The Intern: Chasing Murderers, Hookers, and Senators Across DC Wasn't In The Job Description Read Free Page A

I couldn’t blame him. I’d have said the same. “All
right. I’d better get back to it.”
    I went through some files and called back a couple of people
who had questions about grant applications, but I soon went back to staring at
the electric blue screen of my Wang word processor. I finally shook my head,
gave up, and jotted down a few things I wanted to include on a notepad.
    I didn’t get much done the rest of the day. The main reason
was Stephanie.
    Stephanie was the woman of my dreams: medium height; soft
brown, shoulder-length hair; subtle, brown eyes; ungodly, long eyelashes; and a
very cute nose. She was a Georgetown law student, originally from Kentucky, and
we met almost a month before while browsing at Mysterybooks in DuPont Circle.
    She bit her very cute lip, trying to decide which Raymond
Chandler book to buy, which gave me one hell of an opening. She said she loved
James Cain but hadn’t read any Chandler. I pretended to have the vapors and
suggested The Long Goodbye . I asked her for her phone number, and she
scrawled it down on the back of her receipt. I somehow managed to wait the
requisite two days before calling her and asked her out.
    We had been on four dates since, and I was beginning to fall
for her. A rare thing because I was normally the guy who nixed the idea of a
second date for whatever reason, and I was realizing the shoe was now on the
other foot. I regaled all of my friends with tales of her excellence whenever I
could.
    She was twenty-five, three wonderful years older than me,
from Danville, Kentucky—what a beautiful accent—and graduated from the College
of Charleston, where she double-majored in English and Engineering.
    She had been in DC for almost three years, where she began
by working as a paralegal in a small law firm and was now starting her second
year of law school, which, she said, was hard as hell. She loved to dance, had
a secret crush on Vince Gill, and she mentioned so many times she was over her
old boyfriend Roger that I wondered if she really was. However, I wasn’t about
to tell her this.
    That night, I was going to attempt to raise the culture
quotient of our relationship. We had previously gone to the park, the movies
twice, and an Orioles game, so I told Stephanie to be prepared for an evening
of dining and dancing—meaning, please dress up—and who knew what else—meaning,
to put it politely, more physical intimacy than I had yet experienced with
Stephanie. We were going to Rachel’s, a wonderful seafood restaurant, and then
dancing at the River Club. Hubba, hubba.
    All afternoon my mind was so consumed with which of my two
suits to wear, which tie to don, and exactly how uptight I was going to be in
the constant presence of this goddess that I barely paid attention to the
panel. Fortunately, through years of church-going and school attendance, I have
developed the ability to appear engrossed in the subject at hand when my mind
is actually in the Cayman Islands with a swimsuit model.
    Time moved like a three-toed sloth, but finally at 4:30 pm I
quietly got up and left the room, nodding at Joe as I went. One advantage of
being an intern is the ability to excuse yourself whenever you need to. Now I
could look forward to a date with the most awesome woman in Washington, DC. My
night was definitely going to be better than my day.

Chapter
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    Three
    I  have been on more than my share of
dates. I’ve had pretty dates, plain dates, easy dates, dates who wanted to
wait, smart dates, fun dates, boring dates, and the always-interesting blind
dates.
    As long as you’re not calling each other boyfriend and
girlfriend, and/or you have yet to bare your sugar-white ass to her during the
throes of passion, you approach any date in a very Zen-like manner, trying your
best not to get your hopes up and checking quite frequently to see if your fly
is zipped. This was exactly my frame of mind as I approached Stephanie’s place.
    She lived by herself in a townhouse in