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As we walk inside, his hand lands on the small of my back, as we approach the hostess stand.
“Reservation for Mills.”
The lady checks her tablet and walks us back toward the kitchen in a cozy spot where most of the restaurant can’t see us.
“Will this be sufficient?”
He nods, and the hostess leaves us with two menus.
“Nobody is going to see us here. Isn’t it nice to get out together?”
He smiles. “You aren’t meant to be kept secret. I can’t wait until the semester is over.”
I take a look at the wine menu, and order a bottle of chardonnay. We are celebrating tonight.
My hand lands on his and our eyes meet. Noah is unlike any man I’ve ever met, and I can see us being long-term. We are spending so much time together, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
This career change is going to come with ups and downs and some getting used to, but starting on Monday, I can work on my clients in my free time and see how much I can get done. This will help me figure out how many manuscripts I can handle over the course of the semester. I don’t want to overextend myself, but the money needs to continue coming in. The logistics of it will fall into place once I get my schedule down.
Noah picks up the bottle and pours into the two glasses. “Here’s to your next adventure. Living the dream, baby.”
It’s nice to have someone be supportive in my endeavors. My father has always told me I am crazy for wanting to do freelance editing, and honestly, I don’t think he ever thought I was going to leave the department. I’m glad I could prove him wrong. He’s my dad, and I love him, but following my dream has always been in the back of my head, and I’ve been working towards it for five years.
Noah just doesn’t seem all here tonight. I’m sure there is a lot on his mind because of this whole Adam situation, and the pressure it puts on him and his reputation is bound to cause some issues.
“I know you don’t want to talk about it, but it’s the elephant in the room. Being together means we need to be able to talk about the hard stuff, too,” I say, taking his hand in mine again.
Noah’s chest rises and falls and he explains what is going on in detail. I didn’t know about the other complaints, and the fact that they are still trying to use them against him is blasphemy. They shouldn’t even be in his personnel file, and if I were him, I would get a lawyer, too. He could risk losing his tenure because of something like that.
“Those assholes won’t know what hit them when you show up with a lawyer. Listen, you need to take care of that this weekend. That’s something you have been working toward, and they can’t take it away from you because of their wrongdoing. It’s unethical to take money from a donor to cover up a complaint against a teacher. Why should you be held liable?”
The more I hear him talk about the officials at the university, the less I even want to be associated with it. One last semester and then I’m gone for good. Why does he stay there? If they tried to pull this crap with me, I would be out of there.
“Can you just go to a different university? Somewhere where they won’t pull shit like this? You deserve better, Noah.”
“I can’t just up and leave. All the years I’ve put in for tenure and my reputation, and they are just going to throw it away. None of these fucking complaints are valid, and they have the nerve to threaten me.”
He starts to get heated and his knuckles turn white. I’ve never seen him this upset before.
I get up from my side of the table, and sit in my lap. “Listen, we will take care of this, okay? For now, let’s try to have a nice dinner, enjoy some wine, and let the stress go. Can you do that?”
He smiles and kisses me. “Anything for you, Les.”
Even with everything going on, for the rest of the night, we don’t worry about anything else, but each other’s company.
22
NOAH
Imust have had too much wine to drink because my eyes open to being back in my bed, not remembering how we arrived back. A celebratory dinner for Leslie, turned into a drinking fest for me. Shit. She must be pissed. Did I ruin her night?
She is passed out next to me, and I get up without waking her. It will take some time to adjust to her new schedule, and now she doesn’t have to sleep all day and be up all night.
I go into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee, and while it’s going, I go into the den and boot up my computer. With it only being five in the morning, I might as well get some caffeine in my body, and get some editing done. Leslie might want to do something later and getting this out of the way early will clear my calendar for the day.
After grabbing and filling my mug, I sit down in my office chair, and put in some headphones. I like the Read Aloud feature, but don’t want to take the chance of waking Leslie up. She needs her sleep.
A couple of hours later, I look over, headphones still on, and see Leslie draped in only sheets.
