Title: Nobody In Particular

Author: Oliver Harpst

Rating: T, for mild language and sexual references

Summary: Twenty-eight year old Gabriella Montez had given up on love -- rather, love had given up on her. Until a new boss shows up and throws her entire world upside down...

Disclaimer: I only wish that I owned HSM. I only wish. :sigh:

Author's Note: This story will be updated very slowly. I'm sorry, but I work over 30 hours a week and I just don't have time to update a chaptered story every day. Please be patient with me, and enjoy the many one-shots I'll throw your way. Thanks!

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Oh, fuck.

"I'm not asking anyone to... be afraid of me. We're a small firm, and I'd like us to be friends. All I ask is that you listen to me, follow my orders... maybe even respect me."

Gabriella sighed, internally beating a large straw-and-cloth dummy of herself in a frenzied distress. Of course, with her luck, Nobody in Particular would be her new boss, the rich, ambitious, upstart young lawyer from Los Angeles. And, of course, she would just have to speak out loud the embarrassing and none-too-polite thoughts niggling in the back of her mind. Yes indeed, she thought, already mentally writing up her resume for the job she would attempt after being gloriously fired, you should have just sat all day in the subway station. And yet, was that a hint of amusement beneath his words? Probably the sick enjoyment he's going to get from firing me, the bastard. She clenched her fists, praying that she would neither scream aloud nor burst into big, blubbering tears -- both embarrassing, when done in public, and likely to appeal to the sadistic fantasies of the lawyers around her. They fed on human suffering, didn't you know.

"Miss Montez?"

She realized only then that he had been speaking to her all along, and before her rationality could kick in, before that voice in her head could scream 'NO, DON'T DO IT!' she felt her mouth open and her voice say, "I'm sorry, were you talking to me?" A snicker of laughter from Taylor, the other secretary -- in fact, Grabriella was not even in the position of secretary. She was a lowly assistant for the lowly secretary -- brought her to her senses. Well, this is it. I'll be fired for sure. Now I won't get this month's paycheck and be able to buy a new car because the last one was stolen and I won't be able to pay rent and I'll be thrown out on the street and have nowhere to live and become a drug dealer on the corner and push cocaine to children and then I'll be arrested for certain. Or shot. I wish I were shot. This is all the fault of that firm-assed, tight-pants waiter at the restaurant last week! "Fuck!" she imagined herself accusing, not yet realizing she had switched from the mental to the verbal (as she had the embarrassing habit of doing in moments of high emotion). "Fuck you and your tight ass."

Silence.

She heard an awkward cough from Chad Danforth, one of the lawyers, and a nervous laugh that might have been Taylor punctuate the absolute, oppressive, embarrassed silence that had cannon-balled rather unceremoniously into the conference room. It took a few moments for her to realize the staff meeting had halted, and her roving attention was quickly dragged home with the sinking sensation that all of this was because of her. Her eyes squeaked open into the quiet, frantically locking onto those closest to her -- Chad's. "That was out loud, wasn't it." She already knew the answer.

"Yeah."

Nodding, Gabriella looked determinedly down at her toes -- the manicure she had gotten specially for this last date was begin to chip away. If there was anything more depressing in her world, it was the sight of chipping pink nail polish peeping out from the hole in her most comfortable heels. "I don't suppose anyone else was talking at the time?" She fiddled with the last button on her shirt, picking at an invisible piece of thread until it became a real one to unwravel. "Maybe a low-flying plane passed overhead at the exact moment?"

Chad drew in a breath. "I think Johnson over in Litigation might have missed your outburst... but no, Gabs. Everyone heard you." She and Chad, who only talked as long as they were in the same building for eight-hours-a-day-six-days-a-week, were as close to friends as she had at the firm.

The button with the unwraveling thread was quickly becoming a small hole in her shirt, as deftly clinging fingers grasped imaginary straws hidden within the fabric. "No chance then that a turf war between rival gangs erupted outside? Did someone fart loudly? Anything at all?"

Chad winced, and smiled at her in his soothing, not-even-in-your-dreams sort of way. "No, Gabs... So, umm, I guess I shouldn't ask about Friday's date, then?"

"No," she shrugged. "I guess you could ask. Remember how every guy I ever date either leaves me or dies?"

A few heads turned at this, but Chad only nodded and loosened his tie -- the meeting was probably over after the impromptu verbal ode to the boss's ass, which Chad could neither confirm or deny the veracity of, having never even thought of glancing at another man's anything below the armpit, and he might never see Gabriella again after she was fired (and, given the impressive client base Mr. LA-Law had brought with him, never work in this town again). "Yeah..."

"Remember my car?"

He winced sympathetically. "He crashed your car? Are you okay??"

Gabriella patted his arm lightly, pleased that he cared. "He stole my car." Recounting the boring date from beginning to untimely end (from where he had arrived at her door tapping his foot impatiently and muttering that he supposed he could be seen with her and her last season peep-toe pumps, but only because the reservations were in fifteen minutes and did she know how hard it was to get a reservation at Printemps? to the moment where she came back from the bathroom to find her salad eaten, her keys missing, her date gone, and the words "it's actually not me, it's you" scrawled across her plate with the last of her favorite lipstick), she found herself smiling at the situation. How could she not? "So here I am. I'm not married, my breasts are starting to sag, I'll never give my mother any grandchildren, and I have an amazing talent of turning even boring, unattractive men gay. Oh, and I just got fired."

Chad tsked appropriately, and offered his arm for her. "You know what you need, Gabs?"

"Thirty-two cats and a vibrator?"

"A drink. On me." Firmly tucking her hand into the crook of his elbow, he smiled and gave her a soft kiss on the cheek. "Just don't ever date me, because I'm not into the pole and I like being alive." The elevator dinged in punctuation, leaving behind a law firm oddity of shocked faces and uncomfortable silence.

One desirably expensive mouth was opening and closing slowly, as though words that meant to come out had gotten lost along en route and were currently arguing over a map of the larynx, and at high risk for a rather inexpensive bug to fly into it, so Taylor leaned forward and snapped it shut with a sympathetic smile. "Do meetings here often end like this?" he asked, half a mind to turn tail and run back to LA where there were safe, reliable crazies with guns and other such safe, reliable tortures.

"I'd like to say no," she shooed the remaining stragglers to their respective offices with a wave of her hand, and readjusted her glasses upon the bridge of her nose. "But you get used to it after a time. Welcome to Simons and Co, Mr. Bolton."