Saving Sunni (13 page)

But Sir was extremely grave when I brought him some coffee and told him dinner was almost ready.

“Mary called,” he told me, seeing that sage was standing in the door of the kitchen. “She’s been getting harassing phone calls. She thinks they’re from a church that’s not far from the club. She knows the minister there and he’s given her a little trouble before. Now she thinks they may get a group together to picket the club.”

“How upset is she?” sage asked.

“She’s handling it well. The publicity won’t be bad for The Keyhole once the drama dies down—unless her landlord decides to make trouble for her.” He looked up at me from his coffee cup. “And when I asked her to check, she said there was a person in the introductory class last Saturday named Randy Chambers.”

sage nodded once and disappeared into the kitchen. I stood where I was, staring at Sir. I had known it was Randy, of course. There was no one else it could have been. But still my skin turned to ice, and I didn’t dare move, as if I was a small animal hoping to be overlooked in the undergrowth.

Sir looked back into his drink for a while and then said quietly, “How long until dinner?”

I whirled around and almost ran back into the kitchen. There was something terrible about the worried expression on his face, and I felt like I’d inadvertently set off a bomb that was going to destroy civilization.

sage seemed to think the same thing. Her mouth was set in a thin, hard line, and she was putting plates on the counter with just a bit too much force. I meekly poured drinks and dished out potatoes and salad while she fixed Sir’s hamburger the way he liked it. She carried his plate and drink into the living room, and I assembled my own dinner and followed. When sage passed me on the way back in to get hers, it felt like an icy wind had blown through. The anger radiating from her was almost visible.

We sat on cushions on either side of Sir’s feet and began eating. He didn’t turn the television on and nobody said anything for five or ten minutes.

“So what happens now?” said sage, breaking the silence.

I jumped a little when she spoke, but managed not to spill anything off my plate and kept my head down as if I was watching it carefully.

Sir sighed. “I don’t know. I could potentially lose my job when the interview is broadcast on television. There’s just no way of knowing.”

“I could quit school and go back to work if you do,” sage offered immediately. Was she was saying that because she wanted to help or because she was getting tired of studying? I decided that was a mean thought and felt even worse.

“Thanks, beautiful,” he said, briefly laying a hand on her head. “But I don’t think it will come to that.”

“Is there anything we can do?” I asked, horrified. I had meant to keep quiet and hope they would forget I was in the room. sage gave a tiny snort. I could almost hear her thinking that I’d done plenty already.

But Sir was thoughtful. “Do you think we should bring Randy here and talk to him?”

sage’s eyes got huge, and I’m sure mine were too. “Bring him here?” I choked out.

He grinned, amused. “Maybe we can talk some sense into him. And if not, we have ropes and knives, and you girls are learning jujitsu. Between us, I’m sure we could take care of him. It’ll be good practice for you.”

Chapter 12

When sage got home from school on Tuesday, she insisted on practicing the forms we’d learned in jujitsu. I’d brooded all day about Randy and the news story and really wasn’t in the mood for exercise, but I agreed and followed her through what stretches she could remember from the class. It did feel kind of good, throwing punches and kicks and working out the frustration I’d been feeling.

sage turned out to be surprisingly good at remembering the forms. The few times she got stuck we figured it out between us, and most of the hostility that I’d felt from her dissipated as we worked through the various moves.

“You’re pretty good at this,” I told her as we faced off to try a little sparring.

She grimaced at me. “That would be really surprising. I’ve never been good at any sport in my life.”

She threw a punch, and I tried one of the blocks from the first form. It was designed to trap an opponent’s arm and break it, but I only managed to deflect the punch. Still, it was something. I punched back as slowly as possible without being condescending. I wasn’t a great athlete or anything, but sage seemed to assume that anyone who was naturally thin would be automatically qualified for the Olympics in any sport they chose.

She blocked frantically and much too forcefully, and our forearms collided painfully. We both hopped backward and bent over, cradling the hurt areas and moaning.

“You know,” I said before I could stop, “I’m not trying to kill you. You don’t have to react so violently.”

“I’m sorry.” She sighed and collapsed on the floor, looking to see if there was a bruise forming. “I just get so freaked out when I see someone throwing a punch at me.”

I sat down too and nodded. “You need to develop some more physical self-confidence. It’ll just take a little practice for you to get used to the sparring. You’ve got a great memory for the forms.”

She was skeptical. “Thanks. But did you see how hard they spar in the brown belt class? I could never do that!”

“I bet you’ll be great at it once you calm down a little.”

She shrugged and doggedly got to her feet again. “Let’s keep going. If Sir wants us to do this, we might as well do it right.”

From the amount of energy she was putting into our practice session, I suspected that she was doing it more for herself than for Sir. Maybe she’d decided it was a good stress reliever. Maybe it helped her work out her angry feelings toward me. She certainly did take the sparring seriously, making me throw punch after punch while she tried to block or catch them.

We were still at it when Sir walked in. I was opening my mouth to offer to demonstrate the form we had been working on for him, but after one look the words died. Something was obviously very, very wrong. His eyes were dull, and he seemed to have shrunk a little. He might not even have noticed us as he walked heavily over to the recliner and collapsed into it.

sage and I went over and sat on the floor by his knees, looking up at him.

“What is it, Sir?” sage asked, reaching to touch his hand.

He lifted it out of her reach without noticing and ran it over his face.

“My bosses saw the news clip last night,” he said.

“They recognized you?” I croaked.

He nodded. “They let me explain about the lifestyle and what the scene was about. They weren’t accusing me of anything, but they said I might have to leave for the image of the company. They don’t want someone working there who is a known…pervert. They didn’t quite put it in those words, but that’s what they meant.”

I gasped. “They’re
firing
you?”

sage said at the same time, “Can they do that?”

He shrugged. “Probably not legally, but I’d have to hire a lawyer at this point to stop them.”

“Wait,” I said. “You said
might
. Have they decided for sure that you need to leave?”

“I don’t know.” He sounded incredibly tired, as if he couldn’t face talking about it anymore. “They said they wanted to wait to see how the investigation turned out. I suspect they are consulting with their lawyers about it. If the investigation doesn’t go well, I imagine they will ask me to resign if I don’t take the hint and do it myself.”

sage and I slumped down a little. I tried desperately not to cry. This was all my fault. If I had divorced Randy before I left Michigan, he might not have come here to find me. He might have kept his fanatical ideas to himself, or maybe found another girl who shared them. There must be thousands of those around. Why hadn’t he done that?

Because I’d been too lazy to do the paperwork. Once Sir had pushed me into doing it, it had been really easy. There was no reason I couldn’t have done it before this. It was stupid.

While I berated myself, Sir reached over automatically for the remote and turned on the television. At first I didn’t pay any attention to what was on the news, but there was something about Sir’s and sage’s postures that drew my gaze to the television.

I saw signs, angry faces, and gradually I took in the background of the scene. It was a storefront, and the sign over their heads read, “The Fringe Element.”

“Oh, no, what now?” moaned sage, echoing my thought exactly.

“The church group is protesting a local store that they say encourages all kinds of abuse against women, as well as satanic worship and witchcraft,” the announcer was saying. The camera zoomed to the store window, where the mannequins still displayed the outfits Debi and I had worked on the day Randy showed up. After that encounter, there hadn’t been time to change the third figure, the one in the dominatrix costume, so I had found a leash and draped it between her hand and the collar I put on my mannequin. The French maid was still bent over with her panties showing. Even with the tension in the air, I had a stab of pride that I had dressed that window.

“…obvious exploitation of women,” a girl said. She looked to be around twenty-five, with lanky brown hair and no makeup. Her sign read
Keep America moral!
It was unimaginative, but I supposed it wasn’t easy to be witty and fanatical at the same time.

“Look at this complete disregard for common decency!” an older woman screamed from behind the first rank of protestors.

The cameraman ignored her, however, and seemed to focus on the younger woman. As I searched the crowd behind her for a glimpse of Randy’s face, I wondered why the reporter had singled out such an unattractive girl, but his next words answered the question.

“Isn’t it true that your mother is the owner of this store?”

The girl looked horrified. She quickly glanced back at the building as if she hadn’t been aware of where she had been picketing. I had the feeling she was watching for Geri to come storming out, Taser in hand. I didn’t blame her for looking nervous.

She faced him again, squaring her shoulders. “Yes,” she admitted, “but that doesn’t mean I have to approve of what goes on there.”

“What does go on there?” I wasn’t sure what he expected her answer to be, but she just shrugged.

“I haven’t been in it,” she said defiantly. “I don’t talk to my mother about her unchristian practices.”

“Aren’t you on good terms?” the reporter asked.

“I just said I’m not,” she snapped with a withering look that implied he was an idiot for suggesting she would be on good terms with such evil people.

He lost interest in her then, searching around for more interesting people to talk to. Sir, sage, and I exchanged incredulous looks.

“That was Geri’s
daughter?”
sage said.

“It would appear so,” said Sir dryly. “I doubt she would have lied about it.”

“Geri said she had a daughter that gave her a lot of problems, but she didn’t say…” I was at a loss how to finish. She didn’t say the girl was a religious fanatic, or would show up outside of her mother’s store with picket signs and a reporter, or never bothered to get her hair styled by a professional. Why would she have said any of those things? Besides, I couldn’t remember what Geri had said about her.

Sir looked at his watch. “Why don’t you call Geri and see if she’s all right?” he suggested. The phone rang as if it knew it had just been mentioned. He leaned over and picked up the receiver.

“Hello? Who?” His voice suddenly took on a very sharp edge. “No, I don’t want to…Wait.” He glanced back to the television. “Yes, I will do an interview, if you can assure me that it won’t be sensationalized. I would like to present the leather lifestyle as it is, not as some imbecilic reporters choose to represent it.”

I tried not to giggle, imagining the reaction of the imbecilic reporter on the other end. I looked over to see sage’s shoulder shaking slightly too. We both ducked our heads to avoid making each other laugh. This was definitely not the time for that.

“Now?” Sir said and sighed. “Very well, if it will help end this foolishness once and for all. Give me the address.”

We scrambled to get him a pen and paper, and he wrote down directions to the television station. He hung up curtly, barely saying goodbye and obviously not waiting for the person on the other end to do so.

“I am torn between having you come with me or letting you go to your class alone,” he said to us. “I hate to leave you by yourselves any more than I have to, but I don’t know that I want you at the station where they might catch you on camera again, either.”

“I don’t think I want to be there, Sir,” sage said shyly.

I nodded. “I don’t think I do either. Can we go to jujitsu instead? We’ve been practicing all afternoon.”

He looked concerned. “Do you think you’ll be safe?”

I wasn’t usually very good at reading sage’s expressions, but this time I knew exactly what she was thinking: she had been single for several years and took very good care of herself. Just because she now had someone to protect her didn’t mean she needed protecting. She struggled briefly and managed not to sound too defensive when she replied, “Yes, Sir. We’ll be safe. We’ll park right in front and remember, there are all those black belts there to fight off Randy if he comes by.”