her hands came down on Maria’s shoulders, applying a firm, deepening pressure. “Every sigh. Every hesitation. I can feel him in the room.” Her hands slid down Maria’s spine, possessive and sure. “Let’s evict him.”
Sasha led her through a series of intense hip-openers—pigeon, lizard, butterfly—poses that always carried an emotional charge. Maria gasped as the tension released in a hot wave, a physical ache that blurred dangerously with the one in her chest.
“See?” Sasha whispered, her knees bracketing Maria’s hips in a deep lizard pose, her body a warm press against Maria’s back. “The body remembers. It holds the memories. We’re just… transferring the deed.”
It wasn’t yoga anymore. It was something else. A negotiation conducted through touch and strain. Sasha’s hands were everywhere, guiding, adjusting, claiming. They pressed into the soft part of Maria’s hips during a wide-legged fold, thumbs circling with an intensity that promised bruises. Maria didn’t protest. The sharp, clean pain was a focus. It was now. It wasn’t the past.
“Turn over,” Sasha said, her voice rough.
Maria rolled onto her back on the mat, chest heaving, staring up at the ceiling where the dawn light was beginning to spread. Sasha straddled her hips, not in a sensual way, but in a stance of complete control. She placed her hands on Maria’s ribcage, just below her breasts.
“Breathe,” Sasha instructed. “Deep. And forget.”
Maria breathed. She looked up at Sasha’s focused face, the concentration there, the slight flush on her skin. She felt the solid, real weight of her. This was a person. This was happening. Joe was a shadow, a text message, a memory in a shirt.
Outside the frosted glass of the studio’s front door, a shadow moved.
It paused, elongated and blurred by the textured glass. A silhouette of broad shoulders, a familiar slope of the head. A runner, stopped mid-stride.
Joe.
He stood there, a frozen statue. He’d gone for his pre-dawn run, a punishing route designed to purge his system of the hope that had bloomed when Maria hadn’t replied to his text. His path, habit or fate, took him past her studio. He saw the light. He saw the movement.
He saw the two forms on the floor.
Inside, Maria’s eyes were closed. Sasha leaned down, her lips close to Maria’s ear. “Is it working?” she breathed. “Are you forgetting?”
Maria didn’t answer. A tear escaped from the corner of her eye, tracing a hot path into her hairline. It was a confusing signal—a release, not of pleasure, but of a profound, wrenching conflict.
Sasha saw it. She softened, just for a second. Her thumb brushed the tear away. “Shhh,” she said, almost sadly. “It’s just biology. Just physics. Pressure and release.”
Outside, Joe took a step back. The image behind the glass was a dagger to the gut. He knew that silhouette, the fall of that dark hair on the mat. He saw the other form atop her, the intimacy of the pose, the suggestion of it all. This was the “space” she needed. This was the “growth.”
He felt like a voyeur. A ghost.
He turned and walked away, his run abandoned, the cold morning air cutting into his lungs like shards of glass. The rhythm of his feet on the pavement was a frantic, broken beat.
On the mat, Maria’s eyes flew open. A sudden, cold certainty washed over her. She turned her head, looking toward the door. The shadow was gone. Had it ever been there? It could have been anyone. A early morning dog-walker. A trick of the light.
But she knew. The air in the room felt different. Charged, then abruptly empty.
“What is it?” Sasha asked, feeling the tension reclaim Maria’s body beneath her.
“Nothing,” Maria whispered, her voice hollow. The forgetting was over. It had been a failure. All she felt now was a new, sharper remembering—of what she had, what she was risking, and the look she imagined on Joe’s face if that shadow had been real.
She pushed gently at Sasha’s shoulders. “I’m done.”
Sasha dismounted, sitting back on her heels, studying Maria’s face. She saw the shutters come down. The moment, whatever it was, had passed. She nodded, once. “Okay.”
They sat in silence as the sun finally broke, filling the studio with a guilty, golden light that showed every dust mote, every fingerprint on the mirror, every mark their bodies had left on the mats. The warmth did nothing to touch the cold knot tightening in Maria’s stomach.
She had wanted to forget. Instead, she had given herself, and possibly Joe, something entirely new to remember.
Instead, she had given herself, and possibly Joe, something entirely new to remember.
The silence between her and Sasha stretched, thick with the unspoken end of whatever that was. Maria wiped the lingering tear from her hairline, the gesture abrupt and angry. The studio floor was cold through her leggings now that she was still.
“I should clean up,” she said, her voice oddly formal.
“Sure,” Sasha said, standing with a fluid grace that felt like a reproach. She began gathering her things, the scratch of her mat being rolled loud in the quiet. “You know where I am. If the forgetting ever actually starts.”
Maria just nodded, unable to meet her eyes. She listened to the soft pad of Sasha’s bare feet walking toward the door, the click of the latch, the heavier finality of it closing. Alone, she let out a shaky breath that bordered on a sob. The golden dawn light now felt accusatory, illuminating every smudge on the mirror.
She stared at her reflection—flushed skin, disheveled hair, the vulnerable sweep of her own throat. She saw the ghost of Sasha’s hands on her hips. Then, unbidden, she saw Joe’s face, the warm brown eyes she knew could cloud with a hurt so deep it was quiet. Her stomach twisted.
The front door burst open.
It crashed against the stop with a crack that echoed through the empty space. Maria flinched, her heart seizing. Framed in the doorway, backlit by the harsh morning sun, was Joe. He was breathing hard, but not from running. His chest heaved with a raw, visceral anger she had never seen in him before. His running clothes were dark with sweat, his hands clenched at his sides.
He didn’t move. He just stared at her, sitting on the mat in her tank top, skin glowing with a sheen that wasn’t just from yoga.
“Joe,” she breathed, the word barely audible.
“Was that her?” His voice was low, a ragged thing scraped from the back of his throat. He took one step inside, letting the door swing shut behind him. The room dimmed, but his presence magnified, filling the studio. “The blonde. From the bar.”
“What?” The lie was instinctive, pathetic.
“Don’t.” The word was a whip crack. He ran a hand over his close-cropped hair, his gaze sweeping the room as if searching for evidence. It landed on Sasha’s forgotten water bottle, sitting by her rolled mat. “I saw you. Through the glass. I was going to keep running. I did keep running. For three blocks.”
He took another step closer. The scent of his sweat, of cold outdoor air, cut through the sandalwood.
“Then I turned around.” He let out a short, humorless laugh. “I thought, no. That wasn’t what it looked like. Maria’s doing a private. She’s working. I’ll just… I’ll just go in and say hi. Keep it light. Friends, right?”
Maria stood up, her legs unsteady. “Joe, let me explain.”
“Explain what?” He was in front of her now, close enough for her to see the pulse hammering in his temple. “Explain you and her on the floor? Explain you not answering my text last night but being here with her at dawn?” His eyes dropped to her hips, to the skin her tank top exposed. “Are those bruises?”
She instinctively covered the spot with her hand. The pressure of Sasha’s thumbs. She felt branded, caught.
“It wasn’t like that,” she started, but the words dissolved in the face of his expression.
“What was it like, then?” he asked, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. “Tell me. Because from where I was standing, it looked like you found a very creative way to work on your ‘individual growth.’” He made air quotes, the gesture slicing through the space between them. “Was that the agreement, Maria? Space for you to do… that?”
“Don’t you dare,” she shot back, anger flaring through her shame. “You don’t know anything. You were spying on me?”
“I was passing by!” he shouted, the sound shocking in the quiet studio. He immediately recoiled, lowering his voice with visible effort. “I was running my fucking route, trying to run you out of my head. And then I see… that.”
The fight left her as quickly as it came. His pain was a physical thing in the room. She saw the betrayal etched in the new lines around his eyes.
“It wasn’t sex,” she said, flatly. “It was… it was a mistake. I was trying to get you out of my head, too.”
He looked at her for a long moment, his anger cooling into something worse: a profound, weary disappointment. He nodded slowly, digesting it.
“So that’s the playbook?” he finally said. “We hurt each other, so we go find someone else to press on the bruise? To ‘forget’?” He glanced at the mirror, where their fractured reflections stood apart. “I went home last night, you know. After I didn’t hear from you. I watched… I tried to watch something. Anything. To distract myself.”
He paused, swallowing hard. The admission cost him.
“Every single person looked like you. It was pathetic.” He let out a long breath. “I turned it off. I just sat there in the dark, holding that goddamn key you gave back, thinking we were both sitting in our own dark rooms, at least doing it together. At least suffering honestly.”
Maria felt his words like body blows. Each one landed with perfect, terrible accuracy. Her vision blurred.
“Joe, I’m so sorry,” she whispered, the apology utterly inadequate.
He didn’t seem to hear her. He was looking at her shirt—his shirt—the faded grey cuff still visible under her sweater sleeve where she’d pushed it up. A sad, broken smile touched his lips.
“You’re still wearing it,” he said, almost to himself. The observation deflated him. All the furious energy bled away, leaving a man who looked utterly exhausted.
He turned and walked back to the door. His hand rested on the knob.
“The friendship part of this,” he said, not looking back. “The ‘we’re in this together to heal’ part. I can’t do it anymore. Not if this is what it looks like.”
He opened the door. The morning sounds of the city rushed in.
“Keep the key, Maria. Or don’t. I don’t think it matters now.”
He stepped out into the light and was gone, the door clicking softly shut behind him. This time, for good.