Confessions of a Litigation God: A Legal Affairs Full Length Erotic Novel (27 page)

It was a vicious
cycle and I know that I’m at the point now I need to get home
and sleep this off.

I haven’t
quite reached the point in my inebriation where I’m able to
forget about Mac, but I’m coming out of my “woe is me”
pity party. When I stop feeling a little sorry for myself, I start to
remember that Mac is the one that I’ve aggrieved. Yes, I’m
hurt… but fuck, I’ll admit—at least to myself
right now—that was mostly my own doing.

But she’s
hurt, and that is all on me.

I’ve caused
every bit of her pain.

Pulling out my cell
phone, I text Mac a message without much thought.

I’m sorry.

Within seconds, she
responds,
For what?

Good question. What
exactly am I apologizing for? I’m not drunk enough that my
brain is fried, and a variety of items for which I’m sorry
flash before me.

I’m sorry for
treating her like just a fuck toy.

I’m sorry for
showing her care and tenderness, then pulling that away from her.

I’m sorry for
being an ass and intentionally hurting her feelings.

I start to type a
response, but I’ve never been a good texter and when you’re
drunk, it makes it exponentially harder, especially when you’re
trying to be quick.

So I go with direct
and simple, typing
Fot ebwryrhing,
and then hit “Send”.

I wait for her
response, and I get it.

?????

Why the question
marks? Does she not understand my apology?

Then I see my
texting skills truly do suck, and she has no clue what I just said. I
quickly type back and hit “Send”, and only after the
message flies off into the internet universe, do I realize it was no
better.

For evwtthimf

Shit. I quickly text
her again,
Fuck,
and hope she bears with me.

I try to slow down
my fingers, and attempt one more time to apologize “For
Everything”, but it just comes out as word salad again.

Fuck it.

I pull up my
Contacts and hit Mac’s phone number. She answers on the second
ring.

“Matt?”

“H-e-e-e-e-y
Mac,” I drawl in what I hope is not too drunk of a voice. God,
she sounds fantastic, and I never realized before just how much I
love her voice until I had not heard it for a few days. “Didja
get my text?”

“Are you
drunk?” she asks with suspicion.

“Abso-fucking-lutely,”
I tell her truthfully, because when you have as much alcohol in your
system as I do, then you tend to say the truth. Out of the corner of
my eye, I notice one of the dude’s darts flip end over end and
thud against the dartboard, dropping to the floor. “You missed…
drink, motherfucker.”

The guy turns, gives
me a sloppy grin, and everyone laughs. I’m so loving my new
buds and grin happily back at them.

“I don’t
have time for this shit,” Mac sneers, and my attention is
jerked back to her. “Call me when you’re sober.”

“Wait!”
I practically yell, panicked, into the phone. “I need to tell
you something.”

“What?”
she asks, and I’m not drunk enough to miss the annoyance in her
voice. This so isn’t going how I had planned it.

Oh, who was I
kidding. I hadn’t planned anything. “I just… it’s
just… Aw, fuck. I just miss you, McKayla.”

She’s quiet
for a moment, and I wait anxiously for her to say something. When she
does, it’s not what I wanted. “I’m hanging up,
Matt. Don’t call back.”

I turn on my
barstool, putting my back to the noise of the rowdy dart game, and
lower my voice to almost a whisper. “I lied, McKayla.”

I hear someone in
the background—Macy I assume—say “Hang up…
you don’t need to listen to his bullshit.”

I cringe, because
Macy’s right and there’s no reason why Mac wouldn’t
call “bullshit” on me.

Thankfully, she
doesn’t hang up. “What did you lie about?”

I sigh in relief
that she’s still listening to me. I hope she understands that I
am laying the absolute truth out to her. “I didn’t use
One Night Only
again. I just couldn’t go through with
it.”

“Why not?”
she whispers, with what I think is hope in her voice. Maybe she
hasn’t given up on me completely.

“Because I
can’t stop thinking about you. You’re all I want.”
That is the absolute fucking truth too, and it doesn’t hurt as
much to admit it as I thought it would. But that still doesn’t
mean I’m not scared… and I’m not drunk. I am, in
fact, both of these things, so I clarify to her, “It’s
why I left work at two o’clock today and hit a bar to get
shitfaced. So I could drown you out of my mind… even if only
briefly. You’re a blessing, Mac… but you’re also
my curse.”

Then I hang up, but
not before I hear her gasp of dismay.

I hurt her again,
and the only way to drown the guilt of that out is to continue
drinking.

I repeat the same
routine Saturday night, except I don’t go out and I don’t
text or call Mac. I stay in my apartment and finish off the other
half of the Macallan.

It’s Sunday
morning and just within the last forty minutes, I’ve gone from
waking up on my bathroom floor with the taste of puke in my mouth to
standing at Mac’s apartment door. Within that forty minutes, I
showered, popped two Excedrin, brushed my teeth three times, and
caught a cab to Mac’s place. Also within that forty minutes, I
came up with what I wanted to say to her. It was going to be the most
important closing argument of my career.

While this morning’s
journey only took forty minutes, it actually took me a few days to
come to the realization that this whole fucked-up situation with Mac
did not turn out the way I wanted. I bemoaned my fate for several
days, some of which I spent drunk, before I finally got my head out
of my ass and decided to take back control of my life.

When Mac walked out
of my office five days ago, I was hurt and angry, just as I knew she
was. But I was selfish, believing my hurt and anger was the only
thing that was important.

By the time Saturday
night rolled around, I really started thinking about risk and reward.
I took stock of all the ways in which I have been happy and fulfilled
since I’ve met Mac, and I really made myself consider whether
this was something important enough for me to fight for.

It started to become
very simple. I weighed how I was feeling at that very moment against
how I was feeling when Mac and I were together. It sort of became a
no brainer to me. That if my life is shitty right now, it’s
really my own doing, because I clearly had someone that was making me
happy.

So then I had to ask
myself… am I willing to risk getting hurt again for the chance
to be with Mac? That wasn’t so simple, and I warred with myself
all night. I don’t think the Macallan made things any clearer
necessarily, but it did make me loose enough to let go of some of my
preconceived notions and prejudices.

It made me consider
the possibility of something more.

By the time I had
passed out on my bathroom floor, because let’s face it, cool
bathroom tile feels great against your face when you’ve got the
spins, I decided to go for it with Mac.

Apparently, that
wasn’t just drunk Matt’s psyche working, because when I
woke up, I felt almost giddy with hope that today, things in my life
were about to possibly get better.

So I stand, outside
of Mac’s apartment, and hope my life is about to actually get
better.

I knock on her door
and then shove my hands in my jeans pockets, staring at the floor. I
know I probably look like shit. After I showered, I hadn’t
bothered to brush my hair… just sort of combed my fingers
through it. I know my eyes are bloodshot and I threw on an old, navy
blue T-shirt and a pair of ratty jeans. Of course, you can’t
have on ratty jeans and not wear Chuck-Ts so I threw a pair of those
on as well.

The door opens and I
raise my head, my eyes locking with hers.

So fucking
beautiful.

Hair pulled up in a
ponytail, no makeup on her face, wearing a t-shirt and a pair of yoga
pants, her feet bare. Yes, I’d take her like that every fucking
day.

Best of all, she had
a dab of chocolate on her chin and the scent of chocolate chip
cookies assaults me.

“You have
chocolate on your chin,” I murmur, stepping forward. She
doesn’t back away, so I reach a hand up and collect the
chocolate on my thumb. Then I put it in my mouth and suck it clean,
feeling immense satisfaction when Mac’s eyes go dark and her
breath rushes out over her lips.

“Can I come
in?” I ask, even though, technically, I had walked over her
threshold. I guess the more appropriate question would have been,
“Will you please not kick me out?”

She doesn’t
respond but just gives me a nod and turns away, heading into the
kitchen. I follow her in, and whereas normally my eyes would be
trained on her fantastic ass, I take note of how stiff her shoulders
are and how high she’s holding her head.

In the kitchen,
there are a variety of baking ingredients laying on the counter,
flour is dusted everywhere and she has a sheet of cookies on top of
the stove. One cookie looks pathetically broken and lonely on the
floor.

“Is Macy
here?”

“No. She’s
at the gym,” she says as she bends over to pick the cookie up.
She throws it in the trashcan, never once looking at me, and then
starts to remove the rest of the cookies from the sheet, placing them
carefully on a plate.

When she’s
done, she turns to me and crosses her arms over her chest in a
defensive posture. She runs her eyes up and down my body, but there’s
nothing sexual about it all. “You look like hell, Matt. Did you
go on a bender or something?”

I grimace over how
lame that makes me. “Actually… I did. I never drink like
that, but I pretty much stayed drunk Friday and Saturday.”

“Did it help?”

“No. It didn’t
help at all.”

Mac’s eyes
fill with pain, and I don’t know if it’s for me or for
the hurt I’ve caused her. She won’t look me in the eye
though and turns her gaze to the plate of cookies.

“I can’t
get you out of my mind,” I tell her quietly.

Her eyes snap to
mine, and now they are filled with sympathy… for me. “I’m
sorry,” she says apologetically.

What the fuck?

“Sorry? You
have nothing to be sorry for. I’m the asshole. I have so much
to apologize for that I don’t even know where to begin.”

And because Mac is
probably the kindest, most empathetic person I know, she still tries
to make me feel good, even though I know she’s hurting.

“Matt,”
she says softly. “It’s okay. I understand what was
driving you.”

Stop it! She just
needs to stop worrying about me and let me get through this. I walk
toward her, eating up the distance and itching to touch. Her arms
fall away from her chest and she watches me warily.

Tenderly…
slowly… with purpose, I raise my hands and lay my palms on her
cheeks, framing her face and holding her still.

Making her look at
me, refusing to let her look away.

“No, it’s
not okay, Mac. I have to make up for this, and I’m hoping that
I haven’t messed things up so badly that you won’t let me
start over by taking you out on a date. I want to give you what you
want. At least, I want to
try
to give it to you… if
you’ll let me.”

Fuck, that felt so
good to get that out. To let out the words I think deep, deep down…
way deep down… I really wanted to say to her for a long time…
giving her something that she’s wanted.

Mac’s eyes go
wide with wonder, maybe a little confusion. “A date?”

I smile at her,
nodding my head, and wait to hear her answer. The suspense is killing
me.

“What made you
change your mind?” she inquires.

“I finally
started realizing that the pain of loneliness is much worse than the
pain of betrayal and heartbreak that I was trying to avoid.”

Mac’s mouth
opens slightly, and she sighs in relief. “I’d love to go
on a date with you.”

I give a sigh of
relief too, because I’ve made it past the first major hurdle.
“I’m probably going to be really bad at this dating
thing… I hope you have patience with me.”

“I’m
sure you’ll do just fine,” she says softly, but I might
sense a little bit of apprehension in her voice.

Still, I feel like I
just conquered the biggest fucking case of my career…
convinced the most jaundiced jury to award me everything I could ever
desire. And all she did was agree to go on a date with me.

Leaning in, I kiss
her forehead and then pull back, searching her eyes one last time to
make sure there’s no doubt… no hesitation on her part.
She returns my look boldly… confidently… hopefully.

Smiling, I drop my
hands from her face and turn away from her, heading back to the front
door.

“Wait! Where
are you going?” she calls out to me in confusion.

I don’t look
back at her as I reach out and open her door. But I do yell back over
my shoulder. “I’m going home so I can call you and ask
you out all nice and proper.”

I hear her stammer,
“But… but…” but then she fades away as I
walk out and close the door behind me.

Chuckling, I
practically skip my way to the elevator, so fucking high on life
right now.

***

As soon as I get
home to my apartment, I grab a can of Diet Coke from my fridge and
hop over the back of the couch, bouncing on the cushions. Pulling my
phone out, I call Mac and she answers on the second ring.

Her voice is all
breathless and excited, and oh, so sexy, and I immediately think of
having phone sex with her. But I shake my head to clear those
thoughts. “Hey.”

“Hey,”
she says back coyly, but I can hear the smile on her face.