Juris-Imprudence
Title: Juris-Imprudence
Author: x_los
Rating: R
Fandom: Legally Blonde, the Musical
Pairing: Callahan/Elle Woods
Summary: "Callahan always thought everything through. Every defense, every stratagem. He did not think through grabbing Elle Woods by the thin shoulders and shoving his tongue down her throat. For the second time."
A/N: After the show aralias suggested she'd be surprised if Five/Lucie Miller didn't pop up on the kink meme. In interpreted that as a request.
The second time he kissed her, it was in the midst of a long, hard, exquisitely torturous discovery fight. He might’ve wished for a more salacious noun phrase there, but then hadn’t there a special element of perverse, nigh-sexual frustration to the drawn out, hellish Johnson products liability case? In his insistent, demanding attempts to pierce her defense with his interrogatories, to wear down her resistance with his repeated requests for production? In her chaste refusal to give up what he asked of her?
He had, at one point, faxed over a copy of “To His Coy Mistress” as a cynical joke. She’d responded by buying him a subscription to Playboy, presumably to help him to help himself, and, humiliatingly, having it delivered to his office, to be opened and snickered at by this year’s crop of interns. These ones were already too fresh-the students thought him less intimidating now, after his failed gubernatorial bid. They still asked how high when he said jump, but they no longer tried to slit each other’s Achilles tendons to thin out the competition. Weak, he called it.
To get her back he sabotaged her own request for production with a sandbag, sending over two-thousand pages of poorly organized documents. Somewhere in there was information she might be able to use against his client, but he wished her good luck finding the needle in the haystack.
She came storming into his office herself, slamming the door behind her, and very unprofessionally begun by asking where in hell he got off wasting her time and the Court’s.
He leaned back in an obscenely expensive chair, raising an eyebrow at her. “Miss Woods,” he shook his head despairingly, forgetting, as he often did, that that wasn’t really her name anymore, “didn’t you listen when I said emotions make you weak? You look ridiculous, storming in and wailing as if I’ve violated you-you sound worse. Go home to King Corduroy, fax me something eloquent and scathing like the rest of the civilized world.”
“Look,” Elle seethed, “I get that you don’t like me. Fine. I don’t need you to. All I want is to be treated like-”
“Like the sort of rank amateur who’d storm into the opposing counsel’s office to rant at him?” He stood, his jacket abandoned on the chair. “If you can’t manage to find the door, please allow me to show you to it.”
“If you’d just listen to me-”
“If you’d just shut up-”
“You’re a sad, frustrated old man,” Elle spat.
“You’re so much more attractive when you don’t talk,” Callahan sneered, and Elle gaped at him, taking a step closer, like she wanted to just smack him.
“You-”
Callahan always thought everything through. Every defense, every stratagem. If he had trial, he wore whatever color of suit his firm’s physiology consultants advised him that the jury would find the most soothing, whatever would make him look the most trustworthy. If he was dining out-and now that he lived alone, that was almost every night-he had his assistant call the restaurant and make reservations, call his driver and tell Rico precisely when and where to pick him up. He far preferred the perfect execution of well-laid plans to spontaneity.
He did not think through grabbing Elle Woods by the thin shoulders and shoving his tongue down her throat. For the second time.
She didn’t respond, but she didn’t shove him off. She smelled of perfume, tasted like the confectionery lattes he knew she drank to excess. For a moment her manicured, bright pink nails sunk into his shoulders through his Oxford shirt, and his breath hitched into her mouth.
It was like startling a deer-she practically leapt back and bounded off, wordless and wide-eyed. In the shower that evening Callahan meditatively pressed the small, half-moons marks her sharpened nails had left in his skin-like little daggers. He smiled to himself. Good girl.
She wrapped the case quickly, settling for less than he thought she could have. He didn’t see her for another two years, which was suspicious in itself-there were dozens of bar functions she, too, should have attended, and Boston was hardly a large town. When he did they were co-counsels. The assignment was so juicy neither of them could afford to pass it up. He’d made some mocking comment about her at least having learned not to quarrel with personally distasteful but lucrative assignments from him, and she’d looked away quickly, biting her lip. He’d been surprised, then intrigued.
She was undeniably on edge in his presence-very unlike the uncowable Elle he knew. Callahan couldn’t help picking someone’s weaknesses until he knew them well enough to use against them, and though they were currently allied, he couldn’t help himself. He had to know what was going on in that possibly aerated, insufferably blonde head of hers. The trouble was he couldn’t get her to stay in a room alone with him long enough to properly fix and interrogate her. Then he wondered if, in fact, that was part of the problem.
After a meeting with their clients, he contrived to slip into an elevator she alone occupied at the last moment. A tense silence seeped in with the muzak. Elle stared determinedly at the buttons. Each was safely ensconced in a lit ring, as hermetically sealed off from its fellows as she seemed to wish she could be. He watched her fingers twitch, tapping irregularly on her Bergdorf bag. She needlessly pushed back a lock of her blonde hair. The apple of her throat bobbed as she swallowed.
He leaned forward, blocking her against the wall with his arm. “Woods,” he asked in a crisp class-room tone, as if he were cracking her name over his knee, “are you afraid of me?” Amusement in the question, and a hint of something darker.
Her eyes flared, and the elevator doors opened with a bright bing. He stepped back and Elle rushed around him, wordless, walking fast. He stepped out of the elevator and stared after her, a smirk twitching onto his lips at the confirmation of something he’d strongly suspected years ago.
She wanted him.
***
“What’s your sign?” Elle asked the deponent, smiling encouragingly. It was routine procedure to ask a few easy to answer questions at the beginning of each deposition, to accustom their victim to the format, to lull him into candor.
This time, Callahan had planned. He wore an outfit that did him every favor expensive tailoring could do a (somewhat) older man. Discretely, under the table, he laid a hand on her knee. To her credit Elle’s smile didn’t so much as flicker, though it did grow more brittle.
“And how long have you been a resident of Massachusetts? Since you were born?”
Callahan ran his hand lazily up her leg, drawing circles, fingertips grazing over the grain of the hosiery, drifting under the hemline of her relentlessly cheerful skirt. He bet she knew the proper name for its cut and everything. He avoided actually coming to the crux of the matter, but he did spend a good ten minutes fondling her inner thigh before, with a friendly pat, leaving off to open the file before him and start in on a withering cross-examination.
***
When she was tired and worn, her good sense at its lowest ebb, he moved. It was the end of the week’s second all-nighter, and they had just finished were hashing out a settlement proposal they should have turned in yesterday, but which wasn’t technically overdue until the opposing counsel’s firm opened at eight in the morning. Callahan had sent an intern (at four a.m.? Elle had been amusingly scandalized, but too exhausted to really protest.) to deliver it for them. The post-mortem of the work they’d done played out with the fine attention to detail paid by two experts who loved their work.
This time, when he leaned forward, she didn’t looked surprised. When he quietly told her to sit up on the desk, commanding as he’d ever been as her professor, she did it. Her arms draped around his neck.
She rolled her eyes at his ready erection. “There really is nothing soft about you.
He raised an eyebrow at her lacy, hardly lawyerly lingerie, and she smiled wearily at him. He slipped fingers into her predictably pink, surprisingly wet sex, and when he fucked her it was roughly-she’d expected that from him. She bit his lip hard when he kissed her, and he gasped approvingly, his little shark. He laughed genuinely, not maliciously, at her coital ‘oh my god, oh my god.’
Callahan didn’t ask after Emmet, his former protégé, whose wife he fucked over his desk and in expensive hotels after pricy working lunches (which he told Elle he picked up the tab for, and which he actually charged to their clients) when the afternoon’s work schedule permitted, and once in master bedroom of her parent’s house in the Hamptons where she’d gone to get some work done alone. That had failed miserably when Callahan had intimidated her secretary into giving away Elle’s classified location. He’d taken the car up and spent the weekend working with her and working her over.
He didn’t have to ask about Shabby Sheik, he could have told her how that story ended before it began. Poor boy marries pretty little rich girl-and to him she is part woman and part conquest, and every fuck is claiming membership in her world, is an effort to revenge himself on her. If he’d been charmed by her spirit, he’d become disgusted with her easy privilege, with her frivolity. The chip on Emmet’s shoulder would never go away, and would, given time, wear away his civility and her good humor. He would never forgive Elle for not checking the bill at a restaurant before giving the server her Visa Platinum, even though they could now obviously afford it, and though Elle always acted out of a sense of abundant trust in the good will of others.
Their schedules would get busier. They would begin to avoid each other, growing ever more distant. He’d hate her friends, hate her dog, hate things about her and then, finally, he’d hate her. Read your Thomas Hardy, your Mark Twain, he might’ve told Elle at twenty-six, if she’d asked.
She didn’t confide in him now-she could have, he thought she should have. He wouldn’t have made it especially unbearable for her, not anymore than he usually did. The democracy of Callahan’s contempt was undeniable-he despised everyone equally, unless they were especially clever or extremely useful to him. Elle had proved herself both these things.
They drank a bottle of wine quietly at his house one evening. She lay on the couch in front of the hearth, he sat on the floor below her. It was just convenient-they’d been on that side of town. It was months and months into the case, and into this, and still it was the first time they’d ever been to one of their homes. They felt uncomfortable and twitchy as cat burglars-he supposed Elle at least was an adulteress, but he had no excuse.
“Have you got anything to eat?” Elle asked, considering the excellent wine he’d bought them, thinking about how she couldn’t drink like she used to and that she should probably get something solid in her stomach before having another glass.
He considered, then pronounced, “Veal cutlets in the deep freeze.”
“You actually eat veal? Typical. I bet you savor the animal cruelty. You probably pay someone to poke the poor baby cow an extra time, just for you.”
He smiled at the fire. “You know me so well.”
“Nothing else then? I can’t eat that.”
“I’m afraid not.” He didn’t bother to stock the fridge anymore-he almost literally did live at the office these days.
“They used to say you bathed in the blood of sheep, back at school. I thought you might be keeping a lamb in the shed for that-I could so totally go for a gyro.”
“Babies, actually,” he corrected promptly. “Keeps me supple. Limber,” he pronounced with filthy relish. “I do it all for you, dear.”
She’d taken his wine glass away from him so as not to spill it on his lovely shirt and smacked him thoroughly with a pillow from the couch.
“It was still wrong, you know,” Elle said meditatively, after he’d wrested the pillow away from her and sent it sailing across the room, knocking over one of his American Lawyer Awards trophies.
“Blood-bathing? How so?”
“Hitting on me. I was twenty-three. I was your student. How could you even go there?”
He remembered how desperate she’d been to impress him, when she’d finally stopped worrying about catching her idiot ex-boyfriend’s eye. The way she’d leaned into him as she tried to argue her point about the pool boy’s proclivities. Her back against his chest, her head tucked under his chin. The rich vanilla-bean smell of her imported shampoo.
“Tell me you didn’t find me the least bit attractive,” Callahan flexed the fingers of his hand, taking up his wine glass again. “That you weren’t the slightest bit curious. You were interested. I was in a position of power over you, my admittedly unwise attraction to you gave you power over me. I ‘went there’ at your invitation.”
“I didn’t ask to be sexually harassed in the workplace, you dinosaur. It was still immoral.”
He laughed. “Woods, you ingénue. Of course it was, I did it.”
***
“It’s for you,” he shoved the white box at her carelessly with one hand, flicking through the papers on his desk with the other.
Elle hesitated, taking it cautiously. “It is a poisonous snake trained to attack when I open its box?”
“You know very well Vivian doesn’t work for me, she’s off squandering her talent in Guatemala or some similar ridiculous hell hole.”
She laughed despite herself, smothering it quickly. “I like Vivian.”
“And I like poisonous snakes-open the damn box.”
Elle’s eyes widened when she parted the tissue paper. She pulled out the dress almost with reverence. “Is this a-”
“None other.”
“But the Spring collection’s not even out.”
“Neither is the head of that particular fashion house, surprisingly, and if he’d like to keep it that way he’ll arrange to have something made in your size and,” he winced even saying it, it was nearly as bad as ‘whip your way to tighter buns,’ “signature color when I tell him to. He’s yet another of our difficult gay and European cases, or he was until I caught him blowing my driver during a dinner party.”
Elle stared at the dress. “We’re not going out.” She looked over at him, worried. “That’s totally not what this is.”
“No, of course not,” Callahan agreed breezily, “we’re just fucking almost every day, working together, going on dates and spending the weekend at your parents’ house in the Hamptons. And I can’t think of anyone I hate less. ‘That’s like, totally different.’”
Elle flushed pink as the dress. “Oh shut up.”
“Make me,” he retorted adolescently. “I’m rewarding you for the successful conclusion of our case. And I’m asking you to be my partner. In the legal sense, not the fucking you sense, though on that note, free up Thursday night, I don’t have anything Friday before a continuation hearing at three, and I’m booked all this weekend. Condemned to drive up and play tennis with what’s left of the Kennedys at the Compound-pray one or all of them get assassinated before the week’s out, because I can think of almost nothing I’d rather do less.”
Elle still stared at the box, ignoring his heavy-handed attempt to shift subjects. “Are you asking because you’re, you know, interested, like with the internship?”
“I’m asking because you’ve earned it,” he corrected, “like with the internship.” He’d been grudgingly impressed by young Elle’s capability as much as her truly impressive ass. She had to know that, surely. He remembered growling that he’d thought she was smarter than that, surprised and angry at being rejected, when he’d really thought- but that was years ago.
“Think about it over dinner; I thought we’d celebrate.”
Still she hesitated. “Dinner? It’s Emmet and I’s anniversary.”
He knew. "Well you'll just have to prioritize, won't you."
Elle shook the box, considering, and he told himself he was not the slightest bit agitated by her prevarication. He pointedly put down the pen he was turning over.
“Let me choose where we go,” she said finally.
He shifted uncomfortably. “I’ve already made reservations. Besides, you like the French place by the court house.”
“I know I do, but loosen up. Not everything has to be planned in advance.”
This was more than dinner, he knew. This was the sort of concession she’d expect as his partner. It would be her due. He would have to actually live up to the spirit of his proposition, to be flexible enough to allow her a share of his vaunted control. He tapped his fingers on his desk for a long moment, then resigned himself to the inevitable. “Alright,” he sighed. “Wherever you like. You’ll probably have me in a sports bar with the common people or some nonsense.” He sighed manfully-sulking, but not unwilling.
For the first time in what he was beginning to think of as their relationship, Elle Woods kissed him first.
Author: x_los
Rating: R
Fandom: Legally Blonde, the Musical
Pairing: Callahan/Elle Woods
Summary: "Callahan always thought everything through. Every defense, every stratagem. He did not think through grabbing Elle Woods by the thin shoulders and shoving his tongue down her throat. For the second time."
A/N: After the show aralias suggested she'd be surprised if Five/Lucie Miller didn't pop up on the kink meme. In interpreted that as a request.
The second time he kissed her, it was in the midst of a long, hard, exquisitely torturous discovery fight. He might’ve wished for a more salacious noun phrase there, but then hadn’t there a special element of perverse, nigh-sexual frustration to the drawn out, hellish Johnson products liability case? In his insistent, demanding attempts to pierce her defense with his interrogatories, to wear down her resistance with his repeated requests for production? In her chaste refusal to give up what he asked of her?
He had, at one point, faxed over a copy of “To His Coy Mistress” as a cynical joke. She’d responded by buying him a subscription to Playboy, presumably to help him to help himself, and, humiliatingly, having it delivered to his office, to be opened and snickered at by this year’s crop of interns. These ones were already too fresh-the students thought him less intimidating now, after his failed gubernatorial bid. They still asked how high when he said jump, but they no longer tried to slit each other’s Achilles tendons to thin out the competition. Weak, he called it.
To get her back he sabotaged her own request for production with a sandbag, sending over two-thousand pages of poorly organized documents. Somewhere in there was information she might be able to use against his client, but he wished her good luck finding the needle in the haystack.
She came storming into his office herself, slamming the door behind her, and very unprofessionally begun by asking where in hell he got off wasting her time and the Court’s.
He leaned back in an obscenely expensive chair, raising an eyebrow at her. “Miss Woods,” he shook his head despairingly, forgetting, as he often did, that that wasn’t really her name anymore, “didn’t you listen when I said emotions make you weak? You look ridiculous, storming in and wailing as if I’ve violated you-you sound worse. Go home to King Corduroy, fax me something eloquent and scathing like the rest of the civilized world.”
“Look,” Elle seethed, “I get that you don’t like me. Fine. I don’t need you to. All I want is to be treated like-”
“Like the sort of rank amateur who’d storm into the opposing counsel’s office to rant at him?” He stood, his jacket abandoned on the chair. “If you can’t manage to find the door, please allow me to show you to it.”
“If you’d just listen to me-”
“If you’d just shut up-”
“You’re a sad, frustrated old man,” Elle spat.
“You’re so much more attractive when you don’t talk,” Callahan sneered, and Elle gaped at him, taking a step closer, like she wanted to just smack him.
“You-”
Callahan always thought everything through. Every defense, every stratagem. If he had trial, he wore whatever color of suit his firm’s physiology consultants advised him that the jury would find the most soothing, whatever would make him look the most trustworthy. If he was dining out-and now that he lived alone, that was almost every night-he had his assistant call the restaurant and make reservations, call his driver and tell Rico precisely when and where to pick him up. He far preferred the perfect execution of well-laid plans to spontaneity.
He did not think through grabbing Elle Woods by the thin shoulders and shoving his tongue down her throat. For the second time.
She didn’t respond, but she didn’t shove him off. She smelled of perfume, tasted like the confectionery lattes he knew she drank to excess. For a moment her manicured, bright pink nails sunk into his shoulders through his Oxford shirt, and his breath hitched into her mouth.
It was like startling a deer-she practically leapt back and bounded off, wordless and wide-eyed. In the shower that evening Callahan meditatively pressed the small, half-moons marks her sharpened nails had left in his skin-like little daggers. He smiled to himself. Good girl.
She wrapped the case quickly, settling for less than he thought she could have. He didn’t see her for another two years, which was suspicious in itself-there were dozens of bar functions she, too, should have attended, and Boston was hardly a large town. When he did they were co-counsels. The assignment was so juicy neither of them could afford to pass it up. He’d made some mocking comment about her at least having learned not to quarrel with personally distasteful but lucrative assignments from him, and she’d looked away quickly, biting her lip. He’d been surprised, then intrigued.
She was undeniably on edge in his presence-very unlike the uncowable Elle he knew. Callahan couldn’t help picking someone’s weaknesses until he knew them well enough to use against them, and though they were currently allied, he couldn’t help himself. He had to know what was going on in that possibly aerated, insufferably blonde head of hers. The trouble was he couldn’t get her to stay in a room alone with him long enough to properly fix and interrogate her. Then he wondered if, in fact, that was part of the problem.
After a meeting with their clients, he contrived to slip into an elevator she alone occupied at the last moment. A tense silence seeped in with the muzak. Elle stared determinedly at the buttons. Each was safely ensconced in a lit ring, as hermetically sealed off from its fellows as she seemed to wish she could be. He watched her fingers twitch, tapping irregularly on her Bergdorf bag. She needlessly pushed back a lock of her blonde hair. The apple of her throat bobbed as she swallowed.
He leaned forward, blocking her against the wall with his arm. “Woods,” he asked in a crisp class-room tone, as if he were cracking her name over his knee, “are you afraid of me?” Amusement in the question, and a hint of something darker.
Her eyes flared, and the elevator doors opened with a bright bing. He stepped back and Elle rushed around him, wordless, walking fast. He stepped out of the elevator and stared after her, a smirk twitching onto his lips at the confirmation of something he’d strongly suspected years ago.
She wanted him.
***
“What’s your sign?” Elle asked the deponent, smiling encouragingly. It was routine procedure to ask a few easy to answer questions at the beginning of each deposition, to accustom their victim to the format, to lull him into candor.
This time, Callahan had planned. He wore an outfit that did him every favor expensive tailoring could do a (somewhat) older man. Discretely, under the table, he laid a hand on her knee. To her credit Elle’s smile didn’t so much as flicker, though it did grow more brittle.
“And how long have you been a resident of Massachusetts? Since you were born?”
Callahan ran his hand lazily up her leg, drawing circles, fingertips grazing over the grain of the hosiery, drifting under the hemline of her relentlessly cheerful skirt. He bet she knew the proper name for its cut and everything. He avoided actually coming to the crux of the matter, but he did spend a good ten minutes fondling her inner thigh before, with a friendly pat, leaving off to open the file before him and start in on a withering cross-examination.
***
When she was tired and worn, her good sense at its lowest ebb, he moved. It was the end of the week’s second all-nighter, and they had just finished were hashing out a settlement proposal they should have turned in yesterday, but which wasn’t technically overdue until the opposing counsel’s firm opened at eight in the morning. Callahan had sent an intern (at four a.m.? Elle had been amusingly scandalized, but too exhausted to really protest.) to deliver it for them. The post-mortem of the work they’d done played out with the fine attention to detail paid by two experts who loved their work.
This time, when he leaned forward, she didn’t looked surprised. When he quietly told her to sit up on the desk, commanding as he’d ever been as her professor, she did it. Her arms draped around his neck.
She rolled her eyes at his ready erection. “There really is nothing soft about you.
He raised an eyebrow at her lacy, hardly lawyerly lingerie, and she smiled wearily at him. He slipped fingers into her predictably pink, surprisingly wet sex, and when he fucked her it was roughly-she’d expected that from him. She bit his lip hard when he kissed her, and he gasped approvingly, his little shark. He laughed genuinely, not maliciously, at her coital ‘oh my god, oh my god.’
Callahan didn’t ask after Emmet, his former protégé, whose wife he fucked over his desk and in expensive hotels after pricy working lunches (which he told Elle he picked up the tab for, and which he actually charged to their clients) when the afternoon’s work schedule permitted, and once in master bedroom of her parent’s house in the Hamptons where she’d gone to get some work done alone. That had failed miserably when Callahan had intimidated her secretary into giving away Elle’s classified location. He’d taken the car up and spent the weekend working with her and working her over.
He didn’t have to ask about Shabby Sheik, he could have told her how that story ended before it began. Poor boy marries pretty little rich girl-and to him she is part woman and part conquest, and every fuck is claiming membership in her world, is an effort to revenge himself on her. If he’d been charmed by her spirit, he’d become disgusted with her easy privilege, with her frivolity. The chip on Emmet’s shoulder would never go away, and would, given time, wear away his civility and her good humor. He would never forgive Elle for not checking the bill at a restaurant before giving the server her Visa Platinum, even though they could now obviously afford it, and though Elle always acted out of a sense of abundant trust in the good will of others.
Their schedules would get busier. They would begin to avoid each other, growing ever more distant. He’d hate her friends, hate her dog, hate things about her and then, finally, he’d hate her. Read your Thomas Hardy, your Mark Twain, he might’ve told Elle at twenty-six, if she’d asked.
She didn’t confide in him now-she could have, he thought she should have. He wouldn’t have made it especially unbearable for her, not anymore than he usually did. The democracy of Callahan’s contempt was undeniable-he despised everyone equally, unless they were especially clever or extremely useful to him. Elle had proved herself both these things.
They drank a bottle of wine quietly at his house one evening. She lay on the couch in front of the hearth, he sat on the floor below her. It was just convenient-they’d been on that side of town. It was months and months into the case, and into this, and still it was the first time they’d ever been to one of their homes. They felt uncomfortable and twitchy as cat burglars-he supposed Elle at least was an adulteress, but he had no excuse.
“Have you got anything to eat?” Elle asked, considering the excellent wine he’d bought them, thinking about how she couldn’t drink like she used to and that she should probably get something solid in her stomach before having another glass.
He considered, then pronounced, “Veal cutlets in the deep freeze.”
“You actually eat veal? Typical. I bet you savor the animal cruelty. You probably pay someone to poke the poor baby cow an extra time, just for you.”
He smiled at the fire. “You know me so well.”
“Nothing else then? I can’t eat that.”
“I’m afraid not.” He didn’t bother to stock the fridge anymore-he almost literally did live at the office these days.
“They used to say you bathed in the blood of sheep, back at school. I thought you might be keeping a lamb in the shed for that-I could so totally go for a gyro.”
“Babies, actually,” he corrected promptly. “Keeps me supple. Limber,” he pronounced with filthy relish. “I do it all for you, dear.”
She’d taken his wine glass away from him so as not to spill it on his lovely shirt and smacked him thoroughly with a pillow from the couch.
“It was still wrong, you know,” Elle said meditatively, after he’d wrested the pillow away from her and sent it sailing across the room, knocking over one of his American Lawyer Awards trophies.
“Blood-bathing? How so?”
“Hitting on me. I was twenty-three. I was your student. How could you even go there?”
He remembered how desperate she’d been to impress him, when she’d finally stopped worrying about catching her idiot ex-boyfriend’s eye. The way she’d leaned into him as she tried to argue her point about the pool boy’s proclivities. Her back against his chest, her head tucked under his chin. The rich vanilla-bean smell of her imported shampoo.
“Tell me you didn’t find me the least bit attractive,” Callahan flexed the fingers of his hand, taking up his wine glass again. “That you weren’t the slightest bit curious. You were interested. I was in a position of power over you, my admittedly unwise attraction to you gave you power over me. I ‘went there’ at your invitation.”
“I didn’t ask to be sexually harassed in the workplace, you dinosaur. It was still immoral.”
He laughed. “Woods, you ingénue. Of course it was, I did it.”
***
“It’s for you,” he shoved the white box at her carelessly with one hand, flicking through the papers on his desk with the other.
Elle hesitated, taking it cautiously. “It is a poisonous snake trained to attack when I open its box?”
“You know very well Vivian doesn’t work for me, she’s off squandering her talent in Guatemala or some similar ridiculous hell hole.”
She laughed despite herself, smothering it quickly. “I like Vivian.”
“And I like poisonous snakes-open the damn box.”
Elle’s eyes widened when she parted the tissue paper. She pulled out the dress almost with reverence. “Is this a-”
“None other.”
“But the Spring collection’s not even out.”
“Neither is the head of that particular fashion house, surprisingly, and if he’d like to keep it that way he’ll arrange to have something made in your size and,” he winced even saying it, it was nearly as bad as ‘whip your way to tighter buns,’ “signature color when I tell him to. He’s yet another of our difficult gay and European cases, or he was until I caught him blowing my driver during a dinner party.”
Elle stared at the dress. “We’re not going out.” She looked over at him, worried. “That’s totally not what this is.”
“No, of course not,” Callahan agreed breezily, “we’re just fucking almost every day, working together, going on dates and spending the weekend at your parents’ house in the Hamptons. And I can’t think of anyone I hate less. ‘That’s like, totally different.’”
Elle flushed pink as the dress. “Oh shut up.”
“Make me,” he retorted adolescently. “I’m rewarding you for the successful conclusion of our case. And I’m asking you to be my partner. In the legal sense, not the fucking you sense, though on that note, free up Thursday night, I don’t have anything Friday before a continuation hearing at three, and I’m booked all this weekend. Condemned to drive up and play tennis with what’s left of the Kennedys at the Compound-pray one or all of them get assassinated before the week’s out, because I can think of almost nothing I’d rather do less.”
Elle still stared at the box, ignoring his heavy-handed attempt to shift subjects. “Are you asking because you’re, you know, interested, like with the internship?”
“I’m asking because you’ve earned it,” he corrected, “like with the internship.” He’d been grudgingly impressed by young Elle’s capability as much as her truly impressive ass. She had to know that, surely. He remembered growling that he’d thought she was smarter than that, surprised and angry at being rejected, when he’d really thought- but that was years ago.
“Think about it over dinner; I thought we’d celebrate.”
Still she hesitated. “Dinner? It’s Emmet and I’s anniversary.”
He knew. "Well you'll just have to prioritize, won't you."
Elle shook the box, considering, and he told himself he was not the slightest bit agitated by her prevarication. He pointedly put down the pen he was turning over.
“Let me choose where we go,” she said finally.
He shifted uncomfortably. “I’ve already made reservations. Besides, you like the French place by the court house.”
“I know I do, but loosen up. Not everything has to be planned in advance.”
This was more than dinner, he knew. This was the sort of concession she’d expect as his partner. It would be her due. He would have to actually live up to the spirit of his proposition, to be flexible enough to allow her a share of his vaunted control. He tapped his fingers on his desk for a long moment, then resigned himself to the inevitable. “Alright,” he sighed. “Wherever you like. You’ll probably have me in a sports bar with the common people or some nonsense.” He sighed manfully-sulking, but not unwilling.
For the first time in what he was beginning to think of as their relationship, Elle Woods kissed him first.