Page 56 of My Forbidden Boss
“I’m not sure if you avoided it or if I somehow steered us away, but this time, I mean it. Spill it. It’s pretty clear by now that we can get along just fine with our own nonsense, but let’s talk about the real you.”
“Oh, come on, Tish. You don’t want to hear about me. There isn’t really much to tell.”
I sipped at my glass, surprised by how rich this wine was relative to the sweet crispness of the last one.
“Hollis.”
I looked up, finding her stern and unyielding.
“Yes, beautiful?”
Her jaw clenched, repressing a smile.
“Spill it.”
I sighed. “Okay, fine. I’m an open book. What would you like to hear about first? Any requests?”
She considered for a breath. “How about… from the beginning?”
I recoiled emphatically. “The beginning?”
Tish nodded quietly, sitting back and turning in her seat to watch me closely.
Again, I sighed. “Well, it all began several billion years ago with the first evidence of life…”
“No!”
I was reluctant to look at her.
“Hollis.”
“Yeah?”
“What’s wrong? You’ve been eyeing me up and down all night, and suddenly you can’t stand the sight of me?”
I smiled with embarrassment, with a grimace to form my own brand of emotion called, ‘Whoops. Busted.’
Sheepishly, I finally glanced her way.
“It hasn’t bothered me all night. I’m not going to start complaining now.”
I blushed, feeling ousted and vulnerable. Once more, I felt snagged on the end of a line, a line which Tisha had the full power to twitch and turn as she pleased.
I growled, biting the bullet. “Alright. I was born in Tyler.”
She cooed, only deepening my sense of ridicule. She stopped quickly, though, for which I felt quietly grateful.
“Sorry… I knew that you could do it. Have you lived there all your life?”
I nodded. “Yep, born and raised. In fact, I’ve only ever lived in two houses: my dad’s, then mine. If you took two baseballs and threw one from each house toward the other, they’d probably collide in mid-air just before touching the ground. In fact, the corner of my lot even touches property lines with my dad’s, so I’ve literally lived in the same place all my life.”
“That must be nice, though, getting to know a place so well after so long. Most people have to start over at least once. My ex was a military brat, so he’d never called a place home longer than two years before packing up and moving on.”
Her face contorted uncomfortably after that. I was quick to keep the subject rolling.
“Yeah, I definitely know it like the back of my own hand, but don’t get me wrong, I’ve been around plenty. I bought my first bread bus before I could even drive, spending hours and hours over the two summers up to my sixteenth birthday, turning it into my first food truck. By the end of my junior year of high school, I had two more running in Sioux Falls.”
I snickered, remembering. “The kids I found to run them… what a bunch of knuckleheads and punks. I had spent weeks figuring out the whole tax thing and how to do payroll for them. They looked at me like I was crazy and, from then on, they insisted that I just pay them in cases of beer. That was my brother’s contribution to the project.”