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“Yes. We made sure of it. Let me call.” She stands up. “I need to get my phone and we both know you need coffee.” She motions me forward. I exhale and grab my things before following her. By the time I’ve set my stuff on the barstools and made a cup of coffee, she’s booked me an appointment for one hour from now.
“It’s Friday so we’re lucky to get you in, but beware,” she says, as I sit down. “That also means you won’t get the results until Monday, which is really bad timing.”
“Is there good timing for this?” I ask, frustrated with myself that this is even an issue.
“Better than this. You have an interview with the consortium Wednesday.”
I gape. “Wednesday? As in this coming Wednesday?”
“Yes. Which is why you need to go to this appointment and be able to get this off your mind. Reese’s team is here this weekend working on a case. We want you to be here. You can learn from sitting in and we’ll randomly throw questions at you for interview prep.”
“Please prep me,” I say. “I want to nail this and being here and working will keep my mind off other things.”
“You aren’t pregnant,” she assures me and picks up her coffee. “Tell me about the hot man that actually convinced you to have some fun.”
“No,” I say, because the story of Cole’s existence might be out, but he’s still my dirty little secret.
An hour and a half later, I have peed in a cup and given blood, and suffered through a pelvic exam. I’m now dressed again and judging from this visit, that’s the way I need to stay. My doctor, a stunning woman in her forties with blonde hair and blue eyes, rejoins me after. “All tests are negative,” she says, after shutting the door and perching on her rolling stool, while I sit in the chair by the exam table. “It’s been a month, almost five weeks by the date you’ve given me; you used a condom, you’re safe. The urine test would be showing the pregnancy by now.”
She reviews a long list of possibilities as to why I haven’t had my cycle. “We can put you on a birth control pill,” she concludes. “That regulates your periods and hormones.”
We discuss this option and decide on that path because I just need to control whatever I can control, starting with my body which I let control me that night with Cole. “Wait to start it until we get the blood test back just to be safe,” she says, “but that’s really just a precaution. I don’t believe you’re pregnant.” She hands me a prescription and just like that I’m on birth control with absolutely no sex life at all. And clearly no business picking up men and playing games.
I exit to the street, and think of Cole with that brunette in the bar. I felt like I really connected with Cole. Like I was different to him and he absolutely was to me. I liked remembering that night that way. Why did I go to the bar last night and ruin that perfect memory? I really wish I had never seen them. I wish I could just remember being the Cinderella that got spanked by one hell of a hot man.
Chapter fourteen
Cole
Houston, TX
Saturday night…
Isit in the living room of my penthouse hotel room in downtown Houston listening to Jane and Charlie, junior co-counsels on the case, sitting on either side of me arguing over points in my opening statement. I stand up and watch the floor-to-ceiling windows wrapping the open space, the sun beginning to dip beneath the horizon, red, yellow, and blue swirling together in a complex manner.
“He didn’t kill her,” Jane snaps at Charlie.
Her, being my client’s wife.
“He had blood all over his hands and face,” Charlie argues.
Jane makes a frustrated sound. Charlie is my age, Italian, vocal, and established. He loves to play devil’s advocate, which makes him one hell of a second chair. Jane is young, pretty, and needs to learn restraint. I’m not convinced she can control a courtroom. I catch myself on that one. Age isn’t the issue. She’s Lori’s age and Lori possesses extreme restraint and I have no doubt that she rules a courtroom when she’s present. The spanking was a mistake, at least that night, that cost me any future with Lori. I made her feel like I would demand the control she feels she needs.
“Of course he had blood on his face and hands,” Jane argues. “He ran to her and hugged her. He was frantic on the 911 call.”
I turn and face them. “He didn’t kill her,” I say. “And the blood he had all over him isn’t an indication of guilt, but innocence. No one who loves someone could leave them on the floor with a knife in their chest, and not pull it out and hold them close. And that’s exactly what I’m going to say in my opening statement.”
And I’m going to make it seem like I know what love is. I don’t. I only know this new obsession I have with Lori, but I’ll use that. She’ll help me with this case. She’ll allow me to connect to the passion a man would have for a woman he can’t bear to never see again. Something I have never felt ever in my life, until Lori. Perhaps it’s me wanting what I can’t have, the chase, and all that manly bullshit. Or maybe it’s her.
Lori
New York City, NY
I sit in Cat and Reese’s living room, listening as Reese’s team and Cat, who always helps him with his cases, as they debate the details on a case about to head to trial. The client is a woman who killed her husband, who beat her regularly, and there are witnesses, photos, and calls by neighbors to the police. The prosecution says that he threatened her family and so she slowly poisoned him. She says she didn’t do it. She loved him. She loved him desperately.
“You’re sure she didn’t do this, boss?” Elsa, one of Reese’s co-counsels asks, an older version of Cat’s blonde confident beauty. She sits in the chair to my left.
“I don’t represent guilty people,” Reese says, from an ottoman he’s pulled to the center of the room. “You know that. Next question.” When Reese says move on, in his intense attorney mode, you move on. He’s good-looking and tall, dark and handsome, funny at times, a bit like Cole, only different. Cole is different. I shake off that thought without further definition.
