I knock on Janice’s door and she says, “Come in!” in a singsong-like yet distracted sounding voice.
When I open the door I see that she’s sitting in her office chair, hastily going through a pile of messy folders and papers in her lap. She looks up at me as if in a daze, her curly brown hair flying in all different kinds of directions.
“Oh, hi Madilyn,” she says, apparently coming back from la- la land.
I begin to realize what Mandy meant about Janice coming off as a huge flake. And I’m not sure how she came to be a successful partner here.
“Did Alice send you?” Janice asks.
“Excuse me?”
“My secretary. Alice. I’d been wanting to talk with you so I figured that’s why you’re here.”
I stare at her blankly.
“But now that I think about it,” she continues, “I never got around to asking Alice to set up an appointment with you.”
“I see. Well, here I am.” I smile sheepishly. “And it wasn’t Alice who told me to come, but Mr. Marks.”
“Oh yes. Mr. Marks. I had spoken with him about his mentoring of you after you told me the other day that you don’t have enough billable hours.”
I clear my throat, but no words come out. My stomach sinks, wondering if Asher is mad that I had mentioned anything to Alice.
“I had already started thinking about what work to give you, and that’s why I kept meaning to have Alice send for you. I need you to do some work on the Valdez case. We’ll have a meeting with Kim soon.”
Kim is an associate and a really annoying one at that. She was a year ahead of me in law school and she was on the editorial board of law review. She’s a real brownnoser although she’s not that bright.
Since arriving here at the firm and having nothing to do but observe, I’ve observed that Kim does most of her work for Janice. I’m sure she won’t be happy that I’ve stepped in and I can already imagine her always trying to boss me around and tell me how Janice likes things done. That’s exactly how she was in law school, anyway.
I’m really regretting not wearing that fucking outfit. I think I would have had a much sweeter deal working with Asher and on his many important cases, as opposed to working on Janice’s small depositions and with her bossy associate.
But it’s not like I have a choice.
“Okay. Sure,” I tell her.
“After I talked to Asher… I mean, Mr. Marks—” Janice blows a runaway strand of hair from her face, before continuing— “He told me he has been too busy to properly mentor you right now and asked me to step in for the time being.”
“I see.”
I hold back a sigh of relief. The phrases “right now” and “for the time being” give me a little hope. It’s not that Asher is completely dumping me for good. He’s just… temporarily stepping aside. Or something.
“And I also wanted to talk to you about something else. In fact, can you close the door?”
“Okay.”
I do so, wondering what could be so top secret.
“Have a seat,” she says, and gestures to a chair in front of her desk. But both that chair and the one beside it are loaded down with papers and files, piled in haphazard and precarious stacks.
I try to lift some out of the way, wondering where I should put them.
“I forgot about those things,” Janice says. “Alice was supposed to move them. Shall I call her in and have her come do it?”
“No, it’s okay. I can just…”
I try to set one pile of papers on top of the higher stack of papers on the other chair but it clearly won’t work without everything tumbling down.
“…remain standing,” I tell her, placing the pile of papers back on the chair from which I’d removed them and hoping they don’t fall over.
“Okay. Sorry about that. I need to clean my office. Anyway. About Asher Marks. As I was saying.”
I look at her and nod, even though she hadn’t been saying anything about him.
“About this mentorship program,” she says. “Asher is the type of person who doesn’t do anything that doesn’t benefit him. Do you understand?”
I blink.
This is where she’s going to tell me that she knows what Asher and I did. And that I’ll never be respected in the firm because of it.
This is where I find out that not only do I not get Asher, but I also get punished even though I didn’t even give in to my baser instincts and let myself be with him. Or not all the way, anyway. Not the way that now I wish I had.
This is where it all comes tumbling down.
And I didn’t even get to have sex with Asher Marks.