My brother pushes himself back from the table and stands up.
"Come on, Miss Logan. We'll pick this up in the morning."
"Are you sure? I can—"
"I'm not going to walk in here in the morning and find you passed out and drooling in my books."
"I don't drool," I answer, but he's got a doubtful smile and the humor is infectious.
"Come on. You haven't eaten anything. We'll go find something."
"Oh, I couldn't—"
"You can, and you will."
I stand up, reaching over to stack books and straighten them and I'm making plans in my head for how I'm going to carry them over to the shelves when his arm wraps around my shoulder and he moves me bodily toward the door.
The sudden closeness makes my breath catch in my chest. If I'd seen it coming, maybe I could have hidden it, but I didn't. I can smell something on him, a cologne too faint to detect from across the table. He smells faintly of spruce and oranges, clean and manly all at the same time.
For an instant, I let myself lean into him, my natural desire getting the better of my self-control. And then I get control of myself again. I shouldn't allow myself to get close to him at all, but I definitely shouldn't allow myself to get close to him on my first day.
He certainly didn't mean anything by it. I have to repeat that to myself. He didn't mean anything at all by it. It's just the girlhood crush coming back to bite me, making me see things that aren't there, imagine things that aren't happening.
I want him because I've always wanted him, and now that he's close, I'm letting myself imagine something that isn't going to happen.
But God, is it easy to imagine, and God do I want to be right. I straighten myself pull gently free of his guiding arm around my shoulder. He lets it go without making any big deal about it. There's a good chance he didn't mean anything by it at all, and I would do well to remember that.
"I should go get some sleep."
"You should, Autumn. But you should eat something, first. Where are we going? I'm buying."
"I can't let you—"
"Are you telling me that I can't buy a beautiful woman dinner?"
A shiver runs down my spine when he calls me beautiful. A voice in the back of my mind tells me that he doesn't mean anything by it, and that if he did mean something by it, I shouldn't be flattered.
But I am. Eric—my Eric, who I have dreamt about just about every night for years—just said, about me…
I don't know how well I hide that I'm flattered, because I shouldn't be flattered at all. But I am.
"I don't know what's open at this hour."
He looks at the clock, and he sees exactly what I see. At eleven, most places are going to be closed.
"I see what you mean. Burger, maybe? I know a little place that's open twenty-four hours. You'll want to learn where a few are. It'll come up more than you think."
"If you're buying," I answer, shrugging. I try to keep my expression light to let him know I'm joking. He doesn't have the expression of a man who's joking around, though.
He's got the same look that took my breath away when I first walked into his office. A look that says that he's got something on his mind that, if he knew I was his sister, he wouldn't be thinking.
Which is exactly why I'm not going to tell him.
Because if I tell him, he'll stop, and I have no interest in that.
Chapter Six
I don't know what she was expecting, but Autumn's face when she realized she was coming along for the plane ride down to Phoenix was priceless. The way that she tried to hide her excitement and her surprise. She wants so desperately to be seen as someone who's serious that it works against her. She forgets to act like a normal human being.
Which in a sense, makes her perfect for me. I'm sitting here faking it with her, and she's trying so hard to fake everything, too. A perfect match.
She's close enough that I can smell her shampoo, sweet and fruity and pleasant. She's got a suit on, which was a mistake, but she wants to be taken seriously more than she wnats to be comfortable on the plane. That's her right, whether I think it's wise or not.
She goes into the scanner and then goes through, and I'm up next. I can't stand this shit, but part of the job is accepting that you have to deal with airport security, so I deal with it.
Then we're through and I pull my belt back around my pants, slip my things back into my pockets and walk off with my shoes in my hands to find somewhere else to put them back on.
I can't take my eyes off her as she tries to slip her shoes back onto her feet. It starts as an innocent interest, but there's something oddly feminine about the way she does it, modest and uncertain and very probably the nerves from having the opportunity to go on this trip are getting to her, as well.
"You got everything?"
"I think so," she says. She doesn't sound any more sure than she looks, her hands moving across pockets and tapping pockets on her bag.
"Well, when you're sure."
She straightens, her lips pressing together into a thin line that plumps back out into the luscious lips that would draw any man's interest all by themselves.
"I guess I've got everything."
"Then come on. We've got a little time before they start boarding."
Airports are strange. Large, open spaces, but somehow it seems like no matter where you go, you're almost going to run into someone, because they happened to walk the same way.
I feel the fabric of her suit under my fingers as I brush into her stepping out of the way of a man driving a cart down the middle of the aisle. He waves apologetically as he goes by, but I'm not going to be nearly as upset as he seems to think I am.
She feels good under my hands. Every bit like a woman, soft and comfortable and it's going to get to me if I'm not careful but frankly I don't give a God damn.
"Sorry about that," I say. I'm not sorry it happened, but I'm sorry if she's upset about it. The flustered expression tells me that she's not.
"You're fine."
"I'll buy you the first cup. By way of apology."
"No, you don't have to—"
"I thought you'd learned your lesson," I say, my voice only halfway to teasing.
"Maybe I need to be taught again. I've always been a teacher's pet, you know."
"Oh yeah?"
She sees the look in my eyes and raises her eyebrows. "Not like that."
"Hey, you said it, not me."
"You know what I meant."
I step up to the counter of the nearest coffee joint. A kid behind the counter smiles at us from where he's standing, pouring someone else's coffee from a big industrial-looking machine. He's got big holes in his ears and looks exactly like the sort of guy I imagine to work in a coffee shop.
"You do a lot of flying," I ask off-hand. I'm guessing not.
"No," she says. "I drove up here from Tallahassee."
"Long drive."
"You're telling me."
"Nervous about planes, or…?"
"I mean, I don't love them."
"There's nothing to be nervous about, you know. Safest way to travel."
"But at least I feel like, you know, something goes wrong in a car, I can control it."
I smile. "That's where you're mistaken. You're not in control in a car. Not in control anywhere." The guy with the big holes in his ears comes over and stands behind the cash register with a faint grin and a look that says that he's listening for our order. "Two coffees. Cream and sugar."
"Oh, uh. Cream and sugar are on the table over there."
"Great. Thanks. Two coffees."
The kid nods and starts tapping the screen on the register, and numbers start showing on the price display.
"What was I talking about?"
"You were saying that I can't control anything."
"Well, can you?"
A shade of a frown appears on her face, but she tries to hide it. She doesn't succeed.
"No, you're right. I—you're
right."
I almost feel bad for her. Then the coffee's here and we're walking away, and the moment's gone. Everyone's got a story, and she's no different. I'm no different, and in our case, the stories touched for a while.
I got burned, not by her, but that doesn't change the association.
"You nervous?"
She finishes pouring her third sugar packet in. "No," she says, but she's lying and she knows I know.
"Don't be. It's going to be fine."
"I know it will be. Which is why I'm not nervous."
"Sure," I tell her.
It's easy for her to lie to me. Natural as can be. After all, she's learned from the best. She's always been a good student, always been a teacher's pet. But her mother must not have been a good teacher.
Because I can see it in her face when she lies to me. But I let it go anyways.
"Come on, let's go find the terminal," I say after a minute, after she's taken a sip of coffee and her face doesn't twist up in disgust.
I let her go a little ahead, watching her strut, the way her hips move side to side. And, for an instant, I allow myself to imagine a little tryst in the airplane bathroom.
Then I snap myself out of it and follow along after her. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I repeat it to myself again. She's off limits. She's your sister, man.
Only, another voice responds… she's not. Not any more. And if she's not going to bring it up, he sure as hell isn't.
Chapter Seven
Three days of learning the Lawyer's trade in Phoenix was an education that I would never have gotten in school. Nobody ever would. You're not going to sit down a bunch of twenty-year-olds and tell them 'If you want to make money at this, half or more of your job is reassuring clients who know nothing about the law.'
And that was what what the last three days had been. They wanted to go over the paperwork, go over evidence, go over every little thing.
Of course, it meant nothing to them. The words might as well have been in Swahili. So then you have to explain it to them in layman's terms. Everything short of swaddling them up in a blanket and giving them a pacifier.
I don't expect everyone to know the ins and outs of law. It's taken more than a week to put together a deposition, and that's with a good team. Clients hire you because they don't have their own good team, and you're not here to talk to whatever team they have on staff, even if they did.
You're here to talk to suits who know a bit about persuasion, a lot about business, and have a fairly solid working sense of how many commas are in their bank statement.
So I don't assume they understand law, but if I'd been a little more optimistic I might have hoped that they would leave those things to people who did know. That would be my hope, of course.
I don't actually believe someone who's got more money than sense would be capable of staying out of where they're not needed.
So the trip down to Arizona, in a very real sense, was better on-the-job training than anything else I've done since high school.
Every kid coming out of law school can do a few things, no problem. They know how to draft up a contract, they can probably put together a deposition and write a brief. They might have a little experience doing mock trials, so they're at least aware of how to speak to a crowd.
Those things aren't special. Anyone can do them. And more than that, they're not the important part of a job, not really.
Medical malpractice is a big field of study. I didn't get into it, but I could have, same as anyone, and there's a lot of money changing hands on the subject.
People don't sue incompetent doctors. They don't know a good con man from a good doctor, after all. It all sounds good to them.
They sue doctors they don't like. Happens all the time. You have foot surgery, the surgeon does an untidy job, and now you've got to go in to get more foot surgery. Open-and-shut, Doctor So-and-So screwed up. Just look at the suturing, it's amateur.
No, says the client, I like Doctor So-and-So. It's that physical therapist. My foot only really started to hurt bad when I did physical therapy. He's got cold hands and he always made me do exercises I didn't like. Outside of P.T. it just hurt a little bit.
So you sue the physical therapist, because the client is just going to find someone who will. Meanwhile, Doctor So-and-So with the nice bright smile and the shaky hands continues unabated because, in the end, people don't have a problem with screw-ups.
They have a problem with assholes.
So your first order of business as a lawyer isn't to figure out the law, as I'm quickly realizing. The law is important, but it's assumed, and if you don't know it well enough, you can get yourself another legal assistant or spend more time on it.
The first order of business is to polish up your smile and turn on the charm, because you need these guys to like you when it's all said and done. At least the one with more money has to like you.
The revelation has opened my eyes. Not just to the nature of the legal trade, though the past three days have been illuminating and have utterly derailed my efforts to study for the bar.
No, there's something else it's opened my eyes to. I got plenty of practice sending the right signals to people. Sending messages with my body language. Reassurance, confidence, coolness. Authority.
You can't say it, out loud. Nobody is convinced by someone who says, 'trust me, I know what I'm talking about.' They trust someone who acts like they are totally confident in their knowledge.
I find that when I learn something new, my entire mind is on that subject for a while. I throw myself in head-first, and then I notice a whole world around me I'd never known existed until I knew what to look for.
And what I'm seeing now is that every single signal that Eric is sending my way is positive. Overtly positive. And, the rare time it's anything but pure positivity—not respect, not adoration, but approval—he's sending me signals that a brother and sister shouldn't be sending each other.
I can't blame him, because in the whole new world of people sending overt signals to each other, in the world where people use their actions to send messages that they can't or won't send with their words, I have noticed something else, too.
I've been sending them right back.
Chapter Eight
The insides of airports are different every time. I think my favorite is O'Hare in Chicago, but they're all different. Some seem small, cozy. Others seem big and ritzy. There's a range. Same as anything.
I've been doing this for almost ten years, and I've been in dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe. I stopped counting after the first few. There's no point in it. Just a realioty of the job. It's always the people who don't take airplanes often that think they're anything sexy or worth remembering.
Once you take more than a few, it changes. Becomes a hassle. Same thing's true about anything. There's something entertaining, though, about watching Autumn's face. She's tired. I can tell that, right off the bat. She'll have time to sleep on the plane ride home, but I wonder if her nerves will let her.
I looked down at my watch. The minutes ticked by a second at a time, as they had been for the past hour. Then he looked up at the digital sign behind the counter.
There were three people standing there. I don't think they need more than one, though they like to switch a lot. So that's reason enough for two at least. On the other hand, three… that means they're either about to start boarding, or there's something going on.
I can't help noticing that we're supposed to be ten minutes out of boarding, according to the boarding passes.
Yet, the sign now says that we're not expected to depart for an hour. I suck in a breath and look over at Autumn.
Looking at an attractive woman has an effect on a man like a shot of espresso. I can feel my eyes open a little wider, my shoulders straighten up. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, though it won't last.
"I think there's a problem with our flight."
She looks at me like I've been speaking gibberish, and then I can
see her play it back in her mind.
"You think?"
"We're going to want to find someplace to stay tonight."
"Are you sure, though?"
"You see our plane out there?"
"No."
The windows were big. If the plane were at the end of the terminal, you'd be able to see it. All around the multi-spoked hub, planes sit at the terminal—but not ours.
"Well?"
"I see what you mean," she finally says.
"You mind making the calls?"
"No, sir," she says.
Autumn reaches into her jacket pocket and gets up from the less-than-comfortable airline seat. I watch her walk. It's a bad habit I've gotten into, but like all bad habits, I don't dare kick it. Her hips slip from side to side.
For an instant I wonder if she knows I'm watching. She definitely knows. I think, though I wouldn't say it to her face for fear of a lawsuit, that she likes it. The way she adds just a little pop to her step when she's walking away. Like a model on the runway.
I find myself mesmerized. Is it the fact that I've barely slept four hours a night, and even that was restless?
It must be. Women are an incredible wonder to behold, but they don't have that kind of power over me. It's that simple. Sorry, that's just how it is.
That, and I've got better control over myself than that. I know how her mother was. That was my first experience with women, and how they can get. That taught me just about everything I thought I needed to know.
Keep your nose clean. Don't go looking for trouble. Above all else, don't get too invested in them. Because you'll want to, and you'll regret it when you do.
I can already feel the regret looming as she walks back, slipping her phone into her pocket. She settles down into a seat beside me, leans in close, and is promptly cut off by the woman on the speakers.
"Delta 1272, bound for New York, has been delayed indefinitely. Again, Delta 1272, Phoenix to New York, has been canceled, after a medical emergency forced the inbound flight down mid-flight. See the customer service desk for new tickets, we apologize for any inconvenience that may have caused."
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