Puking on the Polaroid I stole of my boss’s wife

I’m obsessed with him. I’m juggling three boyfriends and I’m still obsessed with him. Head of the broadcast team, I don’t know if he’s my father, my boss, a lover, a mentor, an enemy or none of my business. He has wavy, salt and pepper hair and always wears loosely fitted suits with the cuffs rolled up. He’s the perfect New York art director, with his cigarettes and black coffee and rolls of graphic paper and sketches hanging all around his office like marionettes. I’m terrified of him. It takes me hours just to type a single message or email to him, longer even to do the art tasks he sets me on. He’s so patient with me I feel like purring when he’s scooted up next to my desk, leaning over me to click my mouse around and show me the unenchanting world of Photoshop that I should be familiar with, but I lap up his notes with the greed of a stray cat being touched for the first time. My little whispers, love me, love me, that’s all I ask for, love me, love me.

Nothing can happen. He’s married. He’s my boss. He doesn’t like AC/DC. He drinks his whiskey neat. Nothing can happen. He’s partied out. He’s too gentle. Nothing can happen. He’s never angry, just disappointed. He’s decades older. He doesn’t like spicy food. He’s friends with the most hated person in the office (an exec). His marriage is older than I am. He only reads magazines. Nothing can happen. He lends me the most asinine design books. He lets me into his office at all hours. He’s never here at the office. He has the perfect life, perfect apartment, perfect drink in his hand. Nothing can happen. He has a shark tattoo on his shoulder. He listens to funk music. Nothing can happen. He drinks as much cola as I do. Nothing can happen. We have the same ringtone. I don’t know what color his eyes are. I can’t imagine him having sex. Nothing can happen.

How does a person stand up to the sunset?

I get adopted by the broadcast team and they give me a desk in the creative pit, right in front of the row of art director offices, all covered with newspaper clippings, sketches, graph paper, Polaroids, posters, ripped out pages of art magazines, all stuck together with long pieces of cellotape and push pins and clips. It’s exactly what I’ve been dreaming of. Even staying evening after evening at the office, all of us huddled over the large graph printer, laughing, sharing cans of aperol sprtizes and Jack and cokes, scribbling away on the whiteboard, cursing out the execs, cursing out the redlines, cursing out the clients.

My entire day revolves around the office. I usually get in around 9am and stay till far, far after dark. Being adopted by the broadcast team means my workload has increased exponentially. They’re the popular kids of the office, working hard and partying hard. A happy hour with them lasts till midnight and we’re back online at dawn. They bring in the most revenue so my expense account finally kicks into use and I settle into playing adult with zest, my knuckles white from grip. My one rule is I don’t drink at coworker events. I don’t know what’ll slip out of my mouth when I’m not looking so I stay away from the aperol spritzes like they’re poison (they are).

He’s all I think about. My entire workload is about pleasing him. It’s the only thing that matters. Getting the pixels right, picking the right skyline for the news studio we’re designing, smudging out dust with minimal supervision, taking hours to airbrush light windows into skyscrapers so they glow just right on the anchor’s hair.