Page 4 of Loathing My Boss
Still, I’d give anything to have the love bombing back. She was just…sogood at it.
“Up, up, up.” She returns to my bedside, sinking herfingers into my blankets. “You’ve got quotas to meet. I’ve got bedding to dry.”
With that, she steals my wet comforter, and trots out of my room.
Weak and shivering, I watch her hips sway until her perfect figure’s out of sight. Then I sigh and drag myself to my computer so I can start on the day’s work.
?
Only a monster would wake me at six in the morning via ice bath on a mid-April day in West Virginia, force me to drink a tall glass of kale protein powder, run my bedding through a dry cycle while answering emails and checking tenant complaints, then cozy up on my nice clean blankets for a nap while I’m trapped at my desk in a video interview with a fantasy blog.
But Crisis—beautiful, alluring Crisis—is such a monster.
Once my interview call ends, I twist my chair away from my wide oak desk and stare across the dark wood flooring, toward where my bed sits centered on a platform surrounded by open windows. Afternoon sun kisses the slumbering woman atop the tan comforter in ways wholly tormenting, filling my head with sonnets and scripts that don’t fit my high fantasy genre.
I am known for writing extravagant trilogies with five-hundred-page-long wars, forbidden desires, and star-crossed love.
Not poetry.
As it stands, my editor would kill me if he knew I was spending half my time working on a contemporary romance fanfiction, starring a self-insert male lead and a precious young woman…named Catastrophe.
Desmond’s a real stickler for deadlines. I’m a real stickler for whatever keeps me from climbing into bed and napping with my assistant.
There is only so much a human body can take before it collapses, and no amount of kale is going to give me the strength I need to stop my thoughts from straying—repeatedly—to places they shouldn’t.
Where Crisis is concerned, all I can do is shove the feelings into word documents and hope I don’t do anything drastic.
Like stand.
Walk myself across my room.
Andtouchher.
I become aware that my hand is an inch from Crisis as a straying ray of sunshine catches on my skin, drawing out the warmer shades of my flesh. Compared to the milk white around her birthmark, I’m almost tan, though next to Kaleb, I might as well be a fresh Google Doc with screen brightness turned all the way up. My fingers close away from that perfect dark star on her porcelain shoulder, and I stuff my fist into my gray sweatpants pocket as I march myself back to my desk, my computer, the two thousand words I still need before the end of the day according to my little slave driver’s schedule.
Crisis, by all trackable means, is the best assistant in the world.
Ever since she started working for me exactly two agonizing years ago today, my productivity has soared. My opportunities have tripled. Income has doubled, which is saying something since I was already a seven-figure author with several major deals before she came sweeping into my world with her Canva Whiteboards and systems. In about a month, she cut my admin time down by a modest…ninety-nine percent. In two, the drafts of the email replies she sent meto go over for my fans were so full of my voice, I stopped feeling like I had to do anything but press send. She’s on top ofeverything—from work to work adjacent, if the ergonomic gaming chair I’m sitting in is any indication. She spent hours searching for the best option after I, mindlessly, mentioned needing a new one. This was in my house the very next day.
The woman is so good at her job, it’s scary.
Good atlife, however…
She is not.
Falling asleep in a grown man’s room aside, the woman’s self-preservation skills do not exist.
True to her name, she’s a walking disaster.
If only that knowledge made me want her less. Instead all it does is make me lie awake at night, hoping she’s okay.
Trouble follows her, like a shadow, always nipping at her heels.
I can’t even count the number of near-death experiences she’s side-stepped, blinked at, saidso, anywayin the face of. I’m positive she’ll give me a heart attack one of these days, that’s for—
A thud.
I turn from my computer screen, toward a tiny lump on the floor by my bed. Crumpled in a ball of disarray, Crisis blinks wearily, rubs her head, and attempts to gather her surroundings while the softestowflutters from her pouting lips.
