by Lola Darling
Sometimes I wish I could be more like her. But every night when I close my eyes, I can still picture Mom’s place. The crappy closet of an apartment she was stuck in. The ramen noodles she lived on, except when I forced better food on her during a visit. She spent her whole life indulging—buying whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, and working a crappy retail job, maxing out credit cards to support herself.
She spent the last years of her life in a hovel.
I need to avoid that. I need to do better. And I need to support her, too. It might be her fault she’s broke, but I’m not letting her suffer just because she wasn’t a practical kid.
That’s my job. Being the practical one.
I thought Heather and I could bridge the gap between our lives, but maybe we’re just too different. Sometimes lately, I’ve started to wonder.
I guess she’s been wondering too.
“Heather, I’m sorry that it’s been so long since we hung out,” I say.
She cuts me off. “Don’t. Don’t apologize. Don’t say it’ll change. It never does. Call me when you’ve decided I’m worth something, okay?”
With that, the call disconnects, and I’m left standing barefoot and alone in the middle of my huge, expensive, gorgeous kitchen, holding a spoonful of slowly melting ice cream over a tub that’s freezing the fingers off my hand.
I click the phone off, toss it on the counter, and pace out into my living room.
Normally, this apartment makes me happy. It’s a constant reminder of how far I’ve come, and everything I’ve managed to make out of my life. The hardwood floors, high ceilings, and leather furniture strewn with cozy fur blankets and comforters is everything I used to dream about as a kid, watching home decorating shows on my parents’ crappy black-and-white TV, in our rundown living room that converted to my bedroom at night, since we could only afford a one-bedroom place.
Now, the TV takes up my entire wall above the fireplace, and I can totally immerse myself in any movies or shows I choose to watch.
When I have time to. Which, admittedly, is pretty much never.
I sigh and cross the room to slump onto my couch. Out the window to my left, the lights of San Francisco sparkle in the distance. But in here, I keep the lights off, and my head buried in the pint of ice cream. Ice cream that I need more than ever tonight, even though, after that phone call, it’s pretty much lost all its flavor for me.
What am I doing with myself?
But I already know the answer to that. I’m building a better life. A better future than my mom’s. No matter what it takes.
Four
Max
“And then, I shit you not, she says ‘So are you coming to my place, or what?’ Can you believe that worked?”
“I really, really can’t. Sure you didn’t just dream that part?” I lift my beer for another swig as Marcus aims a slug at my arm. It doesn’t even interrupt my drink. “Weak, Marcus.”
“Whatever, man, you’re just jealous. How long has it been since you got any action?”
“None of your business, that’s how long.”
Across the table, Jim whistles in response.
“So that’s at least six months to a year, don’t you figure, Jim?” Marcus shoots back, though he’s grinning as he picks up his own pint glass.
“That, or someone’s hindered by the non-fraternization policy,” Jim points out, and hoists his eyebrows significantly at me.
“Tempting as it may be, I don’t mix business and pleasure,” I reply evenly.
“Tell that to the new girl at the front desk.” Marcus smirks. “What’s her name? D-something—no, wait, that’s her cup size.”
“It’s Hannah,” I interrupt. “And she’s not really my type.” Too much giggling and following me around the hallway all day for my taste. But I don’t need to add that. Clearly the guys already noticed. Great, I wonder how long this rumor train will last. Couldn’t be any worse than the time Marcus told half the office I was hooking up with that girl Melanie in accounting who wouldn’t stop interoffice mailing me Sweetheart candy, at least.
That was a new personal low.
“If she’s not your type, you’re either a zombie, or you’re more into Marcus here,” Jim replies, jerking a thumb at Marcus, who has chosen this moment to stuff a fistful of loaded fries into his face.
“Pass.” I push back my chair. “I’m going for another round, anyone else?” They both nod, so I head up to the bar to order three more. The pub is quiet tonight. It’s a tiny little hole-in-the-wall a block from our office—a shit hole, really, with sticky floors, a weird smell that I’m pretty sure is still lingering from back when you used to be able to smoke inside dives like this, and only one bartender slash server, the gruff old Irish guy Seamus who runs the joint.
In other words, exactly the dive we always need after a long day of bullshit.
As I collect our beers, Seamus slides me a shot glass filled to the brim with what smells like Jameson.
“Look like you could use it,” he says.
I toss back the shot. Great. Even the bartender can tell I’ve had one of those days.
And all thanks to Chloe goddamn MacIntyre.
The more I review the files, the more annoyed I get. This case is going to need a lot of attention, and she only wants to slot me in for 15 minutes? I’m going to spend half the day tomorrow working on this, and she’s acting like it’s just another normal case. Not one with a celebrity that could land us more attention than anything I’ve worked on in my career here so far.
Not to mention her attitude in the meeting today. I mean, yes, okay, it was kind of sexy the first couple times she death-glared at me. But after a while that disdain gets old. I know exactly what she thinks about me, like it or not.
Suck it up, Davis. Ignore her attitude. Ignore her shapely ass. Ignore your constant mental images of tearing that silky blouse off of her body and pushing that tight skirt up her legs, leaving the garter belt and her glasses on.
Ignore the constant throb of your cock every time you fucking think about her.
After this case, if I can prove myself, Anthony has already hinted at giving me a lot more freedom. I’ll be able to pick and choose my own cases, select the ones that I think will take me the farthest career-wise. Hell, he’s even hinted, in his roundabout, somehow-still-insulting way, that I could be on a partner track, if I step up my game now.
This is no time to let a little thing like one colleague throw me off. If anything, I just need to look at her as a new challenge.
A challenge I need to avoid conquering. Much as I might want to get my hands all over her sexy curves, Chloe is now a no-fly zone.
Forbidden fruit.
I slide back into my usual seat at our usual table and hand out the usual orders: Guinness for me and Jim, and Corona for Marcus, because he’s a chick.
Small favors—it seems like the topic has shifted while I’ve been away. Thank fuck.
“Keep hearing rumors about it,” Jim is saying, “But nothing confirmed as of yet. At least, nothing that fucking Rubin is going to tell me, since he’s had it out for me since the day I started reporting to him.”
“I heard it’s starting next month.” Marcus shrugs.
“What’s starting?” I wrap my fist around my second beer. The glass is cool, sweating against my palm.
“The restructure,” Jim says, with one of those Did you seriously not know about this looks that he gets.
I blink at the two of them for a minute before the term settles into my skull. “Hang on. What restructure?”
Did I seriously miss an office rumor of this magnitude? Christ, I really am losing my edge.
“Not sure exactly. Only hearing it through the trickle-down at the moment.” Marcus shrugs again, before taking a long, healthy chug of his beer. “Rumor-mill says cutting mostly in accounting and office assistants. But probably about 20 of the litigators too.”
Shit. That’s a significant chunk of our work force.
Paranoia sets in. Why didn’t Anthony warn me about this? He must have known, as a partner. Unless he didn’t tell me because I could potentially be on the chopping block? Normally you’d give anyone you cared to keep a heads-up before news about this kind of thing starts to circulate. Hey, FYI, this is coming our way, but don’t freak, you’ll be fine.
Fucking hell. “At what level, do you think?” I take a healthier gulp of my drink than I probably ought to, considering I’m driving later. But screw it, if I have to cab it home, so be it.
“Don’t know. Probably we’ll hear more next week or the week after. You know how these things go. You hear the rumors first, then the rumor cover-ups, then the truth comes out after the higher-ups have spent a couple of weeks panicking among themselves about who let this shit leak.”
Jim laughs, though it seems forced. All of us are pretending to be unfazed by this news. Drinking more quietly now, but other than that, no one outside of our table would probably be able to tell a thing was wrong.
Which is fine by me. I’d rather not anyone know how much I’m worrying right now. If I lose this job, it all comes crashing down. The apartment loan I could live with; pay it off as I go. But everything else? The location, the ease it gives me for everything else I need to be doing during the day…
No use panicking prematurely, though. All I can do at this point is keep my head down, do my work, and get on with my day. The chips will fall where they will, and at the end of this, we’ll see how I stand.
One thing is for sure. I definitely need to knock this case with Chloe out of the park.
Tomorrow, I decide, I’m going to corner her and make her see sense. If she doesn’t want to work on this with me, then she can ask Paul to reassign her. Otherwise, I’m gonna need her to be all in on this one.
For both our sakes.
Five
Chloe
At 4:15pm, I start to shuffle together the files I’ve prepared. After a long morning of answering handover questions for Rich about the Daniels’ case, I’ve spent the entire afternoon frantically catching up on everything I need to know about Suzie’s. I think I have a pretty good handle on the thing, but it remains to be seen how this whole working with a partner thing is going to go.
Especially a partner like Max Davis.
By 4:20, I’m ready for the meeting. At 4:25, I shove my office door open, a subtle hint.
By 4:30, I’m rolling my nails across my desktop in annoyance. Really?
Mr. Slacker breezes in at 4:31pm with a broad smile on his face. Which is, really, unreasonably chiseled. Who has a jawline that solid, or cheekbones that high? His two-day stubble looks more like shadow painted on to accentuate just how sharply his bones cut across his face. And are those glasses? Sweet mother of all that’s holy, talk about panty-melting. “Got held up in a prior.” He kicks the door shut behind him, and even though I set out a chair on the opposite side of my desk for him, he drags it around to sit right beside me instead. “So, you all caught up now?”
My jaw clenches, and it takes every ounce of resistance I have not to let anything else visible clench, too. Caught up? Like I’m the one who’s running behind. “What was it you were telling me about your preparation, before?” I mutter, with a glance at the clock over my office door.
“Well, maybe if I had a larger window to aim for, I’d be on time.” He stretches his arms out behind his back lazily.
Ugh. We don’t have time for this. Ignore him and get straight to business, Chloe. “So, the main problem I see is that Suzie never officially registered ‘rub it in.’ She has some protection under the unregistered trademark regulations, but we’ll have to prove that she used it first and regularly, and that this company’s use of it is confusingly similar to hers.”
“Have you looked at their video yet?” He pulls out a tablet and taps on the screen, flooding it with a full-screen view of a lycra-clad woman on what appears to be a chair stuck on top of a ball vacuum, to my untrained eye.
I resist the urge to sigh. He’s right; we should view this together, and pick it apart while we can. “Go for it.”
He taps play, and we lean in over my desk to watch. His shoulder brushes mine for a second, before I readjust in my seat. Don’t touch him, he’s probably contagious.
He does smell amazing, though. Some kind of deep, forest-like scent, and beneath that, something that’s all him, savory and masculine. I try to breathe in a little deeper without letting on.
The video starts with the woman on the chair gyrating her hips in a slow grind. The chair rotates beneath her, not just in a circle, but up and down, side-to-side, like she’s rolling across the top of an exercise ball, but in a seat.
“Looking to flatten your stomach, define your abs and tighten your rear? Well, your ass isn’t going to tone itself just from sitting on it!”
“That’s Suzie’s saying too,” I murmur, and ignore the sideways, startled How did you know that glance from Max.
Let’s pretend I’m not that familiar with Suzie Steel’s workout videos, shall we?
On the screen, the camera spins around the model so we can watch her tiny butt rotate that chair from every angle.
“Our all new patented technology lets you perfect your problem areas, ladies.” The voiceover woman really does sound like Suzie. Complete with overly peppy intonations and her gruff, low voice, a strange yet oddly effective combo for making me stick with my shabby workout routine. “Just take a seat, crank the resistance setting up as high as you want—” There’s a brief pause as the model elaborately mimes turning a dial on the side of the chair—“Then rub it out.”
Cheesy music floats through the background as the girl on-screen mimes gritting her teeth and grinding her ass even harder around the chair. Not going to lie, it looks like she’s having the most painful orgasm of her life. I bite down hard on my lower lip to keep from cracking up.
One sideways glance at Max tells me he’s having the same problem—and he’s even worse at disguising it. He’s just straight up silent-laughing, his shoulders shaking as he watches the video roll on.
“Say it with me ladies—Rub it out!” A whole chorus of scantily-dressed girls in Rotator chairs repeat the slogan this time, beaming despite the fact that they’re supposed to be getting the tough workout of their lives.
The video cuts to sales and ordering information—“Just ten easy payments of $9.99 when you call now!”—and I trade bemused looks with Max.
“Just when you thought that phrase couldn’t sound any dirtier,” he says with a smirk, “they get a whole chorus line to recite it.”
“Plus they’re trying to market this to women, right? You’d think they’d have a bunch of guys half-naked on the video instead.”
His dark green eyes latch onto mine, suddenly intense. But after a moment, all he comes out with is, “So the ice queen has a type after all,” and an infuriating smirk.
I roll my eyes. “Oh yes, meatheads really do it for me.”
“No? Well, figures you’d be more into the intellectual types.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I mutter, even though he’s right.
“Nothing. Just that you probably prefer your hookups have a strong muscle between their ears, too. Which I can respect.”
“Why? It rules you out.” I side-eye him.
He smirks. “You know, I’m not who you think I am, Chloe.”
“So you’re not the toned, skimpily dressed swimsuit model type?” I reply, jerking my thumb toward the screen, where the video has begun to automatically replay, the girls’ chests bouncing as they run through their rotating chair workout routine.
“I didn’t say that. Just that I prefer an intelligent, toned, skimpily dressed swimsuit model type.” He winks.
“You claim you aren’t who I think you are, and yet that’s your type?”
“I have a lot of types.”
“What’s your favorite, then?” Shit, I immediately think, the moment the words are out of my mouth. Why did
I just ask him that?
He pauses for a moment, humming softly as though he’s pondering the question. “Bitchy,” he finally says, and my whole face floods with heat.
I narrow my eyes. “Are you calling me a bitch?” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I realize my mistake, and I wish I could clap them right back in.
He leans a little closer to me—and we were already too close as it was—bending over his small tablet screen. I can feel his breath ghost across my cheek. At this distance, I can count his eyelashes, smell mint on his breath, notice small pinpricks of blue mixed into the mostly green of his eyes.
Why is my heart beating so fast?
Why have I forgotten to breathe?
He’s not saying anything, just holding my gaze, staring deep into my eyes, and I have the sudden, overpowering urge to lick my lips. Just another couple of inches between us would close this gap, and then …
“Who says you’re my type?” he says, his voice low and conspiratorial. Then he winks again.
And of course, to make matters worse, my face feels like it could start a small forest fire now. Ugh. Damn him.
Two can play at that game. I twist in my seat, arcing my back just a little, in a posture that I know sets off my curves to perfection, not to mention makes my shirt gap just a little, enough to show a hint of cleavage near the top. Then I arch a brow at him over the thick frame of my glasses. “Really? So yesterday when you were stealing glances at my ass, that was just, what, an accident?”
The moment I say it, his eyes drop down along my body, like a command. I resist a little shiver of power, knowing that whatever he might claim, he’s clearly having trouble keeping his eyes off of me. “You might not be my type, but you can’t blame me for being a red-blooded male, Chloe.”
Just the sound of my name on his lips sets off a flare in my chest. Anger, yes, but also desire. Fucking hell, I want him. What is wrong with me? “Sure I can,” I respond. “Watch me, Max.”
“Oh so you do know my name. I’d been wondering, Miss MacIntyre .”