by Hawke, Jessa
“Ten minutes,” he calls out through the open door.
The office is cool, ventilated, and beautiful. The mahogany wood of the walls and desk is polished within an inch of its life, and he’s got the same windows in it that I have in my studio apartment. There’s a little chair by the side of that desk for me to sit in as I type up whatever memo he’s planning to dictate, and that is where I position myself now.
I was never a particularly posh little princess, but I got used to dressing professionally in Mr. Prinkus’s office in New York. That being said, there’s a benefit to being both professional and sexy, and when I finally moved out of my strict household, I began purchasing clothes that work to my advantage in both. A severe black pencil skirt can hug my hips and rear just right, and an expertly tailored suit jacket can set off my waist and bust to advantage. Sometimes, I get a thrill just looking at myself in the mirror. I am the image of a professional career woman, except sometimes, I’ve got no panties on at all. There have been times when I’ve gotten home from work and imagined a man slipping my shirt out from its tucked-in position and sliding his hands up my skin underneath it, releasing my hair from its simple twist and kissing my neck.
It works for me.
I swallow the yawn that’s born of my own missed cup of coffee that morning—iced vente latte, thank you very much—and open up the notebook to compose the memo.
Twenty minutes later, I am fully awake.
It has become abundantly clear in that small space of time, that Mike Hannigan is on a manhunt when it comes to this case. I remember being an intern in college and hating my boss intently because his people skills quite a great deal to be desired; he couldn’t talk to anybody unless it was in legalese—a formidable skill in the courtroom, but a bitch to work under. At the end of the day, I ended up admiring him because although he wasn’t a halfway decent human being, he was an incredible opponent and cared deeply about his cases.
This is what Mike Hannigan reminds me, except with a much more human aspect to his character. He’s dictated not one, but a total of five memos and a few emails to the school psychologist, a known psychiatrist in the field, and, least three doctors who have examined the child for bruises. It’s not just a custody hearing for him. He truly wants to know who the child wants to go with at the end of the day. He wants to know who’s doing the most damage to the child and if he can save her.
Well, damn.
Between that and his expert command of legalese, I’m sold on Mike Hannigan as a veritable poster child for his trade. I can’t help but wish, however, that I was his assistant instead of a glorified secretary. Maybe then I could impress him with my knowledge of the laws behind this case, too. Oh the sweet, sweet legal music we could make together. I almost laugh aloud at the idea of that wording, but quickly wipe the amused look off my face when Hannigan looks my way. The last thing I need is for my boss to think I am laughing at him.
“When do you need to send these out by?” I ask him, getting up from the little stool and stretching out my cramped back. He turns and I catch him looking at the length of my torso and breasts as I do so, but it’s so quick that I think I’ve imagined it.
“Within the next half hour. I want to have all the available information added to the file so that I can present a comprehensive case at the trial. ASAP, Adrian, just ASAP.”
I nod and turn to place the notebook on his desk to proof the emails and memos before I distribute them. I am suddenly acutely aware of Hannigan’s presence at my back as I lean over a little to get a better look at the small screen. He’s a hair’s breadth away from my legs and I can feel his eyes traveling up and down the rounded curve of my ass, tight against the heather gray skirt I’m wearing, drinking in the strong smooth line of my thighs and calves that are pressing against the fabric in a delicious way. I suddenly find myself regretting that I put on underwear today.
“You’ve made an error there,” he says, his low voice startling me out of the moment’s reverie.
“Where?” I ask, peering over my shoulder at him.
“Right there,” he answers, leaning over until his hip is touching mine and pointing out my mistake.
“So what are you going to do, sue me?” I say, and immediately want to stuff the words back into my mouth. Legal experience or not, that’s not any way to talk to your boss.
To my surprise, Mike Hannigan cracks up. His face changes completely as he laughs, two dimples creasing his cheeks and his bright blue eyes snapping as he truly assesses my face for the first time in two months.
“Cute,” he tells me, and gestures towards the door, indicating that my time with him is up, but his eyes are still merry.
I head out towards my desk and sit at my wheel chair, willing my heart to stop pounding. I can’t believe I never saw it before, how attractive Mike Hannigan is. A smart, powerful man, a lawyer who knows his shit inside and out, a man who’s probably screwed more intelligent women and judges than one can count. Who cares if he’s old enough to be my dad? Maybe, just maybe, that’s also part of the allure. I lean back in my chair and imagine Mike Hannigan lifting me up by my hips onto his power desk and in one smooth motion undoing the buttons on my white blouse.
Yes, oh yes, Mike Hannigan is fuckable indeed.
* * *
My freshman year of college, I met this girl Elen who liked to seduce doctors. I met her in my Russian Folklore class, this tall skinny Russian immigrant with double Ds on a stick-figure frame. She seemed sweet as candy to start with, and the perfect match for her equally Russian boyfriend, until the day I complained to her that I couldn’t meet a guy I liked.
That’s when she told me to do as she does. Apparently, she worked as the secretary in her mother’s medical office and liked to don little miniskirts to show off her long legs. According to her, the doctors would all ask her out to dinner and she’d go, fucking them brainless, accepting their gifts, and never speaking to them again. Her mother’s office was the only one that had to replace its staff with such frequency.
I can’t say that I’ve ever been much seduced by the idea of gifts, but I knew that at least some of the allure for Elen was in the fact that these men were leaders in their fields. Maybe she found our mutual power-hungry bitchiness attractive, and that’s why she decided to share that information with me. Or maybe she just wanted to show off her accomplishments, so to speak. We didn’t last because she wanted presents to feel in control and I wanted the guy, but I never forgot that story.
It’s been two weeks since the day I realized I was hot for Mike Hannigan and I had yet to make a move. Then again, so did he. I blamed it on him getting so involved in that custody case; he was like a maniac during those days, often working overtime. But his suit was always impeccably unwrinkled.
As for me, hiking up my skirts and wearing my more sheer blouses to work had done nothing to attract his attention or raise my self-esteem. It was like we had started a game of chess—set up the board, put down all the pieces, but suddenly, I was staring at the black and white squares completely alone, with nobody to move the pawns.
“My my, darlin’,” a man’s voice drawls, lazy as a big cat’s. “They did a good job putting a pretty lil’ piece like you at the front desk.”
I look up into the light green eyes of Hannigan’s associate Lee Evans. The man matched his voice. With his silver-streaked black hair and lashes as thick as a woman’s, he resembled a sleek, half-asleep black panther, wise and licking itself in the sun, as content with its place in the world as I imagine Lee Evans himself is. The damned man was attractive, and what was worse, he knew it, and had used it in the courtroom since his first day in it. But to say that he was a pretty boy would be ridiculous; his looks were nothing more than a distraction, lulling the prosecution into a false sense of security only to slam them with evidence and legalese.
That’s not all he could slam, given half a provocation.
It’s funny, I remember being on the cusp of puberty and thinking that older guys wer
e gross. I couldn’t understand for the life of me how girls in high school could date college guys, big, hairy apes who looked at women’s bodies as if they were instruments tuned to their exact specifications, as if at any moment, they could play them exactly in the way they pleased. It took me to the ripe age of sixteen to realize that this was an incredibly sexy quality. After all, few women wake up and think, “Oh, I hope an inexperienced little boy sweats over me today.”
My first time was with one of my father’s friends, ironically a lawyer himself. It was a rare occurrence that the girls were ever alone with men in the house—my parents raised us old-school—but one day, my father asked me to deliver a stack of manila envelopes to his friend’s house; they were working on a joint case. I walked in to find him knocking back a smooth brandy, and half an hour later, I was on my back with my legs spread.
It hurt, that first time, but I liked it. At the time, he must have been no older than thirty-seven, virile and healthy. I had no idea what I was doing, but luckily, he did not mind instructing me. He wasn’t gentle throughout, and he wasn’t tender. He opened up my young brown body like a tasty little feast, licking his fingers to wet me between the legs to ease his passage into the pinkness of my pussy. He told me to raise my hands above my hand and clasped my wrists together in a vise-tight grip that left impressions long after I had arrived home, disheveled and thoroughly fucked.
When I look at Lee Evans, I remember that time.
My life seems to be running on a great little theme here. I went out with a few guys my own age, but they were always dreaming rather than doing, and you can’t eat off of a field of dreams. I’ve always preferred men of action, men who are confident and established in their careers and lives enough that they don’t need and whine and beg and cling. Who wants all of that?
I’ve heard a lot of women complain that they attract creepy guys, self-proclaimed gentlemen who always take “no” to mean “try harder” and “yes” to mean “worship the ground I walk on.” They say that these men almost smell something about them that makes them reach out, and that there’s no change of attitude that’s ever going to change that attraction. I have the opposite situation. I can smell self-assurance in a man a mile away, and it draws me like a moth to a flame. Usually, the men are older, and I wonder what it is they smell on me that attracts them. What is that scent, and what does it say? They either sense my ambition or the fact that the one place I truly enjoy being told what to do is the bedroom.
Younger guys hang back, ask permission. They never spank you hard enough; I swear, they think you’re made of glass and will shatter at the least impact. Older men, they push you further, they test your boundaries and don’t shy away from the so-called flaws. The thing I’ve realized about younger guys is that they idealize; women are supposed to be smooth-shaven, perfect creatures who don’t shit, sneeze, or queef. Older guys realize it’s a package deal and bask in the ambiance of the whole woman.
After all, it’s not their first rodeo.
“If you think I’m a beautiful body with an empty mind, Mr. Evans,” I tell Lee, not bothering to lift my eyes from the computer screen, “Then you are sadly mistaken.”
“That’s quite an opinion you have of yourself, Adrian,” he snaps at me, but I catch an amused note in his voice. No, my dears, lawyers are rarely NICE.
I finally look up, and make sure it’s squarely into those incredible, black-pupilled green eyes of his. “You need to go with a different psychiatrist for the kid in the McKinley file,” I tell him evenly and watch his eyebrows spike towards his hairline.
“And why’s that?” he drawls, masking his surprise.
“Because based on the last seven court cases where she was called in as an expert witness, she swayed the case in favor of the mother. She’s a hardcore feminist.”
Lee Evans is stunned speechless for a moment, but to his credit, he recovers quickly. “I see there’s evidentiary support for that opinion,” he finally says, and I catch his gaze dipping towards my cleavage. My words have clearly just had the same effect on him as Hannigan’s did on me just a few weeks ago.
I smile as if his compliment means nothing, even though my heart is thudding, pumping blood below my waist at a rapid-fire pace, and get up from the desk. “Can I get you a coffee, Mr. Evans?” I ask sweetly, even as his eyes follow the length of my torso on that little trip to vertical.
It’s not my first rodeo, either.
* * *
“He’s a nice Greek boy, kira mia, give him a chance,” my mother begs me on the phone.
It has been the same story for over an hour at this point. My mother has done one of her so-called normal weekly calls and tried to set me up with Mrs. Kanstafolous’s son pretty much right off the bat. She goes off on another topic, my dad’s health, or my sister’s new baby boy, and then she swings right back to Mikey Kanstafolous. I had heard pretty much everything there was to know about him. We had gone to college together, except he had graduated a few years before me. He was tall. His mother made the best honey cake that side of Brooklyn. He had eight siblings, so you know that the swimmers in that family definitely went upstream and fertility would never be an issue. In fact, I knew more about Mikey Kanstafolous than most people would feel was appropriate.
“Ma, now that you told me everything, why would I ever want to see him? There’s nothing left for us to talk about!” I tell her, brushing the tangles out of my hair.
“You see if you’re attracted to him. He’s a very handsome boy, so tall!”
“You told me already. Ma, if tall was the only requirement I had, I’d have been married by now.” I regret saying that as soon as it was out of my mouth. Mention the word marriage to my mother and you immediately elicit a Pavlovian-like response where she gets wistful and excited at the same time.
“Really? Honey, marriage will happen for you! You’re my little pride and j—”
“Oy, ma, I’ll go out with him! Just no more marriage talk, okay?” Marriage is the last thing on my mind these days. Certain hunky lawyers are definitely first.
“He’s gonna pick you up Thursday at seven.”
“Ma! You told him I’d go already?”
As I listen to my mother prattle on about how she was not sure whether or not I would have said yes and when was I going to give her grandchildren already, I had promised I would wait until school was done, I became glad, not for the first time, that I was spending this summer far away from home. And who knows, maybe this date would lead to something good for me. An appreciation for guys my own age. After all, Mikey Kanstafolous was working as a paralegal right now; surely we would have some things to talk about.
He picks me up right on the dot. I have dressed up conservatively for the occasion in a blue lace dress, but still his eyes assess my body when I opened the door; he seems to like what he sees. Foreboding fills me as I take in the groom my mother has offered me. He’s tall, certainly, with dark hair and dark eyes, but there’s something about him that smacks of someone who is not comfortable with himself just yet. Maybe it’s the amount of gel in his hair, or the fact that his eyebrows look expertly waxed, but Mikey Kanstafolous is living on borrowed confidence.
When we arrive at the restaurant, I wonder if I should be ordering the least expensive thing on the menu. After all, paralegals don’t make as much as lawyers do. I hate feeling this way, but Mikey seems nice enough as he holds the chair for me.
“So, I remember you from Hunter,” he tells me as the waiters bring out our Caprese salads, fresh with sliced mozzarella.
“Oh yeah?” I ask, stabbing a cherry tomato with a fork.
“Yeah. You were sitting on the bridge with your friends, and they were all discussing some party they had gone to. You, though, you had your nose in a book. I always thought you were a nice Greek girl.”
I choke on a piece of tomato, and Mikey leans forward to pat me on the back. Nice Greek girl? Poor Mikey Kanstafolous. I guess no one told him about my professor and I going at it on the
desk. I doubt he’d still be here if he knew.
As Mikey launches into a story about some lecture class we apparently had together, I think about what would happen if I dared to tell Mikey about that little incident. He’d look at me in stunned silence and pretend he was cool with it, probably. And then somehow the story would get back to my mother, making my next trip home more than a little bit awkward. In my family, we don’t talk about sex; we sweep all mention of it under the rug as if families like the Kanstafolous’s don’t have nine kids and didn’t procreate like rabbits.
Mikey is asking me about some other professor I barely remember, and that’s when it hits me. Am I able to answer him like a normal human being? Sure. Is there even a part of me that’s thinking that this is a little nice, that we have touchstone points on which to connect? Maybe. But there’s an overwhelmingly large part of me that’s asking my own subconscious if I truly give a damn. Because that’s what this is like for Mikey. A simple world of simple marriages, where the normal is not only possible, it’s expected. Mikey’s world is all about stuffed grape leaves and sex within the walls of the bedroom.
When I come back from a trip to the bathroom, Mikey hands me my coat. I like that he’s already paid the check; it’s a classy little move that I recognize from the stories my old Greek friends used to tell me about dating. I start wondering if maybe there’s something appealing after all about the normal side of things, and smile favorably upon Mikey, who lights up like a Christmas tree when he sees. He drives and walks me to my door, making small talk until the last, as if he’s afraid I’m going to turn around and run inside like some kind of scared chicken. I don’t know what kinds of girls he’s dated up until now, but I’d bet dollars to donuts that there have been many who have played it up shy and done just that.
“I had a good time tonight, Adrian,” he tells me, and it’s like I can see the gears in his head turning, the machinations taking place. When he leans in, his lips are predictably dry, flaky, and soft, like I’m going to shatter into a million pieces at the least provocation. I promised my mother I’d give it my all, so I lean forward and take Mikey by the head, press my body against him, and give him all I’ve got. I’ve got some considerable stuff, and he begins to squirm against my body as if he’s trying to climb inside of me while my clothes are still on. I feel the sharp jut of his half-chub on my thigh and that’s when the full realization of what this evening is hits me.