Page 3 of Falling for Mindy
My best friends and I taught at Berkeley and several of them had other jobs, too. Aaron’s gym kept him so busy it was a wonder he had time to be an adjunct instructor in Exercise Physiology. He was also committed to teaching and to mentoring his interns at the gym.
Hamilton had a thriving legal practice on top of his associate professorship. I was a tenured professor, and it took up most of my time, as well as the work I did with some local shelters and outreach programs. Honestly getting us all in one place at the same time was a juggling act with our schedules. So, when Rick asked if we could get together that night near campus before all hell broke loose, we made it work. Even if it meant neon-colored drinks and seriously bad music.
The place was ridiculous, especially that night. Everyone was back in town for the semester, so the population was booming. Matters were made worse by a noisy and rude bachelorette party. The partiers kept trying to twerk on my friends and me, which meant they were clueless as well as rude.
Nothing about the way we were dressed or the way we looked at them would have made any reasonable person think we would participate in that. Hamilton finally threatened one of them with a lawsuit if they didn’t stop trying to hump his leg. I’ll admit that part was funny. Buttoned up lawyer panics and says he’ll sue obviously drunk twenty-two-year-old who’s wearing a white satin sash that says ‘Bridesmaid’.
It was a chance to see my friends. All of us well into our thirties, except Drake who hit forty last month, and workaholic bachelors. Hanging out with them just put me back in touch with my truest self, the way we gave each other shit about everything but behind that we were supportive and encouraging.
I’d be there for any of them, and they’d do the same for me. They grounded me, kept me honest. And we’d laughed over plenty of mistakes over the years. Through thick and thin, and green lights and loud club pop, we stuck together.
I was on the way to the bathroom when I ran into someone who was dancing. When she turned and looked at me, it felt like I got hit with a sledgehammer right in the chest. Here was this blonde woman, tiny and looking so serious, meeting my eyes and just looking right at me. I could almost believe she could see inside my mind; her gaze was so focused. She was little, but her beauty nearly knocked me off my feet. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Not even when she raised her eyebrows and then smiled what I could only call a deranged smile. It made me want to laugh.
I wanted to say something to her. I wanted to know her name. The moment wore on, with me taking in every curve of her face, every freckle, how long her eyelashes were and how her face was exactly the shape of a heart with a stubborn little chin at the point. Then the same obnoxious bachelorette party came trooping through, and I was swept into the crowd.
I looked back over my shoulder, but I couldn’t see her. She was short, and the raucous crowd of over-perfumed bridesmaids were tall and pushy. I had no hope of catching a glimpse of her. I went on to the bathroom. When I came out, I went back to the same area of the dance floor, but there was no sign of her. The place was packed, and it was hard enough to keep track of my friends, much less locate a pretty blonde I saw once for sixty seconds. She had looked young, too young for me. I headed back to our table and took a long drink of my beer.
Rick was ribbing Aaron about a one-nighter he’d had recently. I sat back and enjoyed the humor of it, considering the fact that Rick himself wasn’t exactly living the celibate life.
“So you just never called her?” Rick asked.
“Why do I wanna call her? We had a few drinks, spent the night. We both got what we wanted,” Aaron replied.
“Kyle, help me out here,” Rick said. “You teach Women’s Studies. Explain to our boy here how his behavior is disrespectful.”
“Look out,” Hamilton put in. “Kyle is no stranger to the one-night stand.”
“That’s true,” Rick looked puzzled. “How is that possible? Your job is to teach a bunch of girls how bad men have treated women for the last thousand or so years and then you let your hair down and take advantage of women at the bar?”
“Hold on, man,” I said, warming to the topic. “I don’t take advantage of anyone, and I wouldn’t. Having a one-night stand isn’t disrespectful to either party as long as they both know what it is going in. You make sure there’s consent, you use a condom, everybody’s happy. What you’re thinking of, Rick, is the patriarchal belief that sex involves a man taking something from a woman, not two people of any gender sharing a pleasurable experience.”
“I bet your students line up to give you blow jobs,” Aaron laughed.
I shook my head. “No way. We all know that our students, male and female, tend to get crushes on some of us more than others,” I grinned, giving Drake a wink since he was by far the most horrified the first time a student asked him out. “We all know that any kind of personal involvement is completely wrong. That would be the kind of situation where I’d agree with Rick that it would be taking advantage of someone or leveraging authority.”
“I’m just glad none of you wanna be the next Nat Josephson from the math department,” Hamilton said. “The man comes to me looking for free legal advice at least once a semester to see if the fact that he’s had sex with a student will get him sued if she gets a bad grade. So I find myself in the uncomfortable position of explaining to him, once again, that he isn’t supposed to have sex with students and it’s in our contract as grounds for immediate termination. That the university is indemnified in that case, but his personal net worth is in jeopardy as well as his job, reputation, and overall career. No one wants to hire or publish a guy who fucks nineteen-year-olds at work, am I right?”
“Well, somebody hired him here,” Aaron snorted. “Creepy fucker.”
“He’s someone who uses his position of authority to attract his students. Even if he doesn’t offer any grades in the bargain, it’s exploitive. He makes me sick. There should be a warning on his syllabus—do not have sex with this man. He does not think you’re mature for your age or an old soul. You aren’t different from other girls. Women his own age just recognize that he’s an asshole, so he goes after his students,” I said, satisfied with my assessment of Nat.
“You know what I hate about the whole thing?” Drake asked.
“What?” I replied. “The fact that you really believed those girls wanted you to teach them self-defense when they were just hot for teacher?”
“No,” he rolled his eyes, “although I hate that too. I hate that he teaches math. Math is hard enough without a jerk like that trying to get in your pants when you’re just trying to understand enough algebra to pass the test.”
“That, too. Harassment is one of the many forces that kept percentages low when it comes to women in STEM for a long time. It’s our job to hold men accountable for it. Like when I saw Nat at the faculty holiday dinner and told him to keep his dick in his pants and quit staring at the undergrad servers or I’d beat his ass right there in the faculty dining room while Hamilton videoed it and put it on YouTube.”
“Very supportive,” Aaron snorted.
“Just doing my part to make the world a better place. Obviously in my department there are fewer male students and zero tolerance for any kind of misogyny. In math and sciences, it can get ugly.”
“Have you tried making your women’s studies majors into hall monitors? Deputize them with badges and stun guns to keep their other classes sexism-free?” Rick teased.
“You think it’s funny. I think it’s not that extreme. If you ever really looked into the stats on girls, not women but girls, under eighteen years old who have been groped by a strange man in a public place—it’s really sobering.”
“Fuckers,” Aaron said, shaking his head.