"I still think we should keep trying to convince them to relocate," Brandon said as he picked up my fidgeting hand and started to massage my fingers. The calming effect was instantaneous.
I sighed. "I keep trying. But they are both so crazy stubborn."
"How many more times does Danny have to be messed with before he realizes he needs to get out of Brooklyn?" Brandon asked irritably, his Boston accent seeping through. "Is your family so attached to New York that they are willing to risk their safety? Is your dad's life worth a band he can't play in or your grandmother's card games?"
I didn't answer. These were questions I had asked several times, and every time had them swatted away like flies. I was asking them both to give up their lives, they'd said. Hadn't they lost enough? Was it right to let Messina kick them out of their home?
"I'll keep working on it," was all I could say. "But in the meantime, I'm not going to abandon my family. If they won't come to me, I need to keep going to them." I pressed a kiss to Brandon's jaw line. He'd shaved for the first time all weekend this morning, and his skin was smooth and soft. "And don't forget: I still have the bar exam in less than three weeks. I think a weekend away from you might be a good thing. You're too much of a distraction."
"I'm a distraction, am I?"
He looked down with a devilish grin, then slyly picked the book off my lap and tossed it onto the chair across from me. I followed the book, then watched as he unbuckled my seatbelt as well. I couldn't stifle my smile, but I tried to give him my best "I told you so" look.
"You're not really fighting that reputation right now," I said as his hand slipped inside my shirt and floated over my breasts, causing my nipples to stand erect through the loose fabric.
"I wasn't arguing with it, Red," Brandon said as he leaned down to nuzzle my neck. "Why don't I show you just how distracting I can be?"
~
The rest of the plane ride to Boston was basically extended foreplay, and we landed on the small runway at Logan panting like a pair of horny teenagers. Instead of going our separate ways, Brandon ended up taking me home in the back of his Mercedes and walking me up to my apartment, which took about twice as long as it should have because we kept stopping on the stairs to make out.
"I feel like I've barely been alone with you all weekend," he murmured into my neck while he ground his hips into mine beside my door.
"It's not like we didn't...you know...most of the weekend," I said, although the twist of his tongue at my neck made me lose my breath.
Brandon laughed, low and sexy, against my shoulder. He pulled back with a grin, then gave me another thorough kiss.
"You're funny," he said against my lips. "I'm the uptight New Englander, but you're the one who can't bring yourself to say that we fucked whenever we could."
I opened my mouth with a comeback, but was captured again with a kiss that took my breath away.
"I just want to be able to take my time about it again," Brandon said when he finally released me.
His hands reached down to my ass and lifted, and I moaned when his hips ground me against the wall so that my feet no longer touched the ground. His fingers tickled my most sensitive spot though the fabric of my capris. I moaned.
"What do you say?" he rumbled. "Can you come by tonight? I don't want to wait until tomorrow."
Brandon kissed me again before I could respond, and this time, I wrapped him equally up in me, grabbing greedily at the hair at the nape of his neck and biting lightly on his lower lip while my legs wound around his waist and squeezed. It didn't matter that we had just spent an entire long weekend together. I needed him just as badly.
"Tonight?" he asked again as his fingers played with my waistband, sliding under it, then back out with a regretful grunt.
"Tonight," I concurred against his soft lips.
He dropped me to the floor and adjusted the obvious bulge in his pants.
"Tonight," he repeated with a rakish grin, and left.
With a smile still on my face, I walked into the apartment. It was wiped completely away when I found Eric on the couch, completely naked and panting loudly.
"Oh! Christ!" I yelped, whirling around even as I shielded my eyes like I'd been blinded. I basically was. I'd never get the view of my roommate's jerking hips out of my head. "I so did not need to see your ass this early in the morning, Eric!"
"Shit!"
Behind me, I heard the telltale scrambling of limbs and shuffling of blankets and random items of clothing.
"Fuck! Where the fuck are my glasses?"
"I don't know! You're the one who threw them across the room before you pounced on me."
"Jesus, you really are only good for one thing, aren't you?"
The familiar back-and-forth had me standing ramrod straight, although I kept my face pointed firmly at the closed door, my hands plastered over my eyes.
"Jane?" I asked.
Behind me, Eric chuckled, and there was a long, loud sigh.
"Yeah, it's me," said my best friend. "You can turn around now. No more of Ken Doll's skinny ass to see."
"Ken Doll?" Eric asked. "Seriously? He's basically a eunuch."
Slowly, I turned around, still wary of what I might see. Eric had shoved his boxers back on, while Jane just sat on the couch, wrapped in a throw blanket.
"Keep your pants on, Eric," Jane retorted. "Once, you know, you actually get them on. I wasn't talking about your junk. Just your boyish, Aryan looks."
"Whatever," Eric said with a roll of his eyes. "Hey, Crosby. Sorry. We weren't expecting you back until later."
I glanced between the two of them. Jane had the decency to avoid my gaze, but Eric just looked at me directly while wearing nothing but his boxers, oblivious to the fact that half of his hair was standing up or that he had splotches on his neck and a set of angry red scratch marks on his pale chest that looked remarkably like fingernail tracks.
"What happened to no fucking on the couch?" I demanded, trying my best not to crack a smile. My lips twitched, but that was it.
"Seriously?" Eric asked. "Like I haven't had to come home to you sucking my boss's face at least five times?"
I shrugged. "Clothes on, my friend. There were no bare asses anywhere near that couch. Speaking of which––" I looked back at Jane, who was sitting with her hand shoved into her bedraggled bob. "I'll expect you to take care of cleaning that blanket when you're...done with it."
She nodded and made a muffled "of course, Sky." Eric blinked, still unabashed, then stretched his long arms up toward the ceiling.
"All right," he said. "Since we won't be finishing what we started, unless, Jane..." He nodded at his bedroom, and Jane gave him a look like he was actually insane. "Right, then," he said. "Shower for me."
It wasn't until he disappeared into the bathroom and the water started running that Jane finally looked directly at me. She found her glasses and shoved them over her face.
"That's better," she muttered. "I'd like to be able to see your condescension with crystal clarity."
I smirked and went to sit on the couch next to her, then thought better of it and took the opposite chair instead.
"Hey, I'm not judging," I said, holding my hands up innocently. "You're the one who calls him 'Petri Dish'."
Jane leaned back into the couch and pulled the blanket up her bare form to cover her shoulders completely, so that now all I saw of her was a rumpled head with glasses.
"He's...yeah. Maybe not so much that anymore."
I raised a brow. "So, are you guys dating?"
She shot me a wide look. "Um, no. It's still just fucking, Sky. That's it."
"Isn't flying in for the weekend from Chicago three weeks before the bar exam a little bit more than 'just fucking'?" I asked. "And, since you're still here, presumably skipping a day of prep class? Does Eric know it's 'just fucking'?"
"Oh, like he'd want more," Jane said, not quite able to hide the bitterness in her voice. "I know the score, and he does too. You think I don't know w
here that thing goes when I'm not around? Trust me, I'm making him double-bag it."
I glanced back at the bathroom, where steam was starting to filter out through the bottom of the door.
"I don't know about that," I said. "I happen to know that Eric doesn't bring women home. And unless he's sneaking in quickies at the grocery store, I don't think he's meeting them anywhere else, either. All I've seen him do for the last month is eat, sleep, and study."
"Well, then it's only a matter of time. He's not going to commit to a skinny Korean girl with weird hair who lives a thousand miles away." Jane bit her lip while she stared down at the folds of the blanket.
"Janey. Since when do you talk about yourself like you're nothing?" I reached over the coffee table and gave my friend a pat on the knee. "You're the shit, and you know it."
The shower stopped. Jane tensed.
"It's just sex," she repeated, this time louder and with more surety than before. She popped an arm out of the blanket and held it wrapped around her lean form. "I'm going to shower and get dressed, and then you and I are going to a late lunch after your class, before my flight tonight. No walking dildos allowed." She looked to the still-closed bathroom door. "You got that, Mr. Clean?" she called.
The door opened, and Eric walked out in nothing but a towel wrapped around his hips, his long muscles somehow more on display despite the fact that his boxers had actually covered less of him.
"Loud and clear," he said with a grim look, and disappeared into his room.
Jane followed his form, then closed her eyes tight when the door slammed shut with a loud bang. Then, with a heavy sigh, she stood up.
"It's just sex," she said like a mantra as she walked to the bathroom. "Just sex."
~
Chapter 29
I passed. I knew it. There was just no other way that test could have gone.
When I walked out of the Convention Center on a sunny Friday morning in late July, I felt like one of the people in Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," blinded by the bright summer sun after spending so long in the dark. Except my dark cave was prep classes and the last two days of testing.
I squinted in the late afternoon sun triumphantly. I wouldn't find out the official results of my exam for eight more weeks, but I knew I had done well. And now a weight had been lifted from my shoulders, the last step toward becoming a licensed attorney, ready to start my real life in the real world.
"Time for a motherfucking drink," Eric pronounced as he followed me out of the Boston Convention Center, where we had just spent the last two days in one of the enormous rooms with the other hundreds of new law grads in the Boston area.
Eric looked more than a little worse for wear. His T-shirt was rumpled, and his hair on one side was sticking out on the side, like he'd spent the last six hours pulling at it while he wrote the second-day series of essay responses on Massachusetts state law. His eyes drooped with dark circles, and despite the summer weather, he looked even paler than normal.
I probably looked just as terrible. Like most of the test-takers, I was exhausted and had forgone things like makeup or jewelry. I'd dressed comfortably, in layers of jeans and a hoodie to withstand the air-conditioned rooms. Outside, however, in the sticky, late-July heat, I quickly stripped down to my white tank top and pulled my messy hair into a loose braid, eager to get the sweaty strands off my neck.
"That guy with the cell phone during the third essay," Eric said. "I wanted to kill him. If I fail, I'm suing his ass, I swear it."
Several other classmates from our Andover and Harvard classes were also filtering out of the building. Most had the same bleary, dazed expressions that come from two straight days of testing.
"Woohoo! Time to get messed up!"
Shouts of relief started to pepper the air as more and more people emerged. If there was ever a day to let loose, this was it. Most of us were taking two weeks off for the vacation we hadn't gotten after graduating from law school in May. It was fairly typical for most firms to negotiate their associates' start dates a few weeks after the exam; no one needed a burned-out associate when they expected us to hit the ground running.
For my part, I was thrilled to have some time off. While the dramas of the spring hadn't completely disappeared, they were all basically in a holding pattern. The security team in Brooklyn confirmed that my dad was continuing with his rehabilitation and therapy regimen without any more interference from Victor Messina or Katie Corleone. Miranda had, predictably, continued to delay divorce proceedings, but had not caused any additional headaches once Brandon and I had started seeing each other more openly.
Maurice and Janette had remained in New York (presumably with her family) since the Fourth, and although Maurice continued to pester Brandon with occasional phone calls and sometimes even messengered proposals, there was no more than a few distant suggestions that we socialize with them until they returned to Boston in August. The gifts had stopped. Janette was as silent as she had ever been.
The official word from BNP was that Maurice was working at the New York office for the time being. Margie, Brandon's assistant, couldn't get any other information about why he was there. It could have been any number of things: a deal gone bad, some kind of scheme the company was trying to hide. Maurice was a large enough figure that any malfeasance could cause a scandal that would affect stock prices. My best bet was that he was being given a shot at a mea culpa.
He didn't talk to me much about it, but I knew that the DNC was also pressuring Brandon to make a decision about a mayoral run. The election wasn't until the following year, but they likely wanted to start fundraising. The local papers continued to speculate about his interest in politics, and a few PACs had already been started for him. I didn't miss the clench of his jaw whenever he saw a new headline. What I didn't know was what he was going to do. I wondered if he was waiting for me to make that decision first.
Like a herd of escaped livestock, close to fifty of us overtook the nearest bar, aptly named The Drunk Monk, as we'd all felt like secluded monks with our study guides for the last month.
Eric and I sat at the bar with Steve Kramer, one of our classmates, and quickly ordered several plates of bar grub along with drinks, the boys opting for a pitcher of PBR while I took my preferred drink of whiskey and soda.
"And a round of tequila shots!" Steve called out as the bartender walked away to put in our order.
"Come on, Crosby," Eric prodded when I made a face. "If there was ever a day to drink cheap liquor, this is it."
"You seem pretty sure of yourself."
Jared appeared next to us, looking only slightly less groomed than normal. The collar of his polo shirt was still starched, and the only sign that he'd also been testing for the last two days was that his khaki shorts were creased from sitting for too long. He flagged the bartender and ordered a beer, then looked down at me with a bright smile. I couldn't help but smile back as the bartender delivered everyone's drinks along with a tray full of shots.
"Onwards and upwards, counselors," Steve crowed as he reached between us and delivered shot glasses to me, Jared, and several other classmates crowding the bar.
I held up my shot along with everyone else as the adrenaline of finishing this chapter rushed through the room. We all tipped them back with howls and hoots and gleefully ordered another round.
"Keep 'em coming!" Steve shouted before throwing back a second tequila and sucking on a lime.
"And some water," I called before following suit.
I held a hand to my forehead while I sucked on my lime. Two shots in, and I was already feeling lightheaded.
"I need some food," I croaked to Eric while Jared calmly sipped his beer. "Didn't we order potato skins?"
As if on cue, the skins arrived, along with a plate of fried mozzarella and clam strips. We dug in. Fried food had never tasted so good.
"I wish Jane were here," I said to Eric after scarfing my second skin. "It isn't the same, celebrating without her."
"She
'll be here on Friday," Eric said, as if it were completely normal that he would know that in the first place. Suddenly he found a scratch in the bar top extremely interesting.
Both Jane and Eric had been mum since the Fourth––Eric because he never said anything about his love life, and Jane because she still staunchly denied the long weekend meant anything at all. More interesting was that although I had talked to her several times in the last three weeks, she had also not mentioned a visit. Not once.
"Will she?" I asked with a raised brow. "And when was this decided?"
Eric took a gulp of his beer. "Last night. She's planning to spend her vacation in Boston."
"And is she planning to stay with us?"
Eric looked up. "What, do you want me to pay more of the rent? I didn't think you'd mind. I'm sure she was going to tell you after her exam. She's just not done until tomorrow."
He popped a piece of fried cheese into his mouth and focused on aligning his coaster and beer glass with the edge of the bar, as if knowing Jane's bar exam schedule and the fact that he would be hosting the same girl every night for two weeks wasn't completely out of the ordinary. I said nothing, just gave a hard stare while he ate.
"Okay!" he finally exploded after swallowing his food. "Jesus. If I tell you that I like her, will you stop staring a freaking hole through my forehead with those laser beams?"
He rubbed viciously at said spot, as if the pressure was literally killing him. I folded my arms with a satisfied smile at Jared, who just looked confused.
"I'm glad you can admit the truth," I said haughtily before picking up my drink.
"I'm not the one you should worry about," Eric grumbled. "You should be talking to Jane about the truth, not me."
I quirked my eyebrow, but that was all he was willing to say about the matter.
Two more shots and several rounds of drinks later, the entire bar was effectively shitfaced. I had already seen at least three soon-to-be-prominent Boston attorneys sprint to the bathrooms to throw up, and a few others had just skipped the line and dashed outside to hurl over the pier. We were messier than a frat house during Rush week.
Legally Mine (Spitfire Book 2) Page 31