The building was a converted warehouse in the Arts District, the kind with a rooftop deck that required a key card and a waiver. I’d been coming to Sloane’s sunset yoga sessions for two months — Tuesdays and Thursdays, 6:30 PM, “Vinyasa at Altitude” — because the view was worth the climb and because Sloane had a way of making me hold poses until I forgot my own name.
Sloane was thirty. The building’s resident yoga instructor — a former dancer with shoulders that looked carved from marble and a voice that could make you relax muscles you didn’t know you had. She wore white tank tops that glowed in the sunset and gray leggings that showed every muscle she’d earned.
Tonight was a private. A “hip-opening intensive,” she’d called it. Just the two of us, the rooftop, and the sun bleeding into the city behind us.
“The rooftop deck closes at sunset,” I whispered, lying on my back in reclined butterfly — soles together, knees open, completely exposed. The mat was warm from the day’s heat. The air smelled like tar and jasmine from the planter boxes. “It’s 7:05. The gate is locked. The elevator requires a key. And you’re adjusting my hips in a pose I never requested. Your hand is on my thigh. Your face is inches from my stomach. And the entire city is behind you — twenty stories of windows, of people, of eyes that could look up and see exactly what you’re doing to me.”
Sloane didn’t speak. She just leaned down, her cheek brushing my inner thigh, her hand sliding from my hip to the waistband of my shorts, her thumb tracing the edge with a precision that made my breath hitch.
“If the building manager comes up for his cigarette,” I breathed, my back arching off the mat as her fingers slid lower, “he’ll see the instructor’s hands inside my shorts with the entire city watching from below. He’ll see your mouth on my hip and your fingers pressing into places that have nothing to do with chakras or alignment or the breath work you teach in your Wednesday class. He’ll see that I’m not doing yoga. I’m just lying here while you—”
She turned my face toward her with a hand on my jaw. Her mouth found mine. A kiss that tasted like sweat and skyline and the exact moment when a sunset becomes something that doesn’t end when the sun goes down. Her tongue slid against mine, her hand sliding deeper inside my shorts, finding me wet and ready and completely misaligned.
The rooftop door creaked.
“Hello?” The building manager’s voice. Carlos. Sixty years old, smoker’s cough, completely harmless. “Sloane? You up here? The gate’s supposed to be locked.”
Sloane didn’t pull away. She just pressed her other hand over my mouth, her fingers still moving inside me with a rhythm that matched my heartbeat, her eyes locked on mine in the golden light.
“Just finishing a session, Carlos!” she called out, her voice perfectly serene, completely at odds with the fingers that were currently curling inside me. “I’ll lock up!”
“Okay! Don’t forget the lights!”
His footsteps retreated. Sloane looked at me, the sunset turning her face into something holy and profane.
“Your alignment is perfect,” she whispered against my mouth, her thumb circling my clit, her fingers pressing deeper, finding the spot that made my vision blur with the city lights. “And I’m about to destroy it.”
She made me come on the rooftop mat. My legs still open in butterfly pose, her mouth on my breast, her fingers inside me, the sunset turning everything gold and the city watching from below like a congregation. I came with her hand over my mouth, my cry swallowed by her palm, my body shaking so hard the mat slid on the concrete.
After, she rolled up the mat. Helped me stand. Pressed her lips to my forehead.
“Same time Thursday?” she asked.
I nodded. I couldn’t speak.
I still go to the rooftop. Sloane still teaches. And every sunset, when the deck is supposed to close, she finds a new way to open me — new poses, new pressures, new ways of making me forget that there’s a city below us waiting for the lights to come on. She says my flexibility has improved. She says I can now do full splits.
She’s right. I can. And the only thing more open than my hips is the gate she leaves unlocked — just for me — every Tuesday and Thursday at 7 PM.
