The Boss by Rick Bennette

Chapter 1
     
    This Monday starts off my work week pretty much the same as every other week. The alarm goes off at 5:44 AM. I’m a night owl, so I roll around a bit before getting out of bed. Only this time, I’m so tired from a late Sunday night party, I fall back to sleep.
     
    Another twenty minutes pass before I spring to life again. Stumbling out of bed, I guide myself down the hallway using my arms against the wall to keep myself from tipping over before I reach the shower. My brain doesn’t even become cognoscente of my surroundings until that hot water runs through my hair.
     
    I’m nothing without breakfast, and twenty minutes behind schedule or not, I refuse to give up my morning ritual of OJ and poached eggs. This time I set the eggs to poach as I get dressed, skimming a valuable three minutes off my missing twenty. A few more moves of efficiency like this and I might only be ten minutes late arriving to my office.
     
    I barely make the first traffic light green, but hey, I manage to shave off another two minutes not waiting at that intersection.
     
    All I can think of is Abbey. She’s my boss. She has been for seven years. In all that time, other than work related conversation, I don’t think we’ve spoken to each other more than five minutes. It’s a shame, really, because she’s rather an attractive woman. At least on the outside. She’s thirty something and never been married. No surprise there, considering every man she’s dated since I’ve been working for her has refused to ask her out a second time. How do I know this? My best friend at work fills me in on the scoop. Not because I really care about Abbey, but because it allows me to better accept her superiority complex knowing I have at least one thing she doesn’t. Friends.
     
    Thank God for Erika. Without her, I’d know nothing about Abbey. In which case I might be envious of my boss for her looks, her money, and the presumption that she is so desirable, every man is after her. I would think she could pick and choose the men she would take home for, well, whatever women do with men after hours in the privacy of their own domain. Not Abbey, though. One date with her is enough to scare away the most desperate of men. And I wouldn’t know any of this if not for Erika.
     
    Along with a dozen other employees, we work for Abbey’s small publishing company. A little over seven years ago her father passed away, leaving Abbey his beloved family business. I answered the help wanted ad Abbey placed in the local newspaper when she needed someone to show her how to run the business. The ad didn’t quite say it that way, of course, but within five minutes of the interview, I knew Abbey had no clue how to run her new business. I knew how to run it though, and I’d like to think she hired me because of my knowledge. I soon found out I was wrong.
     
    Abbey didn’t know how much I could help her business when she hired me. She just hadn’t placed the ad online as everyone else does. In our little town rag of a newspaper, the only other contact with her ad was probably a bird dropping. Good luck for me, of course. Without the competition of fifty other applicants, I got the job. I put my talents to work right away building upon her father’s sterling reputation.
     
    Eventually, even Abbey learns the business from following my actions. She is quick to take over any aspect of the business as soon as she learns it, freeing me of any due credit for helping her put to use her new found knowledge. In seven years, I hear her say thank-you to the waitress at the cafe down the street more times than she ever says it to me. In fact, I can’t even recall the last time she thanked me for anything. That’s OK, though, because I receive my one half percent raise every year regardless of what I do. On Christmas, there is always the well received bonus of a ten pound turkey. I’ve seen chickens bigger than this.

 
     

Chapter 2
     
    I manage to arrive at