Love Confessed

1
Leah

“Good Morning, Scott” I say as I pass the office of my boss, one of the founding partners at Sanders and Smith.

“Good Morning, Leah. How was your weekend?” He replies.

“Eh. I had another disastrous blind date. I think that will be my last one for a while.” The very thought of it makes me cringe.

              “Well you know if you’re ever lonely I can come over and keep you company.” He winks at me. He’s fifty-two but still acts like a frat boy.

              “Thanks Scott, but you and I both know that would never work out.”

              “It was worth a shot.” He shrugs his shoulders and retreats back into his office.

I smile and make my way to my office. Our building is expansive because we are one of larger law firms in Chicago. Having more than one focus of the law in one firm is unique and often helps our clients in many ways. Let’s face it, when you tend to represent wealthy high profiled clients, many of them are bound to get themselves in trouble in more areas than one.

I have been practicing family law for five years at Sanders & Smith, a renowned law firm that was started by two best friends from law school who majored in two different areas of the law. Our corporate division is headed by Scott Sanders and the other branch of the firm, my area of expertise, is the family law division founded by William Smith. I just got promoted to associate, a position I’ve worked my ass off to achieve. I worked hard in college. I worked even harder in law school where I studied as a single mom. The work ethic I developed during those years followed me into my career. Hopefully, within the next two years I can make partner. All signs are pointing in that direction and the closer I get, the more motivated I become and the harder I want to work. Soon, very soon, it will all be worth it.

Partner. It sounds so prestigious. The title will provide a much welcome solace for all of the blood, sweat, and tears I’ve poured into my education and career. I’ve worked my ass off to get to my position in life. Not that I had to, but I’d never felt comfortable riding through life on somebody else's coat tails. I grew up in an affluent family in the Chicago suburbs. Old money affluence. The kind of money where cotillion wasn’t a thing of the past, and where career aspirations for a girl of my social stature consisted of attending finishing school, marrying well, and pouring myself into endless charity functions.

I went to the prominent Whittington Academy, an all girls school inside the city. My parents lived thirty minutes away, and while I chose to stay at home and be driven to school every day, the majority of my friends stayed at the high school dormitory with my two hundred fellow alumni. I was given the choice to stay with my friends but I couldn’t leave my family like that. When I let them know I would be staying home, the relief in my mom’s eyes told me that I’d made the right choice and that she wanted me home just as much as I wanted to be there. My mother, while not afraid to put her foot down and use her maternal powers of veto, also tried to let us make the choices we needed to make to learn who we were. Now, as a mother, I understand how thin a line she managed to walk and I appreciate it all the more. 

When I was thirteen, my mother died in a tragic car accident.  My father, after losing his high school love and the glue that held our family together, quickly became an alcoholic. In an instant, my life had completely flipped upside down and no amount of money could fix it.

After losing my mother, my best friend, and consequently my father as well, it was my intention to attend the college furthest away from home that would accept me. I graduated early with a 4.1 GPA so acceptance turned out to not be nearly as great of a concern as distance was. I loved my grandparents and the safety of their home dearly, but the pain surrounding the rest of my life required some sort of dramatic change. The powers that be though, had other plans.

During my senior year, while I was sorting through acceptance letters and building up my dreams of living far away, my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer. I decided then that after graduation, I would attend Brown University. My parents were alumni benefactors with a library wing named after them, I was welcomed with open arms, and it was close enough to my grandparents for me to not miss a moment longer than necessary of time with my ailing grandfather.

On my first day of classes I sat next Joseph Bennett in statistics. That first morning, before classes started, I remember looking at my class schedule thinking to myself that I must be crazy. Who takes statistics their first semester in college?! My course load was obscene, but I’d known that I needed to stay busy and distracted. It dawned on me that first morning that my methods of distraction may have been just a tad bit overzealous. But the second I walked into my first class and saw those gorgeous blue eyes, it all seemed suddenly manageable. My new life quickly became so much less daunting. Joseph was from London and attending Brown on a school visa. I fell in love the first time he smiled at me. He was unreasonably charming, with his British accent and polite smile. He was also completely at ease with his lean, six foot three inch frame. I learned that he was just a year ahead of me and a business major. Since I was terrible with any kind of math (and, if we’re being entirely honest, I pretended to be a little more terrible than I even was because, well, what kind of dashing white knight didn’t love a damsel in distress?) he offered to help me and we became study partners. Study partners quickly led to a tight friendship which, without knowing it, was exactly what I needed more than anything else in my life.

My father and I grew apart quickly after my mother’s death and with the state of turmoil my life was in I pulled inside myself. Joseph helped to save me from that. Previously, my closest friend was my younger sister, Emily. Being the baby, she had taken the hits of our adolescence harder than I; as the older sister and protector, I did everything I could to protect her. Given my instinct to protect Emily, it was difficult to talk to her about any of the important things that I was struggling with in my family. Until Joseph. Joseph was a friend who was there for me in ways that I hadn’t experienced in so long, and at the time, I couldn’t have been more grateful for his place in my life.

Right before we went on Christmas break I got the dreaded call that Gramps was running out of time. Fortunately, I was able to take my finals early and go home to spend those last two weeks with him. Two days after I got home I went to answer the door and screamed when I saw Joseph standing there. He was wearing in his favorite hoodie and faded blue jeans that I loved because of the way they hugged his butt. I snuck a peak at them every chance I got. At that moment, I’d never been so happy to see anybody in my whole entire life. I threw my arms around his neck and burst into tears. He had cancelled his Christmas trip home to come and spend time with me, being the support system I so desperately needed. He spent the whole break with me - talking to my grandpa, helping my grandma however he could (mostly fixing the things that grandpa would have taken care of around the house), entertaining Emily and best of all, holding me to his chest and rocking me to sleep those nights I would break down because it was all just too much. Appreciative as I was, I was always surprised to find that I felt just a little bit disappointed when I’d wake up and find him sleeping soundly in the guest room across the hall.

It was clear to me that Christmas that Joseph and I were just friends. I had thought or maybe hoped that our friendship would turn into something more but his attention to me seemed nothing more than platonic. Recognizing this I realized that I was okay with him being my friend because I would rather have that than nothing. So, I worked really hard in college and had managed to graduate with Joseph and honors. The night of graduation, Joseph came to my dorm to pick me up for the after party but when I opened the door he grabbed me and pulled me in for kiss.

“I’ve wanted to do that for three years. How I managed not to do it yet is beyond me. But since this is our last day together, I couldn’t leave without you knowing how I felt.” His voice was low and a little bit shaky as he searched my eyes for a reaction. I had nothing. I was so shocked that he had felt the same things I did that I couldn’t speak. I had imagined so many times, for years, exactly what it would be like to hold him and kiss him and now I could. He felt it too. When I realized this, all I could do was pull him closer and kiss him back. We made love for hours that night. It was perfect. The night of my dreams.

When morning came, he was gone.

When I called him two months later to tell him I was pregnant, I realized that it was the first time I had spoken to him since that night. The sound of his voice reminded me of how hurt and angry I was by his departure. He had become my best friend, my confidant, and then finally my lover. Yet, when I needed him most, he had disappeared.  That hurt never really disappeared. I just did what I had to do to move on with my life, like I always did.

I remember my grandpa would always tell me I should be a lawyer because I was argumentative. I wasn’t just good at it; I actually loved to argue my point. There was something so satisfying about being able to show somebody a different perspective, about providing a point of view so convincing that they felt comfortable changing theirs. However, my main motivation for going to Harvard Law School came from the fight that my grandparents went through to do what was right for my sister and me. I will never forget the nights I would stay awake and hear my grandma crying to my grandpa asking him why it had to be so hard to want to care for a child. I’ll never forget the arguments with my dad that they tried so hard to hide from Emily and I; the fights where they begged and pleaded to take Emily and I home. All my mother’s parents wanted was to give us the stable environment we so desperately needed, but all the while he would swear up and down, often in his pajamas half drunk from the night before, that he could care for his children himself. I knew from those days that all I wanted to do was help families, most importantly children, have the safe and loving home they deserved.

Law school was different from my undergraduate studies. It was definitely a struggle. I was pregnant part of the first year and then a single mom the rest of the time. I spent my days at school and would study at night after my son, Ethan, would fall asleep. I tried to arrange my schedule so that my classes would start around mid-morning but even those came too early when Ethan would be up all night as a baby.

Joseph had moved back to London after we graduated. His father owned a telecommunications company and he was being prepped to take over one day. Unfortunately for me, this meant that he was not going to come back to live in the U.S. with Ethan and I. His parents had him late in life, so I knew the day where he would run the family business was going to come sooner rather than later. For this reason, I understood why he couldn’t leave home. He asked me, out of what seemed more like moral obligation rather than sincerity, to move to London. He promised that we would be a family, but I couldn’t leave. Not when I was so unsure about what we were to each other. The only family I had was here and even though we lived miles away; we were still closer than if I lived on a separate continent. So he parented from London via video chat and I was all alone.

During those years, my grandma and my sister would come visit me, and stay a week here and there. Not always together and even though these visits weren’t as often as I would’ve liked, they always made me feel better. Every time one of them came into town, they would take Ethan for a few hours or schedule me an appointment at a spa so that I had a chance to do something just for me. I tried to use these moments to reconnect with myself and focus on Leah. I so rarely got the chance that sometimes I forgot who I really was outside of being Ethan’s mom. I was always sure to thank them but I don’t think they’ll ever know just how much I loved them for it.

*              *              *

I sit down at my desk to work on a deposition I’m preparing for. I’m not in the mood to be at work today. If I had my choice, I would have stayed asleep and continued my dream…

I’m standing so close to him I can smell his aftershave; it smells manly, kind of woodsy and just how I imagined it would smell. I know he just said something but the only thing I can hear is the pounding of both of our hearts. The combination of these two senses has completely taken over my ability to process dialog. I wonder to myself, why is his heart racing? Is he nervous? Do I make him nervous? As nervous as he makes me? I can feel the smile tugging at my lips at that thought.

“What are you smiling about?” he asks.

“Nothing. I can’t seem to not smile when I’m around you” I reply.

He moves closer to me looking me in the eyes and lightly touches my face. Neither one of us closes our eyes as he leans down and softly places his lips on mine. In an instant the moment that started out soft and gentle turns ravenous. I push up on my tiptoes to get better leverage at the same time as I intertwine my fingers in his hair, pulling him closer to me. Without breaking contact he picks me up, I wrap my legs around his waist, and he carries me to the bed.

He pulls away to look at me and I see the lust in his eyes. I sit up so he can pull my shirt over my head. My fingers move frantically to the buttons on his shirt. A breathy “Wow” is all I can say. I just want to look at him. I want to admire all of his hard work - and there’s no question how hard he works to look like that. He lightly grazes the swell of my breast with his finger and I quiver. He slides his hand down my body until he reaches the buttons on my pants. Slowly he undoes the buttons and pulls them down my legs. I reach forward to reciprocate but he steps back out of my reach.