Just Pretend

by Juliana Conners

  I’ll turn this one around. I never lose in the long run because I only take winning cases and I’m a damn good lawyer. One of the best there is. But I hate losing even in the short term. And worse, I hate coming back to the office after I lose a fucking case.

  The second shitty thing that happened today is that everyone is staring at me and whispering under their breath as I’m forced to take my little walk of shame from the elevator in the lobby to my office on the partners’ floor. The secretaries’ eyes are downcast while the partners raise their eyebrows at me in a jeering manner. Everyone’s thinking the same damn thing.

  “Woah buddy, heard you took a beating today,” someone calls out.

  I know from his voice, without having to turn around and look, who said it. Fucking Asher Marks. My best friend and law partner. He’s the only one other than me who has the balls to say what everyone else is thinking. Usually I admire this trait of his but I don’t fucking need to hear his bullshit right now.

  “Make sure to exercise your preemptive strike on Baez,” I announce loudly to everyone in the office, ignoring the fucking shit-eating grin on Asher’s face.

  “Oh sure, blame it on the judge,” Asher says. “It couldn’t possibly be due to anything you did or didn’t do.”

  “I’m serious,” I hurl back at him, and everyone. “Judge Baez is as plaintiff-friendly as they come.”

  On my way back to the office, I’d shot out an email to a trial lawyers’ list I belong to, asking about Judge Baez. Granted, I should have done that a lot earlier— while I was preparing for the hearing. Asher’s right on that count but I’m not about to admit it.

  The former judge— Elliot— that I am used to appearing in front of had fallen ill right in the middle of this case and is on an indefinite leave of absence. Judge Baez was appointed interim judge and I should have looked into whether or not to strike him during the first ten days after notification of his appointment, which the rules allow me to do.

  But I’d heard that Judge Elliot had just checked himself into rehab for the eighth fucking time, and he’s always back better than ever after his standard twenty-eight days are up. I figured no judge could be dumb enough to grant summary judgment this early on in the case and that it wasn’t worth the hassle of paperwork.

  Turns out I was obviously fucking very wrong. A flurry of email responses had come in, letting me know that this interim Judge Baez is a bleeding heart pro-plaintiff’s guy through and through. He had already granted lots of judgments in the plaintiffs’ favor in cases against big corporations left and right in the fifteen days he’d been on the bench.

  And of course, I’m representing a big corporation. Because I make a shit ton of money, and big corporations have the ability to keep it that way.

  Don’t get me wrong, I do pro bono work too. And I take on cases I believe in. Like right now I’m about to represent the manufacturer of toys for kids with disabilities. His name is Damien Hudson.

  There’s not a lot of money in such cases. But I believe in the guy’s work. I want to help.

  But obviously, I have bills to pay too. Big ones. Like the one for my fucking yacht. And my jet skis. And my jet that takes me to the yacht and the jet skis. Therefore, in general I represent the biggest, filthy rich and often downright scummy corporations. And apparently, this Judge Baez has a problem with that.

  “Oh sure, you just lost the case because the judge has a soft spot for the little guy,” Asher laughs. “Good thing Volcan Corp. has the money and the resources to fight this unfair ruling. How dare the court be so unjust against a giant entity used to stomping its way to victory?”

  He just can’t let it go. I know he’s joking— giving me a hard time because he knows I’ll win on appeal and we’ll get even more money along the way from the legal bills our client will have to pay to fight Judge Baez’s original crazy decision— but I’m not in the fucking mood.

  “Judge Baez is seriously not someone we want on any of our cases,” I tell him. “Not that you would know what the hell has been going on in them lately anyway.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he growls at me, but I just turn away.

  Asher knows exactly what I fucking mean. He’s been too busy fucking Madilyn, his latest bright and shiny new associate— whom he likes to refer to as his “mentee” but is really his office plaything— to pay attention to anything going on in this firm.

  His firm, my firm and Reed’s firm. That we started together even though Asher is always the one who takes— and gets— all the credit for it. And which has so much respect for me that everyone is secretly laughing at me because I just lost one case for the stupidest reason ever: a bleeding heart judge who’s too new to know how things work.

  I clear my throat.

  “Listen up everybody,” I call out.

  The secretaries sitting in their cubicles finally lift up their eyes to meet mine, although a bit hesitantly.

  “I want everyone to search through all of our active files and find any of them that have Baez assigned as the judge. We’re going to need to file Motions to Recuse for Cause in all of them. We’ll cite his bias and the fact that all he’s done since taking the bench is rule against corporations such as our clients. Does everyone understand?”

  There’s a mumbling of “Yes, Sir” that ripples through the office, as the secretaries dutifully pull up their case lists on their computers and search for Baez. At first, they’re rather reluctant but as I stand there looking at each and every one of them, their typing gets more urgent from the sound of things and their throats start clearing nervously.

  Good. They’re finally taking me seriously, even if Asher isn’t. That’ll give them something better to do than sitting around watching cat videos on Youtube or messaging their friends on Facebook to tell them about how their boss and co-founder of the firm, Cameron Sanchez, just lost a case and is now losing his shit over it and making their lives harder because of it.

  “I’ll go search the file room,” says a pleasant voice out of nowhere, sounding calm and collected despite my harsh attempts to scare the ever-living bejesus into my staff. “I’ll be right back with all the Baez files.”

  “How are you going to do that?” I ask her, looking up and down at the person who had just said it.

  I’m not just looking at her because she’s fucking hot but also because she sounds so brazen in her promise and confident in her abilities.

  I know this chick. Kind of. Her name’s Ruby.

  She’s what we call a floater— a secretary or assistant of sorts who fills in where needed and does any task required of her, without being assigned to any certain attorney. Those kinds of jobs are one of the lowest of the low around here— although being a “runner”/delivery boy, a mailroom clerk or the janitor might be a bit lower on the totem pole.

  Normally I wouldn’t have known her from anyone but she kind of fucking stands out. She has brown hair with some streaks of purple dye running through it like these kids think is okay to wear to work these days.

  I don’t know why no one around here has made her fix that but I’m kind of glad they haven’t. Because on her it looks kind of fucking hot. Like I just want to run my hands through those streaks in her hair while I pull it back and tell her to do what I want.

  And she also has a banging fucking body. And that’s how I know her name. Because some of the other guys call her “Ruby Don’t You Wanna,” which is what they call any hot girl around here that they wish they could fuck.

  All the partners have commented on how much they’d like to hit that but then everyone always says Asher is the only one who would ever be stupid enough to try. Except that he prefers new associate lawyers, not assistants and certainly not floaters.

  But yeah. I’d like to hit that. I’d love some of that Ruby Don’t You Wanna. She’s got curves in all the right places and a round yet somehow still tight ass that bounces like a little fitness ball when she walks.

  And she’s fucking young— she look
s like a teenager although they say she’s twenty. Sure, I’d hit that. If I could. And I’d hit it a lot better than all the other partners could, too.

  I’m not as dumb as Asher though. I bang plenty of chicks outside the office but I don’t like to shit where I eat. Even though I’d love to eat her undoubtedly juicy little pussy. And I don’t like to mix business with pleasure, even though I’m sure my ten-inch cock could give her plenty of pleasure.

  I’ve never had things as easy as Asher and I know I can’t take what I’ve built for granted. Even though I’d like to tie this Ruby girl up, I know it would have the power to take me down. So, I won’t. I just wish I could.

  Chapter 2 – Cameron

  I look at the smirk on Asher’s face and wish I really could just go around taking the chances that he does. With the complete shameless attitude that he does.

  Asher thinks that he single-handedly built this firm and that he’s invincible against anything ever destroying it, even his own actions. He and I go way back— he was my friend in fucking middle school— so I cut him a lot of slack but I think his voracious appetite and playboy ways with the women he hires and supervises could land him in hot water. I’m always the one picking up the pieces and helping him out of the fucking jams he gets himself into.

  Asher doesn’t know how easy he has everything. He’s not from the barrio like me— the part of town that is literally referred to as the “War Zone” in Albuquerque. He’s from the posh Northeast Heights neighborhood my mama had to drive to every day— first to scrub rich peoples’ floors and then to drop me off on her way at the private school I had been awarded a scholarship to attend, for being smart and good at tests but mostly for driving up their diversity numbers.

  Asher’s parents had plenty of money to send him to the school I was lucky enough to have my way paid for me to be able to attend— a fact that none of my rich benefactors ever stopped rubbing in my fucking face for the entire six years I was there.

  “Excuse me?” Ruby asks me now, raising an eyebrow at me in a more serious way than Asher just had.

  For the first time, I notice what a very interesting shade of blue her eyes are: sky-blue mixed with gray. So, they look like a day that’s cloudy but about to get better. Like you can see the sun poking out from behind the clouds.

  I can’t believe I just had that fucking thought. Luckily it was only to myself or everyone would have yet another reason to be fucking laughing at me today.

  “How is it that you think you can so easily pull all the cases that have that one judge?” I ask Ruby.

  She’s a relatively new floater and I’m sure she doesn’t understand how our filing system works. Although it’s pretty fucking self-explanatory if she would take a little bit of time away from listening to whatever undoubtedly in bad fucking taste music is always playing out of the headphones she wears and spend some time in the file room.

  The files are arranged on the shelves in the filing room as anyone might expect: fucking alphabetically by client. Not in any way that has anything to do with the fucking judge on the case.

  “Well when I first started I had a lot of free time on my hands,” she answers me, shrugging. “Still do, actually. So, I decided to do something productive in the file room that could make it easier to find files by additional ways instead of only alphabetically by last name.”

  Now it’s my turn to raise my eyebrows at her, in near disbelief.

  “And how is that?” I ask her. “In what other ways did you arrange the files, and how exactly would you be able to do that?”

  “I know, right?” she asks, smiling as if she’s very proud of herself for devising something innovative. “I had the same question. Like, at first, I was wishing we didn’t even have to file things physically, since it doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore. Thanks to computers we have everything filed electronically and can arrange or search for them in all sorts of different ways. And that’s what I dislike about Pinterest.”

  “Pinterest?” I ask her.

  I’m vaguely familiar with the site, but I thought it was something that housewives or nannies used to collect pictures of their cooking or knitting projects. I didn’t know that someone fresh out of their teenage years would use Pinterest.

  “Yeah, I use it for photos of album covers from bands that I like,” she says, “And I get annoyed that I can only sort things by boards. That’s it. So, I can have a band board, or a genre of music board, or a type of cover board, but if I want the same album to go in all three of them, I have to add it to every single board. It really should have tag options like Evernote.”

  “Evernote,” I say, just as dumb-founded as when she mentioned Pinterest.

  I’m a bit more familiar with Evernote but I thought it was something for tech junkies or executives who like to meticulously track their notes and documents. Again, not something I think a twenty-year-old would be interested in.

  “Yeah, so I thought I’d make something that combines Pinterest and Evernote,” she says. “I’m working on it already, in fact.”

  “In the filing room?” I ask her.

  “No.”

  She laughs, and I have to admit I fucking love the sound of it. And I love that she’s laughing about something I said, even if it’s because what I said made me sound like a fucking idiot. She’s still laughing because of me.

  “I mean, yes,” she says, smiling. “I did something like that in the filing room. But I’m coding an app that does it too, for, like, on the computer.”

  “I see,” I tell her. “You… code?”

  I hadn’t realized that was part of a floater’s job description.

  “Yes,” she says. “Well, in my spare time.”

  She shrugs and looks away, as if she’s a little embarrassed. Or maybe like she doesn’t want to tell me anything else about what she does in her spare time. I suddenly realize she could have a boyfriend and I feel fucking outraged.

  “Interesting,” Asher comments, and I instinctively feel a little fucking possessive.

  I know he’s head over heels in lust with his new pet, Madilyn, and he only ever “mentors” one woman at a time.

  But still.

  I’m the one who started talking to this interesting assistant and I’m not going to let Asher mess that up for me. Even if I won’t explore my more basic instincts with her.

  Will I?

  “What do you call this program?” I ask her.

  “You could call it Everest,” Asher says.

  “Like the mountain you climbed?” Madilyn says, seemingly appearing out of nowhere.

  She pops her head up from a cubicle where apparently she had been helping a secretary search for some files.

  Fuck yeah.

  I’m glad to know that Asher was showing off for Madilyn and not Ruby.

  Because she’s mine.

  What the fuck?

  My cock seems to be saying it, even if my brain is willing it to calm down. To sit down instead of getting a bit hard in my slacks.

  “Ha. Everest. I actually thought of that.”

  Ruby laughs a little bit but it’s not nearly as genuine as when she was laughing with me. And she’s still looking at me and not at Asher.

  Her head is tilted at me in a way that says, come and get me. And damn, do I want to. She just fucking oozes sex appeal.

  If she weren’t my subordinate I’d have her pinned up against those filing cabinets she’s talking about, putting my hand over her mouth while she screams my name into it, so that no one can hear us fucking in the file room.

  Clearly my cock is doing all the thinking now.

  “But I don’t want it to be that obvious that that’s where I got my idea,” Ruby continues. “So, don’t tell anyone.”

  She winks at me. Holy fuck is that hot.

  “So, what is it called then?” I ask her.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  She shrugs.

  “It’ll come to me. And in the meantime, I thought I’d work on our outd
ated filing room system. I thought I had stumbled upon this big elaborate idea but my execution of it was laughably simple. It was just based on a color scheme. Like the scheduling system I started up in Google Calendars.”

  “The scheduling system?”

  “Oh yeah,” says Sherry, one of the paralegals. “That’s really helped us figure out where everyone is when. Red is for court, yellow is for a meeting, blue is for out of the office for personal reasons, pink is for…”

  “Exactly,” Ruby says, before Sherry can continue. “So, I just stuck with the idea of the color system. But I had to add shapes, too. To get the full effect of the ‘tagging’ idea that Evernote uses.”

  “I see,” I tell her.

  I have to admit I’m fucking impressed.

  “Yeah. So, if you’re wondering why our office supply budget jumped up a bit last month, it’s probably because I needed to order Sticky Notes in all different colors and shapes. I added these color- and shape- coded stickers to the folders so that we know which ones have which judges, or are in which courts, or have which of the most common opposing attorneys that you guys always seem to be fighting with.”

  She winks at me again before continuing.

  “Stars are for judges. So, I just have to go load up the folders with red stars on them into this cart with wheels—” she gestures to a cart that the runners and floaters keep in the corner— “and we’ll be good to go with all the Baez files that need these new Motions to Recuse filed into them.”

  “Wow,” I tell her, seriously, seriously impressed.

  But then I look down at the shoes she’s wearing: red patent leather heels. I don’t know much about fashion, but they look nice with the black and white little dress she’s wearing. But they’d look even better without it: if I could get her out of that dress and onto my cock. And by the way she keeps winking at me, I’m pretty sure I can.

  Except I can’t. Not really. I just wish I could.

  “My only question is which of our strapping young men that serve as runners you’re going to ask to help you do that.”