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Adjustments-Chapter 10

She couldn't imagine that she'd heard him correctly. She sat up and reached over to turn on the bedside light, momentarily blinding them both.

"You…you think I should go?" she blinked rapidly, adjusting her eyes to be able to fully see his face.

"I don't want you to," he admitted, propping himself up on his left elbow, "but I don't think me begging you to stay will help anything."

She nodded, confirming his answer as fact. Begging her to stay would not help.

"Tell me about the offer from Berkley."

"It's for an accelerated summer program. Six weeks. Two four hour lectures per week, Tuesdays and Thursdays."

He was thankful it wasn't for more than six weeks.

"Starting when?"

"In two weeks. The regular professor went on unplanned medical leave. I'm quite sure Cam won't mind me going and since I'm not allowed in the field with you, the FBI won't care either."

"It sounds like it might be a good fit for you." He was trying, and she knew it.

"It's a very good school and their anthropology department is excellent."

He didn't want her to know that this was killing him. "Then I think you should go. It might be just what you need."

She spoke slowly, turning it all over in her mind as she spoke. "I have a doctor's appointment next week. I could schedule the next one for a Friday or a Monday. Then I could fly back here and you could go to the appointment with me. You won't miss a thing."

"I'll miss you." He couldn't let her choice of words go by.

"I know." She smiled at him. "And I know this isn't what you want. I know you're being nice to me right now."

"I'm always nice to you, Bones." He hoped lightening the mood with lighten his heart. It didn't.

She raised her hand to his cheek. "Yes, you are. You are the best man I know, Booth."

He closed his eyes at her touch, mentally telling himself he was doing the right thing. He could survive three weeks away from her, then a weekend with her, then another three weeks away. If, this is what she needed to do to stay with him in the long run, then this is what he would do.

He would not allow himself to think about the next time.

He opened his eyes and found her studying him once again.

"Please understand that I don't want to want to run. I just have this overwhelming need to go, to think, without influence or interruption. I need to figure out who I am now. Today, my dependency on you scared me to death. And then when I saw Jenny Dalton I just panicked. I need to get my head glued on straight."

"Screwed on straight" He corrected, not able to help but smile.

"I am not leaving you, Booth. I'm not. I promise you. I want this, us, I do. I just need to figure out how to be half of a relationship and still be who I am." She slumped back onto her pillow. "I know I'm not explaining it very well."

"I know you aren't leaving me. I know you aren't giving up on us. We are still very, very new and even though we've been partners for years, what we have now is different. And a baby on top of that? It's just….it is overwhelming. It just is. Everyone deals with things differently. This is what you do. I'm willing to give what you need to sort it out because I expect good things to come from it. But please remember, Bones, that you don't need to be who you always were. It's okay to change a little. Fighting change makes it so much harder than learning to incorporate the change into who you've always been."

She nodded. "I just need to be able to figure it out on my own."

"Time and space."

"Yes. Time and space."

"I can give you that." He put his hand on her stomach. "For all you are giving me, I can give you that." He meant it.

She kissed him then and he felt none of the reticence from her that he had felt when he had kissed her earlier.

She deepened the kiss. He pulled back.

"I thought you were tired."

"Tired. Not sleepy." She grinned a saucy little grin that was for him and him alone and he laughed and kissed her hard.

Forty-five minutes later, in a tangle of bed sheets and limbs, they slept, not apart, as she preferred, but wrapped around one another so that in the dark it was hard to see where one ended and the other began.

After everything he had just conceded to for her, it was the least she could do.

And even she would have admitted that she liked it.

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