Where You Hang Your Hat: Part XV
Any other time Kim might have been severely tweaked with Ron. Inside of five minutes he was sound asleep once more. He already had a lot on his mind, not even counting their apartment sitch. She didn't begrudge him his sleep since he had to be up early in the morning to meet with his faculty advisors. There was also the fact he really couldn't do all that much to help her, so it was best he sleep as much as he could. Once he was past his hurdle, he could at least serve as backup for her.
There really wasn't any choice as far as she was concerned. With her presentation and all her notes cut off from her, she had just four days to recreate the whole thing from scratch, with one of those days being a Sunday, meaning both the municipal and campus libraries would be closed. At least she could remember most of her sources, and it was just a matter of getting back to them and jotting down notes. It would still be hard to write everything out again. She literally spent so much time at the keyboard her tail-bone was starting to get sore.
Not wanting to bother Ron, she put on the first clothes she grabbed out of their bags and carried the lap top up to her father's office. Normally, only he would enter his inner sanctum, but it was quite, private and had the computer connections she needed. She was exercising emergency procedures and would brook no argument. The place was relatively isolated from the rest of the house, and was fairly comfortable.
She was so intent on typing up the preliminary work she didn't notice the sun coming up through the round window, or Ron giving her a quick peck on the cheek before he left for the campus. It wasn't until her Father appeared at the door, asking what it was she was doing, that she finally took a breather.
"Well, certainly they would grant you an extension, considering your circumstances." He said after she explained the nature of her crisis.
"It's not that simple, Dad. Doctor Snyder is the chairman of the thesis committee." She said, as if that explained it all. To her it did. When she was a senior in high school, one of the professors from Middleton college had been brought in to take over the AP English class at Middleton High School. From the very first day he walked into that classroom he made it clear that he expected each and every one of them to be completely responsible for their work. There were not excuses, no exceptions. They had to have their work complete, on time, every time. If their assignments were not in his briefcase when he snapped it shut as the class ended, they got a zero. No credit, no make-up, nothing. He didn't care if their car broke down on the way to school – they were responsible for ensuring their transportation was reliable. He didn't care if they got sick – they were responsible for keeping themselves healthy. There simply was nothing else save to have their work done on time.
She had come to respect the man very deeply. He was massively intelligent and he both respected and fostered that in his students. He wasn't out to make friends, he was out to mold minds, and he managed to do that by driving them harder than anyone ever had before. They were part of the academic elite at the high school level – being given college credit for their work. He demanded college level work from them, scrawling Cs and Ds on papers that previously would have been marked A plus, plus, plus.
He was right about his students, however. Not a one of them graduated that spring with less than an A in his class, and they all felt it was one of the greatest accomplishments of their young lives.
Feeling confident, Kim signed up for his two-semester Advanced Comparative Literature course her Junior year. It was supposed to be a Senior level class, but Doctor Snyder allowed her to take it. If she thought the course in High School had been tough…
"I'm sure he saw the news. We did too, though I've got to admit, they certainly did manage to show quite a lot of you. Why, they even used that picture of you in your…"
"Daddy! It doesn't matter if I was on the news. Doctor Snyder does not allow anything to be done late. I'm supposed to make my presentation Monday morning, and it I don't, I will either get stuck doing something the committee dreams up for me, or I'll have to wait until next semester to start my project, which will put me half a year late graduating. That means I won't get to graduate with Ron."
That alone said it all. Over three years of college she had only managed to have two classes together with him. The rest of the time they might as well have been going to two different schools. They had spent the better part of their lives together and even if they hadn't gotten together romantically they wanted to go to school together. They had done a lot of work to get Ron into there and they wanted to finish together, even though Kim would be diving straight into graduate school, while Ron would be heading into the work force finally.
"Well, good luck then. Are you sure you don't want to use my system instead of that little lap-top?"
"Ferociously sure, Dad, but thanks anyway. I'm not going to let this thing out of my sight, and even then I'm going to back my work up on the flash-drive." She stopped and looked around for a moment. She had a pile of paperwork on the desk and her book bag was sitting beside the chair. She spent a few minutes looking though the pile, then the bag itself. "Oh, come on, where is it?"
"What are you looking for, Kimmie-cub?"
"My flash-drive. It was supposed to be in here. Oh man! Not that too." She got up and ran down the steps into her room, throwing her bags on the crisply made bed. He father followed her down, standing in the doorway.
"Where's all my stuff?" She shook the empty bag over the bed, then grabbed one of Ron's, doing the same."
"Whoa there, Kimmie-cub. Your mother was up early and she put away all of your things."
Jumping to the nightstand she started going through drawers. There wasn't much in there, only the small jewelry box where she kept her birth control pills and a few scattered pieces of jewelry. Moments later she was at the chest-of-drawers, randomly pulling clothes out and throwing them on the floor."
"I've got a couple flash-drives of my own, if you need to borrow them."
She sat down on the bed, slumping her shoulders. "It was a special one Wade made for us. It was designed to hold two hundred gigs of data instead of just twenty like a commercial version. It was supposed to be in my backpack. Oh damn, I bet it's sitting on the desk back at the apartment."
"Have you considered calling the people over there? Maybe they can let you back in to recover the tower. Then we could hook it up here and then you can just relax over the weekend."
She shook her head sadly. "No, Dad, they made it clear they weren't going to let anybody else in there. We got what we thought was important, and after that they'll just arrest us for trespassing."
"Maybe Ron could send Rufus in to remove the hard drive. I've seen him program the DVR before."
"I'm so not going to chance that. For one thing, that will be breaking the law. More importantly, Wade built that tower for us. It's got some…security features. If he made one mistake he'd be fried." She got up and headed back toward the office. "Crap, I'm just going to have to do what I can and hope for the best. They're probably going to think I'm throwing a load of garbage at them."
"Well, don't panic, Kimmie-cub. You know what I always say."
"Dad, I know, 'anything's possible for a Possible.' There's just too much work to be done." She sat back down at the computer. "I'm not panicking, but it took me three weeks to put all that together, working almost non-stop. I wouldn't even have taken a break yesterday if I wasn't confident that it was finished."
She wasn't even aware when her father left her alone to do her work. She just kept at it, accessing websites from memory, hunting down quotes and passages she had already referenced. Part of that was made harder by the fact she had done that kind of work on the desktop, meaning none of the sites were in the smaller portable's history file. What she thought would be easy, having already done it once before, was proving frustrating. Even the best search engines couldn't take her directly to where she wanted to go and the Wi-Fi connection was interminably slow compared to the dedicated line the big system used. She seriously wished Wade would hurry up with the real-time satellite hookup he had been promising.
"Karma's a bitch, ain't it." Came a voice from behind her.
"I so do not have time for this right now, Joss." She glanced at her cousin, who was standing in the doorway in her sleepwear, munching on a bowl of cereal. Kim checked her watch. It was only about eight-thirty. She had been sitting at that computer since about three in the morning and had neither eaten, nor had she had any coffee. She was running on pure adrenaline, and soon that would run out.
"Serves you right, getting kicked out of that place."
She turned around, fixing the teen with an angry glare. "Just what is that supposed to mean?"
"All I asked you to do was to let me crash there a couple nights. I wasn't going to bring the guy I'm seeing over, I just needed some time to cool off. Instead, all you could think about was being alone with Ron."
"Look, I said I don't have time to go into this with you. The apartment complex being closed has nothing to do with the fact I'm not going behind my father's back for you. Plus, I'm sorry if you wanted my old room. Thought you were happy when you got the first floor room anyway."
"I thought the two a you woulda been stayin here anyway. Instead I get here and yer off ta yer own little place, leavin me to play substitute Kim with your Daddy. That wasn't fair."
"Joss, come Monday, one way or the other this is all going to be behind me, then the two of us can sit down and have a heart-to-heart about all of this. Maybe we might even go stay over at Ron's house for a little while, until this mess is straightened out, but in the mean time I've got more work to do than I ever had to before and I don't have time to sit and go over things neither of us can control. Aren't you supposed to be getting ready for today's session anyway?"
"Day off. Gonna head to the lake with Bobby for the day, unless your Daddy doesn't think I'm supposed to even see him."
"Joss, enough about Dad, okay? He's not out to keep you from having a boyfriend. A curfew isn't supposed to stop you from dating, it's supposed to keep you safe and to impose a little discipline."
"I don't need that kind of discipline. I'm a grown…"
"Joss, don't say that again!" She spun around hand held up her index finger. "Seventeen is so not a grown woman. Yeah, I thought I was then. I thought I was when I turned eighteen, and there for a while I got it in my head that reaching that age was about nothing more than what I could do with Ron. You know what? All that stuff almost ended up coming between us. I started forgetting that it was more important to be in love with him than to be with him. I got where all I wanted was that stuff we started doing after we thought we were 'adults.'"
"I though you told me that started last winter?"
"That did, but there were other things we did, other things that I didn't want Daddy to know about. Joss, I'm twenty-one now and I know for a fact I've still got a lot of growing up to do. If I didn't maybe I'd go ahead and marry Ron. All I can say is trust us. Just listen to what you're saying. I don't even know who this 'Bobby' is, and I'm willing to bet Mom and Dad don't either. Dad trusted Ron because he knew him. I know you won't be able to have somebody he knows as well as Ron, but you have to trust and respect him before he's going to do the same for you. Now, really, I do have a lot to do and I don't have time for this, so please, go to the lake with this guy and just wait for a bit."
"You were a lot more fun when you were just into boys sometimes." Joss griped as she turned to go.
Yes, and you were a lot easier to deal with when you were twelve, Joss, Kim thought to herself as she watched the younger woman go. Twelve, innocent, full of adventure…before puberty and all that crud that went with it set in.
Shaking her head to clear it, she tried to focus on her work once more. The little clock in the corner seemed to jump from nine, to ten, to eleven without her realizing the time was going by. It almost made her think it was broken like the old-fashioned clock in room twelve back at Middleton High School. Vaguely she recalled her mother coming up a couple times to bring her a breakfast sandwich and a large travel mug full of strong coffee. That was long gone and she was wishing for some more, but was unwilling to take the time to go downstairs and get any more.
All of a sudden she stopped and rubbed her eyes. Plowing straight through without any kind of break simply was not going to work. With only a couple hours of good sleep, the weight of their apartment sitch hanging over her, a bladder that was starting to scream at her and an emptiness in the pit of her stomach, she was starting to have a very hard time concentrating. On top of that, she could tell that she really needed another shower. She was still a human being and she wasn't capable of going ninety-plus hours straight, no matter how urgent the work was. Even her mother only had to pull thirty-six hour shifts on occasion, and that had pretty much tapered off as she attained higher positions in the Medical Center Hierarchy. As head of the Neurology department, she reported only to the Chief of Medicine.
She looked up when a pair of warm hands came to rest on her shoulders. "Wow, déjà vu all over again." Ron said as he worked his magic on her tense muscles.
"She put one of her hands on his and brushed her cheek up against it. "How's that, baby?"
"You look just like you did back in high school when you were putting term papers together. Well, maybe except your hair is longer, but look at you. When was the last time you dressed like that?"
For perhaps the first time she considered what she had grabbed from their bags. It had been dark and she simply slipped on the first things her hand closed around. The lime-green top was a little faded, as were the old periwinkle capris, but she did indeed look like she had stepped back in time to their sophomore year of high school, when she had worn that outfit almost every single day, including the better part of winter.
"I didn't have bags under my eyes then either." She said. "Oh, I wish I had time to enjoy that properly."
"What's the big emergency anyway? One minute you were sound asleep, next you were running up here."
She turned and looked at him. "You don't know?"
"All I know is you started pestering Wade about something, then went into full mission mode. I didn't wake up fast enough to know what the two of you were talking about."
Kim actually laughed. They were usually so in sync with each other they sometimes forgot to fill in the details. He was rightfully focused on his own responsibilities that day, and having completed them, was there for her. Closing her eyes for a moment again, she got up and stretched, then gave him a tight hug before explaining the breadth of her crisis.
"Hey, maybe Rufus…"
"No, Daddy already suggested that. It's too dangerous, and not only that, it's illegal."
"I just can't believe you didn't back it up on the network."
"Nope. I didn't know I had to. Wade wrote those programs so I'd have some privacy. He didn't know I pretty much stopped keeping a dairy after we got together."
"Wait a sec, hold on." He dug down into his pocket, extracting a tiny blue device. "You know that night you fussed at me for coming to bed so late?"
"Yeah. I thought you got all that internet gaming stuff out of your system after you and Zita didn't work out."
"Well…not entirely. I was chatting with your cousin Larry and he invited me to play some Fortress V, so I said okay. Can't help it if that stuff is addicting."
"Okay, so you'd rather battle some cyber-beast some nights than come to bed with me." She smiled at him, hiding a mild bit of tweak about the issue. She was still 'celebrating her womanhood' at that point, but she still wanted to cuddle.
"The point is, KP, you'd pretty much finished everything by that point."
"Yeah. On the big computer. I was planning to transfer it to the laptop, but I guess your procrastination rubbed off on me and I didn't get around to it in time."
"Well, after we finished our game, Larry told me I needed to back up where I was, so I put this in the USB port and hit the backup icon."
"Lovely. So now you can go back to playing your game when I'm done with the computer. Woo hoo, extra hoo." She said dryly.
"See, here's the good part, Kim. It was taking longer than I thought, so I asked Larry what was going on. He said that I must have told the computer to backup everything, instead of just the game info."
Kim's eyes got huge. "Hold on. You're telling me you backed a whole four hundred gig hard drive onto that little thing?"
"Not that hard. I know this thingy is only a quarter of the size, but we're not big on keeping lots of pictures or movies or even music on it since we can stream all of that from Wade's network. We only had about forty gigs taken up. It's all here, the whole shoot-n-match as of that night."
Trembling, she took the flash drive from his hand and plugged it into the computer.
"It's here! It's all here! My notes, the bibliography, the report, the video presentation! Ron! Do you know what this means?"
"Uh, I did good?"
She grabbed him, crushing him in her arms. "Yes, you did good, Ronnie. It means I'm going to take you down to our room, lock the doors and not give a hoot who in this house hears us. It means I'm marrying the most wonderful, smartest, best man on the planet." She mashed her face up against his, not caring that she must taste like all-night breath topped off with stale coffee.
Ron finally had to come up for air. "Babe, I think we might need to take a rain-check on that."
"Oh?" She pouted. "Doesn't Wonnie want his weward?"
He smiled at her, kneading the small of her back as she leaned against him. "Yeah, but first you're going to go down to that room, get back into your pajamas and you're going to get the sleep you missed out on last night. KP, and I mean this in the most loving way, you look like hell."
She glanced over at the glass doors of the book case, looking at her reflection. Her hair was frazzled and her eyes were almost completely bloodshot. "Yeah, guess you're right, honey, but you know how I sleep the best?"
"How's that?"
"When I've got my Cuddlebuddy to hold."
He gritted his teeth. "Oooo, oh no. I think we left Pandaroo over at the apartment."
"Not the Cuddlebuddy I was talking about." She said, burying her face in his chest.
a/n – once again I have to give credit where it's due. The whole Thesis Presentation sitch idea came from a chat with CaptainKodak1. Don't forget to catch his current fic, Tunnel Vision.
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