The Blonde Theory by Kristin Harmel Page A

else’s expense; I was the only patent attorney in the firm who concentrated in chemical engineering. It was such a specialized area of law that few people went into it. And because there were fewer sharks swimming in my pond, I was worth more to the company and moved up more quickly. It wasn’t that I was any better than them; I just went into a different area of law. And I worked hard to be good at what I did. End of story.
    But many of my co-workers didn’t see it that way. Most of the attorneys I’d been shoulder-to-shoulder associates with my first few years at the firm were senior associates now. None of them was a partner yet. And although I had never been particularly close to any of them, the day I had made partner had also marked the day that any friendly camaraderie they had shared with me had vanished. I’d even overheard a bathroom conversation once in which Kendra Williams, a property associate, was telling Wendy Jo Moyer, a tax associate, that she knew for a fact that I’d slept my way to partner. The rumor had spread like wildfire, and I’d heard it repeated behind my back several times.
    But ever since that rumor had spread, people had treated me differently. I think they were glad to assign a reason to why I had ascended the law firm ladder more quickly than them. And because that “reason” involved me being a corporate slut, they felt they had me pegged. It didn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind that I had perhaps
earned
my promotion. Nope, there had to be a sinister explanation.
    So firm dinners were awkward, to say the least. At work, I could remain professionally friendly to the attorneys who gossiped about me without really getting into any sort of conversation with them. But at dinners—well, you were expected to talk. To socialize. And I had trouble doing that with people who didn’t seem to like me all that much. I’d been a partner for three years now, so the initial sting had faded, and I was on decent terms with everyone. But they treated me differently. I no longer fit with the associates. And I didn’t really fit with the partners, either. I was one of the only women, and I was the youngest partner by more than a decade. So just as in my dating life, I was the odd man out. Or rather, the odd woman.
    The third reason I believed that these dinners were institutionalized torture was that it just underscored the firmwide divide between the Marrieds and the Singles. If I didn’t fit in with the partners to begin with, believe me, my singleness made matters ten times worse. They didn’t know what to make of me. The one time I had bravely shown up at a firm dinner without a date, I had been mostly ostracized because, it turned out, the partners whom I worked with every day at the office suddenly felt it was inappropriate to chitchat with a dateless woman—it made their wives uncomfortable. The wives, meanwhile, didn’t want to chitchat with me because I was one of the attorneys, not one of the spouses. So I had literally wound up at a table with no one on either side of me—and the attorneys and their wives across the table all but ignoring me.
    Very comfortable.
    Since then, I had always managed to find a date of some sort. Tonight was the closest I had come to being dateless, so in a way I was grateful to Emmie for pressuring Matt into coming. At least I had
someone.
I could usually rely on my friends to set me up with a bad blind date who was a friend of a friend of a friend or something. Usually, the guy and I wouldn’t have anything in common, but my date always wound up at least semi-content, because the dinners were always held at nice restaurants, and they got a nice free meal.
    Who said men weren’t easy to please? Now, if only I didn’t up and ruin it by, horror of horrors, being intellectual and successful. Terrifying, I know.
    “Harper!” exclaimed William Bradley as Matt and I walked through the door into the back room of The Lotus Room, an upscale restaurant on 24th