The Boss (The Boss 1)

So, here’s the deal with Holli. She’s super skinny, due to a metabolic disorder. Which means she has to eat like an elephant to look like a giraffe. It might sound enviable, and I did envy her, for about the first year I knew her. But then I slowly started to notice how often strangers would tell her to eat a sandwich, or assume that she was anorexic, just because she was thin and a model. I stopped saying stuff like, “That girl should eat,” when I saw a skinny star in a magazine. Because I had seen Holli eat. And it was comically disturbing.

“I’m not really feeling the midnight—” I reached across the back of the couch and pushed open the blinds. “Oh god. Mid-almost-sunset pig out. I do have to go back to work tomorrow, even if it is just to get fired. I think I’m going to take a hot bath and have an early bedtime.”

Holli took another deep inhale off the tiny stub of roach that was left, then carefully put it out on the edge of the ashtray on the coffee table before reaching up to boop my nose with her fingertip “You got it, kid.”

I peeled myself off the couch and felt some of the depressive funk lift. It had sounded fun to wallow in my pjs all afternoon, but now I just felt tired and bored and unproductive. Maybe while Holli was eating her way through Chinatown, I could update my resume.

Or, I could take a hot bath and drink more wine.

Look, I don’t want to sound like a walking cliché here, but sometimes, the bath and wine are totally necessary.

The apartment I share with Holli is amazing. A two-bedroom walk up on Canal, one of the major selling points was the big living room window and access to the building’s rooftop garden. The walls in the kitchen and living room were butter yellow, the floors gleaming dark wood. The bedrooms were the size of shoeboxes, but it was still an amazing place, especially compared to our dorm room at NYU. But the bathtub is the reason I will never, ever move. In fact, when I do, I will probably try to stuff it into my suitcase and take it with me.

It’s an antique, high-back, claw-foot tub with gleaming white porcelain enamel on the inside and burnished copper on the outside. There’s a curtain around it and a shower hose, so you can hop in and get clean quick, but today, I was planning to spend some quality time in there.

I turned on the taps and adjusted the temperature to just above scalding. What can I say? I like to get lobsterfied. I added way too much bubble bath and a touch of skin-softening oil then headed to the freezer to get another bottle of chilled white wine.

Holli was putting on her coat. “I’ll see you later!”

“Don’t go to that place you got sick from last time,” I advised her, and locked the door behind her. Then my wine and I headed into the steamy bathroom. To fulfill the stereotype that was my coping mechanism, I lit the sandalwood candles on the small tray table beside the tub, and pulled up some music on my phone.

While Lana Del Rey warbled a dirge-like appeal about singing the blues getting old, I sank into the blissfully hot water and leaned my head back on the cool porcelain.

As I languidly swirled my toes in the hot water, the awfulness of the office that morning melted away. So what if I lost my job? I had enough savings put aside that I could pay my half of the rent and bills for a few months. If that didn’t last, I had amassed plenty of designer handbags and clothes on the job. I could easily keep myself in consignment shop money if I needed to. Nice stuff was, well, nice, but not necessary. I’d sell it all if I had to.

Maybe Neil won’t fire you, I reminded myself. Yeah, you gave him a shock, but he seems like a decent guy.

No. Decent guys did not fuck someone senseless and then steal their plane ticket.

Of course, that guilt might motivate him to keep me at the company. Or a well-timed threat might...

I dismissed that one almost as quickly as I’d thought of it. No way would I blackmail someone. It just wasn’t in my character. Besides, I had no idea how many lives something like that would impact. He might be in a relationship. He might have a family. What he’d done to me six years ago was jerkish in the extreme, but he’d left me enough money that I could have gotten to Tokyo if I’d wanted to. And while he’d been presumptuous and rude and controlling and horrible without knowing a thing about my life or my reasons for running away, it wasn’t worth it to sacrifice my own morals and potentially destroy lives to keep a job.