Page 3 of Forever and Always

Andrew

The phone rang just after eight p.m. The caller ID read Denver City Detention Center. What on Earth? Was one of my clients in trouble?

“Andrew Lawson,” I answered in my professional voice.

“This is a call from the Denver City Detention Center,” a robotic voice announced. “Will you accept a call from…,” the robotic voice was replaced with a human voice that haunted my dreams, “Katy Robertson Steph’s friend”. This was followed by the robot asking me to press one to accept or two to decline.

I pressed one.

“Hello? Katy?”

“Andrew. Thank God. I’m so sorry to bother you. I… I need help. I need a lawyer.”

I was dying to ask questions, but I knew that her phone time was limited.

“Are you in detention downtown?” I asked.

“Yeah.” She sounded sad.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Thank you.”

I changed into a suit, so I’d look more lawyerly and took off down the mountain. It was dark out but fortunately the roads were clear and traffic was light, so I made good time, arriving in downtown Denver in just under an hour. Someone pulled away just up the street from the jail and I grabbed the open parking spot before jogging up to the detention center.

Fifteen minutes and a pat down later I was in a small room waiting for Katy. They brought her in wearing handcuffs, but she was wearing a dress and boots. There was a dark stain over the front of her dress that I suspected was blood, although she didn’t appear to be injured.

“Can you take the cuffs off my client please?” I asked in my best asshole lawyer voice.

The guard sent me a bored look. “No touching. No sudden movements.”

Katy just nodded, looking more somber than I’d ever seen her. Of course I’d only spent a few hours with her, including that hot kiss in the parking lot six months ago. The guard removed her cuffs and she gasped in pain.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “Did they hurt you?”

Katy shook her head. “I’m fine. Thanks for coming.”

She was beautiful, with long, dark blonde hair, pouty lips, wide brown eyes, and skin that looked lightly tanned despite the fact that it was February in Colorado. She was strong – I knew she needed to maintain a level of physical fitness for her job – but had womanly curves that I wanted nothing more than to explore with my tongue.

I’d grown up hearing the family legend of the Lawson Lightning Bolt. My family believed in love at first sight, and when it came, it hit you with a bolt of electric heat that was akin to being hit by lightning. I’d always thought it was just a story my parents told, like Santa Claus. After all, my two brothers and I got well into our forties without ever experiencing anything close to love.

Until Steph came to town and knocked my older brother Christopher right onto his grumpy ass. One look at her and the guy was gone. I would have found it entertaining if I hadn’t met Katy a few days later and felt the Lawson Lightning Bolt for myself. Unfortunately Katy lived an hour away and unlike Steph, she’d been very clear she only did casual.

Now I was the grumpy one in our family, because the woman I loved didn’t seem all that interested in me. It had been eating at my insides for a year and a half now.

“What happened?” I asked as soon as the guard left us alone.

Katy sagged down into a plastic chair and I sat across from her, a metal table bolted to the floor between us. The room smelled like sweat and despair. My heart ached at the defeated look on her face.

“I went to happy hour with a few friends from work,” she said. “It was eighties night so we were dancing and having fun. At some point my coworkers left but I stayed to dance some more.”

“Were you drunk?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I only had two drinks all night, I swear. I was on the dance floor and this guy comes up and starts grinding against me like he thinks that’s dancing. I told him several times to get lost, that I wasn’t interested. But he kept bothering me, being aggressive and handsy, a total jerk.”

I felt a rush of anger at whoever this guy was.

“I told him in no uncertain terms to leave me alone, but then he comes up behind me, pulls my ass back to rub against his erection, and grabs one of my boobs. Hard.”