Page 16 of Wrong Turn

“Put your shoes down.”

Lei did.

Cruz led them to the damp, hard-packed sand near the water’s edge. “We’re going to do a moving meditation. I want you to concentrate on being in your body and the sensations of it moving through space. Harry tells me you dotaekwondo. This is different. It’s calledtai chi.”

“Okay.”

Lei stood behind Cruz as he faced the calm, moonlit sea. She breathed deeply and slowly as she imitated the trainer’s strong, slow, sweeping movements, deliberate and centered, even down to swirling kicks and turns. More and more as time slipped past, Lei’s mind went still, her soul settling into the center of her body.

They moved silently in the darkness in an elegant dance for a timeless hour, and finally Cruz came to a stop. He turned to her, placing his hands palms together at chest height. She did so as well.

They bowed to each other.

Lei felt warm and loose, her extremities prickling. She was gloriously alive, her bruises forgotten. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“You can do this any time you need to come back into your body.” He reached out and took her hand, and she had a sense he seldom did such a thing. “There is another healing I have for you. If you are willing to take a chance.”

The blood rushed to her face; her lips tingled as if he’d kissed her. Who was this mysterious moonlit man? Had God sent him, or something darker? It didn’t matter. However he had appeared, she desperately needed whatever he had for her.

“Please,” she breathed.

Cruz led her up from the water’s edge into the deep purple shadow of the cliffs. “We begin by getting in touch with each other’s body rhythms and breathing. Just follow what I do, as you did before.”

He stepped forward to stand very close. His breath, smelling slightly of cloves, warmed her face. His body, only a foot or two away, was slightly musky, and she felt the heat of him. Slowly, deliberately, he circled an arm around her and set a hand, fingers spread, on her back at the base of her spine.

The other hand he set on her chest, between her breasts.

Lei’s pulse quickened with familiar fear. She gazed into the dark of his extraordinary eyes and breathed slowly, calming herself.

She stretched out a hand and set it in the deep curve of his back, where the swell of his firm, round buttocks began. The other hand she set in the middle of the hard wall of his chest, a mirror of how he held her.

They gazed into each other’s eyes. Their breathing fell into sync.

A tiny wind stirred their hair to brush over each other like fragile antennae. The moon made silvery gleams over Cruz’s profile, gilding along his forehead and nose.

Lei’s mind leaped into overdrive—she was touching a stranger, rather intimately, in an isolated place.

She focused on what was happening in the moment, trying to stay present. In her partner’s steady gaze, she saw nothing but compassion, and yes, attraction and appreciation, but not the kind of lust that took all and gave nothing.

Cruz’s eyes, his body, held something different.

He was very warm beneath her hands, springy almost. Her fingertips moved slightly to explore the sensation of his skin through the thin shroud of his clothing, and she felt his fingers move slightly as well, imitating her.

As the moments unspooled, Lei was still in her body, and she was enjoying the feeling of his closeness, of the way their breath was shared, the matching of their pulses.

She was with a man, touching him, he touching her, and she hadn’t gone to that other place. This was the first time she’d stayed present for this long.

Lei felt a smile move over her face, and he echoed it, his teeth shining like pearls in the moonlight, strung perfectly along the frame of his jaw.

She seldom thought poetic things like that.

Lei took a tiny step closer toward him, and Cruz to her.

Now their hands on each other’s chests were pressed tight between their bodies.

Cruz spread the fingers of the hand on her back and massaged and explored her waist. Lei shut her eyes, and she could feel how she was to him through his hand: firm yet soft, her back a pleasing curve as he pulled her closer.

She did the same, spreading her fingers to draw him as close as she could. His pelvis was slightly higher than hers since he was a few inches taller, and the curve of her belly fit against his abdomen like two parts of a puzzle. His back was hard beneath her hand, the muscles corded ridges, different from her lithe curves.

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