Affirmation by Sawyer Bennett Page B

is all there is between us.”
    I
finally get a sympathetic look from Macy. “Have you talked to
him about it?”
    I
snort hard and take a gulp of wine. Waving my glass, I say, “Talk
to Matt? Are you kidding? Like an actual conversation? Any time I
try, he sidetracks me with sex. He’s deflecting me by preying
on my ovaries.”
    “Maybe
he just needs a little time. I mean, this stuff with his ex-bitch
just happened. Don’t get all upset now when he may snap out of
it in a few days.”
    I
empty my glass of wine and pour another. Perhaps she’s right.
Maybe Matt’s just having a few rough days, and I need to have
some patience with him. It’s hard though, because although it
was never brought up again between us, I certainly have not forgot
the night I was drunk and confessed I loved him. Yes, I remembered
that clearly the next day, just as I remembered he didn’t say
the words back.
    So
I want to have some patience with him, and I want to help him work
through his woes, but the feeling is made even more desperate by the
fact that I’m in love with him and the thought of losing him is
crushing.
    And
worse yet, Matt is just a portion of my woes.
    At
the beginning of the week, Matt introduced Kylie Wynn to the firm,
the newest attorney on our legal team. She wasn’t an employee
of Connover and Crown, but Matt was contracting with her to help work
the appellate case on the Pearson trial that he had lost a few weeks ago.
    While
Matt is fully capable of handling the appeal on his own, his trial
load over the next several months is insane, so he wants extra help
to work the case.
    After
Matt introduced Kylie to the firm, he called her and me into his
office to discuss the appeal.
    Let
me just say, I hated Kylie from the minute she opened her mouth, and
for a variety of reasons.
    First,
she’s one of those lawyers that thinks her shit don’t
stink. Yes, I know that is bad grammar, but it punctuates my feelings
rather well. She is condescending, rude, and arrogant, except with
Matt, of course. She talked to me like I was a third grader, and
spent an inordinate amount of time blowing rainbows up Matt’s
ass.
    Second,
and this is not being said with any hint of partiality or bias, but
she has the hots for Matt. I can tell, and worse yet, I know Matt can
tell. Oh, some of her signs are subtle, such as licking her lips and
bending forward to expose cleavage.
    Other
signs are not so subtle, like the way she sits in a chair and crosses
her legs just so her skirt slides up and exposes the bottom of her
thigh-high stocking. To Matt’s credit, his eyes didn’t
stray down, but then she made a big production of pulling her skirt
down in the hopes of garnering his attention. It was at this precise
moment that I had seen enough and clumsily happened to knock my glass
of water over on the table.
    Kylie
wasn’t so much interested then in Matt looking at her legs, but
was more concerned with saving her Ferragamo briefcase that was close
to getting waterlogged.
    The
thing that upsets me the most, and hence why I intend on chugging
this second glass of wine, is that Matt doesn’t seem overly put
off by her behavior. Again, he hasn’t engaged with her, but he
doesn’t shun her the way he did with Lorraine. For example,
Kylie had laid her hand on Matt’s arm when she was making a
point, and rather than pull his arm back the way he used to do with
Lorraine, he left it there… let her touch him and didn’t
even appear to want to stop it.
    To
cap it all off, Kylie made it clear that I was going to be her little
bitch of a gopher on this case, and Matt did nothing to dispel that
notion. As our meeting was wrapping up, Kylie handed me the file and
said, “McKayla, I’ll need you to make me one copy of the
file and also scan a copy, so I can have the digital version as
well.”
    I
glanced at Matt, and he confirmed my worst suspicion. I was to do as
Kylie asked because she was the big dog when it came to appellate
matters.
    I
suppose the