Page 1 of My Forbidden Boss

Tisha

“I am telling you, there isn’t anything here! Absolutely nothing! You two, just wait and see – I promise you both, six months from now, I will be a fully-fledged, certified workaholic. I feel like that is honestly my best-case scenario. I swear, it’s either going to be that or alcoholism. And let’s be real here, it will probably be both.”

“Oh, Tisha, don’t say that,” said my dad.

“Yeah, honey. Don’t joke about things like your health,” added Mom.

“My… health? … My HEALTH?! Come on, you guys. What about my MENTAL health? And, regardless, this is all because I literally have no idea what else I could possibly want to do around here other than work or drink. I know that when I left, I said I wanted to focus on my career… even to the exclusion of pretty much everything else right now, apart from you two, of course… but good grief! I feel like I’m going to be unwinding at the end of every day with the same three things over and over again: a lukewarm bubble bath, a whole crate of boxed wine, and a massive stack of inventory efficiency reports. That’s going to be my life.”

I heard them both sigh on the other end of the phone. Of course, I was looking for some show of pity… mostly just to make me feel a little less alone, but I would have even settled for one of those vague cliché sayings, anything to bring me just a little ray of motivation. When neither was forthcoming from my adoptive parents, I decided to take their silence as permission to proceed on my own. Without a moment’s hesitation, I began laying out my future prospects like prophecies. With plenty of gloom to spare, I kept predicting my own apocalypse.

“You know what? I should go ahead and invest in a keg cooler. Dad, how much do you think it would cost to install a tap in every room? I mean… a straw in every wall, all connected to one huge bottle of liquor… that would probably signify some personal issues, but who couldn’t get used to having a different option for a draft beer every time you moved from one room to the other? I could do a stout in the living room, definitely something higher gravity in the kitchen… maybe something fruity in the bathroom… Oh! And an IPA for the laundry! Ah, shit… That would be a waste. The laundry and bathroom are pretty much the same room already. But… I don’t want something pale in the bedroom… so… IPA in the hallway? The pantry? … I guess that maybe I will do a vodka fountain for the bedroom, though. You have to put in some boundaries on yourself, you know?”

It was all completely absurd, of course. Still, I wholeheartedly stood by my line of thinking at the time… at least regarding the emptiness of the town. I actually felt a whole lot better about the entire thing, just by embracing the ridiculous nature of my rambling rant. In doing so, it seemed that I had unwittingly located my new standard for personal entertainment, a thought that brought my mood right back to where it had started: mopey and melancholy.

Bleary-eyed and barefoot, I continued aimlessly marching back and forth while I talked, swaying and staggering every so often. I was still waking up.

The pathetic little path that I had sleepily chosen to pace along currently constituted the totality of my crowded living room’s floor space. It was a narrow alley that wound its way in and out of sight, the only spot where the room’s smooth floorboards could still be said to be visible. Ever since I saw my new address for the first time in person… anxiously accepting the keys from the realtor and tentatively swinging open the rented moving truck’s rear gate, I had little choice but to gradually begin barricading myself within my new digs, slowly burying myself with my own possessions. Box by box, I had quickly turned my bachelorette abode into one big storage locker, and, in doing so, my little avenue for maneuvering from one side of the living room to the other had subsequently been squeezed. The lane shrunk smaller and smaller as I struggled to find space to set down each successive armload coming off the truck.

Two weeks had flown by since those first few days… but not because I was having fun. On the contrary, the time was zooming by simply because I was more exhausted than at any point I could ever recall.

“Tisha? You still there?”

“Huh? Oh… Yeah, I’m… I’m still here, Dad. Sorry, I… uh… I seriously think that I just fell asleep standing up.”

Subdued laughter came through the phone but fell silent pretty much right after it started.

“Uh… Okay… Are you alright?”

“Where are you right now? Can you take a seat somewhere?”

I looked around, a little dazed. Everywhere around me sat another big, half-empty cardboard box sat with its little cardboard wings outstretched, beckoning me to make one misstep, fall inside and disappear forever.

“Tisha…?”

I snapped back to attention again, belatedly. “Yeah, Mom. I mean… No, there’s still nowhere really to sit down yet. I’m fine, really. Let me just get some coffee. I think that I still have some in the pot, leftover from last night.”

I wasn’t nearly as upset as I might have sounded on the other end of the call at the beginning of our talk. Even if my body hadn’t suddenly threatened to shut down and slide me back to sleep, I still couldn’t have explained why it felt good to embrace the mayhem sarcastically.

Maybe it was the sudden lack of drama in my life. Maybe, because of that void, I felt the need to fill it with a little theatricality of my own concoction, no matter how fabricated and farcical the end result turned out to be.

As I told my parents to hold on a second, I set the phone down on a box of books and had another thought. Perhaps it was just my natural reaction to the swift change of scenery, the last eight months’ worth of craziness in my life…

I shook the coffee pot, confirming that there was liquid inside. Leaning over the countertop’s clutter of yet more boxes, I sleepily shuffled around until I found a stemless wine glass, suitable enough to hold the strong, cold savior of caffeine. I returned to the coffee maker only to realize that I had been carrying the pot with me the whole time.

My thoughts strayed back to my doubts. There was no denying it: ever since Stephen, my life was just one big revolving door of changing circumstances.

After finding myself freed from the claustrophobia that I had contrived to be commonplace while confined to life in the city, it could be that I was resurrected in a sense, saved from some standard of suffocation that I had previously passed off as sufferable. Getting away from the mania that comes with living in any major metropolis, I was no longer surrounded by the stench of streets squeezed between skyscrapers or the vogueishness of violence and vanity. I considered the whole concept for a moment, wondering if I was stricken with some kind of Stockholm Syndrome. I was freer than I had been in years, but how would I know if the oppressive life within the city had somehow crept from familiarity into infatuation?

No matter what made up the root cause of my ordeal, I didn’t stop to finish considering it at the time.

I wrapped the wine glass in my hands and touched its rim to my lips, cautiously sipping before remembering that the coffee was cold. Comprehension clicked, and I took a big, bitter gulp. A satisfied sigh slipped past my tongue, and I turned to one side of the counter, then the other. Finally, I saw where I had laid down my phone.

“Hey, I’m back.”

I rolled the phone away from my chin to keep the upper speaker portion wedged against my ear. My jaw stretched wide as I suppressed a yawn, hoping that they wouldn’t hear. I needn’t have worried and could have saved myself the effort. My parents were too busy taking turns to test the waters, carefully trying to see if I was still a zombie.

“You good, Hun?” asked my mom.

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