In Summertime Saga

I had six pairs of panties in a Ziploc bag in my gym bag and I was about to trade them for martial arts training.

The economy of Summerville was, objectively, insane. I'd spent three weeks collecting these. One pair from the gym locker room lost-and-found bin. Two pairs Jenny had given me as payment for photo sessions, tossed at my head while she counted her cam-show revenue. One pair from Judith, who'd handed them over in the school hallway with her face so red I thought she was going to pass out, and I still wasn't sure why she'd agreed except that I'd asked and she'd stammered "okay" and walked away fast. The other two I'd acquired through methods I wasn't going to think about too hard.

Six pairs. Different colors, different sizes. In a Ziploc bag. In my gym bag. On the way to trade them to a Muay Thai instructor for fighting lessons.

This was my life now.

Planet Thiccness was busy. Kevin was on the main floor doing lat pulldowns with a weight stack that looked like it belonged in a different building. He waved. I waved back. I walked past the weight racks and past the treadmills and past the front desk and down the hallway to the back room.

The dojo was small. Mats on the floor, a heavy bag in the corner, a speed bag mounted on the wall, and a mirror along one side that had a crack running diagonally from the top left corner. The room smelled like rubber and old sweat. There was a wooden bench along the back wall with a towel folded on it and a water bottle that looked like it had been there since the gym opened.

Master Somrak was standing in the center of the mat with his hands behind his back.

He was small. Five-five, maybe five-six. Wiry, the muscles not big but all visible and all in the right place, the build of a man who'd been hitting things professionally for decades. Brown skin, close-cropped grey hair, a face that had been hit a lot of times and was fine with it. He was barefoot on the mat and he was looking at me and his expression said he'd already decided I was going to disappoint him.

"You want to train," he said. No question mark.

"Yeah."

"Payment."

I unzipped my gym bag. Pulled out the Ziploc. Held it up.

He took it. Opened the bag. Looked inside. Pulled out a pair, inspected it, put it back. Pulled out another one. Held it up to the light for a second. Put it back. Zipped the bag closed.

"Acceptable."

I stood there on the mat in my gym shorts and a t-shirt and I'd just handed a grown man a bag of women's underwear and he'd inspected them like a sommelier checking a wine label and said "acceptable" and this was the stat system of Summerville and I was living in it.

"Take off your shirt," he said. "And your shoes."

I did.

"You've fought before," he said. Looking at how I stood. My weight was forward on the balls of my feet because that's where it went when I expected to get hit. Old habit. Bar fights and parking lots and the one time a boyfriend's brother cornered me in a bathroom and I'd broken his nose with the door.

"Some."

"Street fighting."

"Yeah."

"Street fighting is stupid. You know how to take a hit because you've been hit. You don't know how to avoid being hit because you've never trained. I will teach you to not be where the fist is."

He dropped his hands from behind his back. They were taped at the knuckles.

"Guard," he said.

I put my fists up. He hit me in the ribs.

It was fast. I'd seen his shoulder move but my body didn't translate the information into action before his fist was in my side and the air went out of me and I stumbled sideways and he was already back in position, hands up, waiting.

"Again."

I put my fists up. He hit me in the stomach.

The pattern for the next forty minutes was: Somrak told me what he was going to do, I tried to stop him, I failed, and he hit me. He told me he was going to hook left. I guarded left. He feinted left and hit me with a straight right to the solar plexus. A kick, he said. I dropped my guard to block low. He kicked high and his shin cracked across my forearm hard enough that my hand went numb. He told me he was going to elbow. I had no idea how to defend against an elbow. He showed me by putting his elbow into my shoulder and I hit the mat.

He was patient. That was the thing I didn't expect. He wasn't angry or contemptuous. He hit me like a teacher marking wrong answers on a test. Corrective. Each hit was a lesson and the lesson was: you're standing in the wrong place.

My past life helped. I'd been in fights. Real ones, ugly ones, the kind where someone swings a bottle and you duck and hit back and nobody films it and nobody calls it martial arts. My reflexes knew what a fist coming at my face felt like. They knew to turn into it instead of flinching away. Getting hit wasn't the end, it was just a thing that happened between the start and the finish.

But reflexes aren't technique. I'd duck a punch and Somrak would sweep my planted foot and I'd hit the mat. I'd throw a counter and he'd redirect my arm and use my own momentum to put me on my ass. Everything I knew from bar fights was built on the assumption that the other person didn't know what they were doing either. Somrak knew exactly what he was doing. The gap between street and trained was a canyon and he let me see the bottom of it.

"Your instincts are fast," he said, around the twenty-minute mark. I was bent over with my hands on my knees, breathing hard, sweat dripping off my chin onto the mat. "Your body is slow. The instinct says move. The body doesn't know where."

"Yeah, I got that."

"The body will learn. Yours is learning faster than most."

I looked up. He was watching me with his head tilted. The expression wasn't unimpressed anymore. It was interested.

"Again," he said.

The last twenty minutes were different. He slowed down. Showed me a guard position, corrected my elbows, pushed my front foot forward until my stance was wider. Threw punches at half speed and made me block them. Made me block ten in a row and when I dropped one he went back to one and started over. The repetition was numbing and my arms were screaming and the sweat was pooling under my feet on the mat.

Around minute thirty-five, he threw a jab at my face. Full speed. No warning. And my head moved.

Not much. An inch, maybe two. But I hadn't decided to move it. My head just went sideways and his fist went past my ear and the air from it brushed my cheek and we both stood there.

"Hm," he said.

That was Dexterity 1. I knew it the same way I felt Strength increases at the gym, Kevin's weights going from impossible to heavy to manageable across sessions. The world hadn't changed. I was a fraction faster. Or I was processing a fraction sooner. The gap between seeing the punch and reacting to the punch had closed by a hair and the difference between a hit and a miss was exactly one hair.

Somrak hit me six more times in the last ten minutes. But I slipped two of them.

"Tuesday," he said when I was pulling my shirt back on. My ribs ached and my left forearm was swelling where his shin had caught it and my stomach felt like someone had parked a car on it. "Bring payment."

"I need more panties."

"Yes."

"Every session."

"Yes."

I looked at him. He looked at me. His face gave nothing away.

"Where do you-" I started.

"Tuesday," he said.

I left the dojo. The hallway back to the main gym passed the yoga studio. The door was closed and through the glass wall a class was in session. Eight women on mats in various positions, and at the front, leading them, was Tammy.

She was in a purple tank top and black leggings and her chestnut hair was up with a purple band and she was bent forward in a stretch that I recognized from my past life as the one yoga instructors did when they wanted the class to see proper form. Her back was straight and her arms were extended and she was talking to the class, her voice coming faintly through the glass. Something about breathing from the diaphragm.

She saw me.

Through the glass, mid-sentence, her eyes found me in the hallway. I was shirtless because I hadn't put my shirt back on properly, it was draped over my shoulder, and I was sweating and my left arm was swollen and I was walking with a slight limp because my hip flexor had taken a kick I didn't see coming.

She stopped talking. Just for a second. Then she mouthed something. I read her lips through the glass.

Are you okay?

I gave her a thumbs up.

She shook her head. The kind of head-shake that comes with a smile. A mom-shake. An Erik-I-told-you-not-to-stay-up-late shake. She was smiling and the smile was warm and her green eyes were crinkled at the corners and then she went back to the class and I kept walking.

Her hair was the same color as the chestnut highlights in Debbie's but shorter and the tank top was tight and her freckles went across her cheekbones and down her arms and her smile through the glass stayed with me past the front desk and through the parking lot and halfway home on the bike.

Erik's mom. Erik's landlady. Whatever the retcon called her. The woman who made apple slices and stirred the peanut butter and ruffled her son's hair and smiled at his friend through the glass of a yoga studio.

My ribs hurt and my arm was swelling and I had Dexterity 1 and I needed to figure out where to get more panties by Tuesday.

I rode home.