Page 36 of Falling for Mindy

“I’m just tired. It’s a busy semester,” I hedged.

“Bullshit. Something’s been up with you for weeks. Now spill,” she demanded.

“I’m worried about the one woman in my internship. She didn’t show up and I thought maybe her ex had caught up with her. I’ve been stressed about her, and my supervisor made a welfare call to the cops about her for me, and Kyle said that was all I could do. I just wanted to help her in some way. But I actually heard from her tonight that she moved on but she’s okay. So I feel better about it, but I’ve been tense over that lately,” I said.

“Weird. My BS detector is still going off. Like, who’s Kyle?”

I felt my face turn red. “He’s the advisor on my internship,” I said quickly.

“The hot professor? He’s Kyle now?” her eyebrows went up suspiciously.

“Professor Quinn. I misspoke,” I said.

“Yeah, I bet that’s not all you did. How long have you and Kyle been hanging out?”

“We don’t hang out. I meet with him to discuss my internship twice a week. Because of confidentiality rules, he’s the only one I can go into detail with about the client I was worried about at the job center. So, he went over the case with me and gave me some advice. He used to be a social worker.”

“That’s neat. So he was a social worker when you were, what? Nine years old?” she asked.

“He is not that old. He’s like thirty-five or something,” I said.

“Aha. You know his age. You’re defensive. You called him by his first name.”

“Hey, Nancy Drew, calm down,” I said.

“My bullshit radar suggests that you are fucking Professor Kyle.”

“No way,” I said, “he’s just really hot. I’ve been having trouble concentrating in his class—my notes are a mess because he’s so gorgeous. But it’s going to be easier now cause he’s meeting with me and Jeff, the other intern, at the same time. So I don’t have to keep stressing out about the one on one meetings where I sit in his office sweating that he can tell I have a little crush on him,” I said, trying to act embarrassed about it.

“I knew it!” Katie crowed triumphantly.

“You did not!” I said. “You thought we were hooking up.”

“I knew something was going on. I went with the most extreme possibility so you’d tell me the truth to prove me wrong. My strategy worked, and I am undefeated as Nancy Drew!”

“Nobody likes a know-it-all, Katie,” I said with a flounce, just to make her laugh.

I wanted to throw her off the trail of exactly how right she really was. I played up the idea that I was a study-aholic lonelyheart who had a sad crush on her professor. I ate some more soup and told her that his tweed jacket really made me want to draw hearts in my notebook.

“Let me guess,” she teased, “he dresses like he belongs at Oxford in the fifties or something. He probably looks straight out of some old movie you watched with a stuffy, handsome professor in it.”

“Yeah, it was Sandra Dee or Doris Day fanning herself over some older man that scolded her and wore a tweed coat and reading glasses,” I said. “Although I don’t have the Doris Day wardrobe—that woman always had a coat and shoes to match every outfit.”

“Meanwhile, you should get on Bama RushTok. The OOTD’s are really preppy and fun to ridicule,” she said.

“You say that like, number one as if I haven’t watched those which I did, and number two like I didn’t really want those Kendra Scott earrings,” I said.

“I’m proud of you. You know about something popular. Sometimes I wonder if you don’t just sit at home reading your textbooks for fun when I go out,” she said.

“Give me more credit than that. I’m having pitiful, old movie style crushes on distinguished older men.”

“Inappropriate ones, which means there’s hope for you!” she said.

“I’m so flattered,” I said wryly. “Thanks for making the soup this morning. It’s really good, and I liked us getting to have dinner together. Even if you Nancy Drew’d it out of me that I’m crushing on Professor Quinn.”

“Yeah, well it sounds like your imagination isn’t a wholesome place to be,” Katie quipped.

I just rolled my eyes comically, but the fact was, I was glad I’d gotten away with playing it off as a crush. If I’d told her I slept with him twice and now he was avoiding me like the plague, I probably would have died of embarrassment.

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