Katniss, wearing sunglasses and the only bathing suit she owns, pads barefoot across the wet tiled patio to the poolside bartender.
She's been at the Undersees' party for less twenty minutes and already she's in fairly desperate need of a stiff drink. Not a good sign, she thinks dourly.
"Gin and tonic, please," she tells the bartender. "No ice."
As she waits for the bartender – a nice-enough-looking guy in a starched white uniform – to make her cocktail, her phone buzzes loudly in her purse. She digs through it clumsily with one hand and pulls out the phone.
It's a text from Peeta. Just three words.
I miss you, it says.
Her phone buzzes a second time while it's still in her hands and another text flashes on the screen. Can't wait to see you tonight.
Katniss breaks into a broad smile. She knows she probably looks like an idiot, grinning down at her phone at this swanky party. But she can't help it.
It's been almost a week since she's seen Peeta. Last Saturday he flew to New York – the location of Capitol Corporation headquarters – so he could review the company's internal documents and depose its CEO in person.
Before he left on this trip they'd been inseparable for weeks.
True to her word, Katniss has been working with him on the La Maquila case from the moment he basically admitted that he loved her. That same afternoon, right after leaving the restaurant, Katniss helped him draft a class action lawsuit on behalf of La Maquila's Guatemalan employees.
It took them the rest of the day and most of that night to write it, and it ended up being nearly thirty pages long. Once they were finally satisfied, Peeta quickly e-Filed it with the court before they could second guess any of what they'd drafted.
"Well," he'd said after it was finished, folding up his glasses and placing them on his desk. He'd smiled at her. "Here we go."
They'd laughed deliriously then, with exhaustion or relief. Or perhaps a mixture of both. And then collapsed, together, onto his bed.
Every night since then they've gone straight to his apartment after work to go over strategy, discuss relevant case law… and then to eventually fall asleep, well after midnight, mentally drained, in each other's arms.
Katniss has talked to him every day he's been away. For a few minutes, anyway. He sounds even more exhausted than he was before he left, which concerns her. She suspects he's been working eighteen hour days to get ready for his two-day question-and-answer session with Capitol's CEO. Their entire case against Capitol hinges on him linking the American corporation to La Maquila and its sweatshop in Guatemala. If its CEO manages to evade his questions, they'll be right back where they started from. With no deep pockets to go after, and no support from their firm.
Peeta is under tremendous pressure to get solid, damaging testimony at this deposition. Katniss knows it. And so on Wednesday, kicking herself for not having thought of this earlier, Katniss decided to invite herself to join him in New York to help him get ready.
But he beat her to the punch.
"I know you can't count any of this work towards your billable hours requirement, Katniss," he'd said, sounding apologetic. But also desperate. "I know you have tons of other work to focus on. Believe me… I wouldn't ask if I thought I could handle this on my own. I swear." He'd paused and took a deep breath. "But Snow & Crane is just… they're just… burying me in paper."
Snow & Crane. The law firm Capitol Corporation retained two weeks ago to defend it in this lawsuit.
The firm where their friend Delly works.
Twenty minutes after getting off the phone with Peeta that night, Katniss booked herself a nonstop flight to New York that leaves from O'Hare at eight this evening.
Katniss knows that the two days she'll be in New York will be brutal. They'll barely sleep – and not because of pleasurable nighttime activities, but rather because they'll be up to their eyeballs in document review and legal research. And up against a very tight deadline.
But still. She misses Peeta more than she likes to admit to herself. His crooked smile. The way his glasses always slide halfway down the bridge of his nose when he's concentrating or lost in thought.
The way his lips feel, pressed up against her mouth, moving in tandem with hers…
"Miss?"
The Undersees' bartender's voice breaks her out of her reverie. She blushes, and her eyes snap to his. The guy is looking at her expectantly, one eyebrow raised.
"Your drink?" he says, nodding towards the small glass he's prepared for her.
"Um, yeah," Katniss says, coughing into her hand and shaking her head a little to clear it. She opens her purse again and takes out a few dollars. She folds them up and stuffs them into his tip jar. Katniss smiles sheepishly at the bartender before picking up her drink and taking a large, bracing gulp.
Tonight just can't get here soon enough.
After she has half a gin and tonic in her, Katniss' nerves are finally settled enough that she's able to look around at her surroundings. There are easily three hundred people in the Underseees' spacious backyard. Some of them are Madge's co-workers; a few others are Katniss'.
But it's obvious that Madge's and Katniss' friends were just invited as afterthoughts.
The Undersees are among the wealthiest families in the Chicagoland area, and quite possibly the most well-connected. Most of the party's guests are people Katniss has never seen before. Some are wearing more jewelry at this backyard pool party than Katniss has owned in her entire life.
This is not Katniss' kind of event, to put it mildly, and she wishes she hadn't let Madge talk her into coming in the first place.
"Madge, you know I'm going to New York tonight," she'd whined earlier this afternoon. But Madge ignored her, pulling her off their sofa and dragging her into her room to get changed. "I don't have time for this."
"Think of it as the last fun you'll have before trial," Madge suggested. "Come on. Free drinks? A couple of hours in the sun? You know you want to."
Katniss knew no such thing and told her roommate as such.
In the end, of course, Katniss came anyway. Not because she thought the party would be fun; she knew it wouldn't be. Mostly, she just didn't have the mental energy today to fight Madge on this.
But once she's been at the party for two hours – two hours spent pretending to enjoy herself and doing her best to mingle with drunk rich people – Katniss decides she's had enough. She walks hurriedly towards the French doors that separate the Undersees' lavish sunroom from their back yard and braces herself for the blast of air conditioning that will greet her inside.
"Katniss?"
Before Katniss can make her escape, a familiar voice rings out behind her. She cringes inwardly.
Delly.
Katniss turns around and sees her old friend, wearing a one-piece she vaguely remembers from the days when they swam together at Michigan, walking towards her purposefully. Delly has a drink in her hand and looks incredibly nervous.
"Hey," Katniss says, trying to smile. "Sorry I didn't get a chance to catch up with you while I was here. But I gotta go," she says, jerking her thumb back towards the sunroom door. She shifts her weight anxiously from foot to foot, thinking of the flight she needs to get ready for. "Lunch next week, maybe?"
"Katniss," Delly says again. She shakes her head. "We need to talk." Her tone of voice brooks no opposition.
Suddenly Katniss knows, without even having to ask, what this is about. "All right," she says, nodding slowly. I guess we might as well get this over with.
Katniss follows Delly to a set of white wicker chairs off to one side of the pool that's a fair distance away from most of the party guests. They sit down and Delly sets her drink on the table between them.
"I'm probably not supposed to be talking to you about this," she admits, quietly. Then laughs. "Actually, I know I'm not supposed to be talking to you about this…"
Katniss sighs. "But?" she prompts.
Delly nods. "But," she agrees. "I just wanted to tell you that… well… Peeta has no idea what he's up against in his case."
Katniss rolls her eyes. "I think he has some idea, Dell."
"No," Delly insists. Adamant now. "He doesn't. I'm… look, Katniss. I'm on the litigation team Snow & Crane has assigned to represent Capitol." She leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "I'm one of ten lawyers my firm has assigned to the case," she adds.
Katniss' stomach sinks. She'd assumed from the beginning that Capitol would throw as many resources as it could at this case to make Peeta go away. But ten lawyers from one of the top firms in the country?
"I'm breaching ethical rules left and right just talking to you about this," Delly admits quietly. Which is true, of course. Delly owes, among other things, a duty of confidentiality to her clients, just as Katniss does. "But you're my friend. And so's Peeta." She shakes her head back and forth, very slowly. "He has to know that this is something he just can't win."
Katniss leaps to her feet, suddenly furious. How dare Delly tell her what she and Peeta can and cannot do? Her entire life, people with more money and more privilege than her have told her what her limitations were. And she proved every single one of them wrong. She proved the people she cleaned houses for in high school wrong. She proved the snotty New Yorkers she went to college with wrong, too.
Just like they'll prove Delly wrong.
"Watch us win, Dell," she spits at her angrily.
Without another word, Katniss rushes away from Delly and away from the party, her friend's pleading voice trailing behind her.
Six hours later, Katniss carefully steps into a cab just outside LaGuardia, her duffel slung over one shoulder and her briefcase clutched in both hands.
She's immediately taken aback by how different New York feels.
She didn't expect that. After all, she's no stranger to urban living. Her apartment is just four El stops away from her firm in the Loop – the beating heart of Chicago's business and financial district. Her office is on one of the top floors of a skyscraper that's no taller than any of the dozens of others surrounding it.
Katniss had never been to New York before today, but she'd always assumed it would just be more of what she was already used to.
And yet, she muses as the cabbie adjusts his rearview mirror, there's something fundamentally different about New York. Perhaps it's its energy. Or maybe it's the people—with their pronounced accents and sharp speech patterns that sound nasal and harsh to Katniss' Midwestern sensibilities. Whatever it is, the difference between this place and Chicago is a palpable thing. Something Katniss has felt pressing on her from all sides from the moment she stepped off the airplane.
She finds it a little hard to breathe.
As her cabbie weaves in and around the throngs of other cars and pedestrians in midtown Manhattan, she closes her eyes and focuses on her breathing. On avoiding being crushed by the tremendous weight of this city her very first night here.
At length, the cabbie deposits Katniss at the hotel where Peeta has been staying, courtesy of the generous sponsors of the Kirkland fellowship. Wasting no time, she hurries inside and punches the button to the elevator that will take her to Peeta's room.
A police car blazes by the hotel, its siren piercingly loud, as the elevator door opens. Katniss rushes into the relative quiet the elevator tube provides and punches the button marked "14" with her elbow.
She's shuttled upwards slowly, and she closes her eyes, breathing as deeply as she can.
She hopes they can stay in Peeta's hotel room the whole time she's here.
It takes longer than Katniss expects for her to get to the fourteenth floor.
Once out of the elevator, Katniss shoulders her bags and walks quickly down the dimly-lit hallway to Peeta's room. When she gets to Room 1407 she raps sharply on the door, still trying to calm herself down as she waits for him to open it.
She only has to wait a few seconds. Just as she's checking her wristwatch, the door is yanked open, and Peeta is standing on the other side of it.
His hair is an utter wreck. There are enormous dark circles under his eyes, confirming her earlier suspicions that he's barely slept since coming here. Despite that, the moment his eyes light on hers he breaks into a lopsided grin.
Her heart flops a little in her chest at the sight of it.
"Katniss," he says, beaming now. He pulls her into an embrace and wraps his arms tightly around her shoulders. She drops her bags; they make a muted thunk sound when they connect with the thinly-carpeted floor. Unencumbered, she throws her arms around his neck and presses kisses to the tender spot where it meets his shoulders.
Katniss can hear his heart beating, strong and steady and sure, beneath her ear, and she burrows into his chest a little more, sighing. She's missed this so much. The five days they've been apart have been hell. And even this is enough to get her pulse racing.
"I've missed you," he eventually admits, his voice thick with emotion, into her hair. "I'm so glad you came."
She pulls away a little to look up at him. "Of course I came," she murmurs, reaching up and caressing the side of his face. His stubble is prickly against the smooth skin of her palm, and she shivers involuntarily.
He covers her hand with his own and gives it a squeeze.
A moment later he's kissing her, leaning back against the wall of the hotel hallway for support, her body flush against his.
They don't have time for this. Not really. She's about to protest – to tell him that she's only here for forty-eight hours and they really should get to work – but then he starts nipping at her bottom lip with his teeth and she's gone. In one fluid movement his strong hands slide down her back and cup her bottom. He presses her more closely to him, which allows her to feel all of him through the thick fabric of his jeans.
And then Katniss no longer remembers why she wanted to stop this. Moaning a little into Peeta's mouth, she snakes her hands between their bodies and places her hands on his broad chest, sliding them back and forth until they eventually come to a rest over his heart.
God he feels good.
She loses track of time as they kiss and twine together in the hotel hallway – until suddenly, the bell over the elevator rings loudly, alerting them to the fact that someone is about to stumble upon them.
It snaps them both back to reality. Katniss pulls away from him with only seconds to spare. She turns around and sees an elderly couple emerging from the elevator, talking quietly to each other and looking carefully at the numbers printed above each room.
Out of the corner of her eye Katniss sees Peeta trying to stifle a grin.
She clears her throat loudly, which makes him laugh out loud. She looks back to him and sticks out her tongue.
That makes him laugh even harder.
Sighing, Katniss reaches down and picks up her bags. "You don't need to thank me for coming," she tells him, picking up their conversation from where they left it before they were distracted by each other. "I can't let you do this alone. It's too much."
Peeta nods at her, but his face falls and color begins to stain his cheeks. He breaks eye contact. He leans against the frame of the door awkwardly and rubs at the back of his neck with his hand. "None of this counts towards your billable hours," he says, as though she doesn't know this already.
There's a long pause between them, and Peeta still can't seem to look her in the eye.
"No, it won't," Katniss responds, shrugging. They've been over and over this. She's told him repeatedly that she doesn't give one single fuck about making her billables. She has no shortage of other work to do, and she'll meet her hours some other way.
Without another word she brushes past him and into his hotel room.
It's spacious for a room in midtown Manhattan, and much bigger than Katniss was expecting. A king-sized bed outfitted with a fluffy down comforter and large pillows dominates the room. The foot of the bed is piled high with legal-sized notepads, something Katniss recognizes as a hornbook from their Contracts class, and Peeta's laptop. The room smells very faintly of cigarettes, despite the fact that there is a very visible "no-smoking" sign above the control box for the thermostat. But that doesn't surprise Katniss at all.
Katniss turns to face Peeta, still standing at the entrance to the room, hands in pockets.
"Where should I put these?" she asks, shrugging and gesturing to her bags.
Peeta looks around the room, biting his lip. Almost every flat surface is piled high with papers and document boxes. He crosses over to the armchair in the corner and carefully moves the paper stacked on it to make room for Katniss' things.
"Here," he says. He looks at her, a little chagrined. As if he feels guilty that this lavish hotel room isn't larger. The idea is so ridiculous Katniss has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing.
Katniss bends over to unzip her duffel. It's filled with comfortable clothing, notebooks, and a few cases she'll need to review for the work she left behind in Chicago. Because Katniss is not technically on this case, she can't, and won't, be present for Peeta's deposition in two days. Her presence there would eventually get back to Cinna, which would in turn get her in trouble.
And so because her role here will be entirely behind the scenes, Katniss left her suits and heels at home.
She opens a few dresser drawers at random. The top one is empty and she begins tossing her things inside haphazardly. She's reasonably certain there will be no opportunity to actually use it on this trip; but, smiling, she leaves the black nightie that went unworn on their trip to Guatemala on top of the rest of her clothing. Just in case.
She quickly shoves the drawer shut so Peeta doesn't see what she brought along with her. But he isn't paying attention to her anymore. He's already back to work, sitting cross-legged on the bed, a notebook in front of him and his full attention on what's written in it.
"What are you working on?" she asks, crossing over to the bed. "What can I do?"
Peeta's glances up at her over the silver frames of his glasses. He pushes them up the bridge of his nose and looks down at his notebook again before answering her.
"I've been going over Capitol Corporation's financial statements from the past five years," he tells her. He shakes his head. "I wish I were better at this stuff. I'm looking for a large transfer of funds from Capitol to La Maquila. We need for there to have been a large transfer at some point over the past five years." He shakes his head again and rubs his eyes with the palms of his hands. "But I just can't make heads or tails of this accounting."
"Here," Katniss says, reaching for the notebook. "I'll look over the figures." Katniss looks down at his notes. "I'll need the original forms, though. Your notes aren't detailed enough."
"Err, sorry," Peeta says, sounding sheepish again. He jumps up from the bed and grabs a messy stack of papers from the table next to it. "This is what they gave me on Tuesday."
"Do you think it's everything?" Katniss asks, chewing her bottom lip, thinking of the runaround they got in Guatemala.
"Yeah," he says. "They have counsel now. They're not going to try anything stupid."
"Ok," Katniss says, nodding, already paging through the documents. She's grateful, and not for the first time, that she took that Accounting for Lawyers course during her second year of law school. "I've got the numbers covered. You go ahead and focus on the line of questioning that will link Capitol Corp's other business dealings to La Maquila headquarters."
She looks up at Peeta. Her face falls at the pained expression on his face.
"I think I'm in over my head, Katniss," he admits to her, quietly. "They've been burying me in discovery. I just… it's clear they have an entire team devoted to this case. And on our side, it's just you and me." He laughs a little then, but it's a bitter sound. "And you aren't even supposed to be on this."
Katniss has never heard him sound so defeated.
"You were right all along, of course," Peeta says. "Our firm doesn't give one shit about the public interest. If it did, it wouldn't have one single first-year associate assigned to this." He closes his eyes again. "We need to have a whole team on this too. La Maquila's employees deserve that."
Katniss takes his hand in hers. She caresses the back of it with her thumb and gives it what she hopes is a reassuring squeeze.
"Well, all of that is true," she admits slowly. Reluctantly. "But even still, Peeta. There's one glaring problem with Snow & Crane's approach to the case," she says.
"Yeah?" Peeta asks weakly. "And what might that be?"
Katniss leans forward and slowly, gently, kisses each corner of his mouth. She leans over and whispers in his ear: "The law is on our side."
She presses her lips to his cheek and closes her eyes. She can feel him smiling.
"You have a point," he admits. He lets out a long breath. "I'm just really worried I'm going to get my ass handed to me in this deposition. And then again, next month, at trial."
"Not going to happen," Katniss promises resolutely. "Not with me here."
She kisses his cheek again. The stubble against her lips feels rough, but also good. She makes a mental note to ask him to shave a little less often when they get back to Chicago.
More determined than ever before, Katniss pulls away from him and starts leafing through Capitol's financials again.
At two in the morning, Katniss finally looks up from her notes and rubs her eyes.
It's taking her a lot longer to make sense of these financial records than she'd thought it would. In law school, they occasionally discussed companies that engaged in active obfuscation of their financial records. But only as hypotheticals. As things that could happen.
This is the first time she's ever had to go through records quite like these. It's obvious that Capitol is structuring its financials so that determining exactly where, and how, large sums of its money is spent is impossible. While that may be enough to get them in big trouble with the IRS, it isn't good enough for their purposes. They need to show that there's a steady stream of funding going directly to La Maquila.
And, specifically, that it's directly funding La Maquila's sweatshop operations.
"Peeta," she says, yawning. She wants to tell him that it's not any lack of mathematical ability that's giving him trouble with these statements. The statements are actually nonsensical.
When he doesn't respond right away Katniss looks up and sees that he's lying back on the bed, sound asleep. Unintentionally so, most likely, given that he's still wearing his glasses.
The sight of him asleep makes her realize, suddenly, that she's exhausted herself. It wouldn't hurt to get a few hours of sleep.
Yawning again in spite of herself, Katniss puts the documents she'd been reviewing on the floor by the bed. But very carefully, so that she'll be able to find her place when she gets back to work tomorrow morning.
She takes off her shirt and jeans and pulls on a loose-fitting t-shirt from the top drawer of the dresser. She crawls up the bed and takes Peeta's glasses off his face for him. She folds them up quietly and places them on the table next to the bed.
Clicking off the lamp overhead, she burrows into Peeta's side, pulling the covers up around them.
Despite the fact that she can't remember the last time she was so comfortable, it takes nearly an hour for sleep to take her. Now that she's here and seeing firsthand what they're up against, Delly's words of warning ring in her ears.
In the middle of the night, in this strange bed, she can no longer deny that they worry her.
a/n – If you've stuck with this story and are still reading, I cannot thank you enough for your patience. Despite appearances to the contrary I've never considered it abandoned. And I still don't. I can't promise when the next update will come, but I'm (almost) positive there won't be another eight month drought. ;)
A special thank you to Sponsormusings and Salanderjade for cheering me on – and to MalTease, who quite literally pulled this chapter from me word by word. I couldn't have written this without them.
If you'd like to find me on tumblr, where I blog about THG, Game of Thrones, and my naughty cats, I'm there as jeeno2.