She let go.
She let go before the echo of the second tap had finished, before Sam's raised hand had even begun to come down, and the arm that a half second earlier had been hers to control was Blake's again entirely, and she was already up on one knee and then standing, and offering him her hand, and saying, "Are you all right? Your elbow. Did I— are you all right?" in the tone of a woman who has just seen someone come off a bicycle.
"I'm fine," Blake said, from the mat. He said it too fast. He rolled his shoulder, flexed the arm, tested it with the brisk, angry thoroughness of a man checking a car he has just driven into a post for damage he intends to deny. "I'm fine. Fine."
"Let me look," Sam said, and crouched, and took the arm gently and moved it through its range while Blake stared over Sam's head at the ring of faces with an expression that was trying to be amusement and was not succeeding. "Full range," Sam said, to the room at large, in his referee's voice, the voice for the record. "No complaint of pain. Demonstration stopped on a clean tap at—" and here he glanced, out of nineteen years of habit, at the clock on the wall above the office door, the big round white-faced clock that Dee wound, metaphorically, by replacing its battery every November. The clock said what clocks say. It could not tell him what he wanted to know. It was Jenna Park who said it, from the edge of the mat, in a voice she did not raise, holding up her phone with the timer still running on its screen because she had been timing the demonstration rounds all evening for the timetable.
"Seven seconds," Jenna said. "From his go. Seven."
Nobody spoke. The air conditioning went on with its work. The toddler on the man's shoulders, sensing an occasion he could not identify, kicked both feet at once. Somewhere at the back, the bowl of mints went over — a small, bright, domestic catastrophe, mints across the desk and onto the floor, Simon Greer's hand still outstretched toward it — and even that sound arrived in the room like an event, because everything had become the sort of quiet in which small sounds are events.
"Well," said Yusuf Adeyemi, mildly, to nobody, from the second row. "That is the demonstration, I think."
Dee was still standing with her hand half out from having helped Blake up, and Blake was still on one knee, and he looked up at her from there with his champion's face rearranged into an expression she had never seen on it, and she felt, suddenly and completely, not triumph but embarrassment, the embarrassment of a person who has done a private thing in a public place by mistake. She had not meant to make it seven seconds. That was the truth of it, and it stayed the truth of it no matter what was said on the internet. She had meant to demonstrate a counter to a low entry, the way Yusuf had taught it to her when she was twenty-one and convinced that judo was a kind of argument she could win by being right. Blake had brought the entry. Blake had brought the speed and the commitment and the audience. She had brought a half-step and a hip and her hands where they belonged. The seven seconds were just arithmetic.
"Dee." Simon Greer had arrived at the edge of the mat with a proprietor's instinct for a moment that needed managing. He was smiling with all of his face, which he only did when he was frightened. "Dee, that was — folks, how about that, huh? How about a hand for our — for Dee Marenco, everybody, Copperline's own—"
The applause came then, uncertainly at first and then all at once, and it was worse, somehow, than the quiet. People clapped who had never spoken to her. The two women from the bakery clapped with their whole arms. The young men with the phones were not clapping, because their hands were occupied; they were filming her now, both of them, phones up, and one of them said, quite distinctly, "Did you get it? Tell me you got the whole thing," and his friend said, "I got it, I got it, oh my God, I got all of it."