Gordon practically dragged himself out of his car, reaching over to pick up a briefcase that felt like it was stuffed full of kettlebells. He tried to tell himself that the senior partners had to notice the impressive number of billable hours he was putting in on this case, but that didn't exactly comfort him when he was looking at another three hours of reviewing contracts every night when he got home. It seemed like he was trapped in some sort of hellish purgatory of legalese, constantly reading and re-reading a contract that seemed to sprout new clauses by the day.
Not that it really surprised him that a business deal this weird would wind up spawning a contract that broke new ground in byzantine business law. Gordon tossed his briefcase onto the chair as he came into the house, leaving the work behind for a moment even if he couldn't get the job out of his head. How could he? He had a client who straddled the line between 'intransigent' and 'incompetent', a scenario that sounded like something out of a law school textbook written while drunk, and a potential for litigation that could stretch out into decades. It was enough to make him wish he'd taken a job in his dad's carpentry business.
He headed into the kitchen and put together a turkey sandwich he barely even tasted, he was so preoccupied with the whole damn mess. It all came back to his client. April Holland. Oh, that was right, 'Mistress' April Holland. She actually wanted it to appear like that in the contract, for fuck's sake. She gave him a goddamn three-page self-written addendum to the purchase agreement for the magazine she was buying explaining what, in legal terms, the difference was between her legal name and her self-imposed identity as a Dominant Hypnotic Woman. He tried to tell her that it was unnecessary, and that he'd have to bill her for reviewing it, but she just gave him a little chuckle and said, "Money well spent." Gordon was half-convinced she was out of her ever-loving mind.
Of course, he never said that to her; she was the client, after all, so it was always 'Mistress April' this and 'Mistress April' that every time they talked. Gordon's job was to give legal advice, not legal commands. But he could already tell that she was setting herself up for years of trouble down the line. This purchase she was making...it was obviously dodgy, the kind of thing that relatives challenged in court all the time and won because no one in sound mind and body signed over their multi-million dollar smut publishing empire for a legal consideration of one dollar, cash. This was the kind of thing you had to make ironclad if you didn't want to spend the rest of your life fighting appeals.
But what did 'Mistress April' do? She wrote her own contracts. Page after page after page of clauses and sub-clauses and nesting sub-sub-sub-clauses, half of which seemed to be lengthy rambling about her philosophy of 'Female Dominance' with no relationship at all to the business deal at hand, and all of which were probably grounds to get the whole deal thrown out. Gordon quickly rinsed off his plate and went back for his briefcase, then headed into his study. He didn't know why he bothered, since she didn't listen to any of his suggested changes, but he was determined to at least do his job.
He sat down at his desk and opened his briefcase, pulling out another sheaf of paperwork. He checked the dates to make sure he had the latest version-just because Mistress April didn't listen to his suggestions didn't mean she didn't change the contract. She did, on a daily basis; every morning brought a new addendum for him to review, or a new version of the existing contract, or just some 'advisory background documents' that turned out to be more of her endless droning about the glories of obedience to the Superior Female Will. And of course, Gordon had to read them until his eyes glazed over.
And then some. Twelve solid hours at the office, and he still had more to review. He flipped to the page that marked where he'd left off, and began to review again. He resisted the temptation to skim-as easy as it was, he couldn't just let his eyes slide right over lines like, 'aaron beckwith [the Publisher] concedes and acknowledges full power of attorney to Mistress April Holland to make all decisions for the business interest designated herein as 'gent magazine' as well as for his personal legal affairs, in perpetuity and negating all other considerations...'
Gordon winced, rubbing his eyes. Did she get this through some sort of kink-friendly Legal Zoom? Did she just sit down and hammer away at the keyboard with phrases she half-remembered from 'Law and Order' until she had the day's quota of mind-numbing bullshit? His eyes picked out another phrase at random: 'Should the party of the first part accede to the adhesion contract implied in Section Two, then further perusal of the text contains the following terms and conditions...' It was just so much gibberish, or at the very least it was an unenforceable set of vaguely understood guidelines that wouldn't hold up in court.
The 'adhesion contract', for example. Mistress April clearly understood that such a thing as an adhesion contract existed, but she misused the term so badly that he couldn't believe she knew what it meant. Adhesion contracts were things like the fine print on the back of your concert ticket saying that the holder agreed not to bootleg, not something you put in an actual contract to tell the reader that continuing to read meant agreeing to...to whatever it was she put in the adhesion contract. No wait. The 'implied' adhesion contract. As if you could just sneak that in after the fact.
He flipped to another page, quietly marveling at Mistress April's shotgun approach to legal jargon. He knew he was supposed to be doing meticulous review of each clause and sub-clause, but how was he even supposed to give meaningful legal advice on a document that contained the phrase, 'A Superior Female, herein defined to be any Woman who has accepted the majesty and power her gender conveys to her over the lesser male...'? What judge would read that and rule that yep, any guy who read this thing definitely agreed to be a submissive sex slave to whatever woman snapped her fingers and asked for it?
But of course, Mistress April was endlessly convinced of the power of her own deathless prose. She seemed to think that simply delivering a sufficiently dense and complex amount of legal verbosity would somehow bring about her feminine control through sheer force of will. As if someone could read a sentence that said, 'The lesser male, as previously defined in Paragraph II of this section as any reader self-identifying as a member of the male gender per the adhesion contract previously noted, agrees to refuse to acknowledge any conscious receipt of commands, instructions, or directives herein described save through manipulation of their erogenous zones until such time as directly instructed to do so by a Superior Female," and just...just...just what? Gordon realized he didn't even understand what the hell Mistress April was getting at with that whole clause.
Gordon leaned back in his chair, sighing in frustration as yet another of his nights was consumed with the Sisyphean task of reading through this woman's rampaging id disguised as a legal document. He unzipped his fly and pulled out his cock, wondering just how the hell he was going to get through this case. Another week of having to be polite and deferential to Mistress April while she made one veiled hint after another that he was succumbing to her dubious 'hypnotic' charms and he might just have to dump this case on someone else, firm be damned. She sure as hell didn't have any hold on him, contract or no contract. He simply refused to acknowledge it.
Cock in hand, he picked up the sheaf of papers and began to read again. He couldn't exactly take notes this way, but what the hell did it matter when he was going over a clause that said, 'By refusing, the party of the first part agrees to accept and acknowledge the inherent divinity of the Female Gender, now and in perpetuity, in this jurisdiction and anywhere in the known universe. Refusal to consciously accept the authority of Mistress April Holland as vested in this document constitutes subconscious acquiescence to the terms and conditions noted in Section Three, and as ratified by masturbation to physical orgasm. No further modifications, exceptions, or denials will be countenanced once the subject of this agreement has so ratified.'
If he took notes on that, what would they even say? 'Mistress April, this section seems to suggest that the more I think of you consciously as that dingbat client of mine with the weird hypnosis fetish, the more I find myself accepting your commands and stroking my cock for you. This seems counterproductive and irrelevant to the agreement under consideration. Can we relegate this to an advisory document for the sake of clarity?'
