Beautiful Bastard: Beautiful Boss Part 7

"We should really look into getting you some coloring books," I told him, smiling before letting my head rest back against my arm.

"Wouldn't be quite the same, though, would it?"

I pushed my fingers through his hair again, watching the way the colors shifted in the dying light. I could feel the marker move, smell the ink, and when I looked again, I saw that he was carefully drawing individual leaves.

"Now when you go away Wednesday, I'll still be there," he said.

"You're always here," I said, touching the side of his face, tapping it gently so he'd look up at me.

His blue eyes were almost black in this light, so open and honest I wasn't sure I'd be able to walk out the door in the morning, let alone get on a plane and fly to California in three days.

Five.

Will Hanna left before the sun was up on Wednesday, bending to kiss my forehead on her way out.

"Bye, baby," she whispered, thinking I was still asleep. "I'll see you Friday."

She turned to leave, but I pushed up, shuffling behind her to the front door, where she had her suitcase and laptop bag packed and ready.

"Can I make you some coffee?" I mumbled, squinting at her. "Put it in a travel mug?"

She laughed when I absently reached down and scratched myself through my boxers. Shaking her head, she told me, "Go back to bed, sleepyhead."

"Think I'll go run."

Stepping forward, she kissed me, and wasn't fast enough to get away before I pulled her closer by her hips, held her tight against me.

Hanna smiled into the kiss, wrapping her arms around my neck. "You're so warm."

"When do you get home on Friday?" I asked against her mouth.

"Mmmm . . . late. Around ten?"

I stepped back, rubbing my eyes. "Wait. Where are you going this trip?"

Laughing again, she stretched to kiss my jaw. "Berkeley." She pecked me one more time and then stepped back. "My cab is outside. I'll call when I get there."

"You're being awfully quiet over there."

Jensen's voice pulled me out of my thoughts and I blinked up at him across the table. He was down in the city from Boston, and we had joined Max and Bennett for a late lunch at Le Bernardin.

"Just wondering how things are going for Hanna," I said. "She's giving her job talk right now." I tilted my wrist, looking at my watch, and corrected, "No, she finished about an hour ago." Picking up my phone, I registered that she hadn't even texted to let me know she'd landed safely.

"What did she say?" Bennett asked, misinterpreting my attention to my phone.

"Oh, just . . ." I waved him off, shaking my head. "No updates yet. I'm sure it went great."

"I'm sure they're already begging her to accept an offer," Max said, smiling rea.s.suringly. Out of the three of them, he watched me the most closely today, having heard both Hanna and I occasionally ramble about the job hunt, the idea of moving, the idea of staying, what our lives might look like a few months down the road.

Max certainly didn't want us to move, but he didn't seem all that concerned about it, either. I really could do my job from anywhere, though some cities would be easier than others.

"She doesn't believe me when I say the choice is going to be hers," I told them.

"Well," Jensen said, "where do you think she'll end up?"

I shrugged. "I don't actually know."

"And when are you guys planning to move?" Bennett asked.

"Well, we may not be-"

Bennett waved me off. "I mean, when is she hoping to start? Wherever that may be."

"Probably next fall. Though some schools seem to want her to start in the winter term."

"Will," Max said flatly. "The winter term? It's October."

I nodded, poking at my plate.

"It's October," he repeated, "and some places want her to start in January, and you don't have a sense of where you might be going?"

"She hasn't visited everywhere yet." The explanation sounded lame even to my own ears, but it's the one she gave me again and again.

My friends nodded as if it all made sense, and thankfully Jensen changed the subject, but I tuned out after a few bits of exchange regarding a merger of two large pharmaceutical companies.

Hanna and I had been so focused on the wedding and then the idea of her career beginning that we hadn't actually discussed the how.

Everything felt too hectic, and the Let's figure it out after the wedding motto had been an easy way to put off any actual decision making.

Here we were, married, in love, and on the verge of changing nearly everything about our day-to-day lives. And we still had no idea at all how it was going to look.

I pulled a beer from the fridge, popping the cap off with a satisfying hiss.

"You're not drinking my cream soda, are you?" Hanna asked on the other end of the line.

"Do you really think I would steal your cream soda?" I volleyed back, settling on the couch. "I may be new to this, but I know how marriage works."

She laughed. "Good. I've been saving it."

"You know," I told her, missing the heat of her body next to me on the couch, "even if you finish it, you can get another."

"Hush. I like the antic.i.p.ation."

Growling, I said, "I know this about you."

"Will." The single syllable was a quiet plea, a gunshot at the beginning of a race.

I draped my arm across my face, working to not get distracted by phone s.e.x. "Let's play in a minute. Tell me about your day."

She let out a prolonged exhale and then started. "Welllllll. Let's see. I think my talk went well. There was a lot of great discussion. And I like the lab s.p.a.ce they've suggested."

I waited for more.

Hanna fell silent.

"And?" I prompted. "You like the faculty?"

"They seem great."

Shifting my arm away, I stared up at the ceiling. "Hanna?"

"What?"

"Are you at all excited about this process?"

"Seriously?" she asked incredulously. "I'm giddy."

"It's just not like you to be so tight-lipped about it."

Sighing, she said, "I'm trying to be contained."

"With me?"

I could practically see her helpless shrug. "I'm trying to keep my moment-to-moment opinions in check right now. I figured we would talk about it after we have all the information."

"Yes, you mentioned that, but I'd still prefer to be processing it together as we go," I told her. "I mean, I know you had to take all day Sunday to think, Hanna, but it's not like you really told me much of what you were thinking about, other than being annoyed with me. It's a big move." I paused, then added, "For both of us."

"Max reminded me to worry about the job, not the location," she said. "I mean, you can work from anywhere."

I sat up, transitioning quickly from relaxed conversation to irritation. "Oh, Max said this?"

"Well, and you did, too," she added quickly. "Early on you said let's not worry about location, let's just see where things fall."

"Maybe because I expected to be talking about it as we went," I argued, standing to pace the living room. "But every time it comes up, you say, 'Let's wait and see what the choices are.' At this point, Hanna, the choices are every f.u.c.king corner of the globe. Can we at least narrow it down a little? Begin to form a plan?"

"I don't know which place has the best offer yet!" she argued, voice tight.

I laughed out an incredulous breath. "Well, we can lay out the landscape so far. I mean, doesn't my opinion factor in at all?"

"Of course, but we don't even have offers from every school."

"Hanna, we can a.s.sume everywhere you've been is an option!"

It sucked having this conversation over the phone, but I was too wound up to wait. After reading my friends' reactions today, I knew it was absurd that we didn't even have an inkling of where we were going yet. I didn't want to put it off anymore.

I heard her take a calming breath before she said, "I feel like planning right now would be putting the cart bef-"

"Oh, for f.u.c.k's sake!" I cut in. "You are the f.u.c.king cart! You are the f.u.c.king horse! You're leading this. Every school wants you!"

"Will."

I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. She sounded so vulnerable, but her placating tone chipped away at my already frayed patience. "What?"

"Don't yell at me. I don't want to fight."

I felt too upset to diffuse this immediately. "At this point, getting off the phone with me or putting this aside doesn't mean we aren't fighting. The fact that you're eight interviews in and I have no idea where you're leaning is already a problem. I want to have it out."

Hanna went quiet on the other end of the line, finally uttering a small "Okay."

Trying to calm down, I said, "Babe, there's nothing wrong with fighting. Sometimes we won't agree. Sometimes we will actively disagree about how to handle something. It has to be okay for us to have a fight."

"Well, we just argued this weekend, too. And this one feels big," she said.

"Because it is," I answered with an incredulous laugh. "I mean, hey, it's only our future."

She didn't respond. All I could hear was a quiet tapping on the other end: her nervous habit of flicking a pen against her leg.

Leaning against the wall, I said, "Hanna. I need you to say something."

"I'm not sure what to say because I don't feel like I can make a decision yet. I haven't been to Caltech. I haven't heard back from Harvard, Berkeley, or Rice yet, either."

"And that's fine," I told her. "All I'm asking is that we talk about it, because you do have offers from five schools, but you won't even lay out some hypotheticals with me. You loved Harvard. You loved Princeton, but were iffy on a faculty spot at Hopkins and MIT. Right?"

"Right."

And then she said nothing more.

"You only have one more interview," I reminded her evenly. "You've heard back from all but three places. So what are your top three?"

"Based on what?" she asked, clearly getting annoyed. "Location? Resources? Salary? Teaching load? How do you want me to weigh these things?"

I let my head fall back against the wall with a soft thunk. "Jesus Christ, Hanna. It's like you are pathologically unable to approach this decision. You weigh them with me, one bit at a time."

"It's just complicated, Will. This isn't a simple process. There are about a million factors at work here."

"Are you really going to patronize me right now?" I growled, pushing off the wall again to pace the apartment. "I know what schools you're visiting when you leave the house, and you generally tell me the specifics of your interview schedule when you get home, but do I get even a single opinion afterward? No! So yes, I realize it's a complicated process, but you don't seem to."

"Maybe I'm just trying to remain open-minded."

"f.u.c.k open-minded!" I yelled. "Be open-minded when you're doing the interview. Inside this marriage, tell me all the tiny gripes and fears and hopes. I don't need the whitewashed version. I want the big and small, the ugly and the awesome. Right now, I know what questions you were asked in your job talks, how big your lab would be, what your start-up funds would be. But I don't have a single clue what you like. And you haven't asked me once where I would like to live, what I would like to do. I would follow you anywhere, Hanna. But I want to do so as your partner."

She went very quiet, and for a few beats I wondered if she actually had the gall to hang up on me. But then I heard a tiny hiccup and realized she was crying.