Page 5 of The Suit

I offered up another shrug, which was all I could manage. “I guess, if she wasn’t Satan’s spawn.It’s hard to see her features properly when they’re always dripping with contempt or contorted into ascowl. She hasn’t aged though, but that’s probably down to the fact she drinks blood and feeds off the young.”

Murray snorted but didn’t offer up any other credible explanation for why her skin still looked as peachy soft as it had nearly a decade ago.

“She turned up with a boardroom full of lawyers, all of them quaking under her rule, and I’d wager she’s made every single one of them cry.” Every drop of loathing that infected my blood in college had erupted like a dormant volcano and exploded through my veins the second I laid eyes on her again. “But… I did find these came in handy.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out Penn’s amazing ear plugs.

“Yes!” he cried with glee. “I fucking told you they’re amazing. Didn’t I tell you?!”

“You did, and they are. You should have seen her face when I removed them and she realized I hadn’t heard a thing she’d said. Bet she’d been practicing that all weekend too. I’m going to pay for it, but it was worth it.” I laid back down on the couch, my arm over my face. I needed to gear up for the fight of my life. “God, I fucking hate her.”

“Well, you know we always have your back, Raferty.” Penn picked up the bag he’d carried in with him, handing it over to me. “We bought you a present; thought you could do with this today. Maybe even more so now she’s so close by.”

“Thank you.” I shot him a questioning look while I extracted a large box from reams of tissue paper and opened it. I should have guessed, but it didn’t stop me from bursting into loud laughter as the contents came into view.

When we were at college, at the end of every day, I’d come back to our brownstone on Beacon Hill and throw darts at Beulah’s face until I felt better, until my rage had subsided from whatever had come out of her mouth that day. It had started as a page with her face on it torn from the law school handbook and pinned to the board, but after a particularly heinous argument where she’d almost got me kicked out of Torts class, they had one made properly. I still had it, although it currently resided in the den at my family’s house in the Hamptons.

And now Beulah’s face was staring up at me once again. I lifted it out, holding it up as I’d witnessed Tom Brady holding up the Vince Lombardi Trophy, or as Penn wishes he could hold the Commissioner’s Trophy – something that was never going to happen. This dartboard was a thing of beauty, and a small lump appeared in my throat at how awesome my friends were.

I coughed it away just as Penn grabbed me into a massive hug, ruining the moment. “We’ll get you through this buddy; it’ll be just like college. Come on, let’s get it up and give it a whirl.”

He reached into another bag and extracted a hammer and nails.

“Um, Pennington? What exactly do you think you’re doing with those?” Murray frowned at him.

“We’re helping our boy, Muzzler, what does it look like? We can’t very well send him off for the afternoon without getting all his frustration out first. Who knows what sort of trouble he’d get into.”

Murray rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything to stop Penn from hammering into the wall. It was brave too because Penn wasn’t known for his handywork, but after a couple of failed attempts, the dartboard successfully stayed hanging. He walked over to the bag, and pulled out a little pouch which he handed to me. I opened it up and three darts fell out, the flight on each also had a little picture of her face with a warning sign printed over the top. I huffed in a grin, at both the level of detail they’d gone into, and the delight on Penn’s face.

“You’re up, bud.” Penn nodded to the board, and I stepped forward.

“Wait,” Murray stopped me, my arm ready to aim. “Remember the three…”

I nodded, taking a deep breath. “Yeah.”

I rocked back on my heel, my arm once more in its place and ready to throw.

“I will not…” The first dart flew into the board, hitting her directly in the forehead, and the treble twenty.

“Let Beulah Holmes…” The second got her right in the dimple at the top of her cheek, one which appeared with every smug grin she shot my way when she thought she’d won.

I fucking hated that dimple and everything it represented.

“Fuck with me.” The final dart hit the bullseye, and her right on the nose.

The sentence I’d repeated daily in college clung in the air. Murray had come up with it after the time I’d arrived home ranting about a troll on my law course. I’d been raised to respect women, to treat them with kindness and equality - as I would any one of my friends – so I hadn’t realized immediately that she was more Medusa than human, although the tight black curls should have given it away.

During our first week together, I’d wondered if maybe she’d been in a bad mood; after our second, I wondered if she was still in a bad mood; by the third I realized it was only with me, and it wasn’t so much a bad mood as an unexplained hatred following our class on Criminal Justice, where she’d tried and failed to humiliate me with a bogus argument on the validity of mandatory minimums - something I wasn’t entirely sure she even believed. Sometimes I wondered if she’d argue with me that Yale Law was the better school, if I’d openly claimed it wasn’t. It had taken a mere four weeks for her to cement herself at the top of my list of outright enemies - which at the time only had her name on it – but even if it hadn’t, she’d still be at the top. From then on, it had been warfare.

Penn doubled over laughing. “Fuck, I’d forgotten how funny this was. How is this still the same as it was ten years ago?”

“I don’t know.” I pulled the darts out of the board and started over.

“Maybe this time you’ll fuck it out.”

I stopped mid-aim and turned to stare at him. “Don’t hold your breath. We won’t.”

“Murray,” Penn ignored me, nodding over to Murray instead, “if Raferty is starting up his feud again, we need to restart our bet.”

---