Page 2 of Salt in the Wound
Before my knife hand had even made it an inch, I was blocked, seized, spun. By the time I registered what was happening, my back was to his chest and his knife was to my throat.
His chest was warm even through my gi jacket and the tank top I wore underneath. His arms around me were an iron cage, and the rubber knife to my throat pressed just hard enough to make me lift my chin. I didn’t smell cologne or any other kind of expensive scent, which seemed unusual for someone who would go to the trouble to wear such a nice suit; instead, I only smelled fresh and clean air, soap, perhaps, and something else underneath it. The way the air smells after rain, maybe.
He only held me there an instant, long enough to make his point, short enough to be sportsmanlike.
Still. I had no intention of repeating that particular humiliation.
But when I turned to tell him so, I saw Sister Mary Alice and Sister Grace watching me from the dojo’s front desk, their arms crossed. Sister Mary Alice lifted a pale, calloused hand from where it had been tucked into her elbow.
The message was clear. I was to continue.
I kept my breathing even and focused on settling my energy back into my belly.
“How long have you had that knife?” he asked as we bowed and started again. Like the last time, he merely walked while I danced around him—but now I knew the speed and strength that little deception of his hid.
“An hour,” I told him.
“They only showed you standard grip, I presume?”
“They didn’t show me anything. They wanted us to get a feel for them before we started formal lessons.”
He nodded again, and then tucked his tie into his shirt with his free hand. With a flick of his fingers, he was holding the knife like me. “This is standard grip,” he said. “Sometimes called a hammer grip. You can move your thumb to a saber grip, like so, but that’s still really just standard grip when you consider the direction of the blade.”
I braced my thumb on the edge of the hilt like he did, and then slid it back. “Okay,” I said quietly. I wasn’t sure why he was teaching me this, or why we were even sparring in the first place, but I was hungry to learn, desperate to push myself.
“This,” the stranger said, flipping the knife and then catching it expertly with the blade pointing down, “is reverse grip.”
“Like a serial killer,” Bryn chirped from over by the mirrors.
A corner of the stranger’s mouth pressed in, faintly. “Yes. And now it’s easier to use my fist as a fist if I need to. Now I have more leverage for slicing, and more force for stabbing.”
I followed his lead and changed my own grip to reverse. It felt strange—it wasn’t the way you’d first think to hold a knife—but it felt powerful too. I could feel how much faster I could cut, how much harder I could stab.
“Good,” he said, and when he saidgoodin that rough, cold voice, something flickered in my chest, in my thoughts, gone before I could really perceive it. “Now, do you see the difference?”
“Standard is blade up,” I answered, “and reverse is blade down.”
A shake of his head. “Standard,” he said slowly, “is for a fair fight. But reverse?” Once again, he moved faster than I could stop him. This time I landed on my back, with him on top of me. The tip of his rubber blade was lodged against my windpipe. “Reverse is for when you mean it,” he finished.
I blinked up at him, too stunned for the humiliation to sink in, although it would dig its teeth into me later. In a fast, graceful movement, he was standing, and then he grabbed my forearm and pulled me to my feet.
He dropped my arm as soon as I had my balance and then crossed the space to return the knife to Bryn. She and I watched as he strode over to the area by the door and put on his socks and shoes with elegant, efficient movements. Sister Mary Alice and Sister Grace were gone.
“Well, Isolde,” the stranger said as he stood up. His sleeves were still rolled up and his jacket was slung over his forearm. “It was lovely meeting you.”
He left, the bell on the door ringing long after it had shut.
I turned to face Bryn, who was still staring at the door he’d walked through. When she swiveled her head to look at me, there was a question written all over her tan, heart-shaped face.
“How did he know your name?” she asked.
two
The first time I sensed things weren’t entirely as they seemed was three months after I met the stranger in the dojo. It was my senior year of high school, and my father—who split his time between London and New York—had brought me to our Kensington terrace for my winter break. Professionally designed Christmas decorations filled the corners and twined up stair railings. The tall Georgian rooms were filled with fresh evergreens and bowls of baubles and twinkling candles lit by staff. Piles of presents, neatly wrapped, beckoned from under the tree. My father hadn’t bought any of them for me. I doubted he even knew what they were. Something as unimportant as presents was undoubtedly delegated to the same person who sent me birthday cards when he was out of town, and who arranged for the driver to pick me up from school.
We ate a late Christmas Eve dinner in the too-grand dining room, candlelight glinting off the hand-painted china. It was just the two of us; my mother was long dead by then. There’d only been two of us at Christmas dinner for the past five years, and yet that empty spot at the table was still so full of my mother’s absence that it ached like a tooth.
“Your school report was quite good,” my father said. Despite being uninterested in the minutiae of parenting a teenager, Geoffrey Laurence took a keen interest inme. He expected the best from me, which I was grateful for. Even if sometimes I wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted beyond good grades and impeccable manners.
