I must admit I did give him a hard time. His client had tried to pay a restaurant bill with a stolen credit card – stolen from the waitress serving her. I dropped that little tidbit as a surprise and barely managed to contain my amusement when the waitress testified that the defendant had also handed over the waitresses’ own driver’s license as identification. I glanced up at Mark with a shadow of a smirk. Oh come on! It was funny! Who does that? He glared back at me like he wanted to commit a crime himself. Some people have no appreciation for the ridiculous. After I got all of the charges held for trial, and a couple more added, I returned to the prosecution table where Adam was giving me an entirely different kind of look. I sat down beside him as Braden and Jess got up to do a guilty plea.
“That was great,” he leaned over and whispered in my ear. “You handled it brilliantly and it was very sexy. I wanted to take you back to my office and do all kinds of dirty things to you.”
“That was amusing,” I replied. “I can’t believe anyone would be that thick.”
“Believe it and get used to it. I think I’m really going to enjoy being in court with you every day. You’ve got some pretty hot swagger, counselor.”
To my surprise, I was actually enjoying this job quite a lot myself so far. I seemed to be able to channel a ton of confidence in a courtroom that I didn’t always have elsewhere. Maybe I really had inherited something from my parents after all. Besides, Adam had some pretty hot swagger too and we seemed to work well together.
In the evenings that week, Adam and I also learned to cohabitate. That process went a little less smoothly. For example, we bought groceries and decided to make dinner together in the evenings after work, but his culinary skills were a bit better developed than mine were.
“Why are you staring at a garlic press?” he asked, startling me.
“I was wondering what it did.”
“It presses garlic, hence the name,” he answered dryly.
“Do you see the words ‘garlic press’ written on here, Mr. Smartass? How in the hell was I supposed to know what it was called”
“Who usually feeds you, Ronald McDonald?”
“Very funny. Why would you pack a garlic press when you came here?”
“I didn’t; that’s yours.”
“It is?” I stared at it with amazement and confusion.
“You’re an interesting woman, Adler.”
Sharing space was a little tricky at first, as I found the first night that I wanted to go through my little beauty regimen.
“What are doing in there, retiling?” he called out, banging on the bathroom door.
“Why, you like hanging out in bathrooms? I’ve heard there are guys like that.” I finished smearing a mud mask on my face and wrapped the towel around my hair a little tighter.
“No, I don’t actually. I use bathrooms for other things, like relieving myself, which is what I’ve needed to do for the past twenty minutes while you’ve taken up residence in there.”
“Well, why didn’t you tell me you had to go before?” I shouted.
“Because I wasn’t aware that this was going to become a test of my willpower,” he shouted back.
“Can you wait another ten minutes?”
“Not without sustaining permanent injury.”
“Fine! Close your eyes.”
“What?!”
“Close your eyes God damn it! You can open them when you get in here.” I heard grumbling outside the door. “Are they closed?”
“Yes! Hurry up already before my bladder bursts!”
I walked over and carefully opened the door. True to his word, Adam stood there with eyes closed and a pained look on his face, fidgeting around. I walked out and gently shoved him inside, closing the door behind him. A couple of minutes later, after he accomplished what he had set out to do, he came barreling out of the bathroom and stopped dead in his tracks when he saw me. The look on his face went from shock to amusement very quickly.
“What are you doing with your eyes open?!” I demanded.
“You’ve got some mud, right about here,” he teased, pointing to the corner of his mouth.
“You said you would close your eyes!”
“That was going in! I didn’t make any promises coming out.”
“It was understood! Why would I ask you to close them going in if I didn’t want you to close them coming out? What, you think I’m playing hide and seek?”
“No, I think you’re nuts! What are you worried about?”
“I didn’t want you to see me like this. I look horrible.”
“No, you don’t. Well, okay, I’ve seen you look better, but I don’t care. I know that you’re beautiful under all that gook.” He walked over to me, looking like he was trying not to laugh. Putting his arms around me he pulled me to him. “Lily, I love you, even like that.” He leaned down and kissed me lightly on the lips.
“You have some mud, right about …” I wiped it off the corner of his mouth, still pouting a little, but much less hostile.
There were other adjustments … Adam and I had decided to share my desk, which was fairly large, and so after dinner we began cleaning up and taking our work over to my writing nook, where he sat on one side and I sat on the other. I was just trying to figure out a complicated plot point one evening, when I was distracted by a clicking coming from his side of the desk. I peered around my laptop screen in the direction of the sound. There, I saw Adam messing around with a container of tic tacs. I had found the source of the cinnamon taste of his kisses. He looked up.
“Want one?” he offered.
“Sure, thanks,” I replied. He proceeded to knock exactly one tic tac into his palm and hand it to me. “Are you sure you can spare this?’ I asked solemnly.
“How many did you want?”
“Well, more than one. Who gives somebody one tic tac? Would it kill to be a little more generous? Some psychologist somewhere probably has some theory about one tic tac givers and fear of commitment.”
“Fear of commitment, my ass. You should be committed, you loon. If you were intended to have more than one tic tac, they would have just made tic tacs bigger. This is a regulation sized tic tac, and it should be more than enough to satisfy your breath freshening needs,” he said, sounding affronted.
“A tic tac is not merely a breath freshener, it is a candy,” I pointed out, voice rising in anger. Who was he calling a loon? “And they make them small on purpose, so you’ll think you’re getting more, and so you’ll run out faster when someone asks for one, and you give them a few!”