At not-quite-thirty, I was still the youngest lawyer in Robert’s office, and so when we had the opportunity to take on a four-year contract with a large legal publishing company, those duties got dumped on me. It turns out, I was okay with that. Though it did complicate my lurid daily teasing with Julie, Robert’s newly hired receptionist. Wow, was she ever hot. And she loved to play games with my head, in a sexy way. But that’s yet another juice-covered story I’ll think about telling you later.
The legal publishing firm we had contracted with had its offices well over an hour’s drive east of our office’s location, but luckily, I only had to be physically in the offices of Peaks Legal Publishing on the first Wednesday of each month.
I had already hired a growing flock of editors as part of my responsibilities, who had absolutely zero background in the law, but who had both writing experience and highly varied “life experiences” which meant I had now assembled a team of about 27 newspaper reporters, English professors, magazine writers and editors, and just about anyone who could make my client’s product, legal case summaries, more readable by your average well educated professional who would be an instant new customer, if only they could understand the legal jargon.
Accountants, engineers, construction foremen, or any such professional who had never been to law school needed to be able to understand the summaries produced by Peaks Legal Publishing. The marketing strategy relied upon by Peaks assumed that editing the summaries of legal cases to make them more reader friendly would make them more marketable to entirely new customers. They sought to accomplish this by having me teach a pool of people who were hired precisely because they had no past legal experience, how to understand an opinion written solely for lawyers by a judge. Then, the strategy was to have our editors rewrite the judge’s opinion in everyday terms. No small project.
Although I was young, excessively confident, and as they say in Kentucky, "ten feet tall and bullet-proof,” but even so, four years seemed like a tighter deadline with every passing monthly meeting, although we were all in daily contact by email and video conferencing through the rest of the month.
It was beginning to challenge me that my contractual requirement forced me to hire only people who were from completely diverse and non-legal backgrounds in their previous lives, including one of my very first hires, Cassie. She, however, was uniquely skilled at understanding complex terminology and concepts. She was fun and easy to work with.
Cassie had been an editor for a fashion magazine in New York, but had moved back to her home town near Cincinnati to become a Cheer Leader for The Cincinnati Bengals. I shit you not. She practically begged for the chance to get back into editing, now that she had settled back in her hometown neighborhood in a modest apartment. She didn’t seem to mind taking about a twenty percent pay cut to write for me, as opposed to jiggling her jugs for thousands of adoring fans.
Cassie was well educated and absolutely brilliant. She picked up on the legal terms I had her sorting out daily and defining for the rest of the new editors in my project group. Cassie had in fact become so involved in helping me move the project forward that Peaks Legal Publishing agreed with Cassie that it was money well spent for me to meet with her once a week for lunch on my expense account closer to home so we wouldn’t have to make the painfully long-ass drive to the Peaks office building every week. Besides, I have to admit, there was more than a friendship growing between us.
Still, I hadn’t had that Certificate of Dissolution of Marriage signed off on in my pending divorce, and Cassie sometimes wore what appeared to be an engagement ring. I didn’t know exactly what was going on, and so I made an extra effort to keep everything absolutely professional.
As well, Peaks Legal Publishing was a massive, worldwide, corporation and I didn’t want to complicate my contractual relationship with them. The position I had lucked into with Peaks Publishing did bring in a nice constant stream of revenue. It was more than enough to pay the office rent and to cover Julie’s salary, so I did not want to do anything to risk that set-up. Still, at barely thirty and being around the tantalizing Italian complexion of, sculpted, toned, and just over-the-top sexy Cassie on a regular basis, well, I couldn’t help but begin to look forward to our weekly lunch meetings.
We had definitely become a little too relaxed in each other’s company, and then one day I took us even closer to the edge when we met up in the parking lot of a nicer than usual restaurant for our weekly lunch. I suggested that Cassie and I take turns carpooling together to the monthly department meetings. “Carpooling, to save gas, you know... doing our share to save the environment.” I fumbled with my words as I saw signs of reluctance in her.
Cassie giggled, looking down and away from my face, her long, dark brown Italian hair falling over her face, hiding her deep green eyes and pouty lips from my view. I thought I had really messed up, maybe pushed it too far to have others at the office possibly see us arriving together. There were more than enough rumors floating around about the two of us already. The amount of sexual tension between us was simply impossible to hide, though we both tried very hard.
“Uh, you’re not worried about the rest of the team gossiping when someone eventually sees us riding together?” Cassie raised her eyes to meet mine again as she asked, with some reluctance in her voice.
“Ah, bull!” I fired back without the slightest hesitation. “You know there’s no rule anywhere that says employees can’t date, so who the hell cares what anyone says. Besides, we’re not dating, we’re taking turns driving that long-ass trip to the office once a month. I refuse to live my life being scared by what somebody might gossip about.” I concluded, perhaps a bit too confidently, as if I’d been thinking or fantasizing about it for a long time. Of course I had been, but still, I didn’t want things to appear that way.
“Okay,” Cassie smiled, responding so quickly that I began to wonder whether she might have been waiting for me to respond like that. “So, here’s my home address,” she scribbled on the bottom half of her note pad that was sitting on our lunch table as we waited to put in our drink orders and discussed absolutely nothing about work. “And there’s gates out front that you need to punch in a pass code for, so pull up to the keypad and just punch in one, seven, six, three.”
Cassie said slowly, teasingly, batting her long dark Italian eyelashes at me as she wrote the pass code on the same section of note pad and tore the bottom half of the page off neatly. She folded it, then scooted up beside me on the semi-circular bench upon which we were seated. She pressed her thigh up against mine and gently pushed the scrap of paper into my shirt pocket. “You drive first until I get used to this situation!” She smiled and wagged her manicured finger at me, still pretending to be slightly uncomfortable being seen riding with me to the office.
Then, as if her scooting up beside me in the fairly private and rounded booth hadn’t been odd enough, she placed her hand on my thigh as she continued to sit tightly up against me, looking me in the eyes, and then asked: “Eric, this is sort of embarrassing, but can I ask you something, quietly, sort of in your ear?”
I was surprised at everything that had just happened, but my heart did begin to race when I thought of Cassie whispering in my ear as we sat in the last booth in the back corner of the restaurant, in about as much privacy as could be had in the entire place. “Sure, Cassie,” I almost whispered in response. I rearranged my seating position slightly in order to be facing her dazzling green eyes more directly.
“Good, um...” Cassie hesitated as she leaned still closer to me and also placed her right hand on my chest as she leaned forward. “This is really hard for me to bring up, Eric, oh, I’m not even sure I should, but, do you mind? This is really personal, I mean? Maybe too personal?”
I could smell Cassie’s Chanel perfume, I felt the softness of her dark, almost black hair against the side of my face, and I could feel her hot breath against the skin of my face and neck. I wanted to hold off on responding for as long as possible, just to enjoy the moment, but I had to give her an answer. “Cassie, it’s no problem, really. I think we know each other well enough for you to ask me something personal,” I coaxed her to continue. “Do you want to ask me later, maybe go out to the parking lot?” I asked.
“No, no, I’m just gonna say it, even though I’m afraid, and just get it out there,” Cassie said as she slid her right hand up toward my shoulder, pulling our faces still closer. She then leaned in toward my right ear and began to whisper: “Um, well, I’m not sure exactly how to say this but I’ve just noticed, since the day you first interviewed me, that there’s this sort of, um, like an electric buzz sort of feeling all around me when I’m talking to you, and well, okay, now I’ve said that out loud, uh...” Cassie paused as she now almost nuzzled my ear. I could tell she was extremely self-conscious about whatever this was heading toward.
I leaned in toward her as she did the same to me. Now, feeling her head rest against mine, I could feel both of us breathing with a slight tremolo as the sexual tension built exponentially upon itself between us. The waitress came walking toward our table, but upon noticing our position, politely pretended to have forgotten something and disappeared back around the corner.
Seeing the waitress heading our way made me fumble my response terribly. “Cassie,” I attempted to make her more comfortable, realizing how dangerously exposed her as yet unasked question must have been making her feel. “Cassie, it’s alright. Anything you ask me is completely alright, just relax and get it all out, and then if you want, we can talk about it.” ‘Wow!’ I screamed at myself inside of my head. ‘I could have done that a hell of a lot better,’ but before I had a chance to fix it, Cassie continued, still whispering softly in my ear.
“Eric, I’ve had these feelings from the very first time we talked, and well, they’re just getting stronger, and now I’m pretty sure you’re feeling them too.” Cassie repositioned her face to gaze directly at me, seemingly into me, with her glistening emerald eyes. She reached around my neck with both hands and clasped her fingers tightly. “Eric,” she shook me surprisingly firmly with her hands in a tight weave behind my neck: “Eric, I have to know if you’re feeling these, this... this whatever it is that I just have to think that you’re feeling just like I am. And no half-ass answers please, if it’s not there, it’s not, but... oh for Christ’s sakes, I’ve even started having this crazy fantasy about us... but don’t freak...”
“Cassie, stop!” I demanded, ending her fumbling and rambling questions. “Cassie, this ‘electrical buzzing’ you’re talking about between us is so damned strong I literally wake up counting the days, or the hours, until I’m going to see you again.” I had, of course, promised this would remain forever my little secret, but what the hell was I supposed to do? I couldn’t bear to see her suffer like this. I realized my feelings for her were perhaps stronger than I had anticipated.
Her face lit up and she broke her clasp from around my neck, sliding her right hand down my chest. “Wow, Damn, Eric,” she let out a long sigh of relief. “Whooo! I’ve been up sometimes for hours at night worrying about how I’d ask you and what your answer might be, but my God!”
Cassie was now obviously much relieved and far more relaxed as she bounced excitedly in her seat, jiggling her slightly oversized breasts, and laughing as she spoke.