Confessions of a Litigation God: A Legal Affairs Full Length Erotic Novel (39 page)

My stomach drops
because I’m not sure if Rob catches on, but I can clearly hear
that she is deeply hurt about something.

“I’m
sorry, Rob,” she says as she cuts him a quick glance. “I
wouldn’t ask if it weren’t really important.”

“No problem,”
Rob says as he stands up. He gives me a wave before turning away.
“I’ll catch you later, Matt.”

I watch Rob as he
retreats out of my office and when the door closes, I finally turn my
gaze back on to Mac.

“What’s
wrong?” I ask her quietly.

She doesn’t
answer me right away but rather walks straight up to my desk. As she
gets closer, her eyes lose the shards of ice and instead start
filling up with heat. By the time she’s leaning over my desk
and slapping her palms down on the wood grain, flames are practically
leaping out. “I want to know why you lied to me last night.”

Just fucking great!
The day hasn’t even really gotten started, and she’s
already heard that Kylie was out with us last night. I could wring
Rob’s fucking neck right now for inviting that woman.

“How exactly
do you think I lied?” I hedge for time.

“You told me
you were going out with the boys last night, and I get that. It’s
good to have a boy’s night out, even if it did hurt my feelings
a little that you wouldn’t rather be with me. Still… I
let it go. Except I come in this morning to find out that your boy’s
night wasn’t such a boy’s night after all. It appears you
invited Kylie to go with you and, from what I can tell, she doesn’t
have a dick swinging between her legs.”

As Mac ended her
tirade, her words were shrill and accusatory. I note her hands are
shaking as they rest on my desk. She’s itching for a fight…
I can tell. But I’m not about to give her one. Not here…
not at work.

“I didn’t
invite her,” I say calmly. “One of the other guys did.”

“Then how come
you didn’t invite me once you realized she was coming? Once you
realized it wasn’t just a ‘boy’s night out’?”

I wince internally,
because she’s got me good and nailed to the wall now. “I
couldn’t invite you, Mac. People can’t know we’re
together.”

“Bullshit,”
she seethes. “I’ve been in your presence plenty of times
around other members of this firm, and we both could have had fun
last night without ever giving anything away. But the truth of the
matter is—you just didn’t want me there. You wanted space
from me, and I want to know why.”

“Mac,” I
say delicately, trying to bring a level of reason to the
conversation. “It’s not a big deal—”

“Tell me the
truth,” she practically cries out to me, her voice imploring me
for something.

“You’re
making this—”

“TELL. ME,”
she yells as she raises her hands up and slams them back down on my
desk with a bang.

Adrenaline spikes
through me as I realize that Mac is on the verge of really flipping
out, and I can’t have that happening. “Calm down. Do you
want everyone to know about us?”

Sadness fills Mac’s
eyes and her voice is awash in such sorrow that my stomach starts to
roll. Her voice is very, very soft when she says, “Know what,
Matt? What is there exactly to know?”

Fuck, oh fuck. Mac
may have just been asking me a question… “What exactly
is there to know?” But what she is really doing is making a
statement about the status of our relationship. She’s finally
figured it out that I’m not on board and have been sabotaging
everything that we’ve built up together. She’s actually
laying it out on the table, because I’ve been too much of a
pansy ass to actually talk honestly about it.

Leaning back in my
chair, I scrub my hands over my face and sigh. “I don’t
know what to tell you, Mac. I’ve been trying. I really have.
But lately… it just seems like a lot of work.”

“
I
seem
like a lot of work?” she snaps. “You mean… it’s
a real chore for you to have to get it up for
me
?”

“NO!” I
blurt out, because… fuck… no! “That’s not
what I’m saying. I’m insanely attracted to you. You have
to know that.”

“Then why is
it work?” she begs me to enlighten her.

“Because…
because you wanted more than just sex, and I tried to give it to you.
But lately… it just seems too hard. Ever since…”

I don’t finish
that thought because I don’t need to. Mac knows exactly the
moment when things changed for me. She can pinpoint it to the second,
I’m sure.

“You mean ever
since Marissa came over to your apartment that day. That was the day
she reminded you that you’ve been screwed over and all women
must therefore be the same as her. Thus, none of us are good enough
to get the great Matthew Fucking Connover’s full attention. I
mean, if we’re lucky girls… he’ll fuck us and fuck
us good, but he’ll never let us into his heart. No woman is
apparently good enough to warrant that type of attention from you,
right? Because poor little Matt had his feelings hurt, and now he
wants to wallow in misery. Boo fucking hoo, Matt. Boo fucking hoo.”

Okay, now wait a
fucking minute. I think this was a little more than having my
feelings hurt. I was fucking crushed my wife cheated on me and my
best friend was one of the ones who banged her. I was devastated when
my marriage ended, and I spent a lot of time building up some
protection around me to shield against this type of pain. You’d
think Mac would give me a little fucking credit for trying.

Standing up from my
desk, I lean across it toward Mac and growl, “Don’t you
think you may be trivializing what I’ve been through just a
bit? This isn’t easy on me, you know.”

I expect her to
attack… to call me out… point out all the ways that I’m
a pussy and can’t handle the work it takes to make a
relationship work. Hell, if I was Mac right now, I’d tell me to
fucking grow a pair, man up, act like I got a dick swinging between
my legs. Because when it boils right down to it, the only thing
holding me back is fear.

I know that.

Mac knows that.

And I wait for her
to attack me with it.

Instead, she stares
at me a moment more, then the heat dies out of her eyes. Her gaze
drops from mine, she looks at the desk for just a second, and then
pushes away from it. She turns from me… turns her back on me
and this conversation, and walks toward my office door.

I don’t know
what to do. Do I call her back and have her finish this argument? Do
I let her walk away from me for good and go back to flying solo,
because that’s what I really want anyway, right?

Fuck if I know, but
before I can do anything, Mac turns back around and knocks my legs
out from underneath of me. “Cal didn’t initiate sex with
Marissa.”

Turbulent fury
bubbles and boils within me that she would dare even bring that up.
That’s none of her fucking business, and I certainly don’t
want it to be any of my fucking business. “I don’t want
to hear this.”

“He was drunk
at her party,” she says, rolling right over the top of me, not
even slowing down. “I understand you were out of state and your
plane got delayed, so you couldn’t make it in. Marissa offered
him the guest room, and he accepted.”

“Enough, Mac,”
I grit out as I step around my desk and start advancing on her.

“He was
really, really drunk… on the verge of passing out. In fact, he
thinks he did pass out for a little bit, but when he came to—”

“Get the fuck
out,” I bark loudly at her, because I’m so angry right
now that this shit is being put into my brain, that I’m afraid
of what I might do if she doesn’t shut the fuck up. “I
don’t want to hear this.”

Mac doesn’t
listen though and side steps to the other side of my desk to stay
away from me as I walk toward her. “Tough titties, you chicken
shit pansy. You’re going to listen. Cal sort of woke up, and
Marissa was in bed with him… giving him a blow job. He tried
to push her off at first, but he admits… he didn’t try
hard. He was drunk and didn’t have much control. She climbed on
top of him, Matt. He let it happen, for a while. Then he came to his
senses a bit and stopped it. I mean, the act had still been done…
but he stopped it.”

Denial rumbles
through and I stop in my tracks, closing my eyes in a vain effort to
shut everything out. I can still hear her breathing heavy, because
that was quite a mouthful she just said. If what she says is true…
then Cal didn’t go after my wife. I mean… I wasn’t
sure, but how could I have been? I refused to hear a word of what he
had to say after he told me he slept with Marissa. Besides, it didn’t
matter. He fucked her… didn’t matter how it happened,
right?

“If you’re
honest with yourself, Matt, you know it’s true. He didn’t
make the move. Otherwise, why would he have been the one to confess
it to you? He came to you to let you know, and you never even gave
him a chance to explain. You beat the crap out of him and kicked him
out of your life, without even giving him a chance.”

Pain slices through
me because Mac is opening old wounds, and now they are bleeding
freely. I turn away from her and walk back to my desk, my mind
spinning from the information overload. I wish I could erase what I
just learned and go back to being fucking oblivious to what really
happened between Cal and Marissa. Because I had carefully constructed
my world based on an assumption that Cal was a predator and he had no
regard for our friendship.

Mac’s not
through with me though. Her voice is gentle and sympathetic when she
says, “I’m not justifying what he did, Matt. Cal doesn’t
try to do that either. He was wrong, and he knows it. But he did not
instigate it and, although he was weak at first, he did stop it. But
you already know that’s true, because I understand Marissa
wasn’t stingy with her charms.”

I walk up to my
floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the city and stare out
blankly. Buildings, traffic, blue skies, and white clouds. I really
don’t see any of it. All I can do is envision the scenario that
Mac just placed in my head. Marissa sucking off Cal while he was
drunk. Climbing on top. Him stopping it… not completing…
foregoing his pleasure because he worked through some of his drunken
haze to realize what he was doing was so very wrong.

It was nothing I
could have ever imagined happening.

I can hear Mac take
a few steps away and assume she’s leaving. Which is good…
I have nothing to say right now.

But she apparently
has one more piece of advice to impart to me. “I only told you
this, Matt, because your pain and bitterness are holding you back. I
only wanted to show you that it might be a little easier to forgive
Cal than you originally thought. Carrying that bitterness is not
good. It’s already turned you into someone that is destined to
lead a lonely life, because you can’t let it go. That’s
fine… that’s your choice. But remember this… you
teach Gabe by example. What is he learning from watching you? What
are you teaching him about love and forgiveness?”

Those last words
strike at me like a viper, because now she’s brought Gabe into
it. I can fume all day long about the injustices that Marissa and Cal
committed to me, and I can do whatever is necessary to ensure I don’t
get hurt like that again, but I can’t take any action without
considering how it is affecting Gabe.

And now, I have to
truly wonder… have I inadvertently taught Gabe something wrong
by my actions? I’m very careful not to bash Marissa or let Gabe
know we have our differences. I mean, he’s a smart kid and he’s
savvy, so I know he picks up on some stuff, but I absolutely refuse
to fight with her in front of him. I’ve been protecting Gabe in
that way.

But what about the
things he doesn’t see? Is it harmful that he sees a father that
is emotionally closed off from women? What am I teaching him by not
having a stable relationship with someone? How will he even know what
love looks like if I don’t show him?

My office door opens
and closes, and I know Mac is gone. I stumble back from the window
and fall into my chair, my heart sick that maybe I’ve fucked up
a lot more than just my own sex life, all because I was trying to
protect myself.

I sit there for a
long time, staring out the window and thinking about Mac…
about Gabe… about Cal and Marissa. I turn my attention to many
of the things that I’ve been refusing to give a moment’s
attention to because it was just too hard.

Because I was too
afraid of getting hurt.

A lot of good the
avoidance has done for me. Because I fucking hurt pretty bad right
now.

This week could not
get any worse. It started off with Mac walking out of my office…
out of my life, and it went downhill from there.

Every night, I went
home and drank myself to sleep. Every morning, I’d come into
the office, growling at anyone that dared to even look at me, and
would slam my office door with enough force and noise that no one
would bother me. I had two motions hearings, one of which I lost, and
then I lost my temper with the judge who, as a result, threatened to
put me in jail. I just sneered at him and waited for him to do his
worst. He denied my motion and then promptly dismissed me.

That little loss
resulted in me yelling at one of the paralegals as she loitered in
the lobby as I was walking back into the office from court. She was
leaning across the reception desk, chatting with Bea.

“If you don’t
have anything better to do than sit around and gossip all day, I’m
sure I can find someone else to do your job,” I had snarled at
the girls.

They both jumped as
if struck by a lightening bolt, with them both stuttering out
apologies and then scrambling back to work.

Mid-week, Kylie went
ahead and made her move on me, and it wasn’t subtle. We were in
her office, sitting side by side at her small worktable, going over
exhibits. She fucking reached her hand out and put it between my
legs, cupping my dick, which embarrassingly for her, stayed soft. Not
embarrassingly to me, because I couldn’t give a fuck. If I
can’t get it up for Mac, I really don’t feel like getting
it up for anyone at this point.