Harvard Hottie (6 page)

Surprise registers on Luke’s face. “Oh?” he says. “Is it serious?”

Why not go for broke?  “Yes, it’s pretty serious.” It’s fun pretending I have a serious boyfriend. Much better than telling people I haven’t had a date in months.

“I had no idea,” Luke says in a subdued voice. “What’s his name?”

His name?  His name?? Well, of course, that’s a perfectly reasonable request that I can, of course, answer. Um… “His name is Mike.”

“Mike,” Luke repeats. He looks up at my eyes. His are chocolate-colored and possibly his best feature, although it’s a tough call. He’s still so incredibly sexy from the neck up. “Well, I’d love to have you and Mike over for dinner.”

“That would be great,” I say, figuring this is an empty invitation.

“How about Saturday?”

Luke, you asshole.

At this point, I have two options. I could hire some Dermot Mulroney look-alike to be my date on Saturday (possible), I could find a boyfriend by Saturday (uh…), or I could ’fess up that there is no Mike. I decide honesty is the easiest policy. “All right,” I admit, “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“I know,” Luke says.

“You
know
?”

He shrugs. “I asked around.”

“Why did you ask around?”

“Why did you tell me you had a boyfriend?”

We stare at each other for a minute. Finally, Luke drops his head and blows out the candle sitting between us.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Don’t be,” he says. “It’s better this way. We both know where we stand. No bullshit.” He adds, “Anyway, I’m kind of your boss, so the things I was contemplating were probably really unethical anyway.”

I’m desperate to ask him exactly what he was contemplating, but I’m afraid to hear the answer.

***

The rest of our lunch really is a business lunch. We talk about the company and I didn’t realize how many ideas I had to improve efficiency. Luke is really listening to me too. Unless he’s a great actor, which I suppose is possible. Maybe he’s gotten better at hiding the phoniness since college.

“We should do this again tomorrow,” he says as he whips out his credit card without even glancing at the bill. I’d be afraid to look at the bill in this restaurant, but he simply doesn’t care. “This is really helpful for me.”

“It is?” I’m both flattered and suspicious. Does he really care about my ideas?  Or is this just Plan B to get me into bed?

“Ellie,” he says, giving me a serious look. “I never said this to you, but I always really respected you. While the Rosanna Banana hair or whatever was very cute, the reason I liked you was because you were the smartest girl I ever met. All those high school girls… and oh God, the Wellesley girls… they were all so vapid. But you were different.”

I blush. “Well, thanks.”

“So you’ll meet with me again?”

“Yeah, but…” I wave my hand around the restaurant. “This is all too much.”

“Sure.” Luke nods. “I’ll order takeout Chinese food. Are you a chicken-with-broccoli girl?”

He’s right again. I love chicken with broccoli.

Luke escorts me back to my desk after work. Everyone is watching us and I get this bad feeling that they’re thinking there might be something going on between me and Luke. That maybe I’m sleeping with him in order to keep my job. I would think that after working here so long, people would know that I’m way too square to do something like that, but everyone is ridiculously paranoid right now.

Sure enough, the second I sit down and Luke goes back to his office, Lewis rushes over to my cubicle. He’s got sweat stains under his armpits and I cringe when I remember what Luke said about him having a crush on me. “Hey, Harvard,” he says, “had a nice cozy lunch with the boss?”

I shrug noncommittally.

“I would be careful about sleeping with him,” Lewis says.

My cheeks turn pink. I thought he was just going to hint annoyingly. I can’t believe he just said that. “Excuse me?”

“You know he sleeps with prostitutes, right?” Lewis says. “That’s what everyone says.”

“That’s what everyone says?” I repeat with disgust. I very much doubt Lewis’s “everyone” knows what the hell they’re talking about.

“Well, can you blame him?” Lewis says. “I mean, look at the guy.”

“Get the hell away from my desk, Lewis,” I tell him, giving him a look to show him that I don’t have the patience for this bullshit.

He smirks at me, probably happy to have pissed me off. I am logging back into my computer when I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s Jenna. Her eyebrows are knitted together in her classic expression of worry.

“You know,” she says, “if you sleep with him, he probably won’t cut our division.”

“Oh my God, Jenna!”

She smiles apologetically. “Well, he’s not
that
bad. I’d sleep with him over Lewis, for sure.”

“I’m not sleeping with anybody,” I hiss. I wince at the truth in this statement. How long has it been since I’ve had sex?  It’s been… a while. Longer than I’d care to admit.

Okay, it’s been two years.

Is that a long time? I guess it is. When I first left the haven of college and embarked on a city filled with sleazy single guys, I made a rule for myself that I wouldn’t sleep with a man that I had been dating less than three months. Although I’ve been tempted a few times to break the rule, I’ve actually managed to stick with it. I feel like you can regret a one-night stand, but you
never regret not sleeping with someone who ends up dumping you after three dates. And lately, nobody has been making it past three months.

I don’t miss sex that much. I really don’t. There are some women who need a man to feel happy or complete, but that’s not me. I don’t need a guy. I’d rather be alone than with some guy who isn’t right for me.

***

Due to my long lunch, I end up staying late at work to get everything done. Now is definitely not the time to be slacking, not just for me, but for the sake of my entire division. I know Luke probably wouldn’t fire me but I don’t want any of my employees to get fired either.

I finally turn off my computer and gather my belongings to head out for the day, when I realize I’m not alone. Lewis is standing in front of my desk. The pit stains seem to have enlarged over the course of the day and his face is rather shiny as well. “Hey, Ellie,” he says.

He called me “Ellie” rather than “Harvard.” I wonder if he’s making nice after that obnoxious prostitutes comment from before. “Hi,” I say. I purposely avoid eye contact with him.

“Look,” Lewis says, rubbing the stubble on his chin. “I’m sorry about what I said earlier. That was low. I know you’d never sleep with a cripple just to keep your job.”

“Gee, thanks,” I say. I sling my purse over my shoulder. “See you tomorrow.”

“Um, Ellie?”

I look at him and see he’s biting his lip. “Yes?”

“I was just thinking,” he says, “maybe we should, like, get a few drinks together and talk about, like, our plan for the company. We need to work together if we don’t want to get fired.”

My stomach turns. I’ve got this bad feeling that his idea to get drinks is less about strategizing to keep our jobs, and more about him jamming his tongue down my throat when we’ve both had a few beers in us. I’m way too old to fall for that trick. “I’ve got plans,” I lie.

“Really?” Lewis raises his eyebrows at me.

Am I just the worst liar on the face of the planet? Or is it that obvious that I can’t possibly have a life outside of work? “Really.”

“Oh.” Lewis looks really disappointed, and for a moment, I feel guilty. Then I remember what a jerk he is, and how he’s the last person in the world I’d want to go out with. Well, the last person after Luke, that is.

The most exciting part of my evening is coming up with fake plans during my T ride home. In case anyone asks me about it, I went to a bachelorette party in a bar. My gift to the bride was a red thong.

This time I’m carrying a brown paper bag from a Thai takeout restaurant when I’m trying to slip by Sadie’s apartment unnoticed. As usual, she catches me in the act.

“Ellie!” she exclaims when she sees me.

I halt guiltily. “Hi, Sadie.”

She stares pointedly at the brown paper bag. “Is that Chinese takeout?”

“No…” I say. When she raises her eyebrows, I admit, “It’s Thai.”

Sadie sighs. “Oh, Ellie, how do you expect to find a beau if you don’t cook?”

“I cook,” I say defensively. I do! Mostly stuff in the microwave. That counts though. I mean, I have to press a button that says “cook” so that means it’s cooking.

Sadie squints up at my face. “Are you wearing make-up, dear?”

I touch my face self-consciously. “No… well, just a little.”

A slow smile spreads across Sadie’s wrinkled face. “There’s a man you like, isn’t there?”

“No,” I say quickly. Maybe too quickly.

“Don’t worry,” Sadie says. “I’ll give you a cooking lesson this weekend and you’ll have him wrapped around your little finger in no time.”

Before I can tell her not to bother, Sadie rushes off into her apartment, probably to look up sexy recipes.

She is absolutely wrong about this one. I don’t like Luke. Yes, I did put on make-up, which I don’t usually do, but that was just to look respectable for my boss. It was a totally innocent gesture.

I swear.

Chapter Seven

I’m not wearing a scrap of make-up when I show up at Luke’s office at exactly noon the next day. Well, it’s more like 11:59AM, as I’m unable to squash my anal-retentive desire to be early. As I pass his secretary Michelle’s desk and she waves me in, she gets this grin on her face that I can’t quite read. Oh God, she doesn’t think we’re sleeping together too, does she?

When I enter Luke’s office, he’s hard at work on his computer. I remember how deeply tanned he used to be in college (from all those summers in Greece) with his already blond hair highlighted with gold from the sun… but now he’s bordering on pale. “Hi, Ellie,” he says. “What’s wrong?”

“I was just wondering,” I say, “do you ever go to Greece anymore?”

The way Luke looks at me blankly pretty much gives me my answer. “Oh God,” he groans. “I haven’t been there in years. How did you know about that?”

“You mentioned on the first day of expos that your family had a
villa
there,” I remind him, putting emphasis on the word “villa.”

“Did I?” He grins. “Wow, I was such a pretentious prick. No wonder you wouldn’t hook up with me. Anyway, it’s more like a house than a villa. I don’t even know what the hell a villa is… I was probably just trying to impress everyone.”

“Why don’t you go there anymore?”

“No time,” he says with a shrug. “Anyway, I try not to fly any more than I absolutely have to… I end up getting shuffled around like a piece of luggage at the airport. And the beaches are a bitch to wheel around.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “Hey, I always wondered: Are you really fluent in French, Greek, and German?”

“What, you think I was a liar too?” he laughs. “Yeah, I’m fluent.”

“Say something in French.”

He thinks for a minute, then says in perfectly accented French: “
Je suis en amour avec vous
.”

“What does that mean?”

He smiles. “It means, ‘I value your friendship.’”

“Aw,” I say.

“So what languages do you speak?”

“Oh, lots,” I reply. “C, C++, Lisp, Perl, FORTRAN…”

“I get it, those are computer languages.”

“
Muy bien
.”

Luke grins. “Still a nerd.”

Our eyes meet and my tummy inexplicably does a little flip-flop. I’m immediately surprised at myself. Luke wasn’t my type sixteen years ago and he’s even less my type now. Yet… well, I don’t know. It’s weird. There’s just something about him.

At that moment, Michelle interrupts us with a big brown bag of Chinese food. I skipped breakfast this morning and the smell is so unbelievable that I practically claw the bag open. There are paper plates inside and Luke tells me not to worry about it and I’m allowed to eat on his ridiculously expensive mahogany desk. I dig into my chicken with broccoli and practically moan in ecstasy. We’re right near Chinatown so there’s a lot of good Chinese food in the
financial district, but this is the best I’ve ever had by a mile. “Oh my God,” I say. “Where did you get this Chinese food?”

“It’s a secret.”

“Are you serious?”

Luke nods. “It’s like crack. If this is the only place you can get it, you’ll have to come back.”

“I have to come back anyway,” I point out. “You’re my boss.”

Luke still won’t tell me where he ordered this food. Maybe I can bribe Michelle to tell me.

“All right,” he says. “We better get some work done, or else everyone is going to think you’re coming here to have sex to save your job.”

My face turns a little red. I had no idea that Luke guessed what people were saying to me. “They’re going to think that anyway.”

“Sorry.”

“Screw ’
em,” I say. “Does everyone think that about you too?”

“Well, yeah,” he says. “But it’s not as much of an insult when they say it to me.”

I’m not entirely sure about that, but I don’t argue the point. Luke turns to his computer and brings up a page of notes that he made. I’m actually amazed that he really was listening to everything that I said yesterday. We talk and he types in my thoughts using just his index fingers. I wonder if he does that because of his injury or if he was always a two-finger typist.

“Thanks for your help, Ellie,” he says after nearly an hour has gone by.

“My pleasure,” I say, yawning because I’ve eaten way too much. Jenna once commented that she wished this country would institute siestas. Although that probably wouldn’t help our company’s productivity.

“Same time tomorrow?”

“Sure!” I say with an enthusiasm that embarrasses me. I clear my throat and try to look less enthusiastic.

Of course, I’m not excited because of Luke or anything. He has absolutely nothing to do with it. What I’m thrilled about is that after years of labor, someone is actually listening to my ideas. I feel important. Maybe I can help save some of my colleagues’ jobs.

***

Every day over the next two weeks, I end up in Luke’s office for lunch. We do talk about work a lot, but it seems like every day we end up socializing more and more. By the end of the second week, we probably spent about five minutes total on work.

I’m not even sure what we talk about exactly. Sometimes we talk about people we both knew at Harvard… I wouldn’t use the word “mutual friends” because I don’t think any people like that existed. We hung around in very different crowds. We had a large class of about 1500 people, but there were still several people that we both knew. “What happened to that roommate of yours?” Luke asks me one day. “The one with the lips. Daphne?”

“Delia?” I don’t know what he’s talking about with “the lips.” Men notice the oddest things.

“That’s right.”

“She does family practice in Idaho,” I tell him. “She’s married and has two kids.”

“Idaho?” Luke crinkles his nose, which I have to admit, is the same look I gave her when she told me she was moving there.

“I know,” I say.

“And what about that boyfriend of yours?” Luke asks.

I didn’t know Luke was even paying attention to me at the point that I started dating Noah. I met him in one of my complex analysis class during junior year: Noah Weinstein, God of Mathematics. Above all, I respected intelligence back then. I ogled smart men like other women ogled movie stars. If it were socially acceptable to have a pin-up of Albert Einstein, then… well, I probably still wouldn’t have, but you get the idea. In retrospect, the way Noah spouted out answers in our math section was not entirely different than the way Luke mouthed off his opinions in our expos class, but somehow I found myself in awe of Noah’s brilliance.

It was good between Noah and me in the beginning. I was his first girlfriend and he was grateful just to have me and to be getting laid. But eventually, his arrogance seeped through and I could tell he thought he was destined for greater things than little old me.

“I don’t know,” I say. “He got some scholarship in England and that’s the last I heard of him.”

“What an idiot,” Luke comments.

“He wasn’t an idiot,” I say quietly. “He was brilliant.”

“Well, he was definitely extremely ugly,” Luke says.

I start laughing. With his sticklike frame and blazing red hair and freckles, Noah wasn’t anybody’s conception of handsome, especially compared with Luke. Maybe that’s the real reason I was willing to date him—because his looks didn’t intimidate me the way Luke’s did. “Okay, he wasn’t Brad Pitt or anything, but…”

“Oh, come on,” Luke says. “You probably never saw him again because they captured him and put him on display in the zoo.”

I’m laughing hard enough now that there are actually a few tears in my eyes. “Stop…”

“Seriously, I couldn’t believe you picked that guy over me.” Luke shakes his head. “Talk about blows to the old self-esteem…”

“And what about that blonde cheerleader type from Wellesley you were sucking face with through all of senior year?” I remind him, wiping my eyes.

“Margo?” He shakes his head. “She decided to believe the doctors who said I wasn’t going to walk again, and she took off.”

I stare at him, the smile gone from my face. “Oh my God, Luke, I’m so sorry…”

“Don’t be.” He shrugs. “It wasn’t true love. If she got in some disfiguring accident, I would have dumped her just as fast.”

I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Luke is nowhere near as shallow as I thought he was. After all, he liked me.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had hooked up with Luke that night in college. Maybe we would have dated a few months, but I can’t believe it would have gone any further than that. We were just too different. We still are, yet… well, he’s not quite as awful as I thought he was. Maybe.

***

That night when I get home from work, I’m proud to report I don’t have a scrap of make-up on my face. That’s proof that I don’t actually like Luke. At least not in
that way
.

When I get up to my floor, Sadie is standing in the hallway talking to another of my elderly neighbors, a
seventysomething woman named Ethel. They’re both wearing housecoats and fuzzy slippers. I swear, nobody in my building is under retirement age.

“Hi, Ellie!” Sadie says cheerfully. “Are you going out with your suitor tonight?”

“Um,” I say. “I don’t really have a suitor, Sadie.”

“Of course she doesn’t!” Ethel pipes up. “Don’t be dumb, Sadie.”

I stare at Ethel in surprise. I always thought Ethel was a nice-enough lady, so I didn’t expect her to insult me (or Sadie) that way.

“How could you say that?” Sadie cries in my defense. “Ellie is beautiful!” She bites her lip. “Well, except for her hips. But she’s working on that.”

Great.

“Oh, Sadie,” Ethel sighs. “Don’t you know anything?” She gives me a knowing look. “Ellie is a lesbian. She’s not interested in having any suitors.”

Seriously? 

“No!” Sadie gasps. “Is that true, Ellie?”

I start to tell her that it absolutely is not true, but Ethel quickly cuts me off: “Ellie, you don’t have to stay in the closet. Just because we’re old, it doesn’t mean we’re not understanding about this stuff.” She smiles proudly. “My granddaughter is a lesbian, you know. I could set you up if you’d like. She’s really pretty.”

Okay, I have to put an end to this right now. “I’m not a lesbian,” I say. Ethel looks very skeptical, so I add, “Really.”

“I told you,” Sadie says smugly.

“Oh,” Ethel says. She seems really disappointed. “So why
are
you still single then?”

“It’s her hips,” Sadie says.

I don’t really want to discuss why I’m single with these women, considering I haven’t entirely figured it out myself. I suspect this is going to get very insulting and possibly end up with my having to take home another tub of pot roast. So I excuse myself, run back to my apartment, and take a nice long bath.