The job you pretend to love

My boss and I have a thing that isn't a thing. I got the promotion on my own merit — I know I did, I've checked the work a hundred times — but there was one late night in a hotel bar in Denver at a conference, one conversation that went somewhere it shouldn't have gone verbally and then, at the edge of the cliff, stopped, and now every raise, every 'good work,' every time he says my name in a meeting, I hear that hotel bar underneath it. Nothing happened. We are both careful, professional, married to other people. But I will never fully know which came first, his belief in my work or that night, and I have built an entire career I'm proud of on a foundation with one crack in it that only I can see, and some nights that crack is all I can see.

He's my boss. He's also the reason I got the promotion, and I will never know which came first — his belief in my work or the elevator in Denver. Every raise since has felt like a receipt.

I fell for the person interviewing me for a job and got the job and spent two years in agony three desks away, professional and dying, and I finally quit for another company just to be able to breathe, and at my going-away lunch they said the office won't be the same, and I wanted to say neither will I, and I smiled and shook their hand and left and cried in the elevator over a love that only ever existed in the space between two workstations.

I loved him and he was my boss and nothing ever happened and I left the job to make sure nothing ever would, and I've decided the most professional thing I ever did was quit a career to protect a man from a temptation he never even knew existed.

My coworkers threw me a party for ten years at the company. What none of them know is that I've been secretly qualified to do the boss's job the whole time and have turned it down twice, in private, because the promotion would move me to the floor where my ex-wife works. I have let them think I lack ambition. I lack only the stomach to ride an elevator every day past a life I already lost once.

Once a quarter I get headhunted for the job I actually trained for. Once a quarter I say no, hang up, and go back to the job that pays for my mother's care facility. Nobody at work knows I'm choosing this. It helps me to write down that I'm choosing this.

There was a moment my wife asked me to quit the job that was killing us both, and I said one more year, and one more year, and by the time I finally quit she'd stopped waiting for the man who might come home early. We're still together, tired, tender, older. Last week she made me coffee and I made her laugh, an old real laugh, and I thought, I nearly worked away the person who makes coffee for me, and I'll spend whatever years are left trying to deserve the one I almost missed.

I fell for the woman who interviewed me and got the job and spent two years in agony three desks away, professional and dying, and I quit for another company just to breathe, and at my going-away lunch they said the office won't be the same, and I wanted to say neither will I, and I cried in the elevator over a love that only ever existed in the six feet between two workstations.

I got the promotion on my own merit. I've checked the work a hundred times. But there was one hotel bar in Denver, one conversation that went to the edge and stopped, and now every time he says my name in a meeting I hear that bar underneath it, and I'll never fully know which came first.

I know which coworker my father meant every time he said the office. I was twelve when I answered the phone and she thought I was him. I said love you too and hung up. He never found out how much I knew, and my mother never found out at all.

There was a man who wrote me poems and a man with a good job, and I chose the good job, sensibly, and it was a fine marriage until it wasn't. The poet became somewhat famous. I found one of his old poems in a magazine at the dentist last month, a waiting-room accident, and I recognized myself in it, a girl by a window, thirty years young. I sat in that vinyl chair and read the evidence that I had once been worth writing down, and then a nurse called my name.

Two versions of my résumé exist. The real one, and the one that got me this office. Nine years of good work since, and it still only takes one phone call. I keep the ringer on loud.

She was my boss. Nothing ever happened except fourteen years of almost. When her obituary said devoted wife, I closed my office door and mourned a life neither of us had the nerve to live.

He proposed on a bridge and I said I needed time, and time turned into a job across the country, and the job turned into a life, and the life turned into now. He married my friend. They seem content. I built something impressive and lonely. At his fiftieth birthday party last year he pulled me aside and said, no regrets, right? and I smiled and lied so cleanly that I almost believed it myself, which is the most married-to-my-choices I have ever felt.

My wife's coworker understands her work in a way I never could and she comes home lit up from conversations I can't have with her, and the affair I fear isn't of the body, it's the slow discovery that someone speaks a language of hers I was never taught, and that she's lonely for it in our own kitchen.

We fell in love the summer we were both eighteen and working a terrible job, and it ended in September like everyone said it would, and I've had good jobs and good years since and none of them smelled like that kitchen.

We loved each other and I got the job in another city and I asked her to come and she said no and I went, and I've decided I chose a career I've since left over a woman I've never replaced, and the math on that has never once worked out.