The first thing I notice is the quiet. Not the empty kind. The kind with weight, because you are still in my flat, and the sun has already found the kitchen.
I am always up before you. Practice at six, breath first, everything else after. But this morning the breathing is the easy part. The hard part is that I can hear you moving in the next room, and I have no wish to be anywhere else.
Up before you and still thinking about you
I stand at the counter with the kettle going and count ten slow breaths, the way I do before a class. It does not work the way it usually does. Every time I exhale I get the sound of the sheets again, the way you turned over in your sleep, the way your hand went looking for the space where I had been and found it still warm.
I am not a man who rushes. I know what I want, and I know it will still be there in ten minutes. That is the whole trick of me. Patience is not me waiting. It is me deciding when.
So I make coffee for two. I grind the beans by hand because the noise gives my forearms something to do, and because it gives you time to find your own way down the hallway. I want to see how you arrive.
You in my shirt at the kitchen door
Then you are there. Bare legs, hair flattened on one side, my grey shirt hanging off one shoulder like you have owned it for years. You stop in the doorway because you are not sure what you are allowed to do next.
I let you not know. I lean back against the counter, cup in one hand, and I look. Slowly. From your feet upward, with no hurry at all. Taking my time is not a courtesy. It is a decision, and you feel it land somewhere under the cotton.
You say good morning. Your voice is still rough from sleep, and that is the first thing that very nearly breaks my calm. I keep it anyway. I want you to see how much it costs me.
The slow minute I make you stand there
I do not answer straight away. I put the cup down. I cross the room without hurrying, close enough that I can smell my own soap on your skin, and I stop one step short of you.
I ask what you remember about last night. You start, then lose the thread, because I have lifted the collar back onto your shoulder with two fingers and left them there, resting against your neck just above the pulse. It is going fast. I like knowing that.
You would expect a yoga teacher to be gentle about all this. I am gentle for the first minute. What I do with the second one is what you will be thinking about all week.
Where the calm turns deliberate
Here is the turn, and you see it coming before I do anything. My hand moves from your neck to the back of your head. The grip is unhurried and completely certain. I steer you the half step back until the counter edge meets the base of your spine and there is nowhere to go except where I am taking you.
Behind us the kettle clicks off. Neither of us moves to deal with it.
My mouth is beside your ear. I tell you what I have in mind for the morning, low and plain, no decoration, and I do not repeat it. I never repeat it. You either heard me or you did not, and from the way your fingers have bunched into the hem of the shirt you are wearing, you heard every word.
From the kitchen to the hallway, and nobody mentions the coffee
We do not make it to the bedroom quickly. It takes a while. Somewhere between the counter and the hallway the coffee goes cold, and the light shifts across the floorboards, and I stop being the calm one in any sense you would recognise from a yoga mat.
I am not gentle the whole way. I never promised that. I am sure and slow, and then I am not slow, and you learn that the man who counts his breath can also be the one who takes yours. The hallway wall knows. The bedroom door, left open behind us, knows. The sheets that were warm an hour ago are warm again in an entirely different way.
I do not ask if this is what you wanted. I can feel the answer in how you lean into my grip, and I take the answer as a reason to keep going.
The quiet afterwards, and what I say before I leave the room
Afterwards the flat goes still again, but it is a different kind of still. Late morning, window open, the street carrying on faintly without us. You lie there in nothing but my shirt, because I told you to keep it on, and I have one arm behind my head, entirely at peace, which you find almost unfair.
You ask whether I am always like this. I tell you this is what I am like when I am relaxed. You have not seen what happens when I decide to keep a man for a whole weekend.
Then I get up, put the kettle on again, and leave you lying there to work out what I meant. That part is deliberate too.
The part I keep off a public page
There is more to that morning than I can put on a page Google will show. The hallway, the second coffee that never got drunk, the exact words I said at your ear: those stay closer to home. If you want more of me, unfiltered, the rest of the morning is waiting for you on OnlyFans.