Beautiful Boss

by Christina Lauren

  “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 anticipation.”

  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 sex. “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 space 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 fucking 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 assume 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 fuck’s sake!” I cut in. “You are the fucking cart! You are the fucking 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.”

  “Fuck 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.

  “I’m not trying to be selfish,” she said. “You know that, right?”

  “Of course I do,” I told her, softening. “But, look, you have to process this with me, as a unit. Your desire to remain open-minded means that you’re not letting yourself fall in love with any one place. And your inability to express a preference—no matter how preliminary—is making it totally fucking impossible for me to get engaged in this process.” I heard her blow her nose in the background. “And now, your unwillingness to deal with any sort of confrontation is going from naïve to thoughtless. I didn’t like the way you used to avoid dealing with things—it nearly ended us before we even began—and I really hate it now.”

  She sniffed. “I just want to get off the phone.”

  My heart stuttered. “Hanna. Come on.”

  “You’re making me feel like a child. I’ll see you Friday night.”

  The phone clicked and nothing but silence carried through the line. She’d hung up. I’d yelled at her, and she’d hung up. Well done, Will.

  Guilt and aggravation and just plain dread warred in my chest as I crossed the room before dropping back onto the couch. My beer sat on the coffee table in front of me, still full, condensation forming at the neck of the bottle and running down the glass to pool on the wood underneath. I picked it up and brought it to my lips.

  It was going to be a fucking long night.

  Jensen jogged beside me on the trail. “Yeah, I’m probably the worst person to talk to about this,” he said. “I’ve dealt with Hanna’s head-in-the-sand shit for years.”

  “No, see,” I said, glancing over at him, “this is where you tell me it’s normal to get in a fight like this one week after a wedding.”

  This made him laugh dryly, and only then did I realize what I’d said.

  I pulled up short, stopping in the middle of the trail. “Jens, I don’t mean—”

  “You want me to tell you what’s normal one week after a wedding?” he asked, bending to cup his knees and catch his breath.

  “Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “Dude, that was totally inconsiderate. I am a prick.”

  He waved off my apology with a flick of his hand before straightening. “Given that my wife—previously my girlfriend of nine years—told me one week after our wedding that she wasn’t sure we were meant to be together, I’d say that you and Hanna are just fine. It’s a really stressful time, that’s all.”

  “I guess.” I looked past us, down the trail at the line of mothers and jogging strollers headed our way. I hadn’t stopped feeling nauseated for hours now.

  We stepped off to the side, on the grass, and Jensen pulled a water bottle from that dorky jogging belt of his.

  “Hanna has laser focus,” he said, and then took a drink. “It’s what makes her great at what she does, and shitty at multitasking. I suppose I should give her some credit for consistency.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “She’s just trying to be an adult,” he said. “Maybe she thinks this is how adults deal with stuff. Sort of stoically.”

  I groaned, knowing he was right, and marveling at how fucking easy it was for him to come to this conclusion.

  “Well, that makes sense, given that she told me I was treating her like a child last night.”

  Jensen’s laugh boomed out in the chilly morning air. “Good luck with that one, Will.” He pretended to wipe away a tear. “Holy shit, I don’t think seeing you two stumble through marriage will ever get old.”

  My cell rang on the bedside table, startling me awake. I picked it up, swiping the screen and squinting at the clock: just past three in the morning.

  The last time I’d looked at the clock was only fifteen minutes ago.

  “Hey, Plum.”

  “Hey, you.”

  My body flushed warm with relief. “You okay?” I asked.

  She let out a tiny hiccup and squeaked, “Not really.” She paused. “Were you asleep? Your voice is all sleepy-deep.”

  Shaking my head, I said, “I just sort of dozed off a few minutes ago.”

  She started to apologize but I stopped her. “No, no, I’m glad you called.”

  “I couldn’t sleep, either,” she admitted, her voice a little muffled, as if she was lying on her side. “I miss you and I hate that we’re fighting.”

  I fell back against the pillow, rubbing a hand over my face. “I’m sorry. I was a dick earlier.”

  “You weren’t, though . . . You were right.”

  I nodded behind my hand. I was right, and I knew that, but I could have been gentler. Because Hanna was self-possessed in so many ways, it was easy for me to forget that she was only twenty-five and on the cusp of choosing which prestigious university to join, in a faculty role. Talking to Jensen today helped remind me that Hanna had blown through college in three years, graduate school in another three, and then had a post-doctoral fellowship that was only a year—she was still learning how to manage career choices that many of us didn’t have to worry about until much later.

  “So how was the rest of your day?” I asked my wife.

  I settled back into bed as she took a deep breath and launched into a detailed description of her interview: what she was asked during her job talk, the meetings with other faculty members afterward, and, later, dinner with the chair of the department at a small but apparently amazing sushi restaurant in San Francisco.

  She talked about what they ate, the mild gossip they shared, and the strange small-world coincidences sprinkled throughout the day, which, frankly, were prevalent in research circles.

  The entire time she gushed about it, I listened, trying to imagine us there.

  I tried to imagine living there.

  Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, I could see a transition to the Bay Area. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to move to California. I liked our seasons. I liked our urban cluster. I didn’t want to have to drive everywhere.

  I didn’t really want to leave the East Coast, and it wasn’t until this moment that I knew I felt strongly.

  Fuck.

  “But, I don’t know,” she said, rousing me from my thoughts. “I can’t imagine us here.” She paused and I briefly wondered if I’d accidentally said any of that out loud. “I can’t imagine you here,” she added.

  I swallowed, trying to put the right string of words together—one where I wouldn’t agree too immediately, wouldn’t make her feel she couldn’t choose a school in California. I’d meant what I said—I would follow her anywhere—but there was no denying that a big part of me was suddenly hoping I wouldn’t have to follow her there.

  “You can’t?” I asked, hedging.

  “No,” she said, and it sounded like she rolled over. “You need to be in a big city. Bigger than Berkeley.”

  “You still have a lot of choices in cities,” I reminded her.

  “I do.”

  “So, Berkeley is out?” I asked carefully.

  She breathed in, finally whispering, “Yeah. I think so. I liked it, but not enough.”

  We fell silent, and I grew immediately sleepy with the sound of her quiet breaths in my ear. It rocked me from time to time to realize how easily I’d grown dependent on the sounds of her falling asleep next to me.

  “I love you so much,” she mumbled.

  “I love you, too,” I told her. “Come home to me.”

  We fell asleep, neither of us bothering to hang up.

  I surreptitiously canceled the car Hanna had scheduled to meet her at the airport and went there myself, on a wild tear deciding to drive the old Subaru from Manhattan to JFK.

  The reality of this terrible fucking idea—the traffic, the she
er logistics of parking at the airport—reaffirmed my desire to not have to drive every day.

  But when she came down the escalators looking exhausted and sweetly rumpled—fuck it, I would have navigated any cluster of cars to get to her. Surprised, she ran straight into my arms, smelling all warm and sweet and fuckable.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, voice muffled by my jacket.

  “I’m stealing you away.”

  “To home?” she said.

  I shook my head. “We’re headed upstate for the weekend.”

  Jerking back to look at me, she asked, “Why?”

  Grabbing her bag, I led her outside. “When we got off the phone—this morning,” I added, laughing, “I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted you home so we could talk and relax and get back to baseline. It was this weird antsy thing, and I realized . . . our life is going to change. And I need to know that we can talk about all of this somewhere other than the only place we’ve lived together. I need to know we can be us no matter where we are.”

  She turned, stretching to kiss me beside the car, and I struggled against the temptation to open the backseat and fuck her in the sketchy parking garage.

  The drive upstate was torture, with her hand working my jeans open, playing at jerking me off—but never actually getting down to it. Instead I got teasing fingers, her mouth on my neck, and then the weight of her head on my shoulder as she rested against me, hand warm against my bare stomach as she dozed off.

  It was late when we finally arrived at the B&B and checked in, skipping further conversation and tripping as quietly as we could down the hall to our room.

  The room was drafty and smelled of wet cut grass. Outside, crickets chirped and the wind creaked through tree limbs beside the window. It was truly nothing like our apartment in Manhattan. And then Hanna met my eyes, and smiled.

  The whole world cracked open.

  I pulled her clothes off with shaking hands, tossed her onto the creaky bed. Her mouth curled in a laugh, pale limbs spread across the blankets, beckoning.

  The smell of her, the taste of her skin on my lips.

  I turned on the lamp to see her better, to watch the flush crawl up her neck when I pressed my face between her breasts, groaning.