shake. “Best friends. Been that way since first grade.”
“Gosh,” Mia said, confused by the dynamic between them.
Josh tolerated Wyatt’s embrace for a second before pulling away. “I don’t have a lot of time, so if we’re gonna do this, we better get to it.” The kind, helpful Josh she’d met before had been replaced by someone hostile and withdrawn.
“I’ve got to get to campus,” Mia said, grateful for a reason to excuse herself from whatever was going on between the two men. They could work out their interpersonal difficulties without her. She turned to Wyatt and offered a grateful smile. “Thank you for fixing my neck. You saved my whole day.”
“My pleasure,” he replied without any flirtatious overtones for once. His smile was friendly but subdued, a far cry from his usual smirking grin.
Josh was still lingering by the door, watching them sullenly. Mia offered him an uncertain smile. “Thank you for helping Wyatt out with my AC. You’re both lifesavers.”
The only response she got was a vague nod.
Fine. He could be that way if he wanted. Whatever had crawled up his ass, she hoped for his sake it extricated itself.
In the meantime, she was going to work.
Mia’s sister called that afternoon on her lunch break from her graphic design job. “How are things going with the hot cowboy? I want an update.”
Mia had made the mistake of telling Holly about Josh, and her sister had read way too much into a couple of casual encounters. Holly had repeatedly tried to get Mia to take the initiative and make an overture, and Mia had repeatedly told her that wasn’t going to happen. For a number of reasons. Not least of which being, Josh didn’t seem to like her anymore.
“It’s not going anywhere,” Mia said, pushing aside the stack of grading she’d been working on.
“Boo,” Holly replied. “Have you seen him at all?” There was street noise in the background, which meant she was probably eating lunch in Madison Square Park, which was close to her office in Manhattan.
Mia felt a pang of homesickness at the familiar city sounds. “This morning, actually.” She rubbed her forehead, thinking of all the places around Madison Square Park she missed. Eataly. Wagamama. The National Museum of Mathematics.
“And?” Her sister’s voice rose an octave in excitement.
“Hang on.” Mia grabbed her keys and let herself out of her office, heading for the nearest exit. “Let me go outside first.” The building that housed the math department had been built in the seventies, and the walls were annoyingly thin. She’d overheard too many snippets of her colleagues’ personal conversations already and had no desire to make her romantic travails—or lack thereof—public.
As she pushed out the door, the heat outside hit her like a sledgehammer. It couldn’t be good for a person, repeatedly going from arctic cold to blistering heat all day, yet that was what everyone here did.
Once she was clear of a group of students passing by, she said, “He acted like kind of a jerk, actually. So I was right, he’s definitely not interested.”
“Sometimes guys act like jerks because they’re interested.”
“Or maybe they act like jerks because they are jerks, and no amount of projecting nobler motives onto them will change that essential reality.” Mia strolled away from the math building, following an aimless path through campus. What little breeze there was blew in an unfortunate direction today, carrying the stink of animals over from the ag barns.
“You said this guy didn’t seem like a jerk,” Holly reminded her.
“Obviously I don’t know him very well.”
Holly made an impatient sound. “Tell me what happened and let me be the judge of that.”
So Mia did, because as much as Holly occasionally got swept away on flights of fancy, she was still often better at understanding human behavior than Mia. Not to mention, she had a lot more experience on the dating battlefield. Mia told her sister about the broken air conditioner, and about Wyatt and his aggressive flirting, and about Birdie’s neck-breaking mattress. Holly listened quietly until Mia got to Wyatt’s shoulder massage.
“I’m sorry,” Holly interrupted. “Hold up. Did you just say a hot handyman gave you a back rub this morning?”
“He totally fixed my neck pain.”
“Sure, I’ll bet he did. Oh my god, Mia!”
Mia winced and rubbed her ear at Holly’s screechy outburst.
“Why didn’t you lead with that?” Holly demanded. “Or call me immediately after leaving his presence? At the very least that should have been the first thing out of your mouth. You should have