Four Years Later

"H ey, did you go to the store?"

"No," Rosie replied. "Was I supposed to?"

"Yes, I sent you a text with the list, babe."

"You did?" Rosie pulled her phone out of her pocket, and sure enough, she had two missed texts from her wife of two years. "Shit. Sorry. I didn't see this."

"Rosie, I asked you to pick up the things I needed to cook dinner."

"I'll stop by tomorrow. We can order in tonight."

"Why is it so hard for you to check your phone when you're at work?"

"I spent most of the day in the MRI suite. We don't bring our phones in there. They brought in a mummy and needed help with–"

"I don't care," Ami replied. "God, even when you're here, you're not really here."

Rosie sat down on the sofa but left plenty of space between her and her wife, who was clearly angry with her. It shouldn't have surprised Rosie. Ami had been upset with her over one thing or another for about the past year or so. It was getting a little old, though, if she was being honest. Rosie hated feeling like she was disappointing her wife, but she hated disappointing herself even more.

After the strangest day of Rosie's life four years ago, she'd gotten into the car with Felicity and had probed about Felicity's evening plans. Felicity hadn't had any. Rosie hadn't, either, but she hadn't asked Felicity out because the truth was that she hadn't thought of the woman in that way until the machine she'd found in the ocean had given her some kind of hallucination or vision of a moment in time in which Felicity had confessed her feelings for her. In that same vision, Rosie had said yes to the date and had clearly shown some feelings for Felicity as well, but in the car on the way to the office, Felicity had acted like nothing had happened. Rosie, for her part, hadn't thought it would be fair to try to get Felicity to tell her if she'd felt a certain way about her because there had still been a chance that Rosie had just imagined the whole thing, and Felicity hadn't wanted her like that at all .

The next night, Rosie had gone to coffee with her ex-girlfriend more because she'd been so taken aback the day before and she'd already agreed to go; less because she'd actually wanted to have coffee with Ami. It had surprised Rosie, though, that she'd had a good time with her ex. Ami had grown and seemed to no longer need someone around constantly, which wasn't who Rosie could ever be for her. Then, after coffee, they'd decided to go for a walk, and that had led to another walk, which had led to them calling a dinner a first-date do-over, and Rosie had enjoyed it. Several dates later, they'd kissed for the first time in years, and a few dates after that, Ami had stayed over. They'd dated for over a year before getting engaged. Ami had moved in then, putting her house on the market, and Rosie had made promises to her future wife before they took the leap. She'd given up a few expeditions, thinking that she could surely compromise with Ami on how much time she spent away from home, and offered to spend more time in the lab or in her office and to, potentially, take on some teaching responsibilities.

She'd done all of that and more since then because Ami had gotten really upset with her for taking a short expedition in Europe right after Christmas the past year, and Rosie had decided to give her wife what she wanted and accept a full-time professorship at the university. She'd gone on two more short expeditions in the summer as a way to say goodbye to that part of her life before the job would start, and they'd compromised again that she would only take the highest priority research trips and one a year at most. While it certainly felt like Rosie was the only one making these compromises, it seemed to make her wife happy.

She'd started that job in September, and some of it had been good. Some of it hadn't been at all what she wanted. Seminars were okay, but teaching full-time wasn't what she'd planned for herself. The university didn't even have a marine archaeology program as it was a relatively small school, but it did have an archaeology program that offered a graduate degree and a Ph.D.

Having started this job in the fall, Rosie hadn't been as happy as she'd hoped she would be, but then the university had been asked to examine a mummy that the scientists had believed to be an important pharaoh that they'd been trying to find for decades. It had been the find of a lifetime for the person who had finally located the tomb, and Rosie had been so excited to just be in the room while they ran the mummy through the MRI. She'd missed solving the puzzles. While talking to the forensic anthropologist, they'd discovered the leg break in the femur bone they'd been hoping for. This pharaoh had died in battle and had a broken leg from a previous battle. The bones showed all the marks they would have expected to see, and after dating the bones, the timing matched as well. Being there throughout, though, Rosie had realized just how much she missed being in the field.

Of course, her field wasn't on land; it was on water. And even though she'd had those two brief expeditions over the summer, she was already wishing she could get back on the water.

Rosie sighed and leaned back, preparing to hear whatever Ami had to offer her tonight.

"What's that for?" Ami asked.

"What's what for?"

"You just sighed like you're upset."

"I'm not upset. I'm just… Ami, I can't have my phone in the MRI room."

"You can't look at it before you leave?"

"Yeah, I can, and I should have, but I shoved it in my bag and came straight home because you asked me to be here by six."

"Because I needed the food you were going to buy to cook dinner."

"I didn't know that. I'm sorry, okay? Just order whatever you want. I'm not hungry, anyway."

"Is it really so hard for you to have dinner with your wife?"

"Why does it feel like I'm the only one having to make sacrifices around here?" She turned to Ami.

"What?"

"Ami, we got back together. You were different. You said you understood more about my job and why I love it so much. You were fine with me being away sometimes."

"Not four months at a time," Ami argued.

"But I haven't had a trip like that since before we got back together. Things were good. Then, you started asking me to not go on a certain trip or take a shorter one, and I did. We got engaged. I was here. We planned the wedding together. I had trips, yeah, but I called every time I could. We video-chatted whenever I could. We got married. But for the past two years, it's been one thing after the other." Rosi sighed again and ran a hand through her hair. "I keep losing things, and you seem to gain and never lose."

"You keep losing things? "

"Ami, you asked me to teach. You asked me to only take one trip a year."

"You said it was okay."

"I know. But I don't know that it is."

Ami nodded and said, "You want to be gone more."

"I just want to do my job, Ami. I want to do the thing I trained for; the thing I'm really very good at. When we got married, you… It's like you changed again and wanted me to change for you, but I can't help what I love about my job."

"But you can still do your job. It's just different."

"It's not the kind of different I want for myself. I get asked to go on research trips at least a few times a month, and I keep turning them down. Eventually, people will stop asking, and I'll lose this thing I've loved since I was a little kid playing around in tide pools."

Ami nodded again and said, "I love you, Rosie. I don't feel like I'm asking too much here. It's not like I'm asking you to be home every day at six, to never work late, or to give up the hobbies you like to spend every minute with me. Sometimes, we're both at home in different rooms, working independently. I'm not trying to be clingy. I just want my wife to not be on a ship on the other side of the world eight months of the year when I can't always call her or video chat because the connection is bad."

"I know."

"I'm really not trying to be an asshole or take away something you love," Ami added.

"I know. But I'm trying to make you happy, and it's making me un happy."

"You're unhappy? How unhappy?"

"I don't want to teach. At least, not full-time, Ami."

"You want to go?"

"They've asked me to examine a wreck in South America next month. I was going to turn it down, but I think I should go."

Ami nodded, as if nodding was all she could do, and asked, "How long?"

"Twenty days on the water and probably a week in the lab after. Maybe two."

"So, a month, then?"

"Possibly."

"Can I go with you? I'll stay out of your way and work while I'm on the ship. "

"You just complained about how bad the connection is sometimes when we're in deep water. You'd need the internet to do your job."

"And you don't want me there," Ami stated, nodding yet again.

"I think we could both use a little time."

"We've only been married for two years. We shouldn't be having these problems yet. God, Rosie, we haven't had sex in over a month. Closer to two now, I think. What are we even doing here?"

Rosie leaned over, took her wife's hand into hers, and said, "I think we take the month and figure out what we both want."

"I want you , Rosie."

"I want time , Ami," she replied.