Men and Dogs Read Free Page B

might, by some odd chance, darken its neoned door. So, yes, she was already interested. But it was the thing with
Professor Ellsworth that did it.
    “Knock-knock,” Professor Ellsworth would pipe at least once a class. It was a truly pointless prerequisite, and the professor—clearly hired as a favor to some key donor—had an incurable penchant for jokes. When none of the students would answer,
he’d say it again, a few decibels louder. “Knock-knooooooock!”
    “Who’s there?” someone would wearily reply.
    “Justin!”
    “Justin who?”
    “Justin time to give me the statistics report on the success of online advertising targeting baby boomers! Ha!”
    Then one day, Suit Guy raised his hand before Ellsworth could get his knock-knock out. Hannah turned, fascinated. The professor called on the Suit Guy, obviously annoyed that this young man was getting in the way of his antics.
    “Yes?”
    “Knock-knock,” the Suit Guy said.
    “Excuse me?” the professor asked.
    “Knock. Knock.”
    The professor frowned, confused. That was his line. “Who’s there?”
    “The guy who thinks your class is a complete joke,” Suit Guy said. “Look—I’m sorry, but I have a job. You know, a real one,
to get myself through school. So can we please just get through this material?”
    The other students stared, suspended in the thick gelatin of silence. It took the professor a week to fully recover and resume his joke assault.
    Bingo, Hannah thought. That’s my boyfriend.
    It wasn’t easy. When Hannah urged him to come to Nola’s, he politely refused, saying he had to get to his job in the city.
She invited him to parties, to dinner, even to the opera—no, no, no. Then one day, Hannah ran into him on the fringe of campus. Instead of his now trademark suit, he was wearing white shorts and a yellow T-shirt that read, KICK IT!
    “What are you doing?” she blurted. Not the smoothest opener, but it was off-putting to accidentally come across her crush sporting striped kneesocks.
    “I’m on a kickball team,” he said, suddenly absorbed with his shoelaces. “Stanford has a league. Unofficially. You know—off-the-grid kind of thing.”
    “I love kickball,” Hannah lied. “Can I play on your team?”
    “We’re full, actually. We’re sort of the champions, so we’ve got a waiting list.”
    Hannah cocked her head. She had just asked to be on his kickball team. A kickball team . In other words, she had just offered to act like a fourth grader in order to facilitate sex. And this suit-wearing beanpole,
this geek, had said no? Oh, it was on. She had to have this guy.
    By the following week, through a certain amount of applied investigation and light flirting, she had finagled herself a spot on the opposing team. If Jon was surprised to see her on the diamond, he didn’t show it; he simply returned her wave with a nod of what looked like annoyance. When it was her turn at the plate, she treated him to her biggest smile (freshly
Crest Whitestripped), ran to the ball, and kicked it as hard as she could.
    What followed was blinding pain and a view of the California sky. She had torn her hamstring, it would later turn out, and landed on her back. A crowd quickly gathered above her, and she spotted Jon’s face bobbing on the edge of the cloud of heads.
    “Look,” she said, pointing to him. “I fell for you.”
    It was the first of their very own line of horrible jokes.
    “I was flattered you followed me to kickball,” he said on their first date (post–emergency room drinks). “Sort of. But to injure yourself? That takes dedication.”
    “It does,” she said. “You must really be worth it.”
    And he was. He was worth a torn hamstring; worth switching from the Marina to the Mission; worth giving up the Korean’s beautiful cheekbones. Because once one got past the feigned haughtiness, he was the warmest person in the world. Kind, tolerant, able to handle her post–Elbo Room drunken rants and her occasional midnight