Jason

Yes. I’ve been verbally abusing my future boss. I know, I know, it’s not a good look on me, but he brings out my inner asshole. And because I have the shittiest luck on the planet, I run chest-first into the current topic of conversation as I exit the stairwell.

“We were so close,” I murmur under my breath as I scoot back as far as I can without knocking Krysten on her ass.

“Hey Knox,” she chirps with an apologetic grin. I want to kick her in the kneecap.

“Hey there. Taking the stairs for some extra steps?” He's addressing me, but I look pointedly out the window, avoiding his gaze.

“Yeah, for some insane reason, Jason insisted we hoof it down eight floors,” Krys says with a wry smile.

“What can I say? I’m fully dedicated to my health.” I elbow Krys in the side and tip my head towards the exit. “Come on, you’re the one who wants to get there before the line gets too long.”

I head for the exit as Krys stammers a hasty goodbye to Knox and trots to catch up with me.

“Jeez, rude much?”

“I’m not wasting a single second of my lunch hour with that prick.” I take pity on her tiny legs and slow down. When she catches up, she grabs my elbow.

“Look, there’s a level of professionalism you’re going to have to maintain with him, Jason.”

My first instinct is to argue, but I stop when I see the anxious look on her face. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to get myself fired.”

“I just don’t get why you hate him so much.”

I sigh and shrug my shoulders, not willing to comment further. Because there may be a few details I’ve failed to mention.

Knox

Jason has good reason to hate me. I was the first guy he slept with in college, and I helped him face the fact that his experimental phase wasn’t exactly a phase. We were gay, and we were in love. We dated for two years in college, but I broke up with him the day I graduated. In a text. And not just any text-a group text.

Now, put down your pitchforks. The breakup part’s complicated, but the group text thing was a total mistake. My phone pulled up the wrong thread, and I was already upset and nervous, so…yeah. Thirty-seven members of the Chicago Creative Artists’ League received a baffling message saying “I love you, but I have to go to Houston. im so sorry. I hope one day youll understand.”

I’m not proud of the message (or the punctuation), but I wasn’t exactly in a great frame of mind. My father died the week before, and my mom and little sisters were barely hanging on. Staying in Chicago wasn’t an option. And I couldn’t ask Jason to follow me. Or wait for me. So I chickened out, sent the text, and ran away to the Houston.

He responded to my text (as did several concerned members of the CCAL), but I didn’t read it. Nor did I listen to his voicemails. I couldn’t. I’m a weak man when it comes to Jason, and I knew I’d cave at the sound of his voice. He was 20 years old, and he was fucking talented, and he deserved better than an unemployed graduate stuck in the Texas suburbs, trying to blend a clinically depressed mother and two pre-teen girls into some semblance of the family we’d been before the accident.

It took three years before we emerged from the shadow of my father’s death. I stalked Jason on social media, and noted with pride that he’d landed a job at Halsey Media, a mid-size firm in the Chicago area with an impeccable reputation. I was just finishing my second year at Bremer and McKesson as an art director, and felt lucky to have found a firm that allowed me time off to attend marching band contests and drill team tryouts. My mother was surviving, but I wasn’t comfortable leaving her alone with the girls until she was on more stable footing.

I made a life for myself in Houston, but Jason was always in the recesses of my memory, an itch I couldn’t quite scratch. Was it guilt over our craptastic breakup? A longing for my life BDD (before Dad’s death)? Whatever the reason, his face popped up in my consciousness more often than it should, considering we’d been apart for almost eight years.

Which is how, for better or worse, I now find myself in Chicago, as a newly-minted creative director and Jason Reynold’s boss.