22. Julie
twenty-two
Julie
Most of the office was empty. After the press conference, after the transfer of the Desert Scorpions to county jail, after the first round of AG interviews, my assistant gave up pretending to organize the backlog and spent her mornings stalking the vending machine.
She left me alone except for urgent phone calls, which today meant zero.
There was nothing left for anyone to do except wait for the next mess to roll in, or, in my case, finish the paperwork that would close out the biggest clusterfuck in Barstow law enforcement history.
The files were stacked in the dead center of my desk.
Three red welts, so full they barely flexed, each one held together with binder clips.
On the wall above, my degrees were framed in matching black wood, slightly off-level, as if I’d started a war with gravity and lost. I always stared at the gap between the UCSD diploma and the Bar when I needed to think.
The gap bugged me more than the degrees.
I set my pen on the desk and flexed my hand, watching the red dent slowly refill in the flesh between thumb and forefinger.
I’d written so much that morning the ink bled through three carbonless forms and stained the blotter underneath.
My handwriting was turning into a doctor’s scrawl, and if anyone needed to subpoena these files five years from now, good luck.
For a second I let myself close my eyes and listen. The click of the air vent, the faint grind of a printer spooling up somewhere down the hall, a fly beating itself to death against the strip light overhead. It was almost peaceful. Almost.
I’d spent the last several years putting abusers behind bars without ever confronting my own. Now that I had, I finally understood the underlying good I’d been doing. Though my pain and trauma would never completely go away, I was a few steps closer to living a normal, happy life.
The intercom on my phone lit up with a red strobe. I stared at it for a second, then thumbed the button.
“Yeah?”
“Ms. Sparta, Bram Jackson is in the lobby.” The assistant’s voice was flat, office-robot perfect. She’d stopped asking questions about him after the first time he showed up with a bloodstain on his jeans and left a bootprint on the waiting room carpet. “Do you want to see him?”
“Is he alone?”
“Looks like it.”
I exhaled. “Send him up.”
“Copy.”
I straightened the folders on my desk, then thought better and let them stay messy. The window to the parking lot caught my reflection: hair up, no makeup, white blouse that still carried a faint gray where blood had once seeped through at the ribs. I touched the scar, habit, then let my hand drop.
The door didn’t even creak. Bram just appeared in the frame, as if he’d been waiting for the air to change before making a move.
He wore his cut—Jackson Brothers, the skull-and-guns patch sun-faded to something that looked almost ghostly.
Jeans, T-shirt, boots he’d probably owned longer than some of his men.
His face looked better than it had in the holding cell, but only just: bruise gone to yellow, a line of fresh scar tissue slicing up from the collarbone to his beard.
There was a single blue band of tape on his left hand, the kind you bought at the drugstore and wrapped yourself.
He stepped into the office and stopped exactly two paces inside. He didn’t sit. He didn’t even look at the chair.
“Morning,” I said, and tried to keep my voice neutral.
“Julie.”
I thought he’d open with a joke, or maybe an insult, the way he did when he was nervous.
But he didn’t. He looked at me like he was memorizing the details: how the pen fit in my hand, how my eyes tracked his, how I hadn’t changed a thing in the office since he last tried to intimidate me across this desk.
He said, “You want me to wait until you’re done?”
“Not unless you came for a confession.”
Bram’s mouth twitched at the corner, not quite a smile. He closed the door behind him. The latch barely clicked.
“I have a lot of paperwork,” I said, gesturing to the piles. “If you want, you can watch. It’s basically pornography for the terminally bored.”
“Not here for the paperwork.”
“You here to thank me for saving your life?”
“Not here for that either.”
He drifted a step closer, then stopped again, the way a man does in a church: never quite sure if he’s the congregation or the heretic.
“Okay,” I said. “Hit me.”
He looked at the wall, at my name on the diploma, then back at me. When he finally spoke, his voice was raw but steady.
“I have no idea how to do this,” he said. “Never tried it before. Don’t even know if you want to hear it.”
“Try me.”
He took a breath, long and deep, as if getting ready to lay down a verdict.
“I think about you all the fucking time,” he said. “I was thinking about you before the Slaughterhouse, before any of this. I tried not to. Thought it would fuck up the club, fuck up you, and it probably did. But every time I tried to kill it, it got worse.”
I leaned back in my chair. He kept talking.
“I’m not good at this. I know you know that. But I can’t just pretend like it’s business as usual anymore. I don’t want to. Not after what happened. Not after what we’ve done together.”
I felt a rush of heat go up my neck. I kept my face blank.
“You asking me to quit my job and run away with you?” I said. “Because I need at least a week to think it over.”
He almost laughed, but the sound caught in his throat.
“No,” he said. “I want you to keep your job. I want you to do it better than anyone ever has. I just… want to know if you want to try.”
“Try what?”
He shrugged, the motion awkward. “Whatever this is. I’m not asking you to lie about it. Just don’t shut the door.”
I let the silence hang. I looked at him over the folders.
For a second, I saw the room as it must look from his side: the harsh lights, the carpet that was never fully clean, the smell of legal pads and sweat, and me, sitting in a suit with the sleeves rolled up, a single strip of old blood on my blouse, as if the badge wasn’t enough.
“I’m not your property,” I said.
He nodded.
“I’m not your fucking prize.”
“I know that, Julie.”
“You can’t fix me.”
He stared at me, eyes steady. “I wouldn’t even try.”
The air in the room changed. My heart thudded against my ribs, but it wasn’t fear or shame or anger. It was just alive.
Honestly, I wanted him to rebuke everything I’d just said.
I reached for my pen and clicked it, then set it down again, flat on the desk. I pressed my palms to the blotter so hard the file folders shifted. The case file for the Scorpions was on top, the tab labeled in my own handwriting. I let my hands rest on either side of it, then looked up.
“Yes,” I said.
He didn’t move.
“That’s it?” he asked.
“That’s it.”
He nodded, the way a man takes an order in battle and knows there’s nothing left to say.
He started to turn, but I said, “Bram.”
He stopped.
“I do want to try. With you. But you have to let me come to you sometimes. You have to let me do it my way.”
He smiled, this time all the way. “I can do that.”
I moved around the desk and leaned ass first against the front edge, my skirt rising several inches above my knee. Bram noticed.
“You knew I’d be down here,” he said, and I nodded. He took a step forward.
“You knew this would be hard for me to do, to say those things,” he said, and I nodded. He took two more steps.
“You knew I would placate you with standard answers to your demands,” he said, and I nodded. He leaned forward and pulled my skirt to my waist, seeing I’d come to work with no panties on. He sat me on the desk and spread my legs with his.
“You knew there was no fucking way I’d leave your office without fucking you on your own desk,” he said, and I nodded. He slid the middle two fingers between my legs, and spread my cunt, painful at first, but pleasing once I caught my breath.
“You knew I couldn’t resist you,” he said, and I nodded, his fingers fucking me raw.
Orgasms aren’t always created with the greatest of touches.
Sometimes it’s the setting, the atmosphere, the naughtiness of the moment.
Here we were, the DA on her desk, legs spread, finger-fucked by an outlaw biker like there would be no tomorrow.
He went faster, rougher, and I grabbed his shoulders as I came, biting into his leather kutte, killing the sounds of my moan so prying ears couldn’t hear.
Bram stepped back, removed his hand from my cunt, and kissed me, mouths open and hungry. When he pulled away, he slipped his creamy fingers into my mouth.
“Next time, I’m eating that pussy.”
All I could manage to do was nod, hoping there would always be a next time.