First With a Rival

I'm Denise. Forty-four years old, lawyer, never married, and up until about three hours ago I'd have told you the rest of that sentence without blinking. Never been with a man. Not once. Not curious. Not interested.

That last part is the one that stopped being true today, and I still don't know when it happened.

Here's the setup. Contract law conference, downtown Omaha, some mid-tier hotel with beige carpet and a conference floor that smells like burnt coffee. Three days of panels. I'm here because my firm sent me, and because Rashid would be here, and nobody at my firm trusts him alone in a room with a client.

Rashid. Forty-eight. Rival counsel from the other firm, the one we've been butting heads with for what, nine years now? He got married young, divorced by twenty-eight, no kids, works too much. That's about all I know about him outside of depositions. And apparently that's not all I want to know anymore, which is the problem.

So. Day one. Four panels. All bad. The last one was a guy reading his own slides out loud, word for word, like none of us can read. I sat in the back and thought about going home early and then thought about the bar downstairs instead, because the bar is the only room in this building with any life in it.

I took a stool, ordered a bourbon, and started doing the math on my own life. Which is a bad habit, but the bourbon was there and the panels were over.

Here's what got unsettled. I've known I was a lesbian since I was twenty-two, and I mean known, the way you know your own name. First real relationship at twenty-two, with a woman named Carol who played softball and cooked terrible eggs. After Carol came Keisha, six years. After Keisha came Elaine, almost nine. I never once looked sideways at a man and felt anything. I used to say the line at parties, half joking. Men are fine, I just don't want one. People laughed. I meant it.

And now I'm sitting in an Omaha hotel bar feeling like somebody rearranged the furniture in my head while I was in a panel about boilerplate clauses.

I kept replaying this morning. Conference registration table. Rashid in line ahead of me, complaining about the badge lanyards, and I watched his hands fumble with the clip and thought, huh. Just, huh. That was it. One thought. A dormant little curiosity that I'd figured was dead and buried, sitting up and stretching.

I told myself it was exhaustion. Conference brain. Too much coffee. It didn't take, because here I was, two bourbons in, still turning it over.

Forty-four years old and having my first confusing feeling about a man. Christ.

* * *

"You're scowling at your drink," Rashid said, and sat down across from me without asking. He does that. He's been doing it for nine years, walking into rooms I'm already in and making himself comfortable. "Bad panel?"

"The worst panel. The guy read his slides. Out loud. To lawyers."

"That's the same guy from the Dallas conference. He did it there too."

"Of course he did. Why would the universe waste an original bad panel on us."

He flagged the waitress and ordered whatever the local beer was. He looked tired. Not polished-tired, the way he looks in a deposition, but actually tired, gray at the temples and loose in the shoulders. I'd never really seen him off the clock before. That was new too, and I didn't love how much attention I was paying to it.

"Eleven years," he said. "I counted today. Eleven years of these things."

"You've been doing conferences eleven years?"

"Conferences, arbitrations, CLE seminars, all of it. Three cities a month some quarters. My suitcases have better frequent flyer accounts than I do." He turned his glass around on the coaster. "I used to think it would slow down. Senior partners slow down, right? Wrong. You just get nicer hotels."

"This one isn't nicer. This one has a gym with two treadmills and one of them is broken."

"Did you try the broken one?"

"I did. It has character. It only works if you hold the safety clip upside down."

He laughed, and it was a real laugh, not the courtroom laugh. I realized I don't hear the real laugh often. Maybe I never had. We'd been sniping at each other across conference tables for a decade and I could not remember one conversation that wasn't about a case.

"Why do we do this," I said. "Honestly. The circuit."

"Because the work is good and the travel is the tax on it." He took a drink. "Why do you?"

"Same answer. Also my firm doesn't trust you alone with clients, so they send me to shadow you."

"They send you to counter me. There's a difference, and you know it."

"Counter. Fine." I waved a hand. "Eleven years of countering."

"Nine for you. I checked the record once, out of spite. Your first appearance against me was the Meridian arbitration."

"You checked the record out of spite?"

"I was annoyed you won the first round. Spite seemed appropriate."

I looked at him for a minute. He looked back, easy, no angle in it. And the strange thing was the sniping had just run out. There was nothing to argue about tonight. No case, no motion, no client in the room. Just two tired adults and bad hotel lighting.

"You ever get sick of it?" I asked. "The whole thing. The suits and the panels and the airport JSX lines."

"Every Sunday night." He said it flat, no joke in it, and that surprised me more than anything else he'd said. "Every single Sunday night I sit in my kitchen and think about quitting. Then Monday comes and I don't."

"Yeah." I turned my glass. "Monday comes and I don't."

The waitress came by and he ordered me another bourbon before I could say no, which should have annoyed me and didn't. Small stuff like that kept happening and I kept not hating it. His forearms on the table. The gray in his beard. Huh, again, that little word, sitting there like a bill I hadn't paid.

I should explain the blurting. I don't know how it happened exactly. I'd had two and a half bourbons, which is not enough to excuse anything but is enough to loosen the hinge on my mouth. We were talking about the conference hotel gyms, of all things, and he said something about how he'd never seen me at a hotel gym, and I said I run outside when I travel, and he said, what else don't I know about you then, joking, easy, and my mouth just opened.

"I've never been with a man."

The bar noise kept going around us. Somebody's phone rang two stools down. Rashid didn't move for a second. His eyebrows went up, and then they came back down, and he didn't laugh. That's the part I need to put down plain, because I'd braced for the laugh and it never came.

"Okay," he said.

"That's it? Okay?"

"What's the right response? Congratulations? Condolences?" He turned his glass again, slow. "You're telling me because?"

And there it was, the actual question, the one I'd been dodging in my own head since the registration table. Because I'm forty-four and the curiosity woke up and wouldn't lie back down. Because I've been certain about one big thing my whole adult life and today the certainty cracked, and the only person on earth I could imagine saying this to was my rival, because he doesn't do pity and he doesn't do gossip and there's nothing he could hold over me that we don't already hold over each other every day.

"Because I'm thinking about it," I said. "Changing that. The never part."

His eyebrows went up again. Higher this time.

He set the glass down. Careful. Like the coaster might object.

"Okay," he said. "Wow."

"You said okay before."

"That was for the news. This is for the follow-up." He rubbed his jaw. "You're asking me?"

"I'm asking you."

"You sure? Because that sounded like a statement, not a question."

"It's a question with a statement attached. Happy?"

"No." He laughed a little. "Nervous. Different thing."

"Good. Me too. So we're even."

He was quiet for a second. Then he said, "Yes. If you're serious, yes. But one condition."

"Name it."

"One night. No strings. Monday we go back to being whatever we are on the record, and this stays in this hotel."

"Deal. I'd hate for the discovery requests to get weird."

He grinned. "Nine years of opposing counsel. You think I'd jeopardize that?"

"I think you'd try to depose me about it and I'd take the Fifth."

We both laughed at that and something unclenched in my chest. That was the trick of it, I realized. With Rashid, the ground was already level. He'd seen me eat glass in arbitrations. There was nothing to be embarrassed about that he hadn't already witnessed.

"Room 1214," he said. "Or we finish our drinks like adults and then go up."

"Finish the drinks. I need the runway."

"Fair." He raised his glass. "To professional courtesy."

"That's not what this is."

"No," he agreed. "It really isn't."

* * *

The elevator ride took nine years off my life. Twelve floors. I watched the numbers and thought about bolting at nine. At ten I thought about it harder. At twelve the doors opened and I was still standing there, so apparently that was my answer.

His room was standard mid-tier. Beige everything. A king bed made up so tight you could bounce a quarter off it. He hung his jacket on the closet door like it was any other Tuesday.

"Bathroom's there," he said. "Take your time. I mean it. All the time you need."

"That obvious?"

"Only to me. I've been reading you for a decade."

I went into the bathroom and shut the door and stood there with my hand still on the knob.

The mirror was fogged at the corners from the shower someone took earlier. Fluorescent light. The worst possible light ever invented for a human face. I flipped it on anyway.

Forty-four. There it was. The lines around my eyes that Keisha used to trace with one finger, back when I let her. The gray coming in at my temples that I kept telling the colorist was on purpose. The softness at my jaw I'd earned honestly over three years of desk lunches.

Take the blouse off. Okay. Fine. I did. Hung it on the hook, one of my better blouses, the blue one, because apparently I'd planned this at some level without admitting it.

Then the slacks. Then I was standing there in my bra and underwear looking at a stranger's body.

Not a bad body. That's the truth and I'll say it once. Strong shoulders. Runner's legs, still. C-section scar I don't have, kids I don't have, and Elaine used to say I had a swimmer's back. But it was a body with receipts. Twenty-two years of living in it since Carol. Little wells at the base of my throat I didn't used to have. Skin that had started doing its own thing.

And the thought came, the real one, the one I'd been outrunning all day: what if he looks and it shows. Every year. Right there under the fluorescent light.

I sat on the edge of the tub for a second. Just sat.

Outside I could hear him moving around. Nothing heavy. The TV came on low, some news channel, then went off again. He was giving me the time, like he said.

I could leave. Open the door, make a joke about the treadmills, take the elevator down, and Monday we'd pretend this never happened. He'd let me. That was the other thing about Rashid. He'd let me, and never once bring it up, and I'd be forty-five and forty-six and still saying never.

I stood up. Looked at myself one more time.

Okay, Denise. Here's the body. It's the only one on offer.

I took the rest off. Bra, underwear, both in a fold on the counter. And then I did the stupid thing, the human thing, and turned sideways to check, and caught myself doing it, and stopped.

God. Forty-four years old and checking my profile like a woman in a fitting room.

"Denise?" His voice through the door. Easy. "No rush. I'm going to make coffee, actually. Terrible in-room coffee. You want some?"

"Coffee before?"

"It's decaf. I'm forty-eight, I don't need the heartbeat."

I laughed. Sitting naked on the edge of a strange bathtub, laughing at a decaf joke. That was the moment it went from terrifying to just strange. Just a night. Just a man who'd been on the other side of the table for a decade, making terrible