by Vi Keeland
She did just that, plopping her shapely ass down on my lap. “I noticed you looking at me.”
“You’re a hard person to miss.”
“So are you. You’re the best-looking guy at this party.”
“Is that so?” I took another draw on my beer, and Little Miss Longlegs took it from my hand when I was done. She brought it to her lips and sucked down half the bottle. Finishing, she made a loud ahhh sound.
“What’s your name, legs?”
“Alexa. What’s yours?”
“Drew.” I took the beer back and finished it off. “Who’s the guy you came here with?”
“Oh, that’s just Levi.”
“Not a boyfriend or anything?”
She shook her head. “Nope. He’s just Levi. He lives in Douglasville, not too far from me. He’s good with cars. Sometimes he fixes mine.”
Just then, Levi tagged Alexa from the doorway. He didn’t look happy to find her sitting on my lap.
I lifted my chin in his direction. “You sure Levi doesn’t think you’re more than just friends? Looks like he’s a little pissed off right now.”
She had been sitting with her legs across my lap, but she shifted to face me and swung one over to straddle my hips, effectively blocking my view of her scowling mechanic. “Now you can’t see him.”
I clasped my hands behind her back. “My view just got a whole lot better.”
It was less than an hour later when she asked me to show her my room. Of course, I obliged. I’m nothing if not accommodating to beautiful women. I’d been living at college going on four years now. Some women were straightforward about what they wanted. I was busy and not looking for a relationship, and I appreciated a woman who didn’t play games, got straight to the point.
Alexa’s fingers were at the zipper of my shorts before I closed the bedroom door. I pushed her up against it to block out the party, and it also slammed shut—two birds, one stone.
“You’re applying to law school next year?” she asked as I felt up her tits. It should have set off an alarm since I hadn’t mentioned my plans for the future. But…she had great tits. And killer legs. Those were currently wrapped around my waist. I’d also been drinking since the afternoon.
“Yeah. I’ll probably stay at Emory. My father and grandfather are legacy.”
After that, we brought in the new year with a bang.
Great memories.
Bad idea.
Drew
“You what?” Roman Olivet stared at me like I’d just told him I killed Queen Elizabeth. He shook his head. “Bad idea, man.”
I looked down at my scotch, swirling the amber liquid in my glass for a minute before bringing it to my lips. “She’s going to help me while Tess is out for three months in exchange for rent. It’ll give her a chance to find a place she can afford and get back on her feet.”
Roman sucked back his beer. “I asked you to rent me space two years ago, and you told me you couldn’t share space with anyone.”
“I can’t. This is temporary.”
He squinted at me. “She’s hot, isn’t she?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“You’re such a dick.”
“What the hell? Emerie said the same thing.”
Roman’s eyebrows jumped. “She called you a dick, and you’re letting her share office space with you? She must have some ass.”
I tried to maintain my stoic face, but Roman and I have been friends forever. He caught the slight tick at the corner of my lip.
He shook his head and laughed. “A good ass is your kryptonite, my friend.”
To be honest, I was still trying to figure out what the hell had come over me a few hours ago. Not only did I invite this woman—yes, she had a spectacular ass—to move into my office, but I’d had to convince her to take me up on my offer. I repeat, I talked her into moving into my Park Avenue office—the space I loathed sharing with anyone—for free.
I tossed back the rest of my scotch and held up my hand to call for a refill.
“What kind of law does she practice?”
“She’s not a lawyer. She’s a psychologist.”
“A shrink? You’re going to have a bunch of crazy people walking around your office?”
I hadn’t exactly thought of that. What if her patients were psychotic with a variety of multiple personality disorders? Or ex-cons who slit the throats of old ladies but escaped hefty prison sentences because they were insane? I’m going to be murdered because of a great ass. No ass is worth that.
Then again…how sane are my own clients? Seventy-one-year-old Ferdinand Armonk, who is worth a hundred-million dollars, was arrested last year for assaulting his twenty-three-year-old bride with his cane because he caught her tongue between his physical therapist’s legs. This is the crazy I deal with on an everyday basis already.
I shrugged. “Her crazy can’t be much worse than my crazy.”
Candice Armonk had her husband arrested for hitting her with a cane and was trying to get half his net worth out of the divorce. Roman wasn’t just my best friend, he was also my private investigator and had worked the Armonk case. He’d found an old girl-on-girl porno Candice did at eighteen while she still lived in France. It was titled Candy Caned—she got off on women caning her, but apparently her husband giving her one whack that didn’t leave a mark was worth fifty mil. When she came to my office with her lawyer for a settlement conference, she’d refused to sit in the conference room with Ferdinand until I put the cane outside of the building.
The bartender brought my new drink and I sipped. “Crazy will fit right in.”
After a morning conference across town, I walked into my office and found Emerie pacing back and forth in my spare office wearing a headset as she talked on the phone. Her back was to me as I turned up the hallway, which gave me a chance to take my time checking her out. She had on a black fitted skirt that hugged her in all the right places and a white silky blouse. When she heard my footsteps, she turned, and I noticed her feet were bare. The bright red polish on her toes matched her smiling lips. An odd tightness in my chest had me smiling back while wondering if I needed to take a Prilosec or something. I waved and walked into my office, which was filled with my office furniture—though I hadn’t arranged for it to be redelivered yet.
Ten minutes later, Emerie knocked lightly on my door even though it was open. Her shoes were back on—red heels covering her red toes. Nice.
“Good morning.”
“Morning.” I nodded.
She lifted a pad and took a pencil from behind her ear. “You had a busy morning. Six calls: Jasper Mason, Marlin Appleton, Michael Goddman, Kurt Whaler, Alan Green, and Arnold Schwartz. I wrote down the messages on a message book I found in your supply closet. Hope you don’t mind me helping myself.”
I waved a hand. “By all means, help yourself. I don’t know where anything is without Tess around anyway.”
She ripped the messages from the carbon copy message book and put them on my desk. “Here you go.”
“Thank you. By the way, did you have something to do with getting my furniture back from storage?”
“Oh. Yes. I hope you don’t mind. The storage company called this morning and wanted to schedule the delivery for today, so I took the first appointment he had available. The contractor was here cleaning up when I got in this morning, and said he was done with anything that would make a mess. He’s going to send one of his guys by later to do the last few things like hang the light switch covers and put the sign back up in the lobby. The boxes with your personal items from your office are on the floor. I was going to go through them and set it up for you, but thought that might be overstepping.”
“I wouldn’t have minded. But thank you. Thanks for taking care of all that this morning. I thought I was walking in to sit on the folding chair and table again. This is a nice surprise.”
“No problem.” She looked down at her watch. “I have a video conference in a few minutes, but
I’m open from twelve-thirty to two today if you want help setting up your office. I can order in and make it a working lunch, if you want.”
“That would be great. I have a call that should end before twelve-thirty.”
“What do you feel like for lunch?”
“Surprise me.”
“Anything I want?”
“Anything. Unlike you, I’m not picky.”
Emerie smiled and turned to walk back to her office. I stopped her to ask a question that had been on my mind since dinner with Roman last night.
“What kind of psychologist are you? Do you specialize?”
“I do. I thought I told you. I’m a marriage counselor.”
“A marriage counselor?”
“Yes, I work to save troubled marriages.”
“We definitely didn’t discuss that. I’d have remembered, considering I also work with troubled marriages—to dissolve them permanently.”
“Is it a problem?”
I shook my head. “Shouldn’t be.”
Famous last words.
Emerie
“Here are a few more messages.”
Drew had just hung up the phone after waving me into his office. I set the bag containing our lunch on his desk and handed him the little slips of paper. He shuffled through them quickly and held one up.
“If this guy calls back—Jonathon Gates—you have my permission to hang up on him.”
“Can I call him a name first?”
Drew looked amused. “What would you call him?”
“That depends. What did he do wrong?”
“He beats his wife.”
“Oh, God. Okay.” I twisted my lips as I thought of a good name for Mr. Gates. “I’d call him a fucking animal, and then hang up on him.”
Drew chuckled. “You don’t curse like a New Yorker.”
“What do you mean?”
“You pronounce the entire word. F-u-c-k-i-n-g.”
“How should I pronounce it?”
“Fuckin. Leave off the hard g.”
“Fuckin,” I repeated.
“It sounds stiff. You should practice more so it sounds natural.”
I reached into the bag and pulled out the food I’d ordered. With a smile, I offered it to him. “Here’s your fuckin lunch.”
“Nice.” He smiled. “Keep it up. You’ll sound like Tess in no time.”
“Tess?”
“My secretary who’s out because she had hip surgery. She’s sixty and looks like Mary Poppins, but she swears like a sailor.”
“I’ll practice some more.”
I’d ordered us sandwiches from a deli I discovered on my first day of fake tenancy. Since Drew looked like he took care of himself, I picked him out a turkey club on whole wheat with avocado and ordered myself the same, though I usually tended to eat less healthy food. Drew devoured his entire sandwich before I could finish half of mine, and I wasn’t a slow eater.
Looking at his empty wrapper, I asked, “I take it you liked the sandwich?”
“Went to the gym at 5 a.m. and didn’t have time to eat before an early meeting uptown. That was the first thing I’d eaten today.”
“5 a.m.? You went to the gym at five in the morning?”
“I’m an early riser. From the appalled tone in your voice, I take it you’re not.”
“I try to be.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
“Not so good.” I laughed. “I have trouble falling asleep at night, so mornings are tough.”
“Do you exercise?”
“I started taking that Krav Maga a few times a week at night to wear myself out, hoping it would help me sleep. It doesn’t really help. But I like it anyway.”
“How about those drinks with melatonin in them?”
“Tried them. Nothing.”
“Sleeping pills?”
“I wind up groggy for twenty-four hours after I take anything. Even Tylenol PM wipes me out.”
“Prolactin then.”
“Prolactin? What’s that? A vitamin or something?”
“It’s a hormone you release after orgasm. Makes you sleepy. Have you tried masturbating right before bed?”
I was mid-swallow and choked on the sandwich bite. Not the sputtering, coughing, it-went-down-the-wrong-pipe cute kind of choke. No. I choked. Literally. A small chunk of bread lodged in my throat, blocking my airway. In a panic, I stood, knocking the wrapper with the rest of my turkey club and my soda to the floor, and began to point furiously to my throat.
Luckily, Drew took the hint. He ran around to my side of the desk and smacked me on the back a few times. When I remained unable to breathe, he wrapped his arms around me from behind and performed the Heimlich. On the second hard thrust, the bread blocking my airway dislodged and flew across his office. Even though the entire episode probably only lasted fifteen seconds, I bent and gasped for air as if I’d been deprived for three minutes. My heart thundered inside of my chest, the sudden adrenaline surge hitting hard.
Drew didn’t let go. He kept his arms locked around me tightly, just under my chest, as I heaved in long breaths.
Eventually, when my breathing had returned to somewhat normal, he spoke in a low, hesitant voice. “You okay?”
My voice was scratchy. “I think so.”
His grip around me loosened, but he didn’t move away. Instead, he rested his head on top of mine. “You scared the shit out of me.”
I held my throat with one hand. “That was a terrifying feeling. I’ve never actually choked before.” For the brief moment of my impending doom, I’d completely forgotten what had made me choke. But it quickly came back to me. “You almost killed me.”
“Killed you? I think your brain was deprived of oxygen. I just saved your life, beautiful.”
“You made me choke. Who brings up masturbating with an almost stranger while eating lunch?”
“An almost stranger? I’ve seen you in your underwear, bailed you out of prison, and given you a place to park your ass all day long. Pretty sure I’m your best friend in town at this point.”
I whipped around and stared at him. “Maybe I don’t need to masturbate anyway. Maybe I have a boyfriend who takes care of those needs.”
Drew smirked. Not smiled. Smirked. “If that’s the case, and you’re still having trouble sleeping after he takes care of you at night, then dump his ass because he sucks in bed.”
“And I suppose all of your women are fast asleep after you take care of them.”
“Damn straight. I’m like a superhero. The Prolactinator.”
This man had the uncanny ability to make me laugh in the middle of an argument. I snorted as I leaned over to clean up my sandwich from the floor. “Okay, Prolactinator. How about you use your superpowers to help clean up this mess?”
After the lunch debacle was straightened, I offered to help Drew unpack his boxes. He had a cordless drill in the first one we opened, and he hung some of his fancy-framed degrees while I unwrapped things and cleaned them off. Our conversation was light and easy until he asked me the question I always dreaded answering.
“So you never told me the other day, what brought you to New York?”
“It’s a long story.”
Drew looked at his watch. “I have twenty minutes until my next consult. Shoot.”
For a brief moment, I considered making up a story so I didn’t have to tell the truth. But then I figured, this guy has seen me at my worst—he helped me keep out of jail and witnessed firsthand that I could be sold the proverbial Brooklyn Bridge in the form of Park Avenue real estate. So I went with honesty.
“My first year of college, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to major in. I took a Psychology 101 class, and the professor was amazing. But he was also a drunk who often missed classes or came in with ten minutes left in the lecture. He had a TA who was from New York but working on his doctorate at the University of Oklahoma, and he wound up teaching a lot of the course. The TA was Baldwin.”
Drew dumped
a pile of files into a cabinet and shut it, turning to face me. “So you moved to New York to be near this Baldwin guy? I thought you said the other day he didn’t return the feelings you have?”
“He doesn’t. Baldwin and I became good friends over the next four years. He had a girlfriend he lived with—an art history major who modeled on the side.” I rolled my eyes thinking of Meredith—she was so full of herself. “He stayed at the college to teach after he finished his doctorate, and then decided to move back to New York to start his own practice and teach here. We kept in touch while I did my graduate work, and he pretty much helped me write my thesis over Skype for a year.”
“Are we getting to sex or something good in this story soon? Because Baldwin’s starting to bore the shit out of me.”
Drew was next to me, opening the last box, and I shoved at his arm. “You’re the one who wanted to hear the story.”
“I thought it would be more interesting,” he teased with a cocky smile.
“Anyway. I’ll sum up so I don’t put you to sleep—”
Drew interrupted. “No worries. I’m not sleepy. Didn’t masturbate this morning.”
“Thanks for sharing that. Do you want me to finish or not?”
“Of course. I don’t know why, but I’m anxious to hear what’s wrong with Baldwin.”
“Why do you assume something’s wrong with him?”
“Gut feeling.”
“Well, you’re wrong. There’s nothing wrong with Baldwin. He’s a great guy who’s extremely intelligent and cultured.”
Drew put his hands on his hips and stopped unpacking to give me his full attention. “You said he had a girlfriend for four years. I take it they broke up?”
“Yes. They broke up right before he left to come back to New York.”
“And he didn’t make a move on you, knowing you were in love with him?”
“How do you know I was in love with him?”
He looked at me like the answer was obvious. “Were you?”
“Yes. But…I didn’t tell you that.”
“You’re easy to read.”
I sighed. “Why is it so easy for you to see it, but Baldwin seems to be clueless?”
