A Change of Careers
By JJ Argus
Copyright 2011
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
About the author
JJ Argus started writing for Star Books more than two decades ago, spinning out 3 novelettes a month for minimal compensation. Then moved on to write short fiction for Penthouse, Oui, Nugget, and other mens magazines before discovering and being discovered by British publishers. Adjusting to stricter quality requirements, Argus was published repeatedly by Silver Moon, Chimera, Olympia and Nexus. JJ Argus has published over 250 novels to date
All characters depicted in this story are over eighteen.
Chapter One
Have you ever set out to reach a dream and then discovered when you got there that the dream was just a fantasy, and that the reality was nothing like what you'd hoped? Well, that's me. I killed myself in school to get top marks, to get into a good law school, to get top marks there, to get hired by a top law firm, to become a lawyer. I didn't just want to be any old lawyer, though. I wanted to be a lawyer like all the ones on television, and in the movies, a brilliant lawyer who defended the innocent and took the powerful and guilty to task.
Well, guess what? Being a lawyer is about taking whatever you're assigned and most of what you're assigned is deadly dull and has nothing to do with innocence. It's also about sucking up to the partners, about doing favors for them, about back-stabbing other associates to try and make them look bad and yourself look good, and working your ass off day and night in hopes of getting that all important partnership offer.
Such offers don't come easily in the powerful firms, you know. You can toil in obscurity for years, decades, before the princes of the company deign to notice you and consider you worthy for invitation into their ranks. After I graduated from Harvard Law School, I started working for Mitchel and Cardazio as a junior associate. I worked seventy and eighty hour weeks for much of my first year, with no vacation time.
I'm not sure at what point I realized how dead my dream was, how pointless. Maybe in my third year, when it all came home to me just how tiresome, how dull, how pointless it all was. I was making an okay salary, though nothing special, but had a huge student loan to pay back. I graduated at twenty six, so there I was, three years later, toiling like a sweatshop worker, living in a cheap rental apartment, taking the subway to work, most of my money going to pay my student loan.
Boyfriend? Husband? Please! Who had time for that!? I'd been working my ass off for ten years. While I'd had some dates, on occasion, I'd been too fixed on the prize to put the kind of attention into a relationship needed to make them succeed. I'd always told myself there'd be time for that later, when I reached the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
But after more than two years as a lawyer I'd begun to realize that pot of gold was easily ten or more years away; likely more. And I was coming to hate my work, too. Life was so tedious and stultifying at the firm. It was one contract after another, always elbowing against my rivals for the better jobs, to please the more important partners, always desperate to make myself look good. What I didn't spend on my student loan I spent on my wardrobe.
And what a wardrobe it was. It consisted of very expensive clothes done in as bland a fashion as possible. No bright colors. No fashion on the cutting edge. In fact, the less feminine the better. It's ironic, but the fashion mavens at the firm weren't the female lawyers, but the legal secretaries. They, at least, were allowed to dress like women. Most of my wardrobe consisted of blue and gray suits, cut in a loose, mannish fashion, with either long skirts or trousers and black leather shoes.
Hair was a problem too. Many of the female lawyers wore their hair short because they hadn't the time to deal with it, and because long hair looked too feminine and got in the way. I had tried pulling my hair back in pony tails but that apparently was considered too informal. So my hair was pulled up and back into a loose, bun behind my head. I also wore glasses, not because I needed them, but because I thought they gave me an appearance of intelligence.
I hated my hair, hated my wardrobe, and hated the stupid glasses. I hated the work, hated the atmosphere, and hated being poor all the time. I hated not having a man in my life, or, for that matter, anyone else. I didn't even have time for a dog or cat! I was lonely, and angry, and starting to realize how badly I'd fucked up my life, and that there was no real prospect of change in the near future.
The funny thing was that before college I'd been something of a wild child. I'd partied, gotten drunk, done drugs, and yes, had sex, and lots of it. I looked back at that time as the only fun, the only enjoyable time of my life, the only part of my life that had any LIFE in it.
And then, one afternoon, into my life walked Veronica Rawlins, otherwise known as my 11:15 appointment.
Veronica Rawlins was one of those women who momentarily take your breath away. I walked into the meeting room, holding the contract for a low-rise building she was purchasing, and came face to face with what looked like an old time Hollywood starlet. She was gloriously blonde, five foot ten, wearing a sleek blue Prada dress which hugged her many curves like a second skin – but without being slutty. She had a Gucci handbag and wore Chanel. There was a Rolex on her wrist and a diamond necklace dangling casually from a gold chain, pulling the eye to the top of her cleavage.
She knew how to dress stylishly, and to apply makeup to look beautiful and even sensual without looking cheap. Facing her in my formless gray suit and pulled back hair, I felt like a man by comparison. I felt gauche, low-rent, and because of the way the firm was so strictly segregated along who was and who wasn't important, I found that I felt very much out of my class, and I mean that literally. It was like old world, where you had the nobility and the peasants. And I was one of the dime a dozen peasants of no real importance. I felt like I ought to genuflect before her.
My first thought was – Wow!
My second was that someone had made a mistake in guiding an important and wealthy woman like this to little old me. Surely one of the higher level associates, perhaps even one of the partners, ought to have met with her! That, in turn, made me anxious. If I screwed up or offended her someone important would hear about it and I'd be in major trouble. That made me nervous as I gave her a timorous smile and a limp handshake as I sat down across from her.
She seemed amused, in that lazy, superior fashion, and that made me nervous again, and also irritated. I couldn't afford to show either, however, so clamped down on them as I concentrated on explaining the terms of the purchase agreement, and what the firm, that is to say, I, thought about those terms.
Her questions revealed a sharp mind, and a determination that she understood each and every clause of importance, and its implications. She sure didn't hesitate to demand further clarification or to pose questions. I'd known senior lawyers who weren't as precise and determined. The contract was fairly routine, and so the appointments secretary had set aside just 45 minutes for it. But we were still going at it at almost 12:30, which meant I'd missed lunch.
And you didn't get to reschedule lunch. I had another appointment. I was checking my watch furtively, but apparently it wasn't furtive enough.
“Am I boring you, Ms. Stephens?” she asked dryly.
“Pardon? No, of course not, Ms. Rawlins!” I exclaimed guiltily.
“You keep checking your watch.”
I blushed a little. “I have another appointment scheduled for 12:30, I said apologetically. “The appointment secretary felt that 45 minutes would be suitable to discuss this type of routine contract.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Let me guess, so I was supposed to be a good little girl, accept everything without much questioning, and be out of here in time for, I'm guessing your thirty minute lunch break?”
“Well...”
“Which you'll eat at your desk while researching another contract, I'm guessing,” she said, leaning back in her chair.
“I don't – .”
“Tell your appointments secretary to give your 12:30 to someone else, please,” she said.
It wasn't a request. I smiled hesitantly, then excused myself and hurried up the aisle to where Mrs. Bentley sat. She was an arrogant biddy, who, despite the lowly title, had considerable power, and the ear of the partners. She presided over several clerks, and decided how most incoming appointments were awarded. Many, of course, were specifically directed to certain partners, while others came from those partners and were directed towards certain associates. It was the less important, less connected clients, the new ones, which she decided on herself.
Of course, this meant the younger associates fell all over themselves to flatter and please her, and that she treated us all like peasants. Given we were lawyers and she was a mere secretary that was somewhat disturbing, but it was the way things were.
“Mrs. Bentley, could you please reschedule my 12:30,” I asked. “My 11:15 is still here and still asking questions.”
She raised her head, pulling it back so she could look down her long nose at me with disapproval, then checked her computer.
“Your 11:15 was a simple real estate sale contract which should have been routine and easily handled within the time frame I set,” she said.
“Ms. Rawlins has a lot of questions,” I said.
She snorted disdainfully. “Have her sign the contract and tell her goodbye,” she said. “The longer that woman is here the lower our reputation goes.”
“Excuse me?” I said in surprise.
She eyed me piteously. “We're only taking on this routine task as a favor to an important existing client,” she said. “And I can imagine why. It does his reputation no good, although it's already in tatters, and does our firm's reputation no good either.”
“She seems like a uhm, important woman,” I said uncertainly.
Again she gave me that piteous look. “She has a consulting agency,” she said, giving me a significant look which sort of put quotes around 'consulting'. “I suppose that gives her influence with certain sorts of men, but I wouldn't call that important. I will assign your 12:30 elsewhere, but see to it she is gone before 1:00, please.”
I returned to the office, trying to figure out her attitude, and it was just as I opened the door and looked at Rawlins that I realized what she must be suggesting.
Rawlins was a prostitute! Although, from the looks of her, she was of that higher echelon that people called 'escorts'. And if so, there must indeed be a lot of money in that sort of thing because she was buying a three million dollar building.
I'd never met an actual prostitute, never spoken to one, and I guess I was looking at her as furtively as I had been checking my watch because she frowned at me in irritation.
“Is it the dress or me?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“You're staring.”
“I wasn't!” I protested.
“I'm beginning to wonder if I should tell Harry that the next time he recommends a legal firm it shouldn't be this one,” she said.
And wouldn't THAT make me look good!
“But... I'm sorry but I don't understand the cause of your unhappiness,” I said stiffly. “I've done my best to explain the purpose of each of these clauses to your full understanding and...”
“How long have you been a lawyer?”
“I assure you, Ms. Rawlins that all the attorneys employed by Mitchel and Cardazio are fully qualified in the area of specialization which – .”
“Spare me,” she said, waving her hand dismissively.
She pointed a long, perfectly manicured finger at me. “You, look like you're fresh out of college”
“I've been here almost three years now, Ms. Rawlins,” I said firmly.
“Have you? You look younger than that. You act like a virgin, in fact.”
“I'm neither young nor virginal,” I said, flushing a bit. “I'm fully capable of handling a routine real estate contract. Now if we could get back to the details We're almost finished.”
“No, we're not. I want clauses eight through eleven taken out.”
“But they're routine...”
“Not for a building this size. And given the market and my generosity on the price, I think they'll be willing. I'd suggest you contact their lawyer and arrange for it. Be persuasive, Ms. Stephens.”
“I'll discuss it with them, of course, but I can't make any promises,” I said, my heart sinking.
If she really was some sort of escort I wanted as little to do with her as possible. The other associates, some of them, at least, would do their best to play up any such association to make me look bad. But there was no easy way out of it. She was determined, and left soon afterward. Bentley saw no reason to reassign the case, so I was stuck with it.
I wasn't as firm with the lawyer for the company selling the building as I could have been. I was sort of hoping they'd refuse. Then I could call Rawlins, tell her that, and she'd refuse to buy the building. That would conclude our business, and hopefully, when she found some other place to buy she'd take her legal business elsewhere. Unfortunately, Rawlins was right about the economy, and the other party seemed desperate to sell, so they agreed.
But instead of agreeing to come to the office she insisted I go to her office, and the firm was happy to oblige since they billed for every minute of my travel time. I think Bentley was happy to not have Rawlins come to the office, too.
I was wary, to say the least, when I got out of the cab before the building she was currently renting an office from. It was a perfectly respectable office complex, however, and I began to wonder if perhaps Bentley might have let her overly suspicious mind get the better of her. I rode up in a sleek, mirror lined elevator, and walked along a softly lit, tastefully painted corridor to an oak door with a small brass plaque which said 'Rawlins Consulting'.
Inside was understated elegance. The carpeting was thicker and richer. There was mahogany paneling on the wall and a sleek looking receptionist behind an ultra modern desk. It all looked like any upscale office, though the receptionist was awfully pretty. She was an Asian girl with a slender face and long, long silky black hair spilling over her shoulders. She was stylishly dressed in a blood red silk blouse over a shortish black skirt and gave me an inquiring look as I stepped inside.
Rawlins' office was a match for that of any of the partners. It was a corner office with large windows. But in place of the dark, masculine wood furniture in most of the partners offices her furniture was mainly glass, steel and leather, with a lot of flowers and plants around to soften the effect. Her large desk was of green marble with a glass top, and a built in screen just beneath the surface.
She was wearing an Armani outfit today, and I sat before her desk, tense and uncertain. No matter what Bentley might think this was the office of an important person. I felt like a chastened young girl called into the principal's office, even though I'd done nothing wrong. In fact, I had gotten her the terms she wanted.
“You have the contract there, Stephens?”
“Uhm, yes, Ma'am,” I said, opening my briefcase.
I handed it across to her and she sat back in her large, executive chair and began to read it – clause by clause. I fidgeted uncomfortably, looking around, and out at the city beyond. Few clients actually read through their contracts after you approved them. That was what the lawyer was for, after all and if you didn't trust your lawyer why on earth were you paying them?
“I'm paying by the hour, Stephens, so relax,” she said, without looking up from the contract.
I opened my mouth to protest, flushing a bit, and cursing myself as I wondered how this woman read me so easily.
She smiled thinly. “Don't worry. You won't catch anything. We dust regularly.”
“I-I don't know what you mean!” I exclaimed.
She smiled and returned to examining the contract.
Now that she mentioned it, though, I wondered if anything... well, nasty... had gone on in the chair I was seated in, or perhaps on her desk, or maybe on the sofa in the corner, or... did she uhm, entertain clients in here? Was she really a hooker!? Surely not! Yet that crack about my catching something would seem to imply that she thought I knew that.
She put the contract down after a couple of minutes and looked at me with what I interpreted as amused tolerance.
“It seems to be in order,” she said.
I nodded and she raised an eyebrow and sat back in her chair.
“How old are you... Hannah?”
I felt a resurgence of my earlier irritation, and didn't like her using my first name. “I can't imagine what difference that would make, Ms. Rawlins. As I said, I'm fully capable of – .”
“Just curious,” she said.
“I'm twenty nine,” I said, somewhat stiffly.
“I understand you got very good marks at Harvard.”
“I... did, yes.”
I wondered who she'd been talking to. Had she called the firm to complain?!
“That must have taken an awful lot of work.”
“It wasn't easy,” I said.
“And now you work for that... awful place.”
“Mitchel and Cardazio is a fine law firm,” I said, “one of the city's most reputable and – .”
“Yes, I know. But law firms are wretched places to work, especially for a woman. Not that you look much like a woman in that outfit.”
“I dress as the firm requires,” I said indignantly.
She laughed lightly. “Really? And if the firm required you to wear a tube top and plastic miniskirt would you wear that? I doubt it. You dress to minimize your femininity. You dress to look bland and asexual. Which is a pity. You're a very pretty girl.”
I felt a measure of indignation, and was flustered. The firm was rigid in its application of sexual harassment rules. Nobody ever called me a girl, and certainly nobody ever commented on my attractiveness. I was slightly distracted trying to remember the last time anyone had suggested I was pretty, and then by a strange feeling that I should have noticed that. I used to like it when I was a teenager, after all, used to like it a lot.
“My... attractiveness is irrelevant to my ability to draw up an effective contract, Ms. Rawlins,” I said firmly.
“I was told the firm thought well of you,” she continued. “You put in a satisfactory number of billable hours, which means you probably have no life. Your next of kin is listed as your aunt in Denver.”
“I... how do you... whoever you've talked to should not have told you any of that,” I said in consternation.
“Do you know my sister has a masters in business finance?”
“I... no,” I said in confusion, wondering why I would be expected to care.
“I went to bar-tending class, then took modeling lessons. I went to college, but mostly took classes like literature, art appreciation, psychology and acting – liberal arts courses. My sister made thirty five thousand dollars her first year after graduation. I made three hundred and eighty five thousand.”
I stared at her in confusion.
“My sister worked long hours, nose to the grindstone, working on financial deals. She put in almost as many hours as you do. I worked about twenty hours a week.”
God! She was talking about hooking, I realized!
“By my third year, I was still working twenty hour weeks but by then I was pulling in eight hundred thousand a year. While my sister was sorting through papers and attending three hour meetings in board rooms I was lounging on yachts in the Mediterranean, attending charity balls in Paris, and accompanying wealthy men to the finer casinos in Monaco and Hong Kong.
I stared at her, not knowing what to say, or why she was telling me all this.
“You look a lot like my sister,” she said. “I suppose I feel sorry for you.”
Resentment rose. “I can't imagine why you would,” I said indignantly. “I'm a Harvard educated attorney and will likely make partner one day.”
“Yes, when you're middle aged. How much fun will you have along the way? How much fun have you had the last ten years?”
“That is not your concern, Ms. Rawlins,” I said tightly.
“No, of course it isn't. I do apologize. I'm being unconscionably rude,” she said, giving me a sympathetic look. “I'll sign these and you can be back to your... firm.”
She took up a gold pen and began to sign the various pages of the contract, then handed them back to me. I examined them to make sure each was signed appropriately, then put them back into my briefcase and stood up.
“I suppose as I approach middle age,” she said, “I feel somewhat maternal and hate to see young girls like you wasting your lives away.”
“I don't consider I'm doing that, Ms. Rawlins,” I said.
Not that it's any of your business! - I thought.
“You strike me as smarter than that,” she said, getting to her feet. “In any event, if you ever want to think about a career change, as I said, you're quite lovely. And we have a quick training program to bring you up to speed.”
I stared at her in astonishment. Was she actually suggesting – !?
“I could start you off at a quarter million the first year, and you'd probably be making twice that by year two.”
“Thank you. I-I have to go,” I gulped, turning for the door.
I wasn't sure whether to be angry or flattered, and I guess I was both!
Chapter Two
My apartment is so small it doesn't even have a bedroom. It has what the landlord euphemistically calls a loft bed. What that means is that it's an old building with high ceilings. So what they've done is construct a sort of half floor above where my tiny kitchenette, closet and bathroom are. Since the apartment wasn't big to begin with, there's only room in the 'loft' for a mattress. The ceiling is too low up there for a whole bed, so they constructed a kind of frame around where the mattress goes to make it look like you didn't just throw a mattress on the floor.
Since there's no room for furniture, they did some built-in cupboards and shelves along the wall at the foot of the bed and off to its left hand side. It's actually kind of neat, but once you're out of your twenties the idea of climbing down a ladder in the morning kind of gets old. I wasn't out of my twenties yet, but to be honest, it had gotten old pretty quick.
I had a window that looked out on an alley, and a bathroom with a shower, not a tub. The shower was the size of a phone booth, and my refrigerator was smaller than your average dishwasher.
I sat on the edge of my 'bed' that evening counting underwear to see if I'd gotten it all back from the laundry room. I didn't have the time to sit and watch it roll around in the washer and dryer, and sometimes people, I presumed men, took some. I had no idea why. It wasn't like I was washing a lot of sexy lingerie. It was mostly just plain cotton.
While I was thinking this I remembered some of the hot little thongs and bras I'd bought at Victoria's Secret when I was a teenager, and how sexy they'd made me feel. I remembered the looks on the guys faces when they saw it, too. It had been exciting to be lusted after, to be wanted, to have everyone turn and look at me when I entered a room. It had been a bit embarrassing, too, of course, but it had been a pretty good ego trip.
People didn't tend to look at me that way now. Maybe it was because of how I had to dress for work, and maybe it was because I rarely went anywhere else unless it was to the laundromat or grocery store. It was, I thought unhappily, like I was some middle-aged woman, or maybe an old widow, with no kids, no husband, and no life.
Shit.
I needed to start dating. But it couldn't be anyone at work. And again, that left me with the problem that I didn't go anywhere else, so had no other place to meet them. I wasn't about to go wander around in bars and let strange men pick me up.
The idea, mind you, wasn't all that terrible, once I considered it. Maybe a hot one night stand with some sexy guy I'd never meet again, some crazy monkey sex on the floor, and I'd start to feel more human again. I'd never really been one for one-night-stands, mainly because I didn't want to get a reputation as a slut, but I wasn't at school any more, and there were a million strange men out there who would likely be delighted with a one night stand with me.
I was only wearing loose track pants and a tank top. I slid down the ladder with practiced ease and slid out of them, then opened the bathroom door. It swung around and back, and there was a full length mirror on the back. I looked at myself doubtfully. My body was in pretty good shape. That was partly because the elevator in this building wasn't. I was on the sixth floor, and it was usually faster and safer to walk than wait for it.
To get to work I could walk up three blocks and down two and wait for a bus which would take me to the subway station, or I could walk to the station. Between waiting, the traffic, and the circuitous route the bus took it was usually faster to just walk to the station – and back. That meant a brisk twenty minute walk each way.
I wouldn't exactly call myself toned, but I was still as slender as I was in college, I thought, with forlorn pride.
Not that anyone got to see it but me. And I was rarely interested in looking.
With my brown hair loose I arched my back and vamped for the mirror, turned and presented my butt to it, and told myself that I was pretty hot stuff, and men would pay a fortune to have sex with me.
The idea was kind of gross, but also kind of weirdly attractive. I mean, what was it but a one-night-stand that I got paid for? Also, those high end agencies didn't cater to low end customers. The men there would be successful; rock stars, maybe, I told myself, bankers and Arab sheiks and millionaires. I let my mind run away, imagining myself on yachts, making a quarter million a year, living in a nice apartment, maybe with a Mercedes or an Audi.
Me, as an expensive call girl. The idea was laughable, but exciting, and that was another thing which hadn't happened much, lately. I was so stressed out, so overworked, with so little time on my hands that I rarely even thought about sex. I'd never really been one to masturbate much, either. And the last year or two I hadn't felt very attractive, and thus hadn't really felt sexy.
I wasn't sure why I felt sexy now, just because a woman I barely knew told me I was.
* * *
I wasn't wearing my hair in a bun. It was loose and falling around my shoulders. I was wearing a black dress with a short skirt, and sitting in the reading room at work researching case law. Michael Bryant was a junior partner with an athletic body, a handsome, square jawed face, perfect, expensively cut hair, and an ego a mile wide. He walked into the room in an tailored, Italian cut silk suit, walked up to me, and then just bent over and gripped my hair.
I had a thing about my hair, and had ever since Jimmy Sullivan had done me doggy style and used my hair like the reins of a horse. It had been probably the most exciting sex of my life. He was rough, wild, and incredible, and had yanked back on my hair as he rode me into the ground out behind the gym.