of life she wasn’t entirely naive. She might not exactly have been streetwise, but she had tasted the bitter taste of life.
She stood by the roadside in her white tight-fitting T-shirt and shorts that showed every curve of her firm body, holding out her thumb every time a car went by. She thought it would be easy hitching a ride, with her breasts thrusting out in front, straining against her T-shirt, and the perfect ripe complexion of her thighs showing like white silk in the California sunshine. But people were paranoid, she realized now.
A few yards away, her car had broken down and she couldn’t even call for help because the battery of her cell phone was flat. She had made a half-hearted effort to fix the car herself, but she didn’t really have a clue when it came to car engines. So all she could do was flag down a Good Samaritan and ask them to take her to a garage where she could get proper help.
Secretly she was hoping that some good-looking man with technical skills and a cool family fortune would stop and rescue her, not just from the roadside but from the aimless drifting boredom that seemed to have engulfed her life lately. But she would settle for an elderly couple taking her down the road to a pay phone if necessary. Only she wasn’t even getting
Life was unfair.
And then her luck changed.
An aquamarine Mercedes slowed down as it approached her. A recent model and from the up-market end of the European car industry. The owner was clearly affluent… and probably young. By the time it had pulled over by the roadside, she could see that the driver, in his late twenties, was a black man.
She knew that they’d be warm and welcoming in their words. But she wondered if they were capable of walking the walk as well as they could talk the talk. It occurred to her that even now she never really knew her parents. And yet here she was away from home, trying to find herself.
As the young man leaned out smiling and asked if she needed help, she could tell from his confident voice that this some one who was going places. She was drawn to his youthful good looks and quiet, cool self-confidence and she warmed to him instantly, even if his diction betrayed the lingering traces of a background that she half- suspected he was trying to conceal — or maybe just forget.
He took a look under the hood and after about a minute shook his head and said “I’m not really all that good with engines. I’m better with people.” He won her over with that line and a disarming smile. Two minutes later she was in the Merc and they were rolling along down the road, getting to know each other better. Somewhere along the line, she noticed that he had turned off the main road.
She was about to ask where they were going, when she caught a glimpse of his profile and saw his lips twist upward into a smile. But she couldn’t tell if the smile was friendly. And as the first traces of apprehension formed into a knot in the pit of her stomach, she realized that she was too afraid to inquire further.
Friday, 5 June 2009 — 8:50
“I’ve got butterflies in my stomach Gene,” said Andi as the car snaked its way through the streets of Los Angeles. A sharp turn later and the car began slowing down as the office building loomed up ahead.
“It’s too late to go back now.”
They both laughed. This was becoming a bit of an in-joke between them. They had both been nervous about leaving the Big Apple and crossing the continent to a new life on the West Coast. But Andi’s career had demanded it.
Andi Phoenix, sitting silently and brooding nervously, was in her late thirties. She had kept her looks through healthy eating, regular workouts and a bit of cosmetic surgery. Her breasts had been enhanced from 34B to 36D with silicone implants and she had taken a botox injection to remove the first lines of age. But the rest was from hard work and healthy living. The blonde hair came from a bottle; the original had been a decent but boring mousy brown. Changing the color had been a form of therapy after the rough ride of her youth, but the enhancements as a whole carried with them the payload of attention from men that she could well do without. She was a few inches shorter than the black woman who sat next to her, and some ways felt in her shadow.
Gene touched Andi’s forearm gently.
“Just remember this honey.
In the driver’s seat, in more ways than one, was Eugenia Vance, the six foot, muscular, black woman who had playfully wrestled with her in bed that morning — and won — as always.
They had met over twenty years ago, when Andi was still in her teens. Gene had helped Andi through her teenage crisis years, and they’d been together ever since. In all the time they had known each other, they never used the word “lesbian” to describe their relationship. It wasn’t denial. It was just that their every instinct railed against categorization. Neither Gene nor Andi loved “women”; they simply loved each other.
“I’m just wondering if this whole thing is a big mistake.”
Gene snorted her mockery at Andi’s self-pity.
“You’ve picked a
Here in California, Andi’s specialty was much in demand. She had majored in psychology before going on to get her Juris Doctor degree from the Northeastern University School of Law, where she thrived amidst its progressive atmosphere that encouraged social responsibility. But after graduation she had found the law to be an irritating environment in which to work. Most of her criminal work involved plea-bargaining rather than trial work and usually that meant helping criminals plead guilty to lesser charges — hardly the service of justice and way off from the ideals that had driven her into the legal profession in the first place.
Matters had come to a head after she contracted pneumonia, forcing her to take a prolonged leave of absence from the law firm that had initial hired her and held out so much hope and promise. But when she went back to work, she found herself welcomed with less than open arms. She was protected by labor laws from outright dismissal, but found herself increasingly sidelined. She joined another firm but then spent the next eight months playing catch-up.
It was in this period that her interest in the subject changed. Although there were innocent people out there needing to be helped, criminal law meant — for the most part — helping the guilty. And that was not something she particularly enjoyed doing. So she did the old “poacher turned gamekeeper” routine and got herself a job with the DA’s office, in the domestic violence unit, where she thrived for a while. Starting at the bottom of the ladder meant that she didn’t get to do much courtroom work. Most of it involved working directly with victims, reading reports and collating evidence. But she was happy to do this. It gave her a sense of purpose.
Paradoxically, it was only when promotion gave her more courtroom work that disillusion set in for a second time. Because she found herself doing exactly the same thing as she was doing before, but from the opposite side of the table: plea-bargaining with criminals. She found their lawyers to be vile, for the most part, and she realized how contemptible she must have seemed to the DA in her earlier days as a defense attorney.
At the same time, she had developed another interest: crime victim litigation. There was a growing industry involving the pursuit of civil remedies for crime victims and she very much wanted to be part of it. So she got a job working in that fledgling field for a large law firm, but realized very soon that she had hit the glass ceiling.
However, her employers were far from displeased with her performance and wanted to keep her on. They just didn’t have the right vacancy. But they made it very clear that there were more prospects of upward mobility on the West Coast and if she wanted it, there was a job waiting for her at their Los Angeles office.
She wasn’t altogether comfortable about moving to the West Coast. But that was where the work opportunity took her.
“And what if I don’t make the grade?” asked Andi, still seeking reassurance.
“
