Fall seemed to be nonexistent. Maris had been sporting short sleeves only a few weeks before she had to pull out her fleece lined military coat. The chill caused her to walk home more quickly than she normally would have, so she was slightly out of breath as she placed her keys on their hook and rushed on over to the thermostat.

Since Rory had told her she had an appointment before their scheduled dinner, Maris had been in no hurry to start it, but with the apartment so cold, she figured firing up the stove would help warm the place up more quickly.

Maris had become a better cook now that she had someone to cook for. The stuffed squash she prepared wasn't anything fancy, but it was good and something she had made for Rory on a few occasions.

Once it was in the oven, she decided to pass the time by watching some tv, but found herself listlessly channel surfing instead. After her she couldn't find anything to hold her interest the second go around, she sighed and reached for her work bag. Glasses firmly in place, she got started grading papers and didn't look up until she heard a key (the spare she had given Rory) turn in the door.

There were a million reasons to be ecstatic. A good job, a pay raise, a new place to explore ... the new city was the hard part. The new city was what made her feel like she was being split in two. Rory never thought she'd be a person who even considered passing up a big work opportunity for someone she was with ... for someone she absolutely loved. Yet here she was, making her way to Maris' place like she did most nights, and weighing options. She hadn't even agreed, just said she would need a day to decide. Hell even a few months ago she wouldn't have hesitated. She liked her job ... this was just a big opportunity.

She'd be a fool to say no, and yet as she let herself in and followed the scent of delicious food throughout the house, she couldn't imagine not doing this all the time. Leaning against the door frame as she finally found Maris grading papers, a pang of intense longing hit her squarely in the chest. Maybe there was a world in which Maris would join her. Was that so crazy?

"You know what this scholarly look does to me." She greeted with a grin as she made her way towards the couch. It might have been impulsive, but she was feeling that kind of way tonight for many reasons. She crossed the space and leaned over to greet her girlfriend, pressing her lips to hers in a deep kiss. It was more than a usual kind of greeting, one she was trying not to think of as counting how many she'd have left. "Hi, sorry I'm late."

Maris' lips twitched into a crooked smile as she pulled away. "I knew springing for Warby Parkers this prescription would pay off," she teased as she slipped off her glasses and sat them down on the coffee table.

"And you're not. I had to stop and grab milk on the way home anyway. You hungry? I know we said Chinese but Ms. Greenley unloaded some of that squash she's been trying to get everyone to take from the teacher's lounge on me and it looks surprisingly okay? Better than those bruised tomatoes she forced upon you last year."

The guidance counselor at their school wasn't much of a gardener but what she lacked in skill, she certainly made up for in enthusiasm.

Home was this. It was so unfair to think that she might have to choose. Her whole being felt stuck, felt as though she couldn't possibly leave the woman who was in front of her now. Yes, of course she had promised herself she'd never let something like a relationship get in the way of her career, but that was before she'd found herself madly in love with someone.

"Oh is that it?" She accompanied her comment with a low whistle, grinning as she broke it. Rory just wanted to let this evening be like so many others - free of worry or stress. Deep conversations. Wine and food. Kisses until they lost count and clothes strewn about to end with her body wrapped up in her girlfriend's. Rory however, had a terrible poker face, particularly when something weighed heavily on her. Particularly with Maris.

"We better eat fast if we don't want them going bad before our eyes. Let's do it." She agreed, pulling up Maris and pecking another kiss to her lips before turning towards the kitchen. Doing something with her hands would help. Maybe a little booze would help. "It smells really good." Okay now she was starting to seem off even to herself, and she didn't want that.

Maris had alcohol on hand, having long since learned her girlfriend's favorite. She gestured for Rory to sit at the table, wanting to give her a moment to take a breath. She did sense that the other woman was a bit off, but everyone needed a few moments to adjust to finally being home after a long day and Maris knew that after Aurora's appointment, she'd had a longer one than most.

Though she knew her girlfriend had to do something before meeting up that night, she hadn't asked what that something was. Maris wasn't the type to check up (or check in) every minute of every day and it hardly seemed to matter when she would have Rory to herself eventually. But as she sat down their drinks then their dinner plates, her brow furrowed a bit at Rory's expression.

"Everything okay?"

Taking the reprieve of sitting at the table was logically great - but she felt the weight of her looming decision as soon as she stopped moving. For someone who generally thought of herself as a person who took time with her own thoughts and process, this one particular decision didn't just affect her. It affected the other woman in the room just as much. Getting it out meant that she had to actually give thought to it, but she didn't want to raise alarm bells so quickly. After all, she didn't even know if she was going to take the job.

Rory stole Maris' hand after she'd put down their drinks and plates, pressing a kiss to her palm before letting it go. She was being ridiculous, and she very well knew that. Putting too much into the whole thing, so much pressure.

"Yes? I mean, it will be. It can... okay." She huffed, shaking her head at herself because honestly, be a damn adult. "So I've been offered a job at a different school. It kind of came out of the blue and it's a great offer, I'm just kind of trying not to freak out about it." Well, zero to sixty here, but there it was.

Maris reached for her wine, fully prepared to listen to a story about any number of little annoyances that could ruin a person's day. She predicted a story about someone cutting in front of Rory in line, or a rant about some annoying parent who didn't understand how their precious angel could be failing when she never turned in her classwork.

She never expected to hear that her girlfriend had been offered a new job.

"I... wow," Maris let out a laugh (one of her body's automatic nervous response) and sat down the glass, her wine untouched. Despite this, she recovered quickly, nothing if not self possessed. People often wondered if Maris had any emotions at all (though they used less than flattering terms to say so) and the woman across from her was one of very few who had evidence to the contrary."I didn't know you were looking?"

So there it was, lobbed out between them like a goddamn grenade. The only way she'd actually be able to work this out in her mind was to actually talk it out. Really, she didn't have to take the job. She didn't even know if she wanted the job. Okay it was an amazing opportunity and gave her a lot by the way of career advances but ... leaving here and her was a problem.

"I wasn't. I mean, I'm not." She clarified, shaking her head as she reached for her own wine, but mostly just to do something with her hands. She dragged her fingers over the glass, focusing her eyes on it for a moment. "I had drinks with a former teacher of mine, she's great, you'd like her ... um." She paused, pursing her lips together, feeling as though she was drowning a bit. "She's the new headmistress at this boarding school, and wants me to run her english department." She rolled her eyes like that would downplay it.

Finally a pause, she forced her gaze back to Maris. "I'm not going to do it. It just caught me off guard."

The wave of relief that washed over Maris when Rory said she wasn't going to take the job was overwhelming, but there was also a good bit of guilt in there too.

It sounded like a wonderful opportunity, the sort she wouldn't have passed up if someone had offered it to her before she met Aurora. She didn't know just how unhappy she'd been at work (and in general) until her girlfriend arrived and if Rory left Maris knew she'd be even more miserable than she had been before.

But she also couldn't be the sort of miserable, clingy, borderline possessive person that let someone they cared about pass up an opportunity for their own happiness. She'd told Rory she loved her and meant it, though she was the sort of person who said so sparingly for fear the words would lose their meaning with overuse.

Didn't loving someone mean putting their needs before your own?

"Where is it?"

That was that. Saying it aloud, she could actually believe it for a while that she didn't need to do it, she didn't want to do it. What a choice to be made, but she couldn't just give all of this up. It would be different if this was a casual thing, maybe. It would be different if she wasn't crazy in love with Maris. It would be different if Rory didn't see a real future with her.

Poking at her food with her fork (her appetite having waned as those nerves had taken over), she glanced at Maris with a small smile on her lips. Maybe it was a kind of sad one, but more than anything she just had to smile because knew this woman. She knew that they would give each other the world if they could.

"Maine." She answered simply, quietly. She'd done the math already. Train ride, roundabout six hours. Not that they'd ever even discussed a long-distance thing. Those never worked, right? Even meeting halfway at three hours ... no. She couldn't ask that of Maris. And it would be one hell of a commute to sleep in her girlfriend's bed at night. Not having that easy option sat like a rock in her gut. So no ... no. She didn't need this opportunity.

Quiet for a moment, Rory looked up at Maris to study her face. "I'm happy here, babe. I don't need some crazy new set up of a school, and I certainly don't need to be that far away from you."

"Maine," she repeated, frantically trying to calculate the distance she didn't realize Rory had already figured out in her head.

She didn't know anything about Maine other than she didn't want Rory there.

"And it's a boarding school? I didn't know those still existed." She pictured her girlfriend in some overly conservative, librarian style get up, teaching a bunch of rich kids in perfectly pressed uniforms.

There was no denying the girls they taught were wealthy, but Maris considered their school a happy medium between public and the sort of private school education only the 1% could get their hands on. The concept of boarding school was completely foreign to her. Something out of a depressing novel where the protagonist was sent away because of some tragedy where their parent just couldn't stand to look at them anymore. These kids were probably getting shipped off so mommy and daddy could go to tennis lessons and have dinners with the Johnsons uninterrupted.

"Would you have to stay there?"

She may not have had all the details just yet, but the more Maris heard about this new school, the more certain she was she didn't want Rory to go.

But there was no denying an offer to run her own department was miles better than anything Aurora had going for her currently. Both women had complained about working under their department heads. Their school operated on seniority and Maris was fed up with running everything by Rick, a man who loved history so much his teaching methods seemed to be antiquated too. If she had been offered what Rory had in a decent location she would have taken it without much of a second thought.

"Still, your own department." Maris sat down her wine so she could look Rory in the eye, taking her hands across from the table. "I certainly don't want you to go that far away either, but that offer..." She trailed off, knowing Rory would be able to fill in the rest.

Saying it out loud felt like she was speaking a foreign language. Maine. Who lived in Maine? Fishermen and ...Moose? The more she thought about it, the more she was willing to talk herself out of even considering it. She'd made a home for herself here, a life. She was happy here and saying that to Maris was exactly true. She didn't need for much else.

"A boarding school, yeah. Apparently they do? I imagine the teachers would be required to have British accents or something just to sell the pretentiousness of the place." Any version of another school would be ... another school. It would mean she couldn't walk down the hall and sneak into her girlfriend's office for a quick snog between periods. It would mean she wouldn't be around to catch a smile or drop a note in her box.

Her smile was soft as she regarded Maris, a single nod buying her a moment to answer. "At the school? I think there would be the option, but that sounds kind of horrifying." Not that she'd even thought about getting her own place out there at all. Hell, not long before this day, she'd been pondering the opposite of her own place. No rushing, just ... thoughts.

Rory was never power hungry, but she had always been ambitious. Be it her lesson plan for the year or going after a job she really wanted, she wanted to reach for something more, something greater. This was an amazing opportunity.

Just that moment of connection, their hands clasped together seemed to calm her. Even with whatever she felt warring inside her mind, she had this incredible, supportive, amazing woman in front of her. Her fingers squeezed Maris' hands, nodding as she chewed at her lower lip. "I know. I don't want to be that far away from you. I wouldn't ... I wouldn't want that kind of distance to ruin what we have. What we have is really goddamn good, y'know?"

The idea of Rory living on campus did sound horrifying. Maris had left her days of fooling around in dorm rooms long behind her and even if she hadn't, she highly doubted it was an option.

Maris often wondered what would happen if their employers found out she and Rory were dating. If Rory's hypothetical ones caught her sneaking into the other woman's room there would be an entirely different kind of hell to pay. What would they do? Meet up at hotels when Maris came to visit? Sure, it seemed sort of sexy as a one time deal, but it was bound to feel strange when they were just beginning to feel as comfortable in each other's beds as their own.

She used to think familiarity was boring, the beginning of a long, slow death for any relationship but Maris should have known she'd come to enjoy it. She was nothing if not a creature of habit.

"It is good," she assured her girlfriend with a sage nod, wanting to make sure Rory knew she wasn't encoraging her to really think about the offer because she thought otherwise and wanted to see less of her. "And I'm not sure about long distance either. I've never really done it before." A now dead tryst with a leggy blonde lawyer who liked to call her up whenever she was in town hardly counted.

"But it's a good offer and if you took away a few things, you'd probably agree to it, right?" she said, logical as ever even to her own detriment (and it definitely was in this time around). "So maybe you should focus on the pros a bit and see if they outweigh the cons. It's just... it's fresh, Ror. You should let it sink in a bit before you reject their offer. I don't want you wishing you'd passed it up."

Dancing alongside this game of 'what if' was not something she had anticipated. In her mind, she'd shut down the very idea of saying yes to this job because it would take her away from this woman. Pros and cons aside, could anything really actually be worth losing out on nights like this, mornings waking up together, the odd Saturday spent in various states of undress? Still, part of her did wonder if maybe the distance would give them a certain freedom. The school wasn't one under a banner of religion, so who knew how progressive and inclusive they might be? Still actually living in the poshest of dorm situations sounded like a nightmare. Fun for maybe a short while, sure, but then intrusive and oppressive.

What, exactly, she thought of their life together that they were building between them didn't ever involve hundreds of miles between them when she actually gave it thought. Could they survive it? Maybe, but did she actually want to test the theory? She didn't crave anything new, hadn't been seeking out something different or even a change of scenery -- yet this had plopped into her lap. Maybe she had been too rash to immediately say no? It felt terrible to even consider.

"I haven't either, to be honest." She wrote letters back in college, to a friend she'd hooked up with just before leaving. That didn't count either, she figured, when both of them knew that friendship came before whatever they'd experienced over a final summer. Maris was someone she was serious about. Maris was someone she wanted a future with. "Maybe it's not as impossible as people say it is?" Was there a tick of hopefulness in her tone? Maybe.

"I..." She started, pursing her lips together because they both knew the answer to Maris' question. "Sure, I probably would." She finally answered with a little shrug, her fingers reflexively squeezing Maris' hand when she spoke. Her gaze fell back on her girlfriend's eyes, studying her expression, before she finally shook her head with a soft smile. "You're really wise sometimes, y'know." Bowing her head, Rory pressed a kiss to Maris' hand and gave it another squeeze. "Whatever ... I mean, if there's a decision to actually be made, I'd like to make it together."