Page 47 of Vicious
I nod and grab my phone, pulling up the sewing supplies website. I find silver thread, and there are more options than I know what to do with. In the end, I just add a bunch of them to the cart. “Anything else you need? While I’m on the site.”
“Can I have that for a minute?” May asks, reaching her hand out for the phone. “It’s easier for me to look than to try to tell you what else I want.”
I laugh and shake my head. “Nice try. I guess I’ll order just the thread, and you can let me know the next time you’re missing something.”
She rolls her eyes. “I really was just going to look for a few shades of cloth and some adornments,” she tells me. “What am I going to do, call 911?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it. I’m friends with a lot of the police department higher ups.” I snort at that thought.
Friends.
Yeah, right. I donate to whatever campaigns and causes, and they understand that I’m an important, influential person with the right kind of connections—like Senator Savage, Hunter’s mother.
“You really think I’m stupid, don’t you?” She shakes her head. “Anyway, there are a few things.” She tells me what to look for, and I don’t bat an eye when she keeps adding more and more—like she’s trying to test me—until the total is well over five hundred dollars.
“All right. It says we can expect delivery within the week.” I put my phone away again and reach out to hit the play button on the remote to start up her anime again. “Hope you had more fun with your sewing than I did talking to Director Talks-Too-Much from the FTC.”
“Why would you turn it on then start talking?” she complains, grabbing the remote back from me. “Anyway, it sounds like your job sucks.”
“Yep. It does, as you Americans like to say, fucking suck.” I sigh loudly. “I mean, I do enjoy a lot of it. The legal stuff is great. I didn’t become a lawyer just so I could earn millions of dollars per year and stay as far away from England and China as possible. But sometimes I just want to go home and swim some laps and spend time with you instead of dealing with my clients’ crisis that only happened because they sent two differing files to the intern, and he didn’t fucking check which one was the more recent one.”
May finally comes to sit down on the opposite end of the couch from me. “Sounds shitty. But what do you mean, you Americans? You’re pretty much an American. You don’t say like… arse, and torch, and whatever else. ‘Bloody hell.’ Do you say that?”
I glance at her, but I’m too exhausted to pull her closer to me. “I probably say bloody hell. Sometimes. Maybe?” I think about it. “I must have, back when I first moved here. I know my law school peers sometimes laughed about it.” Then I shrug. “I’ve lived here for almost fifteen years now, so I guess I’ve acclimated.”
She relaxes slowly, like a feral cat who thinks it’s safe, and replies, “Anyway, why don’t you just say screw it and go home? You’re obviously not hurting for money. You’re just working yourself into an early grave… Wait. No. You can do that. Just leave the door unlocked when you do.”
I look at her, surprised by her suggestion. Not the early grave thing, of course. But the stop working thing. “Everybody has to work,” I say cautiously. “I can’t imagine sitting around doing nothing.”
It was a whole thing when I’d been growing up. My grandfather and father both put in long hours for their businesses, and it got them the success that they had. It was a given that I would do the same kind of work. My father rarely went on vacation with me and my mother because of how tied he was to his business, and even when he had come along, he was half glued to his computer or phone.
“Well, me either,” May drawls. “But I seem to find myself doing next to nothing anyway.” She shrugs. “But still, I worked like 80-hour work weeks to keep the lights on. You’re working more than that for money you don’t even need. You could give half of it to charity and not bat an eye.”
“I do give a lot of it to charities,” I point out.
She rolls her eyes at me. “Is it because of the tax write-offs?”
“Yes, it’s predominantly because of the tax write-offs,” I agree. “But I support the local Chinese-American society out of the goodness of my heart.”
“Uh-huh.” May doesn’t sound convinced. “Do you work all those hours out of the goodness of your heart, too? Because even soulless lawyers deserve to have time off.” She pauses. “Except you, maybe. Maybe this is punishment from the universe for the time you spend tormenting your fucking sex slave.”
“I mean, I bill at six hundred dollars an hour, so the more I work, the more I get paid,” I say.
She isn’t wrong. I know Hunter and Drake don’t work this much. Hunter has his regular office hours, and he’s on call when his patients go into labor. Drake jokes about his long weekend trips all the time. I know Hunter took his girl to Hawaii just a few months ago, and I don’t remember the last time I went anywhere outside the city, except to go to Beijing or London because of family obligations.
“Six hundred?” May repeats, sputtering. “You don’t need to work overtime if you make six hundred an hour. With that kind of money, I would have worked five hours a month and called it good.” Her expression darkens. “Well, if I’d been living alone.”
Yeah, if her precious Baba wasn’t around to siphon off all her hard-earned wages.
“I didn’t get to be a lawyer who bills six hundred an hour by half-assing my job,” I point out. “That’s the kind of talk that means you’re worth barely one hundred an hour.”
She stares at me. “Excuse me? Worth? I got paid like fifteen dollars an hour for shit labor where I busted my ass for other people to grind me down into dirt. Why the fuck would I want to work my life away, especially when someone like me is never going to work into the higher echelons of a corporation. How much does your intern get paid?” she challenges me. “Or is he just there for ‘work experience’ or whatever bullshit you call it?”
“Our interns get paid,” I say. “But don’t ask me how much. I’m not in charge of payroll at the firm.”
“Bet you they get paid less than a hundred dollars an hour. The good ones, the ones who fuck up… all of them.” She glares at me. “I bet even your payroll people get paid less than fifty dollars an hour.”
I consider that, but I never looked into the finances of the firm that deeply. “They’re salaried, so I have no idea how much they get per year or their annual bonuses. You’re right that the interns all probably get the same stipend.”