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A late evening in a quiet dance studio. Forty-five minutes of choreography leave Kaia glistening before the mirrors. Then Juna steps into the room and into her rhythm. What begins as practice turns into a slow, precise hunger: hands that teach breath, a body held open to the glass, patience that grows rougher by choice. Told in Kaia's intimate first person, Open in the Studio is a mirror-quiet affair of control, surrender and the sweetest kind of afterglow.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Open in the Studio
A Mirror-Quiet Affair
by Kaia
© 2025 Kaia
Kaia writes.Kaia experiences.Kaia illustrates with words, with skin, with light.
All rights reserved.This work, including all its parts, is protected by copyright.Any use beyond the narrow limits of copyright law is not permitted without written consent.
This is a literary work.Any resemblance to real persons or events is unintentional and purely coincidental –unless they dream of it.
First published: 2025Published as an eBook edition
Cover design in collaboration with ChatGPT & Sora (OpenAI) & CanvaCover image: This is Me
Print & distribution: epubli
ISBN: 978-3-565083-23-7
Open in the Studio -A Mirror-Quiet Affair
I have been dancing for forty-five minutes straight. My linen tank clings in places where sweat has darkened the fabric, loose and short enough that every rise of my arms feels like exposure. The slip I wear underneath is barely there, a whisper against my skin, no seams, no edges - only the trace of movement.
My breath is ragged, chest heaving, ribs opening and closing as if I were swallowing air with my whole body. My arms stretch wide toward the mirrors, shoulders burning, skin glistening. I let the silence after the last beat wash over me, eyes closed, the weight of the dance still echoing through my thighs, my core, my lungs.
Then I hear it. Hands clapping. Slow, deliberate. I don’t move. I stay stretched, arms wide, chest lifted, belly exposed to the cool air of the studio. Only my eyes open and in the mirror I catch the curve of her smile.
“Oh,” I grin, breath still unsteady, “hi.”
Juna always appears the way weather arrives: a shift in the air, a faint weight along my skin. She knows where I am with a certainty that should unsettle me and instead feels inevitable. The questions reach my tongue and melt the second she steps into frame.
She comes up behind me. I don’t turn. I let the mirror do the looking while my body does the feeling.
Juna’s fingertips settle on the caps of my shoulders. Warm on sweat, a quiet weight that steadies the tremble in my arms. I see the contact in the glass first: brown skin to sun-kissed skin, my collarbones shining, the loose white linen clinging in darkened patches. My breath flares up into my throat; I taste salt. I keep my arms wide, elbows soft, chest open like the last beat never ended.
Two fingers travel from each shoulder along the top of my arms. Barely any pressure - just a slow trace that makes the air feel thick. The studio shrinks to sound: my breathing, the small slide of fingertip on skin, a distant hum in the lights. I watch her hands move toward my wrists, toward the fine bones and the splay of my fingers in the glass and something inside me lengthens with them. When she arrives at my fingertips, she hovers. Then retreats the same way, unspooling me in reverse. I feel the path she just drew glowing faintly, like chalk on muscle.
She slips underneath now, the same two-finger line along the underside of my arms. The skin that rarely meets daylight. The tender place that always startles me. I twitch, just a breath of a laugh caught in my chest, because it tickles there, a bright current that lifts my ribs. “Easy,” I whisper to my reflection, but I’m not sure if I’m talking to my body or to the want rising in it.
Her touch pours down my sides. Over linen, over the heat the fabric is holding. My top hangs loose but every inch feels mapped: the thrum of my pulse where her fingers pass my ribs, the way my belly tightens when she skims my flank, the whisper of damp cloth against my slip. I can feel the small eddies of air she leaves behind; the studio smells like wood and resin and us.
When she finds the place where sweat gathers again, her touch broadens. Flat palms to my breastbone, quiet, claiming, then gliding down my sternum to my waist, thumbs nearly brushing at my navel before they part and begin the slow ascent. I don’t move. I let the movement happen to me. I watch my own mouth open in the mirror, the soft shake in my stomach as my breath catches and drops.
Her hands slip under the loose hem of the tank, the linen lifting on a sigh of air. Heat to heat now. Skin to skin. My abdomen answers, tight, then yielding as her palms travel upward along the soft, glistening slope of me. I feel the first edge of her fingers meet the underside of my breasts and a sound leaves me, small and unguarded, like a valve opening. I’ve been breathing hard this whole time but now my chest has its own rhythm: rise, press, lift, release. Two arcs in her hands, deeper with every inhale.
She gathers me with care, not a grip, a hold, delicate and exact, until each peak rests between her fingers. The contact is almost nothing and somehow everything; a tremor runs through my arms but I keep them wide, offered to the mirror, to her, to the room. My nipples tighten against the cradle of her touch and the linen, still bunched around her wrists, cools the top of my breasts while her palms warm the undercurve. I hear myself sigh. One low note that tastes like relief and the sound seems to stroke back along her hands to me.
I keep looking. At my open ribs, my flushed throat, the way my chest lifts into her on the inhale and settles, unwilling to leave her, on the exhale. I am a metronome built of breath and want; she is the hand that sets the tempo.
She stays right there. No flourish, no rhythm to chase. Just the weight and patience of her hands shaping my breath. A faint press, a letting go, a hold that feels like forever, the smallest pinch at each nipple. Almost no movement at all, more a temperature, a pulse, a knowledge collecting under my damp top. The linen darkens against my skin where her wrists rest; the air on my collarbones feels cool and thin.
