Page 3 of Flirting with Forever

“Hey, Crash,” Richie Dear said as he skirted around Willis in the doorway and entered the office he shared with John. “My grandma called—she wants her shoes back.”

John snorted with laughter, pulling his legs back to let Richie pass the eighteen inches he had to go to cram himself at his own desk.

Willis glared at both of them. “Whatever,” he grumbled, turning on his heel and stalking away.

“They don’t call me The Exterminator for nothing,” Richie gloated, leaning across the small room to slam their door closed. “I know how to get rid of pests.”

“Yeah. No one calls you that.”

They both laughed. Richie Dear—his God-given last name—was bottle blond, about a foot shorter than John and always a little bit disheveled. His files often found themselves in messy piles on John’s desk or chair. Two years ago, when they’d first started sharing this broom closet the state called an office, John had been positive that the very boisterous Richie Dear had been sent from hell to torture him. Now they were friends.

Plus, John had discovered noise-canceling headphones and that had significantly improved their working relationship.

“What wasCrashdoing here?” Richie asked with all the disdain of a thirteen-year-old mean girl.

“Just coming by to taunt me about my life choices. The usual.”

“Ignore him. He’s just salty that you have more courtroom charisma than he does.”

John’s cell phone buzzed on his peeling wooden desk, spasmodically sliding a few inches to one side. John grimaced when he saw the name there and silenced it.

“Hiding from Mommy today?” Richie asked, eyeing John’s phone.

John loved his mother dearly, but the woman loved to chat during the workday. He’d call her back on his walk home from the train. Or...not. He had an unusually heavy stone of dread in his gut when he thought of talking to his mother this time. “She’s calling to find out about that date she set me up on.”

“That was last night!” Richie realized, nearly pouring an entire mug of tepid coffee all over his pants as he swung around to face John. “How’d it go? I’m guessing if you’re dodging your mother’s calls, it was a bust. Didn’t Estrella swear this was going to be a love match? Your future wife?” Richie slugged back half the mug of stale coffee without even a wince, something that all good public defenders learned how to do at some point or another.

“It was a waste of a swipe,” John grumbled, referring to the MetroCard fare for the two trains he’d taken to get to that ridiculous restaurant.

“Why?” Richie asked nosily, slugging back the rest of the coffee. “Was she boring? Rude to the waiter?” He leaned in and theatrically whispered, “Was she one of those horrible people who blow their noses into cloth napkins?”

John laughed and shook his head. “No. No. There was nothing wrong with her.” As far as he could tell. Actually, as far as he could tell, she was pretty much the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen in his life. He’d spent the whole forty feet of her walk across that restaurant attempting to believe that she was actually there forhim. It couldn’t be. Mothers didn’t set up their sons with movie-star beauties. And then thatsmile. Gah. His heart barely beat that hard when he went jogging. He’d considered it a miracle that he hadn’t upended his water glass onto his pants or something idiotic like that. No. He’d made a fool of himself in a different way. A considerably worse way. Him and his clumsy freaking mouth. Guilt lanced through him. “It’s just—Dating is a waste of time for me right now. I’m not in the position to...do that.”

“For someone who is so unbelievably articulate in the courtroom, you sure have alovelyway with words when it comes to yourself,” Richie said drily.

John pushed the pads of his fingers against his forehead as if he could massage through the bone and straight into the headache that always seemed to brew right there. “I play enough mind games at work to want to do that in my free time.”

“Ah,” Richie said with a sage nod. “Say no more. She was one ofthose.”

Richie had already turned back to his desk, and John usually took every opportunity of averted attention from his chatty officemate to get as much work done as possible, but something about Richie’s words made him pause.

“One of whats?” he asked Richie’s back and then silenced another one of his mother’s phone calls.

“A game player. Someone who has their own set of rules. Who sets traps and then greedily rubs their hands together when they watch you fall ass-first right into them. Trust me, I know the type. Sounds like you dodged a bullet.”

Still a little stymied by his friend’s assessment, John turned back around and woke up the twelve-year-old monitor that sat like a heavy, judgmental toad on his desk.

John considered himself to be an excellent judge of character—you kind of had to be in a courtroom—and that had not been how Mary Trace had seemed to him. But at thirty-one years old, with a grand total of one and three-quarters girlfriends in his entire life, John wasn’t exactly an expert on women. Maybe Richie was right.

His computer belched an error message at him and John groaned, his mind getting pulled back to the task at hand.

Seven hours later, he emerged from the Brooklyn Supreme Court onto Jay Street, his messenger bag over his aching shoulder and his suit coat over one arm to keep it from getting wrinkled. It was that fleeting time of year in Brooklyn when there was very little difference between indoor and outdoor temperatures. The eight o’clock breeze kissed him through his cotton dress shirt.Welcome to the world, John.

Unfortunately, most of his world existed within the walls of the building behind him. These brief, warm-breezed, pre-sunset moments were simply the garnish at the edge of his plate. The real meat and potatoes lived inside the messenger bag slung across his hip. He strode purposefully toward the subway, ignoring the siren’s call of Shake Shack, and jogged down the dingy yellow-painted stairs to his train.

Forty minutes later, he emerged in his neighborhood, the sun already down and a deep regret lodged in his gut that he’d talked himself out of fast food. All he had waiting for him in his fridge were salad fixings and half of last night’s veggie stir-fry. Oh, joy.

John thought about calling his mother on the walk to his apartment but decided to wait until after he’d fortified himself with dinner.

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