Page 17 of Falling for Mindy

“God, no. The opposite,” I said. “The only thing I’m in danger of is making an idiot out of myself over him. If I’m lucky it’ll be blushing and stammering and won’t go any further.”

“Like what are you afraid you’ll do?” she said, eyes lighting up.

“I keep having dreams about him. Really dirty ones,” I confessed, and took another drink.

“Really?” she said, “what are they like?”

“If he was as good in real life as he is in my dreams, I’d never be able to drag myself out of bed, okay? We’re talking super detailed, very realistic dreams. Like I wake up and it feels like it was real.”

“So your professor is giving it to you from a distance? Like on the astral plane or something?”

“No. I’m just really turned on by him. It’s crazy,” I grumbled.

“It’s a shame it’s the beginning of the semester. You have a long road ahead of you. If you could just jump him and get it over with, it would get him out of your system. Forbidden older man, teacher… totally your catnip,” she said.

“How do you know it’s my catnip? That’s not—wait, do not mention Mr. Shuster again!” I begged.

“I can’t help it. He’s the obvious example. Or you can say you have an old soul or some crap like that. Anyway, if you could just get your fill of him, maybe even spend a whole weekend if he’s as good as you imagined, then you’d be fine. But not while you’re in his class. You’ll have to wait it out. As soon as finals are over in December, you can thank him for teaching you so much, and he’ll say he enjoyed having you in class and you can say, not as much as you’re going to enjoy it when I ride you hard tonight,” she said.

“I cannot say that. Not to anyone. I would have to be so drunk to even attempt that, that I’d slur the words and pass out. No way. I’m not going to hit on him, not even after I’m out of his class.”

“So quit the internship. Before you even start. Say it’s for personal reasons, and then reapply next semester when Dr. Arboy is back in charge of it,” Katie said like it was so simple.

“You don’t get it. I worked for months to earn this internship. I’m not giving it up just because I want to avoid him. Plus, if I let the involvement of a male professor keep me from doing my women’s studies internship, that’s just wrong. Defeats the whole teachings of the program.”

“Is he really that hot? I tried to look him up but I didn’t find anything besides his official faculty pic, and it didn’t impress me.”

“Here,” I said, shamefaced, and passed her my phone, “look in the photo stream.”

“Did you take sneaky screenshots of him? I’m so proud!” she laughed, flipping through pictures from the Berkley site and his LinkedIn profile and a magazine profile on him where he did an interview about a book he was going to write.

“Okay, so let me guess—it’s the one where he’s lounging in the leather chair in the sweater, his hair’s a little messed up and he has that brooding British guy look?”

“Yeah. I mean it’s all of them. It’s him. But that one’s my favorite.”

“Here,” she said, giving it back, “he’s not too hard on the eyes, I’ll give you that. I mean he’s not my type.”

“Because he’s not a guitar player with a shaved head and tattoos?”

“I thought we weren’t speaking of the crushes from that show again,” she said.

“Okay, your last boyfriend. Tattoos? Check. Guitar? Check.”

“He had hair,” she pointed out.

“He did. It was---not a normal color.”

“He was expressing himself. He was an artist.”

“Yeah, from what I remember he was expressing himself all over his lab partner while he was supposed to be dating you,” I said.

“Look, that was kinda my fault. I never made him define the relationship exactly.”

“So any reasonable person would assume that it was fine to fuck their classmates even though they’d been dating you for months?” I challenged. I would really have liked to have buried that loser in a shallow grave, to be honest.

“I love it when you go all mama bear on me, but it’s fine. I’ve moved on,” Katie said lightly. “In fact, I might consider moving on with that one over there,” she flicked her eyes to a cute guy in gym clothes sitting with a group at the end of the bar. I rolled my eyes at her. She was always checking some guy out.

“I’ve got to pee,” I said, “don’t steal my drink.”

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