Barring Complications

by Blythe Rippon

  Genevieve groaned and pushed her away. “Jesus, Tori, stop.”

  With mere inches between them, she could see Genevieve try to say something sensible about slowing down or waiting, but their eyes met and desire overcame them both.

  Victoria’s lips lingered on the soft skin of her neck and from far away, she heard Genevieve’s voice.

  “God, Tori, I never thought...I’ve loved you...I can’t believe...”

  She felt all resistance leave Genevieve’s body and their lips met again.

  Victoria struggled to wrap her mind around what was happening. She’d wanted, fantasized, longed for this, but she’d never thought she would actually touch Genevieve this way. Her thoughts stalled again when Genevieve roughly reversed their positions, throwing her against the door. She grabbed Victoria’s hands, raised them above her head, and pinned them to the door. Her demanding lips found Victoria’s ear, her jawline, her neck. Everywhere her mouth touched turned to fire.

  Victoria’s legs were replaced with rubber and she slid down the door, unable to stand.

  Genevieve took her hand and led them to her bed.

  * * *

  “Jesus, Tori.”

  Victoria watched as Genevieve struggled to catch her breath. Her head was spinning and she couldn’t feel her legs, but she couldn’t take her eyes off of smooth skin and toned muscles. She traced light circles over Genevieve’s abdomen, which began twitching. “Ticklish?”

  “Little bit,” Genevieve admitted. She kissed Victoria’s hair, closed her eyes, and sighed.

  “Welcome home,” Victoria murmured. A booming clap of thunder shook the room. “To both of us.”

  Genevieve pulled away and repositioned them so they were on their sides, facing each other. She gently placed one hand on Victoria’s cheek before she said, “Tori. Are you sure? About this—us?”

  “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”

  “I just…I want you to be sure.”

  “Sure that I love you? That I want you? Have you seen you? God, I can’t even describe it.” Instead she began nipping on an inviting earlobe.

  Genevieve pulled back. “We should talk about this.”

  “Should we? We’ve been talking plenty. We just haven’t been using words.” When Genevieve acknowledged this truth with a grin, Victoria laughed quietly. “Overruled, Counselor.”

  “Mmm. If I misbehave, will you hold me in contempt of court?”

  Victoria began licking Genevieve’s lips. “Yes. I’ll remand you to my chambers for a search and seizure.”

  “Technically, that would be illegal,” Genevieve said wryly, referencing the anti-sodomy laws upheld by Bowers v. Hardwick during the previous year.

  “All right, I’ll overturn Bowers as I drag you into my chambers and have my way with you.”

  “You seem awfully confident in your ability to multitask.”

  “You want to test me?”

  “Hell yes. Why don’t you hit ‘play’ on the CD player, and then tell me how you would go about overturning Bowers.”

  Victoria leaned over to the nightstand and turned on the music, grinning as George Michael’s “Faith” filled the room. “I listened to this album and dreamed of you all summer.”

  “All summer?”

  She ran her finger down Genevieve’s chest. “All summer.” She had no idea where this ability to be upfront about what she wanted was coming from, but she wasn’t about to question it. She felt invincible, and never wanted it to stop.

  “You’re stalling. Bowers. How would you craft your opinion, Madam Justice?”

  As Victoria thought about her reply, Genevieve threw her on her back and began to kiss a path down her body.

  “Um. Right. Bowers. Well, the first thing I’d have to address is the absence of an enumerated right to privacy in the Constitution. I would contend that while not explicit, the right to privacy is implicit in a number of Constitutional provisions, specifically the Fourth and Ninth Amendments. Further, as Blackmun wrote in his dissent to Bowers…just because churches and religious institutions…exert moral judgment against…homosexuality…doesn’t mean the state…oh God…” She struggled to continue. “The state can’t criminalize acts simply…because religious…religions…”

  “Religious religions, huh? Clever.”

  Victoria’s mind told her to laugh, but other parts of her body distracted her. She felt a rush of emotions flood through her—lust, yes, but also passion and affection and something that felt more enduring than desire. As she faltered again in her hypothetical legal argument, she poured the feelings coursing through her into the body pressed against hers.

  * * *

  It was well past midnight when a particularly loud clap of thunder reverberated around the bedroom and woke them. Genevieve drew the comforter over their entwined bodies and Victoria began to drift back to sleep when she suddenly shot awake. Her heart rate sped up.

  “Genevieve. Where’s your roommate?”

  “She’s in Texas visiting family until Sunday.”

  “Oh, thank God.” Victoria exhaled heavily.

  “We’d probably scare her speechless, which would be saying something. You know, that would be a huge relief—I don’t know if I can take her constant chatter. Maybe we should think about it.”

  Victoria sat up in alarm. “What? No! We can’t tell her!”

  Genevieve rose beside her and placed a comforting hand on her back. “Hey, Tor, I was joking, okay?”

  Victoria nodded. She wasn’t sure whether to believe her, or panic and run away, or fall asleep, or ravish the woman looking at her with concerned eyes.

  “Let’s go back to sleep, huh?” Genevieve guided her back down and wrapped herself around Victoria’s still-shivering form. “Good night, darling.”

  Victoria took a couple of deep breaths, dismissing thoughts of Bethany and everyone else in the world. She relaxed into the body next to hers. “Good night, Vee,” she whispered.

  After a moment, Genevieve spoke into her neck. “No one’s ever called me ‘Vee’ before.”

  Victoria smiled. “It means I love you.”

  * * *

  Two decades later, alone in her house, Victoria cried over Genevieve. It wasn’t the first time, and she doubted it would be the last.

  Chapter Three

  “Unconstitutional.”

  “Constitutional.”

  “Abuse of executive powers. Unconstitutional.”

  “For once I agree with Jason. Sets a dangerous precedent of sweeping executive authority. Unconstitutional.”

  As they continued around the justices’ conference room, Victoria was surprised that the vote was nearly unanimous. It was the third case they had discussed in that morning’s Conference of Justices, and the only one that wasn’t bitterly divided. Only Eliot McKinzie seemed to think the US government could continue to hold detainees at Guantanamo without charging them with a crime. She shifted in her seat, and noticed that others were fidgeting too. O’Neil preferred unanimous decisions, although with high profile cases he was rarely able to wrangle them. In the next weeks, he would bring unrelenting pressure to bear on Eliot to join the majority decision.

  Victoria watched the chief justice lean back in his chair at the head of the conference table and steeple his fingers. She could see the wheels turning in his head, and knew he was contemplating who to assign the task of authoring the decision. If the author could tailor the wording of the opinion to make it more palatable to McKinzie, then Kellen O’Neil might get his unanimous decision.

  This was how the game was played.

  “Willoughby. I want a draft of the majority decision circulated to all of us in two weeks. Moving on: the public domain case. I side with the appellants.”

  While the other justices in the room began to call out their votes in order of seniority, Victoria put a check mark next to the Guantanamo case on the list in front on her. She was careful to exhibit no other reaction. When it was again her turn to speak, she voic
ed her vote on the public domain case. They were split along party lines, with Jamison siding with the conservatives.

  The Conference ended, and the justices gathered their folios. Victoria caught a wink from Alistair and discreetly smiled back.

  When she returned to her private office after a brief stop to let her clerks know they would be authoring the habeas decision about Guantanamo, she found Alistair waiting for her.

  “Clearly I need to have a talk with my secretary about admitting strange men into my chambers.” She crossed the office and sank into her desk chair.

  “Just because I spend a lot of mental energy trying to reduce life’s problems to mathematical equations doesn’t mean I’m strange.”

  “Just a geek, huh?”

  “I prefer dork, if you don’t mind.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  Alistair pursed his lips at her, which looked so ridiculous that she almost slid out of her desk chair. “More science, less science fiction.”

  “Ah, I see. Is that a dig on people who like science fiction? Because the reboot of Battlestar Galactica captures the human condition better than any television show, ever.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t judge. I just correctly classify.”

  Victoria pulled her thermos of tea from her bag and unscrewed the cap. “Is this really the conversation you stopped by to have?”

  “No, but I find the true gems in life come from the seemingly unimportant conversations in the gaps between the overthought dialogues that are supposed to structure our lives.”

  Victoria stared at him. “You’re a weirdo. Who talks like that?”

  “Evidently I do.”

  She was reminded of a similar exchange with Genevieve. Genevieve had given her that grin that made her feel slightly tipsy for a moment, unsure of how her limbs would respond if she told them to move. With some effort, she pulled her mind back to the present and rolled her eyes.

  “Fine, fine,” he said, throwing up his hands. “What’s your strategy with the habeas case?”

  “Jesus, Alistair, he just assigned it to me! All I’ve had time to think about since then is that my dry cleaning is ready.”

  “When you get into it, I’m around. Bounce ideas off of me. Strategize with me.”

  Victoria tilted her head. “You don’t think I can handle this?”

  “I’m just saying, I went to law school with Eliot. His wife and my wife play tennis together. If you get stuck, I might have some valuable insights.”

  “You don’t think I can handle this.” This time it was a statement.

  Alistair rose, tipped an imaginary hat to her, and exited her office, calling over his shoulder in an exaggerated cockney accent, “G’day, ma’am.”

  Victoria sipped her tea thoughtfully. On the one hand, she was irritated that Alistair would doubt her ability to write a decision that every justice would be willing to sign. On the other hand, she wouldn’t put it past Alistair to sense the flicker of self-doubt in her, and decide to play a little reverse psychology. Alistair had to know that any challenge of her powers of judicial persuasion would be met with nothing short of single-minded determination.

  Either way, she was going to write a hell of an opinion, chastising the executive branch for overreach of power and reaffirming the universal right to freedom from unlawful, indefinite detention. And it was going to be unanimous.

  Chapter Four

  The misinformation campaign to capture the leak in her office was much less fun than television shows would imply. Victoria was grateful that she had an impressive poker face, but she felt awful lying to her staff. She found it difficult to keep her various stories straight about why she was changing her home phone number yet again, and wound up excusing herself from a prying conversation with her secretary by pretending she was coming down with the flu. When her secretary insisted she go home immediately so as not to spread germs, Victoria cursed herself for not concocting a less contagious malady, like a migraine.

  Finding herself unexpectedly dismissed from her own chambers in the middle of the day, she stopped by Pollard’s office.

  “Good, glad you’re here.” He handed her a bag filled with cell phones. “They are programmed as per our agreement. No one else has any of these numbers but the members of your staff, and they have each been given a different number.”

  “So now we just wait and see,” she said.

  “If one of them rings, we’ll record and trace the call, and we’ll immediately start investigating the staff member who was given that number.”

  Victoria shivered. “Well, thank you.”

  “Not at all. This is what we do. Have you seen any more of your stalker?”

  “Not since I’ve had a conspicuous police officer trailing me.”

  “Excellent.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “We ran the plates the Harbour Club gave us on the blue van. Dead end. We found it abandoned in Virginia.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “Nothing you need to worry about. Enjoy the rest of your day, Madam Justice.”

  She could tell she wouldn’t get more information from him. “You too,” she said, and left with a clinking canvas bag filled with cell phones. She hoped no one noticed.

  When she got home, she dropped her keys and purse on a table, unbuttoned her jacket, and went straight to her sideboard, where she lined up all of the phones from the bag. They looked identical, and Pollard hadn’t labeled them in any way. He hadn’t wanted her to know which of her staff was leaking her phone number to Damien Fitzpatrick—at least, not before the SC Police could decide what to do with the information. She was relieved that she wouldn’t know right away.

  Since staring at the row of phones wasn’t going to make them ring, she slid off her heels and headed into her office. She hadn’t worked from home in a while, and was looking forward to a change of scene.

  Sitting in front of her computer, she opened a blank document and began outlining her thoughts on the habeas case. Wallace would write the first draft, but Victoria wanted to lay the groundwork. She suspected that Eliot McKinzie had advised the Bush administration in personal chats that the Court would have no problem with the shadowy legal framework behind Guantanamo. After all, he was tight with both Bush and his chief of staff. These kinds of off-the-record chats often got presidents into trouble. Chief Justice Fred Vinson had told President Truman that the Court would have no problem with the president seizing the country’s steel mills, only to have the entire Court vote against him when the case came to trial. It had been embarrassing.

  And Guantanamo was embarrassing to judges and legal scholars everywhere. Private military tribunals were an illegal substitute for fair trials, to which even the worst, most despicable of murderers had a right. Frankly, Victoria favored public trials more for the healing of national trauma than anything else.

  She flipped through the petitions and amicus briefs, making notes in the margins of things she wanted to come back to, and typing in quotations and case citations for the Court’s opinion. She had a pen in her mouth, a binder in her lap, and her fingers poised over the keys when a cell phone rang. She was so startled that she bit into the pen, cracking its outer shell.

  She rushed to the sideboard to see which phone was buzzing and vibrating, but they all sat silent. Puzzled, she stared at the neat row of phones before realizing that the sound was coming from the table behind her, where she’d discarded her purse upon arriving home. Shaking her head at herself, she fished out her actual phone.

  “Hello?’

  “Well, how was the cookout? I’ve been wondering if some fetching young thing whisked you away to Barbados, since that would be your only excuse for not calling with details.”

  “Hi, Will. How was your weekend?”

  “I watched SpongeBob with child number one and fought with number two about taking a bath. If my drenched jeans were any indication, she won that one. All in all, not as much fun as a cookout with a sexy
lesbian doctor and her hot single friends.”

  “What’s new under the sea? Have you heard that SpongeBob is really a critique of nuclear testing and the political economy of the Cold War?”

  “Wait, really?”

  “Eh, so says the internet and a bunch of conspiracy theorists with too much time on their hands.”

  “Wow. My whole conception of the show has changed. I have to re-watch the whole series now. Tommy will be thrilled when I tell him I want to start back at episode one.”

  Victoria knew her brother was mentally replaying the series in his head. She sank into her couch and appreciated her ability to redirect him.

  “Wait a minute! You only change the subject when you’re hiding something. Spill it, or I’m telling Diane and she’ll weasel it out of you.”

  “Sure, get your wife to do your dirty work for you.”

  “Talk.”

  “Um, we’ve been trying to figure out who the leak in my office is.”

  “Uh huh. And what else?”

  “I got assigned a big opinion to write.”

  “Not something you’d want to divert my attention from. C’mon, sis, you can’t lie to me. You performed a magic show for me when I got the chicken pox in second grade and I saw right through your tricks.”

  “Genevieve was there.”

  “At your magic show? I remember it just being the two of us.”

  “At the party, dimwit.”

  “Genevieve…Genevieve…Oh, the girl from law school?” he asked innocently. “I think I remember her. Oh yeah, that’s right, the only woman you’ve ever been in love with, biggest regret of your life, yadda yadda. Well, did she march right up to you, take you in her strong arms, and kiss you?”

  “No.”

  “Did you march right up to her, take her in your puny, I-don’t-lift-weights arms, and kiss her?”