The first thing Mia Cortez said to Noah Reyes in four years was: “You have got to be kidding me.”
The second thing she said was: “No, I’m not sharing the workspace. There are two tables.”
The Ridgemont Lodge had twelve rooms, a fireplace that worked, a satellite internet connection that mostly worked, and no road access for the next forty-eight hours minimum. She knew this because the proprietor had told her when she checked in, right after she had driven four hours into the mountains to work through the Kellerman merger filing in peace, and right before the first real snow of the season had closed the pass behind her.
Noah was already behind the other table, setting up his laptop, and had the audacity to look amused. “I have a filing too, Cortez. Different client.”
“Different side of the same deal, actually.” She dropped her briefcase onto her table with more force than necessary. “The Kellerman acquisition. Hendricks & Patel represents the buyer.”
“Ogilvy Group,” he said. “Tanner Westbrook represents the seller. I know. I’ve been reading your briefs for six weeks.”
“And editing your replies for corrections.”
“One correction. One factual correction, which you know because you updated the filing the next day.”
This was true. She had, in fact, sent a very terse email to her associate at two in the morning after reading Noah’s reply brief and finding the error, which she had then spent forty minutes pretending he had not correctly identified before updating the filing. She did not plan to mention this.
Noah Reyes had been her rival since the first year of law school, when they had competed for the same moot court positions, the same journal editorships, the same clerkship slots, and eventually the same job offers. She had taken Tanner Westbrook. He had taken Hendricks & Patel. For three years they had been on opposite sides of deals without being in the same room, which was exactly how she preferred it.
He looked precisely as she remembered: dark eyes, the kind of effortless composure that had always made her want to find the seam in it, and a way of reading her that suggested he was tracking more than what she said. He was thirty-three. She was twenty-nine. They had never, in four years of law school or six weeks of opposing briefs or one unfortunate moot court incident that she was not going to think about, been in the same room alone overnight.
She opened her laptop. She was a professional. She would work.
They worked for three hours without speaking except to ask each other to lower the blinds and then raise them again. The snow continued. The filing deadline was Sunday at noon. It was currently Friday at six p.m.
At nine, the proprietor brought up two bowls of soup and said there was nothing else he could do about the pass until Sunday morning at earliest. Then he went to bed.
“We could review the disputed asset schedules together,” Noah said, not looking up from his screen. “Ogilvy’s schedule has three items Kellerman’s team will contest. It would save both of us time.”
Mia looked at him.
“Opposing counsel can share procedural information without prejudice,” he said. “You know that.”
She did know that. She pulled her schedule. He pulled his. They compared the three items, which took forty minutes, and she identified one that he had misdescribed in a way that would hurt his client at closing, and she told him so, because she was a professional and procedural accuracy was not strategy, and he looked at her for a moment and said: “That’s the second time you’ve corrected me.”
“I’m keeping count.”
“I’ve noticed.” He set down his pen. “You’ve been keeping count since Property Law, section two, first year.”
“You beat me by two points on the midterm.”
“You beat me by two points on everything after that.”
“Not the Harwick moot.” She said it before she thought about it. She did not talk about the Harwick moot.
He was quiet for a moment. “I won on a technical ruling. The argument was a draw and you know it.”
“It was not a draw. Your standing argument was—”
“Correct, which is why it ruled.”
“Technically correct. Strategically limited. If it had gone to the appeals round—”
“It didn’t go to the appeals round.”
“I know.”
They looked at each other across the table in a way that had nothing to do with the Harwick moot anymore and both of them knew it.
“Four years,” Noah said. “I thought it would get easier to be in the same room.”
She said nothing.
“It hasn’t.”
She picked up her pen. “We should finish the asset schedules.”
“Mia.”
The way he said her name—not Cortez, which was how he had said it for seven years, but Mia, in the same register as the moment right before the Harwick moot when she had turned in the corridor and he had looked at her and neither of them had said anything and then the door had opened and they had gone in—made her put the pen back down.
“I’m not going to do anything you don’t want,” he said. “I just want to stop pretending I don’t—” He paused. “That I haven’t been, for a while.”
She looked at him for a long moment. She had been telling herself for four years that it was competition. That the specific quality of her attention when he walked into a room was professional situational awareness. That her thorough familiarity with every argument he had ever made in writing, every response she had ever sent, every correction in either direction, was strategy and not the behavior of someone who had been tracking one particular opposing counsel with a level of interest that had nothing to do with the Kellerman merger.
“We work opposite sides of the same deals,” she said.
“Not this deal. After Sunday the filing’s done.”
“The next deal.”
“We could have this argument,” he said, “or we could not.”
She stood up from the table. He stood up from his. They met in the middle of the room, which took about four steps, and she kissed him first—with the full force of four years of pretending she hadn’t wanted to, and he kissed back like he had been thinking about exactly this, had thought about it for a long time, and his hands went to her face and then into her hair and neither of them was pretending anything.
She pulled him toward the couch because her filing deadline was still Sunday noon and the workspace tables were not available for other purposes. He sat and pulled her across his lap and she went, and they spent the next several minutes making up for four years of professional distance in a way that was extremely efficient and very thorough.
He undressed her with the same focused attention he gave a complex argument, working through each layer—her jacket, the buttons of her blouse, the clasp of her bra—with his hands entirely sure and his mouth following wherever he bared skin, and she sat with her hands in his hair and decided that she was done being careful. He kissed down her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her breast, and she pulled his shirt off and ran her hands over his shoulders, which were better than she had spent four years not thinking about.
He laid her back and worked down her body with complete deliberateness—his mouth between her thighs, tongue moving with precisely the kind of focused intelligence she had been competing with for seven years and was now extremely grateful for in a different context. He learned quickly what made her grip the cushions and said her name against her when she did, and brought his fingers in alongside his mouth, and she came thoroughly and loudly in a way that had no relation to their professional track records and everything to do with the fact that he paid attention in exactly the right ways. He kept going until she stopped shaking, which took longer than she had expected and was better than she was prepared to admit.
He pressed into her slowly, watching her face the whole time, and she pulled him down and wrapped her legs around him and moved with him, and the rhythm they found was direct and unhurried and exactly right. She said his name—his actual name, not Reyes—and felt him shudder at it. He said hers. They went on like that, getting less coordinated and considerably more urgent, until she came again with his name in her mouth and felt him follow, his weight against her, his forehead at her throat.
Afterward the snow was still falling outside the frost-edged window. She stayed where she was.
“The Harwick moot,” she said, eventually. “You knew I was going to pivot on the standing argument. You prepared for it.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Because,” he said, his voice close at her ear, “I’ve been paying attention to you for a long time, Cortez.”
She thought about this. Then she said: “After the filing closes Sunday—”
“Yes.”
“We should have a conversation.”
“We could,” he said. “Or we could work through the asset schedule first, and then have the conversation.”
She sat up. He sat up. They went back to the table and finished the asset schedules, which took another hour and was extremely professional, and then they moved the laptops to the windowsills and used the workspace tables for entirely different purposes.
The filing went in Sunday at eleven-fifteen. Both briefs, reviewed by opposing counsel, had no errors.
