Page 25 of My Forbidden Boss

“It gets worse?!”

I nodded solemnly. “She hesitated, so I knew that she was at least considering it. Then she said no, but I kind of egged her on, thinking that she was just playing tough, you know? Well, she turns around and just unloads into me, saying that it’s entirely unprofessional. That I’m overstepping my bounds… that it’s inappropriate… and, just because she’s a woman, that doesn’t give me the right to make those kinds of assumptions. She said, ‘As long as I am your employee, even entertaining such a request is out of the question.’”

Charlie waited. “And?”

I sighed. “And…”

Charlie’s eyes bulged, imaging the worst. “… AND?!”

I covered my eyes as if shading them from the sun. “And… I said that I could fire her if that would help.”

Charlie’s eyes threatened to pop out of his skull.

“You said that? Right after she called you out for being unprofessional? You idiot!”

I hung my head in my hands, unable to believe I had been so stupid.

“I know. I know. It was a joke. I wasn’t thinking. I’m telling you, though, she almost laughed. She was this close.”

I held up my fingers to him, barely a sliver of space pinched between them. “In fact, I’m pretty sure she did laugh a little. But then she turned it into one that was more of an, ‘I can’t believe you just said that. My lawyer is going to love you’ sort of laugh.”

Charlie shook his head. “She’d be right. You have to be careful of that sort of thing. Imagine that – getting rejected and, instead of her fucking you, it’s her greasy old lawyer.” He continued shaking his head and took a sip from his glass. “You know, the only thing you could’ve done worse would’ve been to offer for her to just not work but still get paid.”

My eyes lit up. “That isn’t a bad idea! I have all this extra dough lying around… Hell, I’m practically throwing it away anyway, buying franchises I wouldn’t stop to eat at if I were starving. Why shouldn’t I do something worthwhile with it?”

I looked across to Charlie but found him shocked. He looked at me with sheer disgust, as if I had lesions erupting on my face, and he was wondering why somebody hadn’t had the courtesy to drive me to the outskirts of manhood by now.

I glanced at him nervously. “What?”

He leaned forward over the table and lowered his voice. “Hollis… You’ve just spent all this time describing an apex woman, one who has it all. She’s drop-dead gorgeous in both ways, meaning she’s beautiful and boneable all at once. She’s smarter than you, more quick-witted than you, and she’s probably a harder worker than even you could hope to be. She’s a professional who values her career, and you want to tell her, you don’t need that, I’ll just pay you, and then you can date me?”

My mouth dropped. “I didn’t mean…”

He stopped me. “It doesn’t matter what you meant, brother. You just said out loud that you either think offering her an allowance is okay or that she might be into being your own personal prostitute. Please tell me that you would like to rescind that line of thinking.”

I nodded, eyeing the tables around to see if anyone might’ve heard.

“Yeah… You’re right. That… would have been worse.”

Charlie rolled his eyes and shook his head in disbelief as he downed the rest of his drink.

Tisha

Craning my neck and trying to tiptoe taller, I leaned forward as far as I dared, stopping myself shy of any real progress only because I was entirely unwilling to even risk accidentally nudging the rear of Alice’s chair. Together with all of the other department heads, she and they were the only ones seated around the large conference table. I wiggled and stretched, short in stature and struggling to see, stuck standing behind her high-backed office recliner.

The majority of the room’s remaining occupants were a privileged few and considerably younger by appearance, me included. Apart from the semicircle of bosses sitting patiently, we who filed in later were the sole attendees invited to represent our separate divisions at the corporate meeting. Each of us belonged to a different department, but we all shared the same merit, the same reason for being welcomed at the meeting. It was a mechanism by which we all operated, no matter how displaced one of our department’s day-to-day focus appeared to be from the others within the organization. Every one of us filed into the conference room and stood, encircling the seated authority figures according to whichever department we belonged: marketing, efficacy, finance and accounting, legal, personnel, property and facilities, vendor sourcing, administration, et cetera.

Each of us in the outer ring held the same role, the semi-official sergeant behind our individual directors. In essence, we were their deputies acting as their right hands… at least, relative to all of the coworkers under our different departmental umbrellas.

In practice, most of us merely functioned as project leaders… the middlemen and women of the company, trusted with piloting and managing the daily array of tasks to which all of our coworkers were assigned. Mostly the position manifested in some form of mediation.

We were delegates, drifting up above for a list of directives before dragging whatever the decision was downward through the department. The seated manager of each division of the company could be compared to a coach, a pastor, or a professor. We who stood behind them were the team captains or the booster club.

It was a role that I was used to from my time with the company in Chicago, but a responsibility that I’d had no expectation of reclaiming so soon after joining the team in Tyler. When Alice asked me to attend, I was still using a GPS to find the offices every morning and again each evening once it was time to head home. I was still receiving forwarded mail from Illinois, not only from my short stint staying back with my parents but also from the address just before that where I had lived with my ex. To suggest that I was still a newbie in South Dakota would have been a tremendous understatement. One could reasonably have made the argument that I still had not fully completed the process of moving. I hadn’t even switched over my car’s registration yet. Thinking back, I had vacationed in places for longer than the amount of time I’d been living in Tyler.

Needless to say, the possibility of a promotion, even a pseudo one, had been nowhere near my mind.

Nevertheless, Alice had asked, and, of course, I agreed.

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