Page 19 of Interning For A Billionaire

“Is she worth it? Carmen, I mean?”

Hassan looked mournfully at me.

“What do you mean?”

I sat back. “Imagine for a second…if she was a car.”

“Carmen was a car?” Hassan looked at me as if I were mad.

“Just bear with me,” I said. “If she was a car and she was no longer going the way you liked, you’d trade her in, right?”

“Carmen isn’t a car,” Hassan stubbornly said.

“But if she were!” I insisted. “Come on, go with it.”

“Okay,” Hassan gave in with a sigh. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“If she still looks good, she drives well and goes where I want her to.”

“But she wants a baby.”

“My car? Or are we talking about Carmen again?”

I pulled a face.

Hassan shook his head, “Don’t all women eventually want babies?”

I didn’t have an answer to that.

Hassan went on, “And who knows, maybe I’ll like it. I never really thought about it, to be honest, but I always figured sometime in the future, you know, there would be kids. I don’t think I realized that I was all grown up. Sometimes I feel like I’m still 20 years old trying to make it to the end of the day.”

I knew what he meant. Even though I had made a lot of money, I was still driving myself like I had to prove something, as if I hadn’t achieved anything. I wondered whether it would ever be enough and suspected, somehow, that it wouldn’t be.

Hassan said, “Right now, life is good. We are in good places at work, and we get to travel when we want to. That is the part that I am wondering about. You can’t exactly go snowboarding in Colorado, if and when you want to. Not with a baby.”

“I guess you could have someone to look after the baby then?” I suggested.

Hassan considered it. “Or we take a babysitter along?”

“Exactly.”

That made me think of something else. “Some of the babysitters are cute, man. Like, Swedish or Norwegian. All blonde and blue-eyed Scandinavian goddesses,” I was thinking of my brother’s nannies. They probably came from the same agency. Each one was more attractive than the previous one and I wondered how he managed to keep himself in line.

Hassan was laughing and shook his head.

“Do you even listen to yourself?” He asked.

“What?”

But he just shook his head. “What happened to your last girlfriend, Pam or Patty? What was she called again?”

“You mean Polly?” I had dated Polly for a few months, but it hadn’t worked out. I couldn’t even remember why we stopped seeing each other. “Did I introduce you guys to her?” That meant I must have been serious about her.

“We met her at Jordan’s party,” Hassan said.

“That’s right, I remember now. We had a fight not long after the party and I’d never called her back.”

---