Driving Doctor Mayhem

[16] Wang Chung

The next day, I came in a few minutes early with a bag of doughnuts in hopes of buttering up Doc enough to find out more about his sort-of-kind-of-mystery man. I mean, I already knew his name: Gideon, his occupation: bank teller, and his favorite color: green-with-like-a-little-bit-of-yellow-but-not-too-much.

Beyond that, I could guess that he was easily impressed, because eating in a fancy restaurant with Doc sounded worse than eating alone and having everyone silently judge you.

I'd bet good money on the fact that Doc corrected his grammar at least five times, made snippy comments between the grammar corrections, and possibly even fell asleep at the table--not that he could help the last part, but passing out at random doesn't tend to make for a night to remember.

Not in the traditional sense.

I plopped the doughnut bag on his desk and Doc looked at it like a regular person would look at a pinned grenade. "You want something," he droned, not taking his eyes off the doughnuts.

"Gideon called and said he enjoyed your dinner the other night," I purred.

"Great," Doc replied flatly, returning to the papers on his desk, "Forward me his number. Please, thank you, yada, yada."

I paused. "You could have given him your number in the first place, you know. That's what normal people do on dates, instead of showing off their PAs."

"In my experience, all normal people do on dates is show off. I took a cue from the mediocre. Isn't that what you've been oh-so indiscreetly lobbying for in the past weeks?"

"I'm just saying, I turned him away the first time. A lesser man wouldn't've called back."

"Well, exactly."

Doc's ears flushed a little and he snapped his head back down to his laptop screen.

I grinned, my inner gossipy teenage-girl resurfacing after a long hibernation during which Cricket, who had no love life to speak of, was my only friend.

"So, it was like... a date?" I wiggled my eyebrows and bit my lip.

Doc looked up at me and frowned. "It wasn't like a date, it was a date," he corrected me, almost reflexively. "God, how can you bear to listen to yourself when you talk like that? As if the eighties didn't already haunt me enough already."

"Ooh, what happened in the eighties?"

After a long pause, Doc said, "The death of good taste. Also, Wang Chung, although you could argue that the two are synonymous." He paused to shudder. "I hate Wang Chung."

"Whatever, be vague," I mumbled, wandering out of his office, "I'll forward you Gideon's number."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome, John."

I shut the door just in time to hear what was presumably a dinosaur toy thud against the fake wood.

"Damn you, Banksy Banks!"