Hot Shot

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  Yank began searching the ground at his feet. Sam extracted the Duster keys from his own pocket and tossed them over. "We won't be long."

  He caught her arm and began drawing her back toward the row of stores. "You're still too chicken to fight with me, aren't you? You're incredibly pissed, but you're going to sulk instead of fight."

  Some of her spirit began to come back. Was it his touch? Did he have a magical way of passing his energy through his skin and into hers? "I'm not afraid of fighting with you," she said. "But right now, I'm just not certain you're worth it."

  Even as the words were slipping from her mouth, she couldn't believe she was uttering them. His steps faltered, and she knew that she had hurt him. It was a strange feeling to realize she had any power over him at all. She moved up onto the sidewalk. An ice cream cone lay deflated in an ugly brown puddle on the pavement. They walked past the door of Mom & Pop's. She stopped in front of the dry cleaners and stared blindly at a wedding gown entombed in a windowed cardboard box. Once again, she reached deep inside herself to find the courage to say what she must.

  "Don't ever try to cut me out again, Sam," she said quietly.

  "Is that what you think I was doing?"

  "Yes. You excluded me and then used marriage as a bargaining chip to keep me in line."

  "You're getting paranoid. I assumed we'd get married one of these days. You're not the sort of woman who's going to be happy shacking up for very long." He slipped one hand out of his jacket pocket and laid it over her shoulders. "Suzie, I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to pull any sort of power play. I just didn't understand you were so hung up about crossing all the't's and dotting the i's."

  "To me, it was more than crossing't's."

  "But I don't see it that way. You and I are a couple, aren't we? What one of us has, the other has."

  He was so earnest, so persuasive, but this time she wouldn't let herself be swept away. "Then why didn't you drop out?" she asked gently. "Why didn't you say, 'I'll step aside. Let Susannah be your partner. What she's got, I've got'?"

  He pulled his arm from her shoulders. "That's ridiculous! It's not even logical. This whole thing was my idea. SysVal means everything to me."

  "I lost my father, Sam. SysVal means everything to me, too."

  The harsh glare faded from his features as he took in the significance of what she was saying. Slowly he smiled-a rueful, apologetic smile. Some of the ice inside her began to melt. He tilted his head toward her and touched her forehead with his own. Her eyelids drifted shut. They stood like that for a moment, with their eyes closed and foreheads touching.

  "I'm sorry," he whispered.

  She knew that she was near tears, and she forced them back so that she didn't sound self-pitying. "I want to be as important to you as the company."

  "You and the company are all mixed up together in my mind."

  They stood like that for a few moments with only their foreheads touching. Then their noses brushed, and their mouths. Although their lips were together, they didn't kiss.

  "I love you, Suzie," he whispered, his voice sounding young and scared. "I know I get crazy sometimes, but you've got to promise me you'll stick with me. Please, babe. I need you so much. Oh, God, I love you. Promise me you'll always be there for me."

  He gripped her hands at her sides so tightly he seemed to be trying to couple their flesh. At that moment, she realized how fiercely she loved him. Her throat had constricted and she couldn't talk-she couldn't force out the words he needed to hear. Instead, she parted her lips and gave him a dark, desperate kiss.

  Chapter 16

  "Slap some paint on his shirt, Susannah," Sam said three weeks later, as he placed a two-by-four over a pair of sawhorses. "I'm embarrassed to be in the same room with him."

  Mitch looked down at his crisply pressed work shirt and a pair of dark blue jeans with razor-sharp creases. "What's the matter with the way I look? We're building a wall, for Pete's sake, not going to a fashion show."

  Sam snorted, and Susannah smiled to herself. Building the partition to separate the assembly and storage areas in their new office space was the first job the four of them had done together, and despite the fact that Sam and Mitch had been trading jibes all morning, the wall was taking shape rapidly.

  She had spent the first two weeks of October scouring the Valley for office space, but it had been difficult finding something that was adequate and yet met their limited budget. With Mitch as a partner, they had easily secured a bank loan. Each of them was now drawing a minuscule salary, and their cash flow problems had temporarily eased. But they all knew the loan was only a temporary stopgap, and in order to postpone going to the venture capitalists, they had to scrimp wherever they could.

  She had finally found office space at a reasonable rent in the back of a tilt-up, one of the low rectangular buildings that filled the Valley's industrial parks. It wasn't a large area, but it was bigger than the garage and, with a few additions, would meet their needs. They had begun constructing the dividing partition the day before.

  "I'll bet you go to a tailor to get your underwear made," Sam said to Mitch as he held the board for Yank to cut.

  "My tailor doesn't make underwear," Mitch replied. And then, "I've heard there's a market in the Orient for human hair, Sam. It occurs to me that if you'd sell yours, we could buy this building instead of just renting it."

  Susannah groaned. "Tell them both to be quiet, will you, Yank? They're giving me a headache."

  "You didn't have a headache this morning." Sam leered at her, and then swung the two-by-four around so that it gently slapped her rear.

  She absolutely refused to blush. If she were going to work with men all day, she at least had to pretend to be one of the guys. "That's true," she countered sweetly, "but I'll certainly have one by tonight."

  Mitch smiled. Although she knew he was still watching everything she did and waiting for her to take a misstep, their relationship was at least superficially cordial.

  She went over to help him support a joist he was nailing into place. "Boy, are you lucky you joined up with us. They wouldn't have let you do work like this in Boston."

  He looked down at her from his perch on the ladder, with a hammer in his fist and a satisfied expression on his face. "This is great, isn't it? I haven't had so much fun since I was in college."

  She grimaced as she tried to ease the cramp in her shoulders. "You were supposed to be the sane person in this partnership. Now you're as crazy as the rest of us."

  On the other side of the room, Yank was driving Sam wild by insisting on measuring every board to the sixteenth of an inch. Finally Sam couldn't stand it any longer. "We're not doing brain surgery, for chrissake! It doesn't have to be exact. Just saw the son of a bitch in half."

  But Yank, with his engineer's passion for precision, didn't know how to compromise. By afternoon, Sam refused to work with him any longer, and Susannah was forced to take his place.

  As Susannah worked, her eyes followed Sam. She kept wondering when it would wear off, this need to touch him every moment they were together. She knew that he was arrogant and frequently self-centered, but he was also the most compelling person she had ever met. He waved challenges in her face like red flags, and pushed her into another universe with his lusty lovemaking. With Sam, she could be bold and strong. Without him-But she couldn't bear to think about life without Sam. Left on her own, she would probably crawl back into her proper hollow shell and stay there until she died.

  She realized that the events the night Mitch had joined the company had changed their relationship. Both of them sensed that they had nearly lost something precious. Ironically, Sam was the one who had begun to press the idea of getting married. Being Sam, he had painted word pictures for her of what their marriage could be-the endless possibilities of a union both spiritually and physically sublime, the power of that sort of synergy, the unlimited potential of the joining of matched minds. As always, his rhetoric had mesmerized her. They had even gone so f
ar as to apply for a marriage license and to get their blood tested. But then Susannah had found office space and everything else stopped.

  They christened the wall with a six-pack of beer that evening and spent the next day moving in. At ten that night, dirty and exhausted, they made their way to Mom & Pop's.

  Mitch had been talking for some time about the need for a formal organizational chart. Yank had said that he wouldn't accept any title except Engineer, but even Sam knew that the rest of their responsibilities had to be better denned. After the waitress had taken their order, Mitch pulled a neatly folded piece of paper from his pocket and slid it toward the middle of the table. Even before he opened it, Susannah suspected that it was the organizational chart he had been talking about.

  It was illogical to hope that she could retain her position as president. Mitch had far more experience and was the better choice to head the company. But although she was reconciled to the fact that she would be demoted, she wasn't going to let Mitch give her an empty title. If it meant another fight, then so be it.

  Mitch unfolded the paper and straightened it with his fingers. It was the roughly drawn chart she had expected, and her eyes first fell on Yank's name written in neat block letters slightly below center. He was listed as Head Engineer.

  Sam gave a hoot of laughter and pointed to his own name. "Chairman of the Board. Yeah, I like the sound of that."

  And then, to her astonishment, Susannah saw she was listed as President and Chief Operating Officer, while Mitch had appointed himself Executive Vice-President of Sales and Marketing.

  Mitch took in the expression of surprise on her face. "Being president sounds impressive, Susannah, but it'll be mainly dirt work for a long time. I hope you're up to it."

  "But you're far more qualified. Why-"

  "Marketing technical products is what I do best, and it's why you recruited me. I don't want to be distracted with day-to-day operations. You've said that you're a detail person. Now you're going to have to prove it."

  Her mouth felt dry. Even though this was what she had wanted, she was frightened. They weren't operating out of a garage anymore. What did she know about running a real company?

  Mitch called for a vote, and before the pizzas arrived, she had been officially elected SysVal's first president.

  On a warm and sunny afternoon just before Halloween, Susannah was in the Gamble garage packing up the last of the equipment. Mitch had been right, she thought, as she slapped a pile of tools in the carton with a little more force than necessary. Being president sounded a lot more impressive than it was. Everyone had gone off and left her to do the final cleanup. Yank was working on the prototype, and Mitch had flown to Boston to see his children. Sam was supposed to be helping her, but he had run off a couple of hours ago and not returned.

  In the past two weeks she had been able to handle most of the emergencies that had popped up, and the company was still running. Although Yank continued to grumble about the way the three of them had strong-armed him into leaving Atari, the work on the prototype for the self-contained computer was now progressing much faster. They had hired a talented engineer from Homebrew to design the power supply, and spent hours debating what they would name the machine. All of them had discovered they liked images that had to do with heat and fire. After much discussion, they voted to name the machine the Blaze.

  Sometimes as she studied its emerging circuitry, Susannah found herself remembering the evening at the playground with Sam. Do you know what Yank's machine is going to give you? he had told her. It's going to give you courage. In a funny way, Sam's prophecy had come true.

  As if she had conjured him with her thoughts, he poked his head in through the garage door. His hair was even longer now than when they'd met. At night, when she was naked, she liked to comb it through her fingers and pull the inky strands across her breasts.

  "It's about time," she said grouchily.

  He grinned like a kid who'd just gotten away with something. "Sorry. Things to do."

  "I'll bet. You've probably been out joy riding."

  Removing the wrenches she was holding, he cupped her bottom and pulled her hips forward so that their jeans rubbed together. Then he kissed her. "You're sounding like a nagging wife. Come to think about it, that's not a bad idea. Go get your face washed. We're getting married in half an hour."

  Her head shot back. "What?"

  He grinned. "It's all arranged. Mom just left to pick up Yank, and they're meeting us at the tire playground. I like the idea of doing it there. The guy who's marrying us is the brother of this guy I know. He's got another ceremony at one o'clock, so we sort of have to rush."

  She stared at him.

  He stepped back, tilted his head to one side and gave her that cocky I-dare-you look. A police siren whined in the distance. She could see him waiting for her protests, waiting for her to give him a long list of all the sensible reasons they couldn't do something this impulsive. She thought of the hundreds of phone calls and endless rounds of appoint-ments that had gone into the preparations for her wedding to Cal-all those intricate, elaborate, ultimately useless preparations.

  Although she had known him only six months, her mind refused to consider the possibility of a future without Sam. She needed to touch his skin and breathe his air for the rest of her life. "All right," she said breathlessly. "I'll do it."

  He let out a whoop of delight and drew her back into his arms. "God, I love you." He pulled her into the house, where he barely gave her five minutes to comb her hair and dab on a few cosmetics. She substituted a purple gauze blouse for her T-shirt, but before she could unfasten her jeans to exchange them for slacks, he was dragging her back outside toward the Harley.

  They arrived at the playground just as Yank and Angela climbed out of Angela's red Toyota. Yank was at his worst, so distracted he didn't seem to have the vaguest idea what was happening. Angela was talking a mile a minute and dabbing her eyes with tissue. To Susannah's surprise, Sam pulled a florist's box from the bike's saddlebag. Inside was a bridal bouquet of yellow roses.

  The minister, whose name was Howard, appeared in a Grateful Dead T-shirt and told Sam how cool he thought all this was. Neighborhood children playing on the tires and riding along the bike path came over to see what was going on. Susannah felt as if she had been thrown back to the sixties.

  They stood in front of a dome made of tractor tires, with Yank on Sam's right and Angela, sniffing and holding a rosary, on Susannah's left.

  "Listen, you guys," Howard said as he began the ceremony. "I don't know either of you, so what I have to say isn't important. Why don't you just look at each other and make the promises you think you can keep. Sam, you go first."

  Sam turned to her and squeezed her hand. "I promise to give you everything it's in my power to give, Susannah. I'll be honest. I'll speak the truth for both our sakes. And I won't be afraid to walk into the future with you."

  They were strange vows, but they stirred threads of emotion deep inside her because they were so typical of Sam, so exactly right.

  It was her turn. She gazed into his eyes and tried to find words to express the inexpressible. "I promise to give you my best, Sam, whatever that may be." She paused and the traditional wedding vows of love and honor passed through her mind. She searched for a new way to say them, a way that would reflect the passion and joy she felt in his presence, but her silence lasted too long, and Howard spoke before she could finish.

  "That's cool. That's really cool." He picked up both their hands in his and squeezed them. "The law says that you're married, but only the two of you know what that really means." He then went on to ruminate about the universal powers of light and harmony and concluded with the words, "Be groovy."

  The children on the playground giggled as Sam kissed her, and then Angela kissed them both. Yank and Sam shook hands, and Howard hugged everybody, including the kids. Sam made a mad dash over to a set of playground rings suspended from a heavy chain and pulled himself across them, h
and over hand. When he dropped to the ground, he threw back his head and laughed. He was exultant, as if he had claimed some priceless possession. Together, they raced to his bike.

  Angela had not been able to find a box of rice in Yank's kitchen cupboards and had grabbed a box of elbow macaroni instead. She quickly distributed its contents, and the motley assortment of wedding guests pelted the bride and groom with it as they roared away.

  They took a wild ride into the hills. Sam's hair had come loose and it blew into her face, stinging her cheeks. She pressed her breasts to his back and held him tightly against the chill cut of the wind. They left civilization behind and climbed higher. Eventually he steered the bike onto a narrow, rutted road that soon dwindled to an overgrown path. When even that disappeared, he slowed and drove through the dry brush to the edge of a steep bluff. Only then did he stop.

  The sound of silence was sharp after the roar of the engine. The Santa Clara Valley lay below them, its highways, industrial parks, and rectangular buildings laid out so that it look like an enormous integrated circuit. "I've put the world at your feet, Suzie," he said, his voice husky. "The two of us together-we can have whatever we want. By ourselves, we're not anything. But together, the Valley's ours. Yours and mine. We'll be king and queen."

  There was a strange intensity about his words that made her uneasy. She broke the tension by saying lightly, "Queens are supposed to have crowns. I don't even own a baseball cap."

  He smiled and the sunlight sparked silver lights in his black hair. She drank in the sight of the wild, free lover who was now her husband. "One of these days I'll buy you your own Harley," he said. "How about that? It'll be a royal Harley." He tugged her blouse from the waistband of her jeans and pressed his lips to her temple. "You'll ride it naked right down the middle of El Camino Real, just like Lady Godiva."