“Why is it always race with you people?” Atticus snapped behind me.
“Excuse me?” I exclaimed. “With ‘you people’? Did I just become the poster child for black people everywhere?”
“There you go, twisting my words. I’m just saying that whenever anything happens, ‘African-Americans’ are always the first ones to pull out the race card. I bet if the kid was rich and black, it would still be news.”
“Oh, that’s such bullshit. If he were black, the media’s reaction wouldn’t be one of surprise at all. After all, a black kid with drugs is a thug. A white kid with drugs has made a few bad life choices. There is a systematic issue in our legal system—”
“Oh please, go preach to someone else. This kid didn’t force anyone to take the drugs. They may be underage, but they’re all smart enough to know what could happen to them. Blaming this kid is wrong, and saying he deserves manslaughter, is lazy.”
“I moved to the north to get away from ‘you people.’ ” I muttered.
“And I came here to piss people like you off, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart?
Sweetheart!
“You—”
“Both of you will be working with me on this case,” a familiar voice up front said, with the finest trace of amusement in his voice.
“What?” We both turned around to gape at Professor Black.
“I’ve been asked to represent Richard Archibald, and I have decided to choose the two of you to work alongside me and my associates. Ms. Cunning, since you adamantly believe he should already be in jail, I’m sure you and the prosecution will be on the same page, which should keep me one step ahead. Atticus, you’ve given an angle for this case. Free will, the two that died should have known better. So for that reason, you are both now working with me. The rest of you better step your game up. That’s it for the day,” he concluded, leaving us all stupefied.
Once again, I waited for everyone to leave, and I glared at Atticus as he winked at me before walking out the door. I wanted to throw something at him, or at the very least stick my tongue out like a petulant child.
Yeah, that's mature.
“Do you need something, Ms. Cunning?” Levi asked, drawing my attention back to him.
“What, you aren’t just going to walk out?”
Shit, it just came out of my mouth.
He said nothing as he gathered his things, and prepared to leave.
“You should take me off this case.”
He paused, “Why? Because of our prejudices towards it? I told you it can be useful in formulating a—”
“No,” I interrupted him and I wanted to say because we shouldn’t spend anymore time together. But I just couldn't.
He looked at me, but it felt as though he was looking through me. His eyes narrowed and his stare grew cold, “Do you want to be here, Ms. Cunning, or are you just wasting my time?”
“I do!” I interjected.
“But you’re willing to walk away from the chance of a lifetime because of that?”
“I never said that.”
“But you were thinking it, I can tell by your hesitation. So either you’re not strong enough to keep your personal and your professional life separate, or you don’t have the confidence to be here. Either way you still look weak.”
“But I’m not. What happened—”
“Thea, nothing is bigger than what you want to do with your life. If you want to be a lawyer, you can be a damn good lawyer, and you don't let anything get your way. In fact, you use whatever you can to your advantage.”
He couldn't be serious.
“You’re saying I should use that… use you to my advantage?”
He shrugged. “What’s done is done, and can never be undone. Maybe you don’t get it, but if you want to be a lawyer, you have to be the best there is, otherwise you’re not worth anything to anyone. So do whatever you have to do to get to the top. Considering who your mother was, I thought you would be the last person I would have to explain that to. You fought for your seat, so don’t just give it away. Not now, not ever.”
Clenching my jaw and my fists, I stepped right in front of him. He was so close that one wrong move would inevitably lead to us kissing, and yet in this moment, I didn’t have that urge.
“First of all, never, under any circumstances, bring my mother up ever again. Secondly, I want to be here, I want be a great lawyer, and I will not let anything you do rattle me, because like you said, that was in the past. But don’t make it seem like I tricked you or lied to you. You never told me you were a professor. Lastly, I will never use that as a steppingstone for my career. I will never give anyone the ability to say that I got to where I am because I fucked my professor. I will be great, and that’s because I earned it, just like you did.”
I dug into my purse and left his watch and boxers on the table. Then without another word, I turned and started for the door.
“Wait,” he called out to me.
Damn it, why can’t I just leave?
“What?” I snapped.
He threw my underwear back at me. “Since we’re returning things now.”
Glaring at him, I stuffed them into my purse and stormed out.
Damn him.
LEVI
Damn her.
I had spent all week researching everything I could about her through the Harvard database, only to be hit with surprise after surprise. Thea Cunning, age twenty-three, was the daughter to Margaret “The Shark” Cunning.
I had written my very first thesis on The Shark, how she, in her whole career, had only lost three cases in twenty-five years. She was the original gangster of criminal law. Having her working on your case, was basically like having a get-out-of-jail-free-card, in court. We still studied and referenced her cases today. After learning that, it suddenly made sense why her daughter wasn’t the slightest bit rattled by me. Having The Shark as a mother, must have been like having the ultimate crash course in law.
Thea graduated valedictorian at Towson High School Law and Public Policy, and went on to graduate from Princeton University, summa cum laude, in three years with a degree in English studies. Apparently, she had been on track to follow in her mother’s footsteps, but instead opted to take a two years hiatus when she moved back to Maryland. And now, she was currently attending Harvard Law on a full scholarship. Her hobbies were listed as; volleyball, tennis, photography and creative writing. Her biggest achievement, according to her file, “has yet to be realized, and thus, nothing else matters”. She came back to Boston upon her mother’s diagnosis of stage four-lung cancer, and was currently living in her old childhood house.
“Why?” I questioned, sighing to myself when I got home.
Kicking off my shoes, I fell back onto the couch.
“Why, what?”
“Damn it, Bethan!” I jumped up.
My sister, and her giant pregnant self, came out of my kitchen, with the carton of rocky-road ice cream she had pillaged from my freezer. She was dressed in sweats, a Guns N' Roses shirt, and on her head, she wore a beanie.
“Don’t yell at me!” she yelled back.
“I wouldn’t yell if you didn't scare the hell out of me. What are you doing in my house?” I demanded, trying to sound as though I were really angry.
“We were out of ice cream?” she replied, wobbling over to take a seat on the chair.
“So instead of going to the grocery store, like a normal person, you came over to steal mine?”
“You always sucked at sharing,” she replied, taking another spoonful.
I was tempted to snatch it back from her.
What kind of man takes away food from a pregnant woman?
“Bethan, please tell me you have a more logical reason to come here, or I swear I’ll call Tristan.”
“Is that supposed to be a threat? You’ll call my husband? Who do you think dropped me off here?”
I hated them both.
“Bethan—”
“Okay, okay. Tri
stan told me you’ve been sinning all over the city with a girl, and then she turned out to be one of your students.”
“I don’t want to talk about this with you—”
“Levi, for thirty years you have been the good one, the smart one, the shining star, and I’ve never once faulted you for it, or even been jealous of you, because honestly, your life seemed to be a pain in the ass. But now, I’m a human incubator for a tiny person, which means my husband no longer lets me go to the bar I founded, because I scare away the customers. Mom keeps taking me out to buy me dresses with ruffles…ruffles, Levi. People are in my face every ten seconds, screaming about the joys of motherhood, and honestly, it feels like I’m dying. My feet hurt, I have to pee every twenty minutes, and I can’t drink. I’ve never been so bored in my whole life! So, I’m coming to you big brother, to cheer me up, or so help me, I will end up being the next person you will be defending in court, when I snap like a toothpick.”
When she snapped?
“Whatever you’re drinking, or whatever you smoked, you need to stop,” I said slowly, and she threw the couch pillow at me.
“Tell me about your one week, lover.”
“Of all the people you had to marry, why did it have to be my best friend?”
“Objection! Avoiding the question.”
Rolling my eyes at her, I laid back down— “We went out for a week. It was just pure fun, and then, the morning after the week was over, I saw her in my class, the end.”
“Why didn’t you kick her out? Isn’t that your “scary Professor” thing?”
“I tried, but she’s smart! If she were any other student, I’d seriously be interested in her career path.”
“Well, if it was just a one week thing, then you should both just move on like adults, right? And not let it mess things up.”
That’s right. So why couldn’t we—I— do that?
“So, then,” Bethan continued, “why’d you come in all gloomy?”
“Because I’m a masochist.”
“Too much information,” she cringed.
“I put her on a case I’m working on,” I told her. “I did it without even thinking about our situation. I was thinking about how I could use her to win the case. What’s worse is when she brought it up after class, she was so close to me, I wanted to—” I broke off my sentence, unable to say the truth of it out loud.
“So, maybe it wasn't just a one week thing.”
“It was,” I said quickly. “It has to be. We made that very clear from the start. One week of sex, and that was it.”
“So, that’s all you guys did for a week? Screw each other’s brains out?”
I paused, not wanting to relive our week in my mind while my sister sat on the chair staring intently at me. I chose my next words very carefully, trying my best to mask my emotions and not give too much away. “We didn’t have sex all the time.”
“Okay, let’s think of this in another way; if she wasn’t your student, would you have broken the one week thing and asked her out again?”
Fuck me. I would have. I had planned to.
I stared at my sister and made no effort to reply.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “None of it matters. She’s my student, I’m her professor. That’s as far as our relationship goes. She has promise, and I will see to it that she gets what she needs out of my class.”
Bethan remained quiet, then with careful deliberation she asked, “No, but seriously, what did she do to you in that week? I’ve never seen you act like this over anyone.”
That was the million-dollar question that even I didn’t have the answer to.
What had she done to me?
CHAPTER SIX
P A S T
D A Y 3
THEA
“You’ve got to be kidding me with this,” I laughed, opening his freezer. “And you were judging me for eating cereal.”
“I have a sweet tooth, what can I say?” he replied, as he came up behind me, wrapped his arms around my waist, and kissed my shoulder. “Pick your ice cream already.”
“There are so many choices,” I mused.
And the truth of the matter was that my reaction wasn’t unwarranted. Half of his freezer was stacked with every carton of ice cream that I could think of. They were all lined up perfectly as if we were at an ice cream parlor.
“Well, you can’t go wrong with chocolate,” he whispered, as he cupped one of my breasts through his shirt. I was always wearing his clothes now. Luckily, he didn't seem to mind.
“What?” he asked, as I stifled a laugh.
I reached in, grabbing a carton of vanilla instead, before wiggling out of his arms. “Nothing.”
“You're a horrible liar,” he said as he followed me into the living room. I jumped onto his grey couch… we had already broken it in at least four times.
“That comment you made about chocolate… it sounded like something out of an ‘80s porno.”
“Well excuse me! As a child of the ‘80s, I’m not sure what to say to that—”
“It’s alright,” I chided as I dipped my spoon into the carton, “but the ‘90s were so much better.”
He snorted, eating the ice cream off my spoon before I could. “Oh please! All that sex is messing with your head.”
“Are you kidding me? The cell phone—”
“There were cellphones in the ‘80s too, you know.”
“That giant rock that people carried around like cavemen does not count as a cellphone,” I informed him.
“My generation suffered so yours could have that nice flip phone,” he shot back. “In the ‘80s, Madonna was amazing, and so were New Kids on the Block. Plus, Will Smith became the fresh prince, and on top of that The Simpsons—”
“The Simpsons came out in 1989, that belongs to the ‘90s.”
“What come after the 19?” he tilted his ear to me.
“It’s called rounding up.”
He rolled his eyes at me. “The ‘80s had The Breakfast Club.”
Damn it.
“The ‘90s had The Breakfast Club 2.”
He paused for a moment, looking shocked— “Did you just compare the original Breakfast Club to its sequel?”
“Well you can’t just throw the Breakfast Club card on the table like that, at least wait until I list a few more ‘90s classics, you jerk.” I sulked, knowing I was beat.
“And I still had my Michael Jackson card to play, because Thriller was the shit.”
For some reason, I felt as though I’d let my whole generation down. Scowling, I stuffed my mouth full of ice cream. He looked at me, awaiting my comeback, but my brain was as frozen as the ice cream I was consuming.
“It doesn’t matter what you say, I’m not saying the ‘80s win—”
He kissed me before I could finish.
Falling back against the arm of the couch, I wrapped my hand around his neck as he hovered on top of me.
“The ‘90s had you,” he said, his voice softer now.
“You’re buttering me up,” I pouted, as he undid the buttons of my shirt. “Smart move, Mr. Black.”
He grinned, already kissing down my chest— “I thought so too.”
Closing my eyes, I dropped the ice cream… he made me shiver more anyway.
LEVI
She snored. It wasn’t loud, or obnoxious; it was kind of cute actually. She was wrapped up in the sheets, her legs peeking out slightly, and she held on to my arm as she slept, but I didn’t mind. It was odd that I didn’t mind. I really didn’t know much about her, but I found myself wanting to know her.
“I can feel you staring at me,’ she whispered, as she shifted beneath the sheets.
“You snore.”
“I do not!” she shot back immediately, sounding both embarrassed, and hurt at my remark.
I laughed. “You do.”
“I know,” she gave in with a laugh, as she covered her face with her hands.
I
laughed along with her. Her laughter was infectious.
“It’s alright, it’s actually cute.”
She looked at me for a moment, like she was trying to read me, but with a little sigh, she gave up and rose from her position and stepped out of bed, taking the sheets with her.
“I’m going to take a shower.”
“Okay, then I’ll make us something to eat,” I said, already on my feet.
She paused turning back to me, “You cook too?”
“Yes?”
“Please tell me it’s like, only eggs or something.”
“What? No, I can cook.”
“Damn it, Levi, I like my men just under perfect, thank you!”
“Would you like me to burn one side of the toast?”
“You’d better.” She glared and I kissed her lips quickly.
“Don’t worry Thea, I’m nowhere near perfect.”
“So you say.”
She kissed me back once more before she headed into the bathroom.
“You’re amazingly weird, has anyone ever told you that?”
“It’s all part of my charm, Mr. Black.”
Snickering, I shook my head at her and headed into the kitchen, wondering whether or not she really wanted me to burn her toast.
“I’ll just make one burnt and the other one fine.”
What was happening to me?
THEA
With Levi in the kitchen making us breakfast, I knew that I had at least twenty minutes to myself. Taking my bag from under his sink, I grabbed my curling iron, shaving gel and my stick of deodorant, along with everything else I needed to make it seem like I was still a damned lady.
This morning I’d felt the roughness of my legs, and I wanted to die. I had planned on shaving yesterday, but he had joined me in the shower, and once again, I forgot everything that I was supposed to be doing with my life.
What was wrong with me?
I sighed, as I turned on the shower.