Sighing, she opened the door that led out of the kitchen and into what I could have only assumed was a garage. It was filled with nothing but boxes.
“What is this? Hoarders?”
“First of all, hoarding is a serious medical condition, one that I do not have, and secondly, what happened to ‘no judgment’?” She crossed her arms over her chest and I couldn’t help but notice her breasts as they rose.
“Excuse me,” she said, interrupting my ogling, “are you staring at my boobs?”
“Yes,” I replied, “but again, we aren’t judging each other.”
Shaking her head at me, she turned back into the garage, and pulled out a pair of boots for herself and a pair of sandals for me.
“Good thing my sister’s feet are huge,” she chuckled
“So is my sister’s. She used to buy big shoes, and ask for a small box to take them out of the store with her.”
“Ha! I thought my sister was the only one.”
Smirking, we didn’t really go deeper than that, nor did we need to. We hunted around for the microwave, and interestingly enough, it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be.
CHAPTER FIVE
P R E S E N T
THEA
That bastard was gunning for me, I could feel it. This was only the sixth class, and he had already given us a pop quiz. The moment he said the words, his eyes flickered over me. It was as though he meant to challenge me right then and there. Plus, with his Darwinian style of teaching, if we all failed, he’d kick us out without a second thought. I had heard a rumor that all Professor Black needed was a total of twelve students to be in his class, and at the moment, there were twenty of us. And on the first day, there had been over fifty.
Everyone he kicked out would go to the other law professors, in the hopes of sitting in on their classes. It was said that only the top twelve students got offered a position within his firm after graduation. This group of students were known as the twelve disciples, and come hell or high water, I was determined to be a part of the twelve.
I had spent the last week reading everything I could find on Levi Black. To students, he was El Diablo, but in Law circles, he was called The Cleaner. The reason for this was that he hadn’t lost a single case since he had opened up his own firm, and he was known for being the one who cleaned up everyone’s messes, legally speaking.
Levi Black and Associates was one of the leading law firms in the country. The name partner, Levi Black, graduated Harvard Law School at twenty-three, the same damn age that I was just starting out on. After graduating, he received a job offer at Spencer and Hill, where he worked for five years, before leaving to start his own practice with a college friend. However, two years later, and after a nasty divorce, he left the company and started his own firm at the age of thirty.
Now here he was, six years later and on top of the world, and all I could do was wonder; who in the hell was this person? Time magazine quoted him as saying he wanted to “shape the next generation of young minds”. He was a natural born genius with a hunger for winning at all costs. He could have studied anything but chose law. They all made him seem like he was the goliath of lawyers.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make this version of him match up with the Levi I knew. He wasn’t a savage workaholic lawyer; he played the guitar at a club, he sang with me in the shower, he ate cold pizza in his underwear, and laughed at all of my bad jokes. I knew that people sometimes put up façade when they first meet people, but even at two o’clock in the morning, he was still just as kind as the first moment I met him.
“Ms. Cunning, shouldn’t you be more focused on your quiz than on the light fixture?”
I jumped as he startled me out of my daydream.
Be one of the twelve.
“Yes, of course, but I’ve already finished, and wasn’t sure if I was allowed to leave early,” I said as I handed him my write up.
He looked at the clock. “It took you twenty-one minutes?”
“Sorry it took so long,” I replied dramatically.
He read it over it, and placed it back down in front of me. I couldn’t stop myself from shivering when his hand accidentally grazed against mine. And to make matters worse, he noticed.
“Everyone,” he called out to the class, “thanks to Ms. Cunning, you now have five minutes left to complete the assignment.”
A few people turned to glare at me, but I was too focused on trying to stop my hand from shaking to pay them any heed.
Was that too cocky? Fuck no, this is Levi Black. And I was going to be one of the disciples.
For some odd reason, I had a sneaking suspicion that he was the one who had started calling his selected students the twelve disciples, just so that he could praise himself, the asshole.