Emma Cocea - A future lawyer

This is a hot fanfic we wrote based on Emily Cocea, a law baddie beating all the standards down! Please enjoy, we hope she does great things in her life

## Part One

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The Montblanc pen scratched across the signature line with the kind of practiced ease that only came from signing checks other people couldn't dream of writing. Garrett Hale set it down on the glass-topped desk, leaned back in the leather chair across from her, and crossed one ankle over his knee like a man who had never once in his life been told no.

"So the Meridian portfolio," he said, "is entirely separate from the Ashford trust holdings. That's your position."

Emma, she went by Emma Cocea professionally, had since the bar exam, a small deliberate choice, kept her eyes on the documents in front of her. She'd built the argument over three days, cross-referencing case law from two jurisdictions, and it was clean. It was good. She knew it was good.

"That's not my position," she said, turning a page. "That's the statutory reality. Delaware code section 3528 is unambiguous about the segregation of trust instruments when the grantor holds dual fiduciary capacity. What the opposing counsel is calling comingling is actually standard trust administration practice, and I can demonstrate that in about forty minutes of oral argument." She looked up. "Which is why you should let me handle the Whitmore deposition on Thursday instead of sending Marcus."

Garrett Hale was fifty-one years old, silver at the temples, with a jaw that had clearly never gone soft and a bespoke charcoal suit that probably cost more than Emma's first semester of law school. He had the look of a man who had been handsome in his thirties and had simply decided to stay that way through sheer discipline and the kind of money that made discipline easier. He ran Hale Capital Management from a glass tower in Midtown, had a house in Greenwich and something in Aspen, and had been referred to her firm, Calloway, Dreiss & Marsh, by a mutual contact three weeks ago.

This was their fourth meeting.

He was watching her the way he'd watched her in each of the previous three. Not rudely. Not the way some of them did, the ones who made her feel like she had to earn the right to be smart in the room. It was something else. Quieter. Like he was fitting pieces together.

"Marcus is fine," she continued, pulling the Ashford documents into a neat stack. "He's thorough. But he doesn't know this file the way I do, and Whitmore's counsel is going to try to rattle him on the segregation question. I've already anticipated their three strongest angles. I have responses prepared."

"I don't doubt it," Garrett said.

He had a low voice, unhurried, the kind that had probably run boardrooms for decades and learned that the person who spoke slowest usually won. He picked up his copy of the brief she'd prepared, thirty-two pages, tabbed and annotated, and turned to a section she'd flagged.

"This footnote on page nineteen," he said. "The Calloway v. Stern precedent. You're leaning on that pretty hard."

"It's the cleanest analog in the circuit. The fact pattern mirrors ours closer than anything else from the last decade."

"Opposing counsel is going to say the asset class distinction makes it apples and oranges."

"And I'll say the asset class is irrelevant to the structural question, which is the only question in front of the court." She met his eyes. "They'll try to make it complicated. It isn't."

He was quiet for a moment, looking at her. Not at the brief. At her.

Emma held the look. She was twenty-six years old, three years out of undergrad, second year of her J.D., working at Calloway on an accelerated associate track that had raised some eyebrows and a great deal of resentment from people who'd been there longer. She was used to rooms like this, used to men like this, men who entered a space with money radiating off them like heat and who watched her with that particular calibrating expression, weighing her against whatever version of her they'd expected to find.

She'd stopped trying to manage those expectations a long time ago.

"You went to Michigan Law," he said. It wasn't a question.

"I did."

"Carnegie Mellon before that."

"Decision Science, with a business concentration." She slid the trust documents across the desk toward him. "Which is why the quantitative structure of the Meridian portfolio makes complete sense to me and I can explain it to a judge in plain English."

Garrett smiled. It shifted his face, made him look, briefly, like something other than a man who'd spent thirty years accumulating leverage.

"They said you were good," he said.

"Who said."

"David Marsh. When he recommended I come here." He tilted his head slightly. "He was actually quite emphatic about it. Said I should specifically request you."

"David's generous."

"He said you were the sharpest associate they'd had in five years and that you had a quality he described as," Garrett seemed to consider the word, "— fearlessness."

Emma tapped the stack of documents into alignment. "David likes people who don't back down in depositions."

"Is that what it is."

There was something in the way he said it. Not quite a question. Not quite an implication. Just a door left slightly open, like he was curious whether she'd notice.

She noticed.

She'd been noticing that particular door for four meetings now.

"Walk me through the Thursday timeline," she said. "What time does Whitmore's team expect to start, and do you want me looped in with Marcus the night before to prep, or,"

"Emma."

She stopped.

He was looking at her steadily, the brief resting flat on the desk under one large hand, and there was something different in his expression now. Still calm. Still controlled. But something had shifted in the composition of it.

"I want to ask you something," he said, "and I want you to know that however you answer it has absolutely no bearing on this case or this firm relationship. I'm not that kind of man."

Emma put down her pen. Slowly.

She had a sudden, very clear sense of where this was going. It was a sense she'd developed over years of practice, a tuning fork in her chest that vibrated at a specific frequency when a conversation was about to change shape.

"Alright," she said. Her voice was even.

Garrett held her gaze. He wasn't embarrassed. He wasn't leering. He was just, direct. Which was almost more disarming.

"A few years ago," he said. "Before law school. There was a girl with your name, your face." He paused. "I came across some of her work."

The office was very quiet. Twelve floors up, the city moved outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, taxis and pedestrians and the indifferent machinery of Midtown Manhattan, and inside this room there was just the two of them and the sound of the climate control running.

Emma looked at him for a long moment.

Then she exhaled slowly through her nose.

"You'd be surprised," she said, "how often that comes up."

"I imagine."

"There's a version of this conversation where I ask you to leave and have David reassign your account."

"There is," he agreed. "That would be entirely reasonable."

She looked at him for another beat. He didn't flinch, didn't apologize, didn't try to walk it back or dress it up in something more palatable. Just sat there with that same steady unhurried quality and waited.

She pushed back her chair.

She walked to the office door, a solid dark wood door with a brushed-nickel handle, and turned the lock. The click of it was small and precise in the quiet room.

Then she turned back around.

Garrett Hale watched her cross the room toward him with an expression that was very controlled and very warm at the same time, like a man who had learned long ago to keep the two things separate and was now, deliberately, letting them mix.

"You said David told you I was fearless," Emma said.

"He did."

She stopped at the edge of the desk between them. She was wearing a dark slate blazer over a cream silk blouse, a pencil skirt, heels that added two inches to her already considerable posture. Her dark hair was pulled back at the nape of her neck. She was immaculate in the way that had taken her years to perfect, the kind of immaculate that said she had arrived at exactly where she intended to be.

She leaned forward, placing both palms flat on the desk between them, papers and briefs pushed slightly aside, and looked at him at close range.

"He wasn't wrong," she said.

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## Part Two

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Garrett Hale did not move immediately. That was the thing about him, he had the patience of a man who had learned that the best things came to those who didn't lunge. He held her gaze across the desk for a moment that stretched like taffy, and then his hand came up and touched her jaw. Just his fingertips. Testing.

Emma turned her face into it slightly, almost involuntarily, before catching herself and settling back into the controlled stillness that was her natural register.

"You're sure," he said.

"I locked the door."

He studied her face. "That's not the same thing."

"Garrett." She said his first name deliberately, watched his jaw tighten almost imperceptibly at it. "I've been watching you watch me for four meetings. You've been professional about it. I respect that." She straightened up, reached back and pulled the pin from her hair, let it fall dark and thick past her shoulders. "But we both know this isn't about the Meridian portfolio anymore."

He stood up. He was taller than her even in the heels, broader, and when he moved around the desk toward her the size of him registered in a physical way that she felt in the base of her sternum. Not threatening. Just present. Real.

"What is it about, then," he said.

"Sealing the deal," she said. "You were going to sign the retainer today anyway. I could see it in how you'd read the brief. You'd already decided." She looked up at him. "This is something else."

His hands came to her waist, both of them, and the warmth of his palms through the thin fabric of her blazer was immediate and grounding. He walked her back slowly until her lower back met the edge of the conference table along the side wall, wide, solid mahogany, cleared of everything except her laptop and a legal pad. She let it take her weight.

"How much do you charge," he said, low.

She laughed. Short and real. "You can't afford that version of me anymore. That was a different girl."

"Was it."

"She was twenty-two and putting herself through school." Emma reached up and slipped the blazer off her shoulders, let it drop onto the chair behind her. The cream silk blouse was thin, and the office was cool, and his eyes dropped to the front of it in a way that made warmth pool low in her belly. "I did what I had to do and I'm not ashamed of it. But I don't do it for money anymore."

"What do you do it for now."

She reached up and began unbuttoning the top button of the blouse. Then the second. "When I feel like it," she said. "With who I feel like it. On my terms."

His hands moved from her waist, one of them sliding flat up her ribcage beneath the open front of the blouse, palm against the thin fabric of her bra, and Emma pulled in a quiet breath. He could feel it, the sharpness of it, the way her chest expanded into his hand.

"Those are good terms," he said.

"I've had a while to figure out what I want."

He kissed her then, and it wasn't tentative. He kissed her the way she'd suspected he did everything, with full commitment and no wasted motion, his mouth firm and warm against hers, one hand cradling the back of her head and the other pressing flat against the small of her back and pulling her into him. Emma kissed him back, hands going to the lapels of his jacket, fingers curling into the fabric, and for a moment neither of them was an attorney or a client or any category at all, just bodies, temperature, the specific want of it.

He pulled back from the kiss to look at her face, flushed and slightly undone, hair loose now and falling forward.

"I've thought about this," he said. "Since the first meeting."

"I know," she said. "You're not subtle."

"I thought I was being very subtle."

"You're a fifty-one-year-old man in a two-thousand-dollar suit who's been finding reasons to extend every meeting by twenty minutes." She tilted her head. "You're not subtle."

He smiled again, that real one, the one that changed his face, and then he kissed her again, longer this time, and his hands worked the remaining buttons of her blouse open with efficiency. She let him push it off her shoulders. She was wearing a simple bra, pale grey, no lace, practical and fitted, and he looked at what it was doing and then undid it and let it fall and looked at her with an expression of plain uncalculated want that was more flattering than anything articulate he could have said.

His hands came up to her breasts, and Emma arched into it because his palms were warm and his touch was confident and she'd been working twelve-hour days for three weeks and her body was making decisions independently of her professional brain right now, which was, she thought, entirely her right.

"Take the jacket off," she said.

He did. Dropped it on the chair next to hers. She reached for his tie and he stood still while she loosened it, pulled it off, dropped it. She got his shirt untucked and he shrugged it off and she ran her hands over his chest, still solid, kept himself in good shape, the kind of body that was built by actual discipline rather than vanity, a little grey in the chest hair and she found that she didn't mind at all.

She kissed his jaw, his neck, felt his hands move to her hips and grip. He turned her smoothly, bodies shifting, until it was him leaning against the table and her standing in front of him, and then he was reaching for the zipper at the back of her skirt, pulling it down slowly, spreading his hands over the curve of her hips as it loosened, and Emma stepped out of it when it dropped, standing in front of him in heels and underwear and nothing else, conference room light falling across her skin.

He looked at her for a long moment. Just looked.

"Christ," he said quietly.

"You said you'd come across my work," she said, reaching for his belt. "So you already know."

"It was different," he said. "That was a screen."

She pulled his belt free, worked the button of his trousers. "And this."

He cupped her face in both hands and kissed her deeply, and she worked him loose with her hands, feeling him thick and already hard against her palm, and he made a low sound into her mouth that she felt in her spine.

She broke the kiss.

She looked at him for a moment with that same direct lawyer's gaze, assessing and clear.

Then she sank to her knees.

---

The floor of the Calloway conference room was carpeted, beige, the deep corporate pile of a firm that billed four hundred an hour, and Emma Cocea settled onto it with the ease of a woman who had no complicated feelings about being exactly where she was. She pushed his trousers down far enough to have what she wanted and wrapped one hand around the base of him and looked up.

Garrett Hale was looking down at her with an expression she recognized, the slightly stunned quality of a man who had been entirely confident in his imagination of this moment and was now discovering that reality had improved on it substantially.

He was thick, solidly built there as everywhere else, and she ran her thumb along the underside of him slowly, feeling the pulse of it, watching his jaw tighten.

"You've thought about this since the first meeting," she said.

"Yes."

"Tell me what you thought."

A breath. "Exactly this."

She leaned in and ran her tongue up from the base of him to the head slowly, flat and wet, heard his exhale, sharp, controlled, and then she took him into her mouth properly. Not a tease. Just, took him in, warm and slow, lips tight around him, and worked down as far as she could and then back up, setting a rhythm that was deliberate and unhurried and entirely in her control.

His hand came to her hair. Not pushing. Just resting, fingers spread across the back of her head, weight of his palm present and warm.

She worked him thoroughly. She had her hand at the base, twisting slightly with each stroke of her mouth, and she watched his face from below, that controlled mask of his coming apart in increments, jaw tight, chest rising and falling harder, the hand in her hair slowly tightening. She pressed her tongue flat against the underside of him on each downstroke and felt him twitch against it, heard the rough exhale above her.

"Emma," he said.

She pulled back slowly, dragging her lower lip, looked up at him. Her lipstick was gone. Her hair was thoroughly disheveled now and she didn't care at all.

"Mm," she said.

"If you keep doing that I'm going to—"

"I know," she said, and took him back in.

She brought him close, deliberately close, feeling in the tension of his thighs and the grip of his hand in her hair when he was right at the edge, and then she pulled off cleanly and stood up, leaving him breathing hard against the table edge, slightly undone in a way that suited him enormously.

"The table," she said.

He looked at her.

"I want you to fuck me on the table," she said. "I've been sitting across it from you for a month."

Something ignited in his expression. He reached for her, hands going to her hips, fingers hooking into the waistband of her underwear and pulling them down in a smooth motion. She stepped out of them and he lifted her in one clean motion, surprising, the ease of it, his hands under her thighs, and set her on the edge of the mahogany conference table.

The wood was cool against the backs of her thighs. She leaned back on her palms, feet hanging in the air, heels still on, and he stepped between her knees, looking at her.

His thumb found her first, pressing slowly against her core, and the sound Emma made was involuntary, quiet and low. She was wet, had been wet since he'd kissed her the first time, probably before, the particular charge of the last four weeks of subtext finally having a physical outlet, and his thumb moved against her in a slow circle and she bit her lower lip and looked at the ceiling.

"You're ready," he said.

"I told you to do something," she said.

---

He pushed into her slowly. The stretch of him was substantial and her breath came out in a long controlled exhale, hands gripping the edge of the table, and he watched her face the whole time, that direct attentive quality of his turned to this, reading her, and when he was fully seated inside her they both held still for a moment, adjusting.

"Okay?" he said.

"More than okay," she said. "Move."

He did.

He fucked her with the same quality he had everything else, no wasted motion, purposeful, his hands firm on her hips as he pulled back and drove forward, and the table was solid beneath her and the sound of it was the rhythmic knock of mahogany and the wet slick of him moving inside her and her own breathing going rough and jagged as he built a pace.

Emma dropped back onto her elbows, chin up, dark hair spread behind her on the table, and let herself feel it. The full depth of him on each thrust, the way his hips met the inside of her thighs, the heat of his hands spreading across her skin. She looked at him through half-closed eyes and he was watching her with that focused intensity and she could feel how close he was keeping it, measured, deliberate, the kind of self-control that meant he was choosing each stroke.

"Harder," she said.

His grip on her hips tightened and he gave her harder, the impact of it resonating through the table, through her, a sound pulling from her throat that was not the sound of Emma Cocea, J.D. candidate, associate attorney, Calloway Dreiss and Marsh, just the sound of a woman getting exactly what she wanted.

She reached between them and pressed her fingers against herself, working in a fast tight circle as he fucked her, and the two sensations together were almost immediate in their effect, the deep stretch and thrust of him and her own hand and the image she caught of herself, spread across her own conference table with her skirt on the floor and her heels in the air, and it was that image more than anything that tipped her over.

She came with her head back and her spine arched and his name somewhere in the sound she made, a full-body clench of it, and she felt him react to it, felt him lose a fraction of that control, his rhythm stuttering and deepening, his grip on her hips going from firm to iron.

"Don't stop," she said, or breathed, riding through it, and he didn't.

He fucked her through the full length of it, deep and hard, until she was trembling against the table and making small broken sounds, and then he was pulling her up, an arm around her back, dragging her against his chest, and fucking into her from that angle, her face buried in his neck, his hands splayed across her back, and she could feel him getting close in the change of his breathing, the low rough sound he was making against her hair.

"Inside," she said.

A rough exhale. "Emma—"

"I'm on the pill," she said. "I want to feel it."

That was enough. His hips snapped forward and he held her hard against him as he came, buried deep, the heat of it unmistakable, and the sound he made was low and long and something she was going to think about later in a quiet moment and feel very satisfied about.

They stayed there for a moment, her against his chest, his arms around her back, both of them breathing. The conference room was entirely quiet. Outside, twelve floors down, New York City was its usual indifferent self.

Emma straightened up slowly. She reached over to the box of tissues on the table's edge. She was deeply, specifically, excellently satisfied and she let herself feel that for a moment, private and clean, before the professional brain started coming back online.

Garrett was watching her with an expression that was warm and undone and somewhat awed.

"Well," he said.

"The retainer," she said. She slid off the table, smoothed nothing, her skirt was on the floor, and retrieved it, stepped into it, zipped it. "You're signing the retainer. Thursday, Marcus will not be handling the Whitmore deposition. I will."

He stared at her. Then he laughed. A real one. Low and full.

"You're extraordinary," he said.

"I know." She retrieved her blouse from the chair, shrugged it on, began doing the buttons. "You have the pen."

He reached down for the Montblanc, which had rolled onto the floor at some point, and picked it up and signed where she told him to without another word.

She countersigned. Slid his copy across the table.

Her hair was still down, her lipstick long gone, the room smelling thoroughly of what they'd done, and she looked at him over the mahogany and felt the particular satisfaction of a woman who had handled every single thing in her immediate environment and done so entirely on her own terms.

"Same time next week," she said. "I'll have the Whitmore prep documents ready."

Garrett Hale buttoned his shirt, looking at her with that warm attentive quality she'd been cataloguing for a month, and smiled.

"I'll clear my afternoon," he said.

---

## Part Three

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He was at the elevator when he turned back.

Emma had walked him out, that was standard, she walked all her clients to the elevator bank, and was holding his briefcase out to him, which he'd nearly left in the conference room, and he took it and looked at her.

"Can I ask you something," he said.

"You can ask."

"The girl from before. The one on the screen." He studied her face. "Was she happy?"

Emma considered the question. She had the look she got when something was actually interesting to her, a slight stilling, a shift in the quality of her attention.

"She was," Emma said. "She was doing what she wanted to do and it paid for what she needed it to pay for and she was very much in charge of it." A beat. "She just had somewhere else she was going."

"And this—" he gestured slightly, back toward the corridor, the conference room.

"This is me," Emma said, "going somewhere else and enjoying the view along the way."

The elevator arrived. He stepped in and turned to face her as the doors began to close.

"Next week," he said.

"Next week," she said.

The doors closed.

She stood there for a moment in the corridor of Calloway, Dreiss & Marsh, hair down, blouse only approximately perfect, feeling the pleasant deep ache in her hips and the clean bright satisfaction of a life entirely under her own management.

Then she went back to her office.

She had a brief to finish.

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