Playing With Trouble

by Chanel Cleeton

  It exploded in this kiss, as our bodies waged war with our mouths. It wasn’t a sweet kiss; there were no soft brushes of our lips or gentle hands. This was a full-blown assault of desire, my need slamming into his, sparks firing between us.

  I’d thought it would just be a kiss. A good, hot kiss that would take off the constant edge I felt around him. I’d been so wrong. It hadn’t been a good kiss and it hadn’t been hot.

  It was the best kiss of my fucking life and I was on fire.

  Whatever I’d expected to find the moment our lips connected, it hadn’t been this. This was a boulder tumbling down a cliff, hurtling to the bottom.

  It was a disaster.

  Gray

  I was so fucked it wasn’t even funny.

  Her lips were crack, her body heroin, and I couldn’t get enough.

  This girl had the power to break me in two.

  I’d meant to be in control from the beginning. I was the experienced one, the older one; I was supposed to be the one blowing her mind. But I hadn’t been prepared for how sweet her mouth would be.

  I hadn’t been prepared for her.

  Blair broke away first, and considering she’d shredded my willpower in one move, it took her stepping back for me to drag some air into my lungs, my body strung out, my dick aching.

  Her hand came up to her lips, her fingers touching the skin there, and I stifled a groan, remembering just how that mouth had felt on mine. Her lips were swollen, wet from my tongue, her red lipstick smudged.

  Her breasts rose and fell, her eyes wide, her chest flushed.

  I didn’t speak, just waited for her to give me more, anything, everything. In this moment, her standing there like a fucking queen, I’d take it all.

  We stood there staring at each other, the silence closing in, neither one of us moving. It was like we were locked in place.

  There was no coming back from that kiss.

  I opened my mouth, digging deep, trying to find the words, scraping my insides out for her until I came up empty. This was purgatory, in between everything I wanted and the hell I’d clawed my way out of, knowing I didn’t deserve the softness of her lips or the sweetness of her mouth.

  I didn’t want to make love to her. I didn’t want to give her my heart—didn’t even have one to give. I wanted to fuck her. That was it. That was all this was supposed to be.

  This feeling inside of me hurt. It was a cruel joke to put her in front of me, to know that she wanted me as much as I wanted her. She was a temptation I couldn’t afford, a line I feared crossing.

  The longer I stayed, the more I wanted to kiss her again, the harder it was to convince myself that I couldn’t have her.

  So I gave her a jerky nod, my jaw clenched, and fled.

  Chapter Seven

  We were disappointed to miss out on a meeting between Blair Reynolds and her former fiancé. Rumor has it Blair left the party early and stayed far away from the Wyatts . . .

  —Capital Confessions blog

  Blair

  I couldn’t stop thinking about our kiss. It distracted me when I sat in class, when my mind should have been on con law. It had been two days and the memory of Gray kissing me had yet to fade. Unfortunately, neither had the image of him fleeing like he’d contract the plague if he stood near me for another moment.

  What did it take to make a man like that retreat?

  I didn’t understand it, wanted to die every time I thought about it. He’d kissed me back. He’d definitely kissed me back. And then, it was like a switch had flipped off, and he’d just left. I had been trying to come to terms with what I’d done, and then I’d blinked, and he was gone.

  Was it the fact that he was my teacher? Had I imagined the desire between us? He’d flirted with me in our own weird way. Constantly. For weeks now. And the second I’d let my guard down, the second I’d put myself out there, he’d looked at me like I terrified him.

  That was a new one.

  A voice from the front of the classroom pulled me out of my mental freak-out.

  “Ms. Reynolds, please tell us the issue in Gibbons v. Ogden.”

  Ugh.

  I needed all of my wits about me to make it through con law.

  Professor Myers stared at me expectantly from the front of the room. While torts was my least favorite class, con law ran a very close second. It wasn’t just that Professor Myers was eccentric as hell, or that our textbook was heavy enough to double as a deadly weapon, or that the book’s pages were ridiculously thin and sucked up highlighter ink at an alarming rate. No, the biggest reason I hated con law was that I didn’t understand it. At all.

  Part of the problem was that Myers was a genius, so things that were incredibly simple to him were indecipherable to the rest of the class. He also had a tendency to speak quickly, which made taking notes a near impossibility. In a moment of desperation, I’d shelled out eighty bucks for the supplement, only to be even more confused. And that fucker was a solid five hundred pages on its own. Only in law school would it take five hundred pages to condense a semester worth of material.

  I cleared my throat, staring down at my notes, trying to find the case’s issue. Sometimes our casebooks broke out the issue neatly, other times you had to go searching for it through antiquated language and confusing tangents. This was one of those times. I scanned my brief, staving off a near-heart attack when I spotted the section where I’d bolded the issue.

  “Whether the state monopoly prevails over the federal act.”

  “Very good. And how does that relate to the Court’s holding in Carter v. Carter Coal?”

  And that was where I unraveled. In a pinch, on a good day, I could get enough out of the actual cases to answer the questions thrown at me. But when I was forced to compare holdings or extrapolate information from one case to another, I completely lost it. Which was kind of the point of law school.

  Law school didn’t necessarily teach you how to practice law—even though it should have. Instead, it taught you to think like a lawyer. There was a bit of a learning curve, but by now the vast majority of my classmates got it. We all still fumbled, still had moments when we were lost, but I alone seemed this lost.

  I stumbled over the explanation until Professor Myers’s eyes filled with disappointment. My cheeks heated at the silence around me and the scrutiny of my classmates’ gazes on me. Finally, he called on another student. She managed to reach the conclusion he’d wanted in a fraction of the time I’d rambled on.

  “Thank you, Ms. Barnett.” He turned his attention to the rest of the room. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Commerce Clause is one of the central concepts to understanding the federal legislative power. You need to know these cases like the back of your hand in order to do well on the final exam in December. We’re a month and a half away. If you haven’t gotten it by now, you should really rethink whether law school is a good fit for you.”

  Shit.

  I ducked my head, staring down at the textbook and my sheets of notes, the words blurring on the page. Tears filled my eyes, threatening to spill down my cheeks. The crazy thing was that he wasn’t even being unkind. Just honest. He didn’t say anything I hadn’t already thought.

  I entertained fantasies of withdrawing from school on a nearly daily basis. It took me all of a week to realize that I’d made a hasty decision in some misguided attempt to redeem myself after everything ended with Thom. I should have taken some time to figure things out. Maybe then I would have realized that I’d put myself on a career path that was totally wrong for me.

  The only thing that stopped me from correcting the mistake now was the sheer embarrassment of admitting that this, too, hadn’t worked out for me. And the total uselessness of a semester—or half a semester—of law school. I’d basically spent twenty-five thousand dollars to learn I made bad decisions and was a shitty law student.

  Talk about adding insult to injury.

  * * *

  After con law ended, I walked out of the building and headed to the fa
culty parking lot. I was meeting Professor Canter—Gray—to check out the middle school for the 1L pro bono project. We hadn’t seen each other since our kiss on Wednesday night, our only communication stilted emails couched in professional courtesy through the law school’s webmail system. Between the tension of seeing him again and the epic fuckup in con law, my sanity hung by a thread.

  And then I saw him.

  Maybe he didn’t have classes on Fridays; maybe he came to school like this on days he didn’t teach. Maybe he just wanted to fit in. Whatever it was, he was dressed casually in jeans and a gray sweater that made me want to bite him.

  He stopped a foot away from me and smiled, his gaze shielded by a pair of dark sunglasses.

  “Ready?”

  I nodded, even though I was anything but.

  I followed him through the crowded parking lot, trying not to check out how good he looked from behind, until we stopped in front of a black Range Rover. Despite the chill in the air, my body felt like it was on fire. Gray slid into the driver’s side, putting the school’s address into the car’s navigation system.

  He pulled back, turning out of the parking lot and maneuvering the massive car with ease.

  Silence descended around us, and while I struggled to come up with something interesting to say, I couldn’t think of one single thing. We were in a weird place. We’d kissed, and yet we didn’t really know anything about each other. It reduced the ability to lead with one of those conversations where you spoke without saying anything at all. It was like we’d fast-forwarded into an intimacy I wasn’t sure either one of us wanted and I definitely didn’t know how to handle.

  Gray

  I stopped at a light, sneaking a peek at Blair. She stared out the window, her head turned away from me so I could only make out the slant of her cheek, the line of her jaw, the curve of her ear. Her long brown hair fell around her like a curtain of silk, her eyes hidden by large black sunglasses.

  I turned my attention back to the traffic, gripping the steering wheel with both hands. She was beautiful, and she smelled great, and now that I’d had her mouth, I wanted it again.

  “So what classes did you have today?”

  School seemed like a safe subject. Anything to avoid talking about the kiss. Or the fact that I’d fled like an idiot.

  “Property and con law.”

  We hit another red light in the snarl that was D.C. traffic, and I turned in my seat to get a better look at her.

  “How were they?”

  She still wouldn’t look at me, her gaze trained out the passenger window. “Property was fine. Con law, not so much.”

  “What happened?”

  “Professor Myers called on me with a question about the Commerce Clause and I sounded like a complete idiot.” Her voice thickened. “He gave a speech about where we should all be at this point in the semester and suggested that if we weren’t there we should rethink law school.”

  I wasn’t surprised. A lot of the professors gave speeches like that. I’d certainly heard them when I was a student. It was harsh, but this industry could be brutal. If you couldn’t handle law school, legal practice would be hell.

  What did surprise me was her candor. She sounded like she needed someone to talk to, and while I doubted I was her first choice, I wasn’t going to let the opportunity to get to know her slip through my fingers.

  “And that made you wonder if you should rethink law school?”

  “You call on me every week, you see how lost I am. It’s like there’s something wrong with the way I think. I don’t get it the way everyone else does. I read. I outline. I have a study group. I bought the supplements. I do all the things that they told us to do at orientation and it doesn’t matter. I keep waiting for it to click and it doesn’t.”

  “That doesn’t mean you should give up. And you’re not lost. Most of the time you know the answer. I don’t call on you to trip you up. You’re smart. You obviously do the work. And trust me, your professors can tell that you take school seriously and that you care about the material.”

  The light changed and I turned my attention back to the road.

  “It sounds like you’re having a hard time transitioning to the right mind-set, but that doesn’t mean you never will. Law school isn’t necessarily about being smart or doing the work. You’re right, there’s an art to it. Sometimes it just takes a while for it to click. What was your major in undergrad?”

  “Political science.”

  “Did you like it?”

  She hesitated for a beat. “Yes and no. It wasn’t my first choice. My father paid for my undergrad and he wanted me to major in political science.”

  “What did you want to study?”

  “Public policy. It wasn’t that different; there was some overlap between the classes. And there were parts of poli sci that I liked. It just wasn’t necessarily what I would have chosen.”

  “Where did you go to undergrad?”

  She named a prestigious Ivy League school.

  “So you’re really smart.”

  She shrugged. “I went to a good high school. Did lots of extracurriculars. My parents hired a tutor for the SATs and ACTs, and I did well after taking them a few times. Law school is a whole other ball game.”

  It was. It was totally different from the way you’d learned in undergrad. I’d seen it among my own classmates—students came from impressive schools and struggled for the first time in their lives. There was a certain mind-set that had nothing to do with being smart or having a strong academic record. In a way, that was what made it so challenging—you had to retrain you brain.

  “And law school? How did that fit in?”

  “It didn’t really.” She stiffened. “My father thought it would be a good idea.”

  “So law school was his idea, too.”

  “Kind of. I think he had visions of his daughter going to Yale or something, but my LSATs weren’t high enough. Plus, I applied really late. Fortunately, I’d taken them my senior year just to keep my options open. I didn’t have time for a retest.”

  “And what did you want?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing has ever jumped out at me and said, this.”

  “And now?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered again.

  “Do you even want to be an attorney?”

  “Maybe. I thought I did before I came to law school. But now? I don’t really see myself going into private practice. I don’t think I love it enough to make it my life, to get in the race to bill like crazy so I can make partner.” She was quiet for a second. “I want to have a family one day. Want to be the mom that goes to school plays and chaperones field trips. I want to work, but I want to be there for those moments, too. Maybe there’s a balance there. I just haven’t seen it.”

  “There are other things you can do with a law degree, you know. You don’t have to go into private practice. You could work in nonprofit management, for example. Or a government agency. Even corporate law can have a slower pace. You have a ton of options. Just get through exams, see how you feel next semester. And when you get a chance to take elective courses in your second year, look at some nontraditional classes. There’s a public law class that you might enjoy. Another one on nonprofit organizations. A few advocacy clinics that would give you some hands-on experience.”

  She nodded. “I could do that.”

  “Have you been going to the tutoring sessions?”

  Each of the core courses had tutoring sessions taught by second and third-year students who had received the highest grades when they’d taken the subject in their first year.

  “I have. They help a bit, but I think I need something a little more hands-on. I’ll start to get the concept, but by then everyone else is moving on. I’ve thought about asking someone to tutor me one-on-one, but I haven’t found anyone yet.”

  “Try me.” The offer slipped out before I even thought about the logistics.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Why not?
I have office hours; students ask me questions all the time. It’s been five years, so I don’t remember everything from my law school days, but I remember enough. Ask me about the Commerce Clause.”

  “You’re going to help me with con law?”

  I looked away from the road and flashed her a grin. “We’ve got another half hour to go.”

  Sitting next to her in the car was torture. Absolute fucking torture. At least this would keep me from thinking of how badly I wanted to get her naked.

  Nothing deflated a hard-on faster than the Commerce Clause.

  Blair

  By the time we arrived at the middle school, I somewhat understood Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. Also known as the dreaded Commerce Clause. I’d also learned that while he wasn’t necessarily patient in class, Gray could be patient when he wanted to be. And surprisingly kind. He didn’t mock me when I stumbled over a concept or got confused. He explained things carefully and clearly, and slowly it started to make sense.

  He was also crazy smart. And I only thought about kissing him every minute or so.

  “Why aren’t you like this in class?” I asked as he pulled the SUV into the school parking lot.

  “Like what?”

  “Easy to talk to.”

  “Are any of your professors easy to talk to?”

  I considered this. None were as intimidating as him, but they all did have an air of aloofness about them.

  “Fair enough.”

  “We’ve all been where you guys are now. We get it. But trust me, if you think this is brutal, wait until a judge chews your ass out in front of opposing counsel. Or you fuck up a brief you’re preparing for a senior partner. There’s an element of hazing here, but it’s necessary. This profession can be soul-crushing.”

  “And yet, you love it, don’t you?”

  He grinned. “I do.”