by Bromberg, K
After that, it mattered who he was, and the photo finish became wholly inadequate.
With nothing left, I stopped at the top, pulling out my earbuds before leaning on the back of a wood plank bench with my hands on my knees, gulping breaths like a drowning woman.
Byron’s tightly muscled legs were all I could see from my crouch. He was standing upright with his foot on a stone as if he’d been taking a moonlight stroll.
“Fuck you,” I gasped.
“Is that an invitation?”
God damn his perfect body. He wasn’t even out of breath.
Well, then I wasn’t either.
I stood up and tried to get control of my body. Though I could slow the hard, fast gulps my lungs needed, my chest still heaved with the effort. The movement wasn’t lost on him. His gaze went to my breasts for a moment before finding my eyes again. Obviously he had his own control issues. Noted.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“What are you doing here?”
“Having a run.”
“You live in Holmby Hills.”
He shrugged. “I live lots of places,” he said, indicating the stretch of the Los Angeles Basin beneath us. “I like the view here.”
The sun had just set, leaving an orange glow at the horizon. A net of crisscrossing lines of light sectioned off the dark city. He stood in front of the bench with his hands on his hips. With no guardrail between the drop and the view, he looked like a sovereign lord surveying his kingdom. There was no question of his dominance over the city. No doubt in his stance that if he could see something, it could be his. He wasn’t defiant or insolent. His power was as much a fact as the radiance of the setting sun.
I loathed his assumptions. I hated his unquestioning expectations. I despised the authority he carried. Was it his confidence that turned me on? Or the fact that I couldn’t stand him for it?
“I’ll see you at the injunction hearing,” I said, turning to go down the hill.
“Where are you going?”
“To finish my run.”
“Live a little, Olivia.” He crossed his arms and regarded my heaving chest once more. The moon and light pollution made the appreciation in his eyes just visible. “You beat me. You deserve the breather.”
My bearing changed. I went from “jog down the hill” to “hear him out” with his simple false acquiescence. “It was a tie.”
“Did you know they curved the 101 Freeway around Hollywood Presbyterian? They changed the whole route to avoid a church.”
I stood next to him so I wouldn’t have to look at him. At five-ten, I usually felt tall enough to go toe-to-toe with any man, but Byron was six-three if he was an inch and I felt overwhelmed by the extra height.
“And they bulldozed right through neighborhoods. Which cut them off and demolished millions in wealth equity.”
“Tell me something,” he said. “What made the daughter of a model care about the environment so much?”
“Children of models can’t care about the world?”
“To be honest? They can, but it’s unusual when they could be modeling themselves.”
I shouldn’t have been talking to him, much less allowing compliments, but there was no harm in a personal fact. Knowing my motivations changed nothing about the case.
I stood next to him with my arms crossed, looking over the city. “You building that monstrosity in Bel-Air? I know what that’s about.”
“Really?”
“You want to make a mark on the world. Do something that no one’s done and slap your name on it. It’ll be there long after you’re dead. It’ll be the biggest, most expensive single-family house in the city for a long time.”
“True.” He agreed as if he hadn’t considered his legacy before.
“I want to make my mark by taking on guys like you. Every inch of land I save from you has my name on it.”
“And you get a charge out of taking my name off it.” His eyes drifted to my shoulder.
“You think it’s about you?”
Just then, I felt a tickle on my arm. It wasn’t the breeze or a leaf blowing by. When I looked down to confirm, I saw huge spider legs and froze. I could identify a black widow, but this one was striped, brown, massive. My fear centers lit up, thoughtlessly releasing adrenaline that demanded I fight or run, and in the moment of decision between the two, I went as dead as a possum.
Byron took the entire spider in his hand and casually threw it over the bluff.
“Oh my God,” I gasped. “Thank you.”
“You all right?” He laid his palm on the place where the spider had been.
“Yeah. It was probably nothing, but—”
“It was a recluse.”
“It was huge.”
He laughed. “No, it wasn’t.”
His thumb stroked the skin of my arm. He shouldn’t have been doing that, but my body wasn’t interested in the shoulds and shouldn’ts of his touch.
“It just surprised me.”
“Some things are surprising to me too.” Pensively, he ran his fingertips over my bare arm.
All I had to do was pull away, but his fingers were magnets pulling all my arousal to the trails of his skin on mine.
“I can’t imagine you surprised by anything,” I said.
“I bet you have some surprises in you.”
His fingers drifted across my forearm, awakening new nerve endings. My eyelids fluttered involuntarily.
He smirked, dropping his hand. With the connection broken, I snapped out of the trance and into shame for allowing him to touch me in the first place. My face got hot, and my chest thrummed with anxiety.
“We shouldn’t be talking,” I said.
“We’re in public,” he said, indicating the breadth of the city and its millions of inhabitants with one sweep of his arm. “We’re not talking specifics in your case against me.”
The particularities of the moment were irrelevant.
“I’m not going to be seduced,” I snapped, ready to leave it there until his smug look destroyed my common sense. “I’m not some Frogtown waitress.”
He seemed unruffled by what I knew even as I wanted to swallow back the words.
“No,” he said. “You’re not. I bet you come like one though.” In my shock, he had a moment to lean toward me, into the light where his eyes blazed green and his jaw looked sharp enough to cut deep. “I bet I can make you beg for it like a starving animal.”
My mouth opened to respond, and the words on the tip of my tongue were, “Prove it.”
No. I couldn’t. With his smirk and his arched brow, he was too powerful a temptation. I pressed the tip of my tongue to the back of my teeth and held the words there, squashing them between my pride and my professionalism. Nothing could come out. Neither a lie of denial nor an invitation I’d regret.
The words were held back, but the force of the rejection was too strong for my will. It yanked me toward him as he thrust forward, smashing us together in a kiss that pushed and pulled at the same time. Fresh sweat and hot breaths, tongues that stabbed and twisted, hands clutching hair and fistfuls of damp cotton. He gripped my hip and hair, and I dug my fingers into the hard muscles of his arm as if I wanted to rip off his skin. We tore each other apart with that kiss, mindlessly surrendering to an embrace that shattered boundaries and drove a stake through the heart of caution.
He shoved me away, leaving me gasping for that moment again.
“I was right about you,” he said as if he’d bet I’d be compliant and was deciding on whether or not to take the prize.
I couldn’t sign off on that, but with his taste on my tongue, I couldn’t deny it any more than I could resist him.
There was only one thing to do.
I turned tail and ran down the hill, yearning for him to follow and hoping he didn’t. I didn’t slow down to a jog until I realized he wasn’t behind me.
When I closed my front door, I leaned against it as if blocking a savage army on the other side. B
ut it was too late. His taste was still on my tongue, and the feel of his body was still in my grip. I’d let the savage in with me.
I stripped down, exposing still-hard nipples and leaving soaked panties on the floor.
Everything about that encounter had been inappropriate, especially the swollen throb of my clit and the dense lubrication of the tender flesh between my legs. I set the shower to cold and got in, but I didn’t make it two minutes with the washcloth over my breasts. I pinched a nipple through the rough fabric.
…beg for it like a starving animal.
As I pushed the washcloth inside my thighs and up to my pussy, I tried to imagine another man. An actor. A model. The guy who’d fixed my sink last week. But the harder I rubbed, the more they all had Byron’s face, and when they spoke—
…beg for it.
—they sounded like him as they hurt me and pleasured me with the ferocity of our kiss, stabbing me with their cocks as I begged for it harder. I surrendered to the force of my orgasm, dropping to my knees with Byron’s face and voice in my head.
Breathless, I got a fresh washcloth and washed the fantasy off my body, convincing myself I didn’t want what Byron seemed to offer. I was a thirty-two-year-old woman. I’d had good sex my whole adult life without any of that nonsense. Shane and I had been together three years, and it was fine. Greg had been a little more experimental during the two years we dated. Also fine. More of that would be okay, and I didn’t need to lust after a man I despised to get it.
I couldn’t run into him again. We couldn’t exchange words, personal or otherwise. The state bar had a grievance committee that existed to disbar lawyers like me for bullshit like this.
Byron Crowne was an arrogant asshole. A manipulative creep with a mile-wide sense of entitlement. He was doing this on purpose.
I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a single flirtation, much less another kiss. It had taken him fifteen minutes to overstep in a dozen ways and for me to invite him to do more.
He was an awful human. Period. I was better than this.
That was his appeal and the reason to resist him.
Somehow, I had to win this lawsuit without having sex with Byron Crowne.
Chapter 5
OLIVIA
If Dr. Galang had a desk, I’d never spoken to him across it. He met with patients in a small room with a single window. It had two comfortable chairs and a couch with matching damask upholstery, warm lighting from a tall lamp in the corner, landscape paintings, and plants everywhere. A table under the window had rows of pictures of him, his wife, and his four children. The room smelled of lavender and happiness.
He was from Manila originally, but his accent had been rubbed away from decades in Cambridge and Los Angeles. In spite of his bald head and reading glasses, his age was impossible to assume, but I had to guess he was in his fifties or sixties. Old enough to be the best.
He placed my file on the wooden table but didn’t open it. “So, no luck this month.”
“No. I’ve been doing everything. Eating right. Exercising.”
My legs were crossed, and my pump hung from the foot that dangled.
Bad habit.
I pushed the shoe back on, knowing I’d wiggle out of it when I wasn’t paying attention.
“How are the fertility drugs affecting you?” he asked.
“They’re fine.”
“Mood swings? Cramps?”
“Nothing. I mean, I’m always moody.”
He chuckled. “This is the point where hope starts losing to frustration. It’s time for me to ask if you want to continue this journey.”
“I do.”
“Good. Good. Do you want to talk next steps?”
“Yes.”
“So.” He laid his hands on his knees. “It’s too soon to say the IUI isn’t working. I think two more rounds before IVF is the next option. You weren’t keen on it when we spoke last.”
At the beginning, the idea of extracting an egg, mixing it with Emilio’s sperm in a petri dish, and implanting it seemed a bridge too far, but then I’d been full of hope that the simpler techniques would work. Before I’d invested so heavily in failing completely.
“Is it me?” I asked. “Are my tubes bad? Is it my eggs?”
“Your eggs are fine. And it’s too soon to start treating infertility. What I have seen…” He held up his finger. “As someone who’s been doing this a long time, sometimes the potential mother’s mindset is crucial.”
“My mindset?”
“Ms. Monroe,” he said with a voice of serious, personal compassion, “what do you do for fun?”
“Fun? Like what?”
“Do you have friends you see? A romantic partner in your life?”
“I have friends.”
“Is there any chance you could maybe take a vacation with them? Relax for a couple of weeks?”
I hadn’t had a vacation in two years. I’d taken time off from work but usually spent it catching up on papers and amicus briefs I didn’t otherwise have time to go over. I considered it quite relaxing, but I knew Dr. Galang had something else in mind.
“I have a lot going on,” I said.
“In my experience, the body operates best when it’s given the message that there’s space in one’s life for a baby. We’re just animals. We’re descended from hunter-gatherers who spent all day worrying about food and shelter. Pregnancy and childbirth were life-threatening processes. If you keep telling your body that you’re busy, it’s going to react by making sure you survive.”
“I’m not quitting my job.”
He laughed. “Don’t do that, no, no. Just… whenever you can take it easy, take it easy. See your friends. If you can work less, work less. Have you tried meditation?”
“It stresses me out.”
He smiled as if he’d met women like me and he knew all the excuses. I felt like a hot cookie on a tray being slid onto a plate of dozens that looked and tasted exactly the same.
“How do they do?” I asked him as if he could read my mind, then realized he couldn’t. “Women doing IUI who get stressed out doing meditation? How often do they get pregnant?”
“I don’t have hard data. Anecdotally? We’re successful at about the same rate, but it takes longer.”
“I’m patient,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as him.
“Good. I want you to stay upbeat.”
“I’ll try.”
“And relax.”
“I’ll relax like it’s my job.”
* * *
Emilio took another sip of espresso.
“I have never had coffee this good,” he said.
“Told you.” Linda had traded her thick, black frames for thin wire ones and braided her hair. Her father’s Koreatown coffee shop was hidden in the corner of a strip mall. Linda had convinced Emilio to sample it for the new restaurant. It was the best coffee in Los Angeles and had such a crowd we three had to sit at the bar at seven in the morning.
“Amelia needs it.” He often referred to his new restaurant as if it was actually his grandmother.
“The trick to working with my dad is you wait a long time for him to come out of the back, then you let him do the talking.”
“Got it.” He looked over the menu. “I want to try this Honduran pour-over.”
“Me too,” I said.
“I thought you were on one cup a day,” he said, ordering two from the barista.
“The doctor said I should relax.” I shrugged. “This is me relaxing.”
“You should take a jog instead. Make-out sessions are like opium.”
“Uncle Daddy can shut up now,” I said, wishing I hadn’t told them about Byron and me kissing on Runyon Canyon.
“He’s kind of right,” Linda added. “Sex releases all the good baby hormones.”
“Stop.”
They were making me think about him. The way he’d touched me as if he could—and would—tear me apart like a savage. The way I kept fantasizing about exactl
y that kind of scary, furious sex with him.
“She’s just saying what the doctor wouldn’t,” Emilio said. “Sex is nature’s Disneyland, and damn I wish I had the time for it.”
“I hate him.” They hadn’t said I should have sex with Byron in particular, but I was talking back the thoughts that considered it. “I’m sure he didn’t show up for a jog by chance. He thinks he’s so charming I’ll loosen my grip on his balls.”
“Maybe he wants your grip on his balls.” Emilio nodded to the waiter when he delivered the pour-overs. “Not figuratively.”
“Not interested.”
“You kissed him last night because you weren’t interested?”
“You want Byron Crowne,” Linda sang into her cup. She held a napkin against the bottom of it in case it dripped.
“I do not.” The lady doth protest too much. Even when the lady was me. “That kiss could get me disbarred as it is. I’d be a laughingstock, and he’d be...” I paused, looking for the right insult.
“…better than Tiny Tim?” Emilio finished.
“He wasn’t tiny.”
“Better than Pete the Screamer.”
“Definitely better than Pete the Screamer.” I shuddered as I named him.
They were harping on my few short-term boyfriends because they knew Crowne wouldn’t be any more than that.
“Dad alert,” Linda said, pointing at her father emerging from the back.
Brian Lee wore a straw fedora and horn-rimmed glasses. His tan from his trip to Guatemala was just fading. When he saw us, he made a beeline with one hand out. He laid it on Linda’s back and kissed her cheek.
“Hello, sweetheart.” He reached out to hug me. “And Olivia. Nice to see you here.”
“Where else would I go for the best?”
“Nowhere! Best in town. You must be Emilio?” They shook hands. “Let me show you this Arabica I just brought back from Atitlan.”
When they were out of earshot, Linda pushed away her mug. “I found out something else about Byron.”
“What?” The hair on the back of my neck prickled.
“I was doing some oppo for a client, and he came up. It wasn’t relevant to the job, so it’s not a breach, but as a friend…” She glanced at her dad and Emilio, then the door, and cleared her throat.
