I groaned softly as I settled back at my desk, reaching down surreptitiously to massage one of my calves.
"Too many trips to the copier again, Camila?" My boss asked me sympathetically on her way by with her third cup of coffee.
I heaved a deep sigh, starting to respond, but she was already back through her office door, letting it swing mostly closed as she settled in, sipping her coffee. I shook my head and shifted my massage to my sore feet. It certainly wasn't my fault they installed the copier on the far side of the floor – and it wasn't Lauren's fault that she needed things copied a hundred times a day.
I'd been Lauren's assistant for not quite a year, on my fifth attempt at finding a steady job in the field. My first boss had been a kindly older man, but his second heart attack had forced his retirement, and there'd been no other job open for me that wouldn't have required more sucking up than I was willing to do. My second boss had tried to convince me that assistants always worked until 3 a.m. Don't get me wrong – I don't mind long hours. I don't have a life for them to interfere with anyway. Still, if I wanted to work eighteen hour days seven days a week, I could have gone to law school – and then I wouldn't be holding down assistant jobs for crap pay and no benefits. The third and fourth jobs...well, the less said about those, the better.
Then I had come to Jauregui and Associates, a tiny law firm that consisted of Lauren Jauregui and her partner, the elderly man whose practice she had taken over. He was near retirement, but apparently didn't like his wife all that much – so a young, ambitious lawyer who could take over his practice while not making him work too hard fit him like a glove.
Lauren also had two paralegals who worked for her, but I rarely saw them much. They worked on another floor of the office building where the law firm had its offices, and we shared them with two other such firms, so I basically only knew them as names on interoffice mail envelopes.
Lauren Jauregui had made a reputation for herself as a trial lawyer in her late twenties and early thirties – now forty years old, she practiced mostly as a trial consultant to larger firms. She still cut quite an imposing figure on the rare occasions she actually went to a trial, though – tall, fit, raven black hair, long legs, cold emerald eyes – she was the very image of a ruthless, bloodsucking lawyer.
I thought she was actually a pretty nice woman, myself – quiet and private about herself, but always composed, with a ready smile. She was also one of the few lawyers I'd met that didn't treat their assistants like slaves – she wasn't one of those fruity saccharine types either. When she asked you to call her Lauren, it wasn't patronizing. When she asked you to get coffee for her, it was because she couldn't get it herself at the moment, being stuck on a conference call or coming in a bit late and needing to rush straight to a meeting.
Of course, by this point in my career with her, I'd barely gotten up the courage to call her anything at all. I'm what you'd call the shy type. Very petite from head to toe, brunette, big brown eyes, still far too many freckles across my nose for a girl of twenty-eight, and a body that I worked hard on but seemed capable of attracting attention only from married men a quarter-century older than me. The fact that I hadn't been on a date with a boy since middle school didn't help with that at all. I couldn't even take advantage of it, for crying out loud – I've known I was gay since I was sixteen, when I realized that my masturbatory fantasies hadn't involved a boy in quite some time and weren't likely to any time soon. It hadn't taken very many dates with women to seal things more or less in stone for me. I was lucky, though – I came out in college, my friends were supportive, my mom seemed relieved that I had finally figured it out, and my dad's reaction consisted of one piece of advice: "Just remember, honey, a woman can be just as much of a prick as any man." Thanks, Dad – not bad advice, though.
Lauren, on the other hand, was divorced, though I knew little about her life in that respect. I'd heard something about a law professor, but she'd been divorced for years, and certainly didn't talk about her love life with me. She was one of those people who you'd finish telling your life story to and then realize she hasn't said a thing about herself.
So far, my time working for her had consisted entirely of variations on the exchange I just mentioned, though – basic pleasantries, small talk, and the like. We'd had a couple of very pleasant conversations over coffee and bagels, and she took me out to dinner a few times with the rest of the firm to celebrate a particularly big account, so I hesitantly considered us friends – or at least friendly co-workers.
"Camila?"
I looked up immediately when she called my name, and got up – wincing again at the ache in my feet and ankles – to see what Lauren wanted.
