I cringe and pull my arm away so I can signal for the waiter, who starts over toward us. I’m going to guzzle the champagne because the sooner its drunk, the sooner I can leave and be done with Lorraine Cummings. Granted, she’ll be around for another thirty days, but we can suffer with it since it’s a permanent fix.
Pulling out my phone, I check the time. 8:30 PM.
I wonder what Mac is doing right now. Is she thinking about me? Cursing me? Masturbating thinking about me?
One can only hope.
None of that matters though. We are done, and it’s back to business as usual starting tomorrow.
For the first time, in a long time, I actually feel sad.
Chapter 12
I hang up my phone and mentally check off my list to find a date for the Patron’s Gala for the New York State Bar Association next week. I hate these functions, but they are a necessity. Much of my business comes from personal referrals from other attorneys, so it’s necessary for me to rub elbows with them.
I’m taking my friend, Melody Chambers. She’s a partner over at Weinsten Fannerty, a very successful criminal defense firm. She and I worked together at a little boutique civil rights firm right after we graduated law school. It was only for a few months before she moved on, but we stayed in contact and became friends. We became better friends after my divorce.
Not in a sexual way. Rather, Melody’s husband, Richard, is an advertising executive and he travels a lot internationally. I’ve filled in as escort for her on occasion, and she’s done the same for me so I don’t have to go stag to these functions. It works out nicely, and we get along well. She planned to go to this party anyway, so we’ll basically share a limo and I’ll have someone who I can actually stand to talk to all evening.
Glancing at my watch, I see it’s almost six PM. Mac sent me an email this morning asking for help on the Jackson case. I’m not sure what it says about me that I felt like a schoolboy that just got handed a note from the girl he likes when I first saw that email. A zing of adrenaline went through me and maybe I secretly hoped when I opened it that she would be asking to see me tonight.
Alas, it was short and to the point, asking for help on that case.
Still rocking the schoolboy complex, I immediately responded back to her that she could come discuss it with me any time. I sort of expected her to come immediately to my office, but I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
I didn’t go out to lunch, in case she decided to come see me on her lunch hour.
But still I waited.
Finally, I gave up and spent the remainder of my Friday afternoon lost in some legal research on an admissibility issue, and I forgot… for a while… about Mac.
Which was good, because the email is not the first thing I’ve obsessed about this week. Since she broke things off Monday night, I’ve gone over in my head a million times how f**ked up that entire situation was. I let my anger over seeing her with Cal get the better of me, and I made her suffer for it.
I know it was wrong not to tell her about Lorraine, but the way she demanded it of me took this thing we have going in a different direction. It smacked too much of a relationship, and I don’t like having to answer to anyone. I do know, however, that’s an issue I have to work on… someday.
I know it was wrong to demand she stay away from Cal. But f**k… the thought of her with him is driving me bat-shit crazy. The fact that she has something going on with him causes my veins to feel like they have acid swimming in them.
Everything just f**king burns.
If it would be any other man in the entire world, it would not have been a problem. Okay, well… that’s not exactly true. I don’t want her with any other man.
But for f**k’s sake. Cal Carson?
In the hierarchy of people that I despise, Marissa is numero uno. But taking the second slot position, just a millimeter under her is Cal Carson. Truly, the only thing I hate about my career is that I actually have to deal with Cal on cases we have. Thank God, we are on opposite sides of the cases we have, and so all of our dealings together are dirty fights. Over the last few years, we’ve managed to act civilly toward each other when we are around other people, but if we were ever to get alone… I guarantee there would be bloody knuckles involved.
I think about how I found out about Cal and Marissa. I would have never known had Cal’s conscience not gotten the better of him.
He actually confessed… waiting outside my apartment. Marissa and Gabe were out and about, so I invited him up. He declined a beer I offered him, and then proceeded to destroy me.
I already knew that Marissa was cheating on me. After I started noticing suspicious behavior—taking phone calls and walking out of the room so I couldn’t hear, running errands at odd times of the day or night, going out with “the girls” four to five nights a week—yeah, it all tipped me off something was wrong, so I hired a private investigator. Within one week, he had a thick report with photographs of my wife banging two different guys.
The marriage was over. She didn’t know it yet, but I was carefully plotting the way it was going to occur. She didn’t think it was odd that I was sleeping on the couch, or had basically stopped talking to her all together. In her shortsighted mind, that was just better opportunity for her to sneak around.
So, was I surprised that Marissa f**ked another guy? No.
Was I surprised it was my best friend? Abso-fucking-lutely.
I didn’t even get the story from him. Cal made the mistake of starting his confession off by hitting me with the bad news.
He’d said—with tears in his eyes, “Matt… I am so sorry. But last night, I got really, really drunk and I was with Marissa. ”
That’s as far as he got before my fist planted in his face. It knocked him backward into one of the kitchen island stools, and he flipped over it, crashing to the floor. I was on him like stink on shit, pummeling his face with my bare knuckles.
It was only when I drew back from a direct hit to his eye, and saw I had burst a blood vessel in it, that I stopped the attack. While fury was driving me, common sense was stepping in and telling me not to do anything that would get me in criminal trouble. Without that good, old common sense driving me, I probably would have killed him and to make matters worse, Cal wasn’t defending himself.