Page 18 of Falling for Mindy

“Yuck. I wouldn’t. I’ll be here. Want some mozzarella sticks?” she said.

“Sure, sounds good,” I said.

I made my way through the tightly packed tables and past the cool old jukebox into the narrow hallway that led to the bathrooms. It was pretty dim and way too narrow. I squeezed past a woman talking on the phone and headed for the ladies’ room before crashing right into a brick wall.

It wasn’t a brick wall.

It was a broad, muscular chest as hard as concrete, so solid it sent me reeling back, staggering. Big hands grabbed my hips and steadied me. My heart thundered and my breath was ragged. I caught the arm of the person who was holding me up, just to get my balance.

“Whoa,” I said, and looked up. And up, and further up. Right into the face of my professor.

Before I ever saw his face, I knew it had to be him. It was the same insane jolt of electricity as when he’d barely bumped against me in a crowd, only ten times stronger because I’d walked into his chest, and then his hands held me. There were so many points of contact. Every finger on his hands pressing into my hips to hold me up, the way I held his arm. The brush of my chest and stomach against his. We were tangled up, and my chest was heaving. This was so bad, the slice of lush arousal that cut through me, making my blood sing.

As soon as our eyes met, he stepped backward, took his hands off me and held them up a little as if to show he wasn’t doing anything. Like I was the cops and I’d told him to put his hands up.

“Sorry,” he said, and moved past me and out of my sight before I could even get a word out.

I wasn’t even sure how I was still standing up, he let go of me so quickly. I should have just stumbled and fallen down, but I’d managed to keep my feet under me. More out of instinct and balance than any conscious choice on my part.

I was sweating. My pulse fluttered. My hands started to tremble. I went to the bathroom, and when I was done, I washed my hands with cold water.

So what if I ran into him in a bar? I was over twenty-one and had every right to be here. I wasn’t stalking him or anything. He was here meeting friends, or he might be on a date. If I had just run into Professor Quinn while he was on a date, I would probably throw up my margarita with no good excuse for it.

I could imagine it now, coming out of that tiny hallway and spotting him at a nearby table, leaning close to some sexy redhead. It wasn’t impossible that I’d puke on her. Like right in her lap. Because I couldn’t stand that. I mean, the man could be married for all I knew. Okay, I knew he wasn’t married because I may have casually in a moment of weakness looked up his public records. No marriage, divorce or children in the state of California. Not even a misdemeanor judgment for unpaid parking tickets or anything. There was very definitely something the matter with me for looking him up online. And if me looking that up was as weird as it sounded, well, I didn’t have much of a defense. I was borderline obsessing over him. It wasn’t even an infatuation, just some overgrown-schoolgirl crush.

I had the heart-eye emoji level crush of a fifteen-year-old, but I was armed with the research skills of a twenty-first century grad student. That meant I gave in to the weakness, the impulse to Google him, and to read one of his many published articles, one of which I’d used as a citation last year in a paper, not connecting the Quinn, et. al. in my bibliography with the hot professor at the university I attended.

If I felt like the crush was immature, the way he affected my libido was anything but immature. Since my first encounter with the off-limits Professor Kyle Quinn, my body was alive and on fire. The all-work-and-no-play, full-time student Mindy Sayers had morphed into someone who spun elaborate erotic fantasies and found that she wasn’t just a walking brain, but a hot-blooded woman with needs. He made me think I had needs!

Shakily almost, I made my way back through the tables and to my sister at the bar.

“What happened?” she said, knowing me too well for my own convenience.

“Nothing.”

“The mozzarella sticks are here. I tried to wait, but you took forever. Are you sick?”

“No. I ran into him. My professor.”

“Oooh, tell me all about it!” she said, leaning in like I had juicy gossip. “Did he say something flirty? Did you flirt back? Did you—wait, is that why you took so long? Did you have a quickie in the bathroom?”

“No!” I said, “definitely not!”

“Good. It’s gross. Don’t have public bathroom sex. I tried once when I was with Dylan, but I just couldn’t get over the fact that there were germs everywhere and I could be leaning on a wall with dried pee on it. It took me right out of the sexy mood, you know?”

“I do not need to picture you and your ex humping in a bathroom stall, Katie. Please. Spare me the visuals,” I groaned.

I took a bite of a mozzarella stick and then dunked it in marinara.

“Hey, these are good. Super salty though.” I waved to the bartender to refill my margarita. “This is the life.”

“It is. I had a pretty crazy day too. I’m doing some visual art this semester, remember,” she said.

“Some kind of installation, right?” I said, “because all I knew about installation art was, like, Christo.”

“Oh, there’s more. It’s a huge movement, and a lot of it is political, which you’ll be into. There are some really feminist voices in installation art right now.”

“Please tell me it’s not like, pussies on parade with big vagina piñatas or something,” I said.

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