Morgana's Gift Pt. 14

Chapter Six - Always Saturday

The next few weeks passed relatively without incident before Kevin got the sort of one-two punch of a day like he couldn't possibly have anticipated. It started off relatively light, with him having a meeting with Alice Karteaux with a few final notes about last minute tweaks and adjustments to the score. He would've been worried that Emily wasn't there for the meeting, but she was wall-to-wall booked in terms of editing, final effects and getting as close to final picture lock as she could. Alice had teased him about how many tickets he was going to need for the premiere, asking him if he could keep it under ten.

When Alice and Fatima had first met, Kevin had been absolutely certain the sparks were going to fly and not in a good way, but it turned out the two women had several common interests and mutual friends, so they hadn't had even the slightest bit of professional jealousy or annoyance with one another. Alice hadn't even freaked when Fatima had dropped the fact that Kevin's household was a polyamorous one, with Kevin having multiple partners. Instead, she'd joked that having three or four men to cater to her own needs might be something she'd have to consider moving forward. Neither Kevin nor Fatima thought Alice was actually kidding, judging by the sly smile on her face.

After that meeting, they'd headed back to the house, where Kevin was told he had another interview scheduled, someone they thought the household needed, an attorney.

"You know having a lawyer on tap always sounds like a great idea until you realize that means you've got a maneater sitting around the house," Kevin teased as Miriam drove them back up the hill towards the house. "Constantly hungry. Looking for something to bite."

"You're paranoid, darling," Fatima teased, rolling her eyes as she glanced down at her iPhone, typing furiously onto it. "We need to have a lawyer on call, for both you and me, and Elizabeth found us an excellent candidate that I won't mind seeing naked as part of her interview."

"You know, that's not typically part of the interview process," he laughed, reviewing his notes from his meeting with Alice, making sure everything was set up and actionable over the next two days, considering how urgently they were needed. "Are you sure this woman knows what she's getting into?"

"I trust Elizabeth to handle all the necessary pre-interview screenings, don't you?"

"She hasn't led me astray yet," Kevin replied. "And she somehow made that TMZ scare go away, although I haven't the slightest how she did that."

"Elizabeth has a lot of influence in a lot of dark corners," Fatima said. "That's part of the reason why Morgana chose her for you."

"I've often wondered how Morgana found Elizabeth. I can't imagine that's just a standard spell somewhere in the repertoire for mages just getting started."

Fatima looked up from her phone and turned to gaze at him quizzically. "Do you think mages learn everything from a series of handbooks?"

"I mean... I don't have any idea how mages learn to do what they do," he laughed. "When I wanted to learn guitar, I found a book, I found a teacher and I started practicing."

"And the book taught you how to get that deep synth bed sound, full of echo and reverb?"

"Well, no," he admitted. "I learned a lot of that through endless experimentation."

"So, think of the kind of experimentation you could do if you had, say, a few thousand years or so to fiddle around?"

He paused for a long moment, then nodded. "I can see your point." He could only imagine the sort of fun he might have been able to have given that much time, the songs he could've written, the melodies he might have discovered. "You're sure I need a lawyer?"

"I'm sure we need a lawyer, Kevin," Fatima sighed. "Besides, Elizabeth said she's got an excellent candidate all lined up for us, and that she's extremely different than anyone in the household right now. She has a kink that might take a bit for you to wrap your head around, but you'll be fine with it in the end."

"I think it's fascinating," Miriam said from the front seat of the car.

"It's certainly something," Jackson said from the driver's seat. "But she's a good looker, so I suppose at some point when you look good enough, you can get away with anything."

"What about you, Jackson?" Kevin asked with a laugh. "You got somebody special? I could set Elizabeth on it, give her another task to have going around inside of her head. She'd probably give me all sorts of guff about it, but I think she'd probably enjoy the challenge of it."

"Negatory there, big chief," Jackson chuckled. "I've got me a smokin' hot girlfriend who's a doctor over at Cedars-Sinai, and I'm actually thinking about putting a ring on it, since we've been together two years now, and she's been patient as hell with me."

"How come I haven't met her yet, Jax?" Fatima asked, looking up from her phone, an almost hurt expression on her face. "Are you afraid I'm going to scare her off?"

"I might be afraid you're gonna try and steal her away from me, boss," Jackson laughed so they could both tell he was kidding. "It's just her schedule's been so busy, as has mine, that we don't always get enough time to see each other, much less do social shit. You're right, though. If I'm gonna pop the question to her, I probably should let her meet you guys."

"Bloody right you should," Fatima growled, looking back down at her phone. "Make an appointment for us to all have dinner at the house over the next week or so, and we can iron all of this out properly."

"Yes ma'am."

The rest of the drive wasn't too bad, even though they were fighting traffic something fierce until they hit the hills themselves, when it all thinned out and they could make their way up towards the house, pulling the car through the gate before it slid shut behind them. They tended to leave the SUV out front unless it needed to charge, so Jackson just pulled it up in front of the front door. There was an additional car in the driveway, a silver Audi e-tron, impressive and expensive looking, clearly from the candidate for their position of lawyer.

Elizabeth was waiting for them at the doorway, dressed in a smart crimson skirt that went down past her knees, brown leather boots that made up most of the distance up her legs to the skirt, and a brown button-up blouse with the top view buttons open so that her pendant was on proud display, that smoky crystal framed right in the center of that pale flesh. "Evening, sir, ma'am. The candidate is waiting in the dining room for you both, whenever you're ready," she told them.

"Let me go toss my notes down in the studio and then I'll be up. You can go in without me if you want, 'Tima, or wait there and we can go in together," he said as he turned left and headed towards the stairs. "Won't be a minute."

He headed down the stairs, walking briskly down the hall to his studio. He opened the door and moved to set his bag down, sighing as he saw the studio hadn't been left in the best of states. Dandy Randy had been working with a group called The Dusty Sages, getting some of their initial demo work put together before they started recording their actual album in earnest. Kevin liked to be able to hear the rough song structures before working with the artists to take their skeletons of songs and develop them into something fully fleshed out. That said, Randy wasn't the best at cleaning up the studio afterwards, and Kevin had been very clear about nobody other than him or Randy reorganizing the studio, so it had a tendency to be messier than most of the rest of the house.

Kevin didn't feel comfortable just leaving food and half-empty beer cans out, especially around sensitive recording equipment, so he did a quick pass to get the place into a shape where he wasn't ashamed of how it looked, and there wasn't anything to draw ants or could spill left in the place. It only took a couple of minutes, and while he felt he hadn't left Fatima waiting too long, he still felt a little guilty about taking longer than he'd planned.

When he came up to the dining room, he saw that Fatima had already gone in and started talking to the candidate, which was good, because he trusted Fatima's judgment and she had a good eye for people. "There's my man," she said with a smile. "Randy left you a mess, didn't he?"

"I swear, at some point, we're going to hire a maid for the house, and let them have an hour a day just cleaning up the studio, after I've spent an entire day training them on what can and can't be moved," he laughed, rolling his eyes. "I know Randy means well, but he's too easy on the clients and doesn't make them pick up after themselves."

"Potato chip bags?"

"Half-finished beers mostly," he sighed. "Hi. Sorry about the wait. I'm Kevin Bishop," he said, offering his hand as he took a look at the woman sitting next to his partner.

She was in her mid to late 30s with wavy, almost frizzy hair the color of oak that hung just down to her shoulders in a way that looked stylishly disheveled. She had a bit of a sharp nose, but it gave her face a sort of fierce beauty, with high cheek bones and small painted lips filling out the rest of her face. Her skin was a natural shade of tan, her body slender yet still distinctly feminine. "Leah Fox," she said, taking his hand and shaking it. "Pleasure to meet you, Mister Bishop. I've only heard excellent things about you from everyone I've asked, and that isn't a common thing here in La La Land."

Leah had shown up in a business suit that still bristled with sex appeal, the skirt hanging past her knees but slit up dangerously high on either side, and the blouse unbuttoned down a bit to offer an invitation to look at cleavage on display, the edges of a lacy red bra peeking at the fringes. She also had a briefcase with her, sitting on top of the dining room table off to one side, and a couple of sheets of paper in front of her, sliding one over for him to look at, a copy of her resume, which Fatima was already done looking at.

"So Leah, tell me a little bit about yourself while I skim through this real quick. Elizabeth likes me to know as little as possible before meeting anyone, simply so I don't set expectations in my mind before I get to know them on their own terms."

"Well, I'm 36. I grew up in New York City and went to Yale to get my law degree. I was also involved in a bunch of academics while I was there, and after I graduated I went to go work for a firm called Ariton, Oriens & Associates."

"Never heard of them," Kevin said, noting that she'd worked for them for about six years.

"Nor should you have. That's how they like it. They're... well, they're as much fixers as they are lawyers, so I spent a lot of time learning how to make problems disappear without having to go to trial."

"Is that a euphemism for killing people off?" he asked cautiously.

She laughed hard enough to close her eyes for a moment. "Nothing so ridiculously dramatic. I mean, there may have been some mild extortion and/or blackmail, but nothing with actual violence involved. Anyway, after half a decade or so, I sort of lost the taste for it. I didn't mind the work so much as the people who I was working for, the sort of clients that AOA brings in. It was always people who'd done something bad and needed someone to make it go away, and in the six years or so I was at AOA, I don't think I had a single client that I would've wanted to spend any time with socially. So I decided not only to leave AOA, but also NYC and move out here to the West Coast."

"How did the change in locale treat you?"

"My parents can't just casually swing by my place anymore, so that's definitely progress," she said with a laugh. "I took a job working with Dreamworks for a while, focusing on entertainment contract law. I've been there the last five years, but I'm ready for a change, and something entirely out of the corporate environment."

"If you'd be working for us," Fatima replied, "you wouldn't be entirely out of the corporate environment, Miss Fox. I've got all sorts of things tangled up in corporate structures."

"But you aren't entirely a corporation unto yourself, ma'am, so that's the important thing," Leah replied. "And I looked into GDGear, and it doesn't have any ties to sweatshops or unethical production practices. Plus, they have their own lawyers, so I wouldn't be dealing with most of that. And what I learned during my time at Dreamworks would be incredibly beneficial to you, Mr. Bishop."

"Call me Kevin, please. Especially considering what you know about what else this position would entail," he said. "I've got a number of irons in the fire, in terms of not only music but also work in film and now even in television, it sounds like. And I'm not just a musician, I'm also a producer, meaning I'm helping other people with their music as well."

"That means lots and lots of contract law, Kevin," Leah said with an inviting smile that seemed a mismatch for a lawyer. "I don't mind contract law. It's fun and there's lots of odds and ends to keep track of, making sure you get paid for your work, that your royalties keep coming in and that nobody tries to shortchange you for what you did."

"Do you think that's likely?"

"Well, I asked Elizabeth to show me your contract with Miss Rouchard, and while I don't think it was intentional, there's a couple of ways they could screw you in the deal," Leah said. "I'd actually suggest you file an addendum to the contract, just as an 'in-case' protective measure."

"Like what?"

"Well, for example, if the soundtrack was put out on vinyl, they wouldn't have to pay you royalties for that. That's the way your contract is worded. You're only guaranteed rights on usage in the film itself and from digital releases. Hell, if someone put it out on CD, you wouldn't get a cut of it, not that anyone really uses CDs anymore."

"Some people happen to like tangible tech," Kevin scowled. "How could I have missed that?"

"Because it's like 80 pages, and nobody ever wants to read quite that much legalese unless they have to. It's basically another language. We do that shit on purpose, you know. Lawyers do everything we can to make sure our services are desperately needed forever."

"She's got you there, luv," Fatima giggled.

"Any deep dark secrets hiding in your past we should know about?" Kevin asked her.

"I'm a lawyer, Kevin," Leah replied without hesitation. "Yes, I'm hiding about a million deep dark secrets I don't want you to know about, that you don't want to know about. I've done a hundred things that I'll be ashamed about until the day I die. I've done a dozen things that'd probably get me arrested by any cop worth her salt to carry her badge in any state in this country. I've done two or three things that might be severe enough to get me abducted and tried in front of an international tribunal, maybe even in the Haig, for war crimes."

"Really?" Kevin said, narrowing his eyes to look at her.

"No," Leah laughed. "Not the last one anyway, but the rest of it, pretty much. At DreamWorks, I serve a dozen different masters, so I'd like to whittle that down to just... two. To still have challenges waiting for me every morning, while I have front row seats to the Hollyweird lifestyle without having to get caught up in it when I don't want to. So yeah, I'm very interested in getting this job. And there are all the other side benefits, assuming they're actually true."

This was the point where Kevin was a little wary, not entirely sure how much Elizabeth had told the woman in advance. "Let's assume that whatever you've heard might, in fact, have some truth to it. It's not all wine and roses. It's got loads of complications, things that'll blow your mind, and you may never be able to sleep perfectly well again. That all still something you're on board with?"

"On board with?" she said with an enthusiastic smile, like a child under the Christmas tree looking out upon an endless sea of presents, just waiting to be opened. "I can't wait to be a part of it. I even had a specific request for the marker I'd wear, something Elizabeth was able to get Lady Morgana to make for me. If you decide not to invite me into your family, then she also included something to revert it back to itself, but I'm hoping I've convinced you that I can be a very welcome asset to your family and household."

Kevin leaned back a little. "I hadn't heard anything about changes made to Morgana's gift. But both she and Elizabeth signed off on this, you say?"

"Mmm," Leah said, reaching across the table to grab a glass of water, taking a sip from it, as if for the first time during their entire conversation she found herself a little bit nervous. "Morgana toned it down slightly from my original ask, but I can respect her reasoning and accept the changes."

"What did you ask for?" Fatima said, clearly as curious as he was.

Leah set the glass of water down on the table then folded her hands together. "What I need you both to understand is that I am a woman supremely in control of her own destiny, who has carved her own path of her own choosing for every step since she was able to walk. It's made me... well, something of a control freak. Part of the reason I've been single so long is that, well, I tend to look at personal relationships like I do business relationships - if you don't spot the way the other person is trying to fuck you over early on, then you're getting way more fucked over than you can allow, and you should get yourself clear as quickly as possible."

"That's... cynical."

"Maybe," Leah admitted, "but that's me. So what I want out of my sexual relationships is for someone to use me, roughly and coarsely, without breaking me, and to make sure that both they and I are sated at the end of it. But I also have this little kink that I've never be able to scratch. At least, not before now, when it sounds like magic can allow me to have that."

"Tell us about it," Fatima said.

Leah laughed a little bit, looking down at her hands, before looking up, realizing if she couldn't voice it, it was never going to happen. "Have you ever heard the expression 'fucked stupid' before?"

Fatima grinned a little bit. "It's figurative, but sure."

"What if it didn't have to be?" Leah said, leaning forward slightly.

"Then I would imagine you would rapidly become a very bad lawyer to have in our employ," Fatima said, toying with a strand of her own dark hair.

"I don't mean permanently, naturally, but to have sexual gratification... simplify everything for you, just for a short while. To let it cleanse your brain and reduce everything down to its most basic elements. There's a name for the kink - they call it bimbofication, and I don't want it to last forever, GOD no, but for a few hours. I'd wanted it to be for six-to-eight hours, but Morgana insisted that if she did that, it could run the very real risk of interfering with my ability to do my job, so she's shrunk the timeframe down to just a couple of hours instead."

"Wait wait wait," Kevin said. "So, let me make sure I'm understanding this correctly... you..." He stopped for a moment, trying to find a way to get the words to make sense in his head. "You want sexual encounters to turn you stupid, but only for a short while?"

"Yes, exactly," Leah exhaled, clearly relieved that Kevin hadn't thrown her out of the room immediately. "I want sexual gratification to temporarily reduce my intelligence, so I'm not overthinking that post-coitus sexual glow, that I'm not immediately reverting to worrying about what I have planned for tomorrow or the next day or the next week, and can simplify down my thoughts to just... to just be, to just exist in a moment for a while, to have that sexual delight still running aftershocks through my body and making me feel all warm and tingly and not being so smart as to distract myself from the wonderful sensations."