Cat In An Aqua Storm

2

Nancy Ninja Strikes Again

“Where’s Louie?” Temple stared toward the canna lilies’ red-and-yellow blooms bright against large green leaves. “He was there just a minute ago.”

“Probably got bored by how long it was taking us to get going,” Matt said pointedly. “I thought you didn’t want any witnesses.”

“Right. I’m still not sure I’m cut out for this.” Temple savagely jerked her waistline sash tight. “I feel like Dopey the Dwarf in this outfit.”

She stared down at herself drowning in loose, white cotton pajamas she wouldn’t have worn to a junior-high slumber party.

The most disconcerting sight was her bare feet, flour-white against the blindingly blue-vinyl mat they both stood on. Matt’s feet were lightly tanned, at least, and therefore interesting instead of pasty. Of course, Temple found everything about tall, blond Matt Devine interesting, darn it. Matt remained oblivious to all but his lesson.

“This outfit is called a ‘gi’,” he said, pronouncing the word with a hard “g.”

Gee, Temple thought. Okay. She plucked unhappily at a gigantic sleeve.

“You’ll get used to it,” Matt said, “and it shouldn’t feel too big. I got a child’s size, after all.”

Temple watched his warm brown eyes grow dismayed as he realized that his intended reassurance had gone right for a sore spot with Temple: her height, or—more precisely—the lack thereof.

She shrugged fabric-swaddled arms, not used to making a hissing rustle with her every move. “Great. Teach Shirley Temple to do this, then. Not me. She’d probably even sing something.”

“This won’t be so bad. I’m not going to give you chapter and verse of any particular discipline, just some tricks that you can use if anyone attacks you again. Jack Ree showed me the short-form women’s defense stuff. Anyone can do it.”

Temple eyed Matt, who looked as right in his gi as Robert Redford would, if ever RR would descend to doing a martial-arts movie. Maybe Matt’s light tan and sun-gilded hair made his gi look less like a flour sack with a rubber band in the middle.

“I still don’t know if I want to do it,” she said. “I’ve never been good at athletic things. Balls always went over my head and team captains always picked me last.”

“That’s the beauty of the martial arts,” Matt insisted with an enthusiast’s seriousness. “They all grew out of the peasants’ need to defend themselves without the weapons the nobility took for granted. And Asians are a small people. Any martial art is based on discipline and skill, not on size and brute force.”

The last two words made Temple wince in memory. “Those two guys were brute force, all right, up close and personal.”

Matt stepped nearer and lowered his voice. “Are you going to group?”

“Going to group! That’s so California, Matthew.” Temple looked up at Matt in the shade. This was definitely one way to get closer to Matt Devine, and she certainly wanted to do that, didn’t she?

“Group therapy is not exclusive to California, and my name isn’t short for Matthew.” He sounded a little stiff, even a bit miffed. Temple’s surprised silence forced a further revelation. “My name is... Matthias.”

“Oh.” Matthias was an odd name, was that why it bothered him? Temple decided to move past the issue. “It still shortens to ‘Matt.’ And couldn’t I see a counselor solo?”

“Sure.” Matt relaxed into his usual good humor once back on neutral ground. “But then you wouldn’t hear the stories of people who’ve been through the same thing as you have.”

“Most of them haven’t.” Matt’s smooth face roughened as he began to object. “I know they’ve been attacked,” Temple said quickly, “but by muggers or husbands and significant others, however nasty. How many other people in ‘group’ are going to have to confess to getting creamed by a couple of professional thugs intent on beating information out of them? They won’t believe me. In fact, I have a hard time believing me.”

Matt’s smile was rueful. “I’ve never known anyone who was so outright embarrassed at being the target of a crime, but I’ll bet there are a couple just like you in that group-therapy session. That’s why you need to put your own experience in perspective. And this is an all-women’s group.”

“I’ll look like a crybaby compared to people who’ve been really abused. Rape victims—”

“Survivors,” Matt corrected. “We’re trying to get away from reinforcing the victim feeling. You’re a survivor.”

“Survivor. I guess if I can survive interrogations by Lieutenant Molina, I can survive playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle with you. Okay, Counselor. I’m ready. Let the games begin.”

Matt’s manner became all business, as if a screw at the top of his head had tightened. Temple, still sheepish about what she was trying to do and the costume she had to wear to do it, realized that the martial arts were serious stuff to him.

“First,” he said, “are you pretty much recovered physically? No sore spots?”

Temple nodded. “Amazingly recovered. I can see how abused women keep hoping the abuse will stop.”

“You don’t have any old injuries, say, from high school? A broken wrist or anything?”

Temple shook out her arms in the long sleeves. “Not yet.”

“You won’t break anything here. That’s why the pads. You said you weren’t athletic in school. What about at home, in your family? Did you have any brothers and sisters to tussle with?”

“Not in the physical way.” Temple let her head wag from side to side in resignation. “You sound like Molina during an interrogation. Yes, Officer, I had brothers, four of them. And, no, we didn’t go at it much, for fun or for fury, because I was—naturally—the youngest. And the littlest. With eight years between me and the next youngest, obviously my siblings were too grown-up to have much to do with me. I did get endless icky clothes handed down from older girl cousins.”

“So you were almost an only child. That’s interesting.”

“To a counselor, maybe. To me, no. You know how they say parents over control the first child and loosen up for the later ones? Well, I was such a tail on the dragon that my parents got neurotic all over again. In fact, my brothers all joined in. Everybody knew what was best for me, except me.”

“Sounds like you were the apple of the whole family’s eye.”

“Yup. My father called me ‘Ladybug’ till I left home. And when I flew away from home and left Minneapolis with Max—they went ballistic.”

“They sound a tad smothering. Try to direct your frustration with your family into what we’re doing here. Redirect the irritation into action. And remember, I’m not going into the ‘Kung Fu’ mystical stuff. These are just some moves you can use to get an attacker off balance.”

“Will I be able to throw you over my shoulder?”

“Eventually,” he promised with a smile.

She sighed, looked around again for witnesses, found none, then grimaced. “Just don’t call me ‘Grasshopper.’ ”

Temple padded barefoot into the Circle Ritz and up to her apartment. She hated to “pad.” It made her feel like a child who’d gotten out of bed to ask for a glass of water, like she had to ask permission of someone for whatever she wanted.

Matt had been right. She was more deeply irritated by her family’s overprotective ways than she knew. When she drew on that ancient annoyance, pretending to be Nancy Ninja didn’t feel so weird. Not that she’d get to the stage of tossing him that quickly.

In her bedroom she fought the fabric knot and won. Round One for the little lady in bare feet. When she shrugged off the—what was it, a uniform, a costume?—gi, the unfurling fabric released the scent of her own sweat, faint and pleasantly pungent rather than reeking.

Temple changed into aqua knit shorts and top, then slid her bare feet into cork-soled wedgies two-and-a-half-inches high at the heel. Did she feel more self-confident—-any more vindicated, or vindictive? Had she made a breakthrough in her slo-mo relationship with her attractive but elusive neighbor? Maybe.

She walked to the bedroom/office at the unit’s other end, detouring through the kitchen to snag a glass of Ruby Red grapefruit juice. Visions of chopping a thug in the bridge of his nose with the hardened edge of one hand, then jamming the heel of the other hand under his nostrils so the presumably broken bridge bone would drive, splintering, into his brain, burned as gory-red in her head as the grapefruit juice in her hand.

Matt wasn’t teaching her that maneuver, but she’d heard of it. Maybe going through the motions now, learning the moves that she hadn’t known when the two men had attacked her, would restore something they had taken. Maybe. At her desk, a pale-pink Post-it note with the group-therapy phone number stuck out from the top of her computer screen like an anemic tongue.

She ripped it off, then lifted the phone receiver and dialed. Maybe just going through the motions of anything—even survival—wasn’t enough.