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“Remember, I can bullshit with the best of ‘em.” He wiggled his fingers. “Toodles.” And then he was gone.
Sometimes talking to Jeremy was like going to war. You ended up battered and exhausted. I sat back in my chair, staring blankly at my computer screen, but not seeing it.
What the hell was Tiffany playing at? This wasn’t the first time over the years that she sought to insert herself into my life. I had learned that she liked to keep people on their toes, me included. She hadn’t taken the severing of our...relationship particularly well, but she was first and foremost a businesswoman. She served her interests. The thoughts and feelings of others didn’t enter into it. Especially mine.
In some twisted, dysfunctional way, I respected her tenacity. Her ability to make situations work out best for her. I had grown tired of her games a long time ago. But it seemed she wasn’t ready to concede defeat.
So here we were.
I pulled out my phone and dialed a number I knew by rote. It rang. And rang. And when her sensual, smokey voice filled my ear it was the automated tinniness of voicemail. I didn’t leave a message. I knew better. I hung up, not prepared to hold my breath as to when she’d call me back. She wouldn’t. She’d make herself known at her own time.
I tried not to be inundated with dread.
I did the only thing I knew how to do when confronted with emotional panic. I suppressed it. I tamped it so far down that it would take a backhoe to dig it up again. And I threw myself into my work.
Because when everything else in my world let me down, my work was all I had.
**
I had just turned the light off on my desk when Adam appeared in the doorway.
“I heard the judge agreed to dismiss the charges on Gary Milton this afternoon.” He leaned against the jamb, hands in his pockets.
“Yeah. The DA’s office never really had a case, to begin with.” I shoved a few files into my already overstuffed briefcase and struggled to latch it shut. The hinges strained and looked ready to break. I was hard on briefcases, mostly because I took so much home with me every night. I may leave the office at six but most days I worked from home as well. I had never learned how to “leave work at the door.”
“That’s ten for ten in the last three weeks. At this rate, Jeremy, Lena, and I don’t have a chance keeping up with you,” he joked.
The four partners Lena, Jeremy, Adam, and I had a running monthly contest to see who could win or close out more cases. I had won the last six months running.
“I hope you aren’t here to ask me to take a dive so you can catch up,” I laughed.
Adam held his hands up. “I’d never do that. When you do well—” he spread his arms out. “We all do well.” He grinned and I rolled my eyes good-naturedly. Adam and I had always gotten along. He was much easier to deal with than Jeremy, but both were good guys, otherwise, I would never have gone into business with them in the first place. He watched me as I finished gathering my things. “I think you should come to get a drink with Jeremy and me tonight. Lena’s gone home, so it’ll just be us guys.”
“I’ve got a lot of work to do—” I started to say but Adam stopped me.
“You know you say that every single time right? It’s okay to do something other than work once in a while. I seem to remember a few times back in law school that involved too much tequila and a lot of vomiting,” he chuckled.
Adam and Jeremy had devoted a lot of our friendship to trying to get me to ‘hang out.’ It hadn’t slowed as we got older and they acquired family lives. If anything, they’d become more vocal about my need to chill out more. To cut loose. To get a ‘life.’
I knew how they viewed me. To them, my closest friends, I was a bit of a snooze. The dependable guy, but not the one you’d call for a spontaneous trip to Atlantic City. They thought because I didn’t usually have a lot to say that that meant I didn’t have a lot going on. That I was a “what you see is what you get” kind of person.
They had no idea.
“Yeah, that trip down memory lane won’t exactly sway me,” I commented, giving the room a final sweep of my eyes. It was impeccably neat. Not a thing out of place. It was a far cry from my shit-hole undergrad dorm room. Once I had money, I found that I took more pride in my surroundings. I didn’t want to go back to living in dumps surrounded by junk.
