Olive grabbed the sheet the ancient fax machine had finally finished coughing out and peered at it. The law practice where she interned was buzzing with activity as she waited on "Ol' Bertha," as the machine was affectionately called, to produce some documents for a new case in discovery. Her share of the research and writing had gradually been expanding since she took the position after finishing her 1L year, and this case was the most responsibility she had been given yet. She was eager to find out who she and her colleagues would be up against this time.
As she scanned the letter for familiar names, one made a hot flush rise to her cheeks.
Oh no. Not good.
Her eyes darted back and forth to ensure none of her colleagues had seen her lose her composure, and she clutched the packet to her chest as she walked it to her supervising attorney's office.
Olive had waited five years to recover from undergrad before embarking on her law school journey. She had gone through a wild period in college, deeply affected by the pressure to perform well in school, and would lose herself in drugs and kink to escape the stress for a while. A "slut phase" is normal for any young person discovering themselves, sure, but Olive wasn't sure she liked what she discovered. She learned she liked to forfeit control to men that were stronger than her, she almost liked it too much. She learned she was a ravenous submissive at her core, and that no vanilla sex could ever deliver the satisfaction of total surrender to orgasm after brutal orgasm, her body bound tight in restraints, her limbs and her holes no longer her own to operate. She shivered as the heat from her cheeks bubbled down to her loins.
After fucking her way through what felt like half the city's kink community via Fetlife and even Reddit, Olive had put that submissive side of her to bed. Instead, she fed the part of her soul that craved a gentler intimacy for a while, secure in a monogamous relationship with a loving but vanilla man who had made her feel special. It was hard to feel special to men that would make a whore out of her for the night. Men like him.
Though Olive was still close friends with her ex, when she moved back to the city she'd decided to tread her new career path single and celibate. Her carnal needs could usually be managed with porn and toys such that they didn't pull focus from her work. She had put in the work to get distance from that past version of herself, and reading his name had snapped her right back, as if she'd been trudging forward all these years with a rubber band around her ankle, and tripped on the memory of him.
Paul Kleinfeld.
She tugged at her collar and wondered if she should report a conflict of interest to her supervising attorney. She didn't want her hard work on this case to go to waste, nor did she want to lose out on the opportunity to further prove her ability in her workplace. But if it was indeed the same Paul, still a law student himself when she last saw him, she wasn't sure she could meet his gaze during a hearing. Or hear his commanding voice drilling down on witnesses during deposition. Olive had conflicting feelings about the older men who had indulged in dominating her when she had been that vulnerable, made no less complicated by how much it turned her on to be vulnerable. She took a deep breath, rolled back her shoulders as if to shrug off all this baggage, and strode into her supervising attorney's office, holding the packet of paper out in front of her like a talisman.
Olive's supervisor was a tall, elegant enby named Kent. Their shoulder length blond hair and neat three-piece suits often gave off the morbid appearance of an undertaker rather than an attorney, but Olive sometimes caught small glimpses of an underlying edge-- a peek of a chest tattoo as they buttoned up their starched collar, or a particularly Gothic accessory choice. They were the picture of cool, and Olive was happy to work underneath a lawyer who wasn't too old or stuffy.
