What He Wants Read Free Page B

home.   Nicola was an actress and a dancer, and
it wasn’t out of the ordinary for her to be out at night.   Her and her theatre friends liked to
sleep all day and then stay out all night.
    Her schedule suited me fine.   I liked having the apartment to myself,
liked not having to battle for the bathroom or worry about noise when I was
trying to fall asleep.   I’d lucked
out when I’d found this apartment – a lot of my law school classmates had
ended up with four roommates or an apartment in a bad part of town.   My apartment was tiny, but it was clean
and it was close to campus.
    I heated up some ramen noodles and ate
them in front of the tv, trying to keep my mind on an episode of Bill
Maher.   But I could still only
think about him, about what I’d done, his hands on me, the way he’d branded
me.   I took a shower but made sure
not to wash the X off my wrist.   It
was the only memory I had a of him, and I knew it was silly, but I wanted to
keep it.
    It was midnight when I got into bed, and
I tossed and turned for a while until finally falling into a fitful sleep.
    My cell phone woke me a few hours later.
    I groped for my phone, my heart
pounding.   There were only two
people who would be calling me at this time of night – my mom, or Josh.
    It was Josh.
    “Worthington’s here,” he said.   “His office.   Seems big.”
    “I’ll be right there.”  

 
    ***

 
      Thirty minutes later, at three-thirty in the morning, I was
rushing up the steps of Hinton Hall, heading for Professor Worthington’s
office.
    When I got there, Josh was sitting on one
of the wooden benches that lined the hallway.
    “Nice outfit,” he commented wryly.
    I was dressed in a black pencil skirt and
a silky white blouse.   Worthington
was a bit sexist, and if you wanted to get ahead in his class and you were
female, you had to try harder.   Which meant you didn’t show up looking like a slob, not even at
three-thirty in the morning.
    “What’s the situation?” I asked, ignoring
his comment.
    “He came in right before I called
you.   Seemed agitated   He had a coffee.”
    I nodded.  
    Worthington taught our intro to torts
class, but he was a hotshot lawyer in his own right.   He would sometimes use law students for research or to run
grunt work for him on his cases.   The experience was irreplaceable.   Worthington was notorious for picking whoever was closest to him to help
– he had his own practice and didn’t seem to have time to choose students
based on their merits.
    So Josh and I sometimes took turns
sitting in the big chairs in the lobby of Hinton, where Worthington had his
office.   We’d study and hope that
maybe we’d run into Worthington when he had something going on.
    “Was he –”
    The door to Worthington’s office flew
open.
    He saw us standing there, and his face
set into a wry smile.   “You two,”
he said, pointing to us.   “I need
you both.”
    “Yes, sir,” I said.   My heart sped up and my palms felt
twitchy.   After just a few weeks in
law school, I was finally going to see some action.   I pulled out a notebook and got ready to take notes.
    “There’s been a murder,” Worthington
said. He drained his coffee then crushed the empty Starbucks cup in his hand
and tossed it toward the trash can in the hallway.   It bounced off the rim and onto the floor.    “We have a client, an important
one.   He hasn’t been arrested yet,
but for reasons I won’t get into, he’s going to be a suspect.”   He stared both of us down, and I forced
myself not to move.   Worthington
was a hotshot lawyer – the kind of lawyer who commanded hundreds of
thousands in fees.   Whatever this
case was, it was big.  
    “The client is high profile,” Worthington
went on.   “He’s insisted on meeting
whoever it that’s going to be working with him.”   He stared us all down again, his gaze icy.   “Of course I’ll have people at my
office on this.   But if he is
charged,