Page 19 of Take What Hurts

Hannah laughed. “Elliott, you are the most ethical lawyer I’ve ever worked with. It would actually be infuriating if it wasn’t so admirable that you’re still able to get results for your clients.” She pulled up on the sidewalk and pinned Elliott with a look. “Have you read some of the professional-misconduct decisions? Like, do you know the sort of shit you’d have to do to come anywhere close to one of those? And more to the point, do you know what some lawyers have just, like, gotten away with?”

Elliott glanced down at her hand. At some point during the conversation she’d started picking at her thumb, and it was bleeding again. She brought it to her mouth to try and stem the flow. Hannah shot her a sympathetic look and pushed through the door to the restaurant. “I guess I haven’t really looked into it,” Elliott said.

“Well, you’d probably feel better if you did. For a genius, you’re really dumb.” She approached the counter and turned back to Elliott, eyebrow raised in question. “Usual?”

Elliott laughed, and the heaviness in her stomach eased minutely. “Yeah, thanks.”

Elliott sat across from Hannah, dabbing at a spot of marinara sauce on her white button-down. She sighed. “I really don’t know why I continue to buy anything white.” The dabbing had made the spot worse, and now she had a glaring red stain right over her left tit.

Hannah snickered into her Coke. “I don’t know why you keep ordering the pizza sub when you know it’s saucy. It’s actually a miracle you’ve only got one spot.”

Elliott scoffed. “It’s not worth eating if it’s not a pizza sub.”

Hannah rolled her eyes. “My twelve-year-old cousin says the same thing.” And Elliott was offended. “Anyway,” Hannah continued, “enough about that. Can we circle back to why Mackenzie Williams called me two Fridays ago asking me for your phone number?”

Elliott shrugged, trying hard not to let on that she had been wondering the same thing. “She told you why, didn’t she?”

“She gave me some excuse about wanting to talk to you about her client’s offer, but it had to be bullshit because I saw the email with the offer come in like five minutes before she rang.”

Elliott frowned. “I mean, maybe she wanted to talk it through? Some lawyers operate that way, I guess.”

Hannah stared at her. “Do you really believe that? It was the most straightforward fucking offer. Not to mention, they’d explained it in a literal exposé in the letter.” Hannah’s voice rose with indignation with every word she spoke. “What more was there to say?” She threw her hands in the air. Elliott noticed others in the restaurant starting to throw curious glances their way. She grimaced in apology and turned back to Hannah. “No, there had to be another reason,” Hannah murmured.

In an effort not to fill the silence that followed, Elliott squirmed in her seat and took a big mouthful of her own Coke, then picked at the label on the bottle. Hannah’s eyes narrowed at her across the table.

Elliott stayed silent.

“All right, what the fuck is going on?” Hannah’s hands slapped down on the table in front of her.

“Literally nothing.”

And it was the truth. Because there wasn’t. They were two women working in a difficult profession, on wildly different levels in that profession, who were acquainted with each other. Elliott’s rampant attraction to her notwithstanding. They’d had a handful of chance meetings, a settlement conference, and some over-the-phone communication. Most of it was work related, and the rest was just, well—it was innocuous.

And yet, Elliott couldn’t, couldn’t, escape the feeling there was something else. Something more. Right from their first meeting, whenever they spoke, interacted. Whatever. There was a charge—an energy—between them. It made Elliott want to banter with Mackenzie. Made her want to be close to her. Laugh with her. Know more about her. But Elliott had been here before with women far less put together and gorgeous and intelligent than Mackenzie, and every time, she’d read more into it than what was actually there.

Elliott’s relationship history wasn’t complicated. She didn’t have one.

If there was an award for the most miscommunications a person could have in their lifetime, Elliott would win. How was she to know the people on dating apps weren’t looking for their forever? And dating women… well, it was fucking hard. Because most of them wanted to chat before they agreed to a date. You know, get to know each other first. Which Elliott loved and was entirely, wholeheartedly there for. But Elliott’s problem, according to Hannah, was that she took the “wanting to get to know each other first” chat the wrong way—for more than it was. Because for women on dating apps, that step was, apparently, simply a check to make sure the other person wasn’t psychotic before they agreed to put themselves in reaching distance, rather than a genuine desire to actually know someone beyond how good they were with their tongue.

And Elliott… well, Elliott wanted more than that. And she was up front about it in her bio. But Hannah had so patiently told her people don’t read the bios. And if they did, they didn’t care. Which Elliott thought was just rude, when she studied every profile like she was preparing for a fucking exam before she even thought about sending the other person a message.

So, yeah.

What Elliott had was a series of ongoing hookups, which she hadn’t realized were hookups, with women Elliott had thought she was dating, but she was apparently not dating. The last disaster was the same as the first disaster and every disaster in between. It was like Groundhog Day. She’d match with someone, they’d chat for a few days, they’d be into each other, they’d go for dinner, and yeah, they’d fall into bed because, yeah, Elliott had needs. And they’d do it again the next week, and the week after, and then Elliott would start to catch feelings and the other person would catch on and would, inevitably, stop responding to Elliott’s messages. And then Elliott would give up and try again with someone else.

The last time, Elliott had been seeing someone for over a month. The woman had slept over, and the morning after, Elliott had made the fatal mistake of asking the woman—who she’d just put her heart and soul into making come with her tongue and her fingers—whether she wanted to make things official between them. And the woman had laughed. Laughed. Then she’d stopped abruptly, presumably having seen what Elliott could only assume was a look of extreme hurt on Elliott’s face, muttered an “oh, sorry,” collected her clothes in her arms, and then, half dressed, fled Elliott’s apartment without a word.

Not only had Elliott not bothered sending her a message afterward, but she’d also deleted every dating app off her phone that night. She’d figured that either she’d meet someone organically, or she’d adopt a dog and live out her life as a lesbian kept company by a canine. That was ten months ago.

Basically, Elliott reading into vibes or anything a woman did or said or insinuated ended in disaster. Because, apparently, she was illiterate when it came to women.

So, in Elliott’s mind, if those other women hadn’t wanted anything to do with Elliott beyond a quick romp in the sack, then Mackenzie certainly wouldn’t either. What could she—with her red-bottomed heels and her trendy blunt bob and her designer purse and very realistic partnership-track professional aspirations—possibly get out of a fucking walking disaster like Elliott?

And all of that notwithstanding—as if Elliott needed another reason—there wasn’t anything going on because anything going on would be entirely inappropriate.

So Elliott told Hannah. Because what was the harm?

“We kind of ran into each other in the airport before the conference. I’d missed my flight, and hers was canceled. Neither of us knew who the other was, though. Then we ran into each other in Whole Foods.” Elliott stifled a smirk at the memory of how Mackenzie had looked up at her from the cake refrigerator, surprise widening her sapphire eyes. Elliott’s immediate thought had been that Mackenzie looked so good and so surprising with her fitted flannel open over a vintage Blink-182 band tee.