Just when you think life couldn’t get any worse, it throws you a curve ball so fast that you get surprised, hit your cup of cold coffee, and flail as you stop it from falling all over your computer and the five-hundred-page copy you just printed this morning.

I had been in the middle of marking the latest manuscript from my favorite author, and I was just getting to the good stuff (the lead detective found out her partner and love interest actually did commit the crime) when our boss, Lucille, barged into our shoe box of a room and started throwing out wedding invitations like Frisbees.

My invitation hit me in the chest, and my arm shot out on reflex, elbowing my cup of coffee in the process. I managed to stop it from spilling on my desk and essentially destroying my life, but it did splatter my beige cardigan with large, unmistakable coffee blotches.

“I’ve always wanted a spring wedding,” Lucille began like she was already toasting at the reception, throwing her flat blonde hair over her shoulder, but it didn’t cascade like a waterfall like she intended, only because she goes to shitty overpriced salons and has her hair straightened every six months. Now her hair looks like worn yarn strings.

Not that I had any leg to stand on. My hair was dark and curly: adorably fluffy on good days, a wild mess on most days.

“And Jude was so indulgent,” she continued, batting her thick lashes at me, the new girl Sasha, and the old girl Joy who was going to resign that afternoon (without prior notification, so I was looking forward to Lucille’s face because that would be the only interesting thing that will have happened to me in the five years that I have worked at Springer Books).

“He basically said I could have everything I wanted,” she said and so proceeded to tell us everything she wanted.

I looked over at Joy whose eyes were glazed over like her soul had left her body for some astral adventure. Sasha’s eyes were playing ping pong with Lucille and the slush pile she still needed to look at on her desk.

I looked at Lucille and took in her wide smile, the flush on her cheeks, and that damn engagement ring as large as a quail egg on her finger. I didn’t blame her though, no matter how much I wanted to. Lucille wasn’t a very good boss, and she sometimes said mean things to me, not out of spite but out of ignorance.

But it wasn’t Lucille I had something against. It was her fiancé, Jude.

My ex-boyfriend.

Jude and I met right when I was just starting at Springer Books. I was a research assistant back then, overwhelmed with moving into a new and exciting city that meeting Jude had caught me by surprise.

He was attentive, sweet, and generous. Inexperienced and still timid, I had no armor against him. He broke through my defenses, and I gladly surrendered--until the day he broke my heart. But what I could never forgive him for was shattering my hard-won confidence in myself.

Two years before I met Jude, I came out to my family. You can imagine what came next: My father refused to talk to me. My mother cried.

To be honest, I was expecting more fire and brimstone, considering my uncle was a priest. We were a typical Filipino family, and my parents were your traditional Asian folks. But I had hoped otherwise. I hoped their love for me would trump deep-rooted biases against being gay.

I should’ve known otherwise. It took my parents going back to the Philippines for vacation and subsequently meeting up with my father’s proudly out gay cousin for my father to reach out to me. And by reach out, I mean he liked one of my Facebook posts about a new book our company had launched.

What followed was a slow dance of getting to know each other all over again. That’s why when I met Jude, I thought my stars had finally aligned. Turns out, I was reading the wrong signs. Jude wasn’t out, and he had chosen to break my heart in the most humiliating way rather than tell the truth.

And it looked like he had remained in the closet since we broke up. That or he was actually bi or pan and didn’t know it at the time. Either way, I couldn’t help feeling sick at the idea that my horrible ex-boyfriend--my first boyfriend--would be married to my boss, and so there was a huge chance that I would be seeing him every now and then at the office, just like Lucille’s former nameless, faceless boy toys. Except this boy toy had proposed after only one month of dating (and having wild, torrid sex, if Lucille was to believed).

“...and that’s why I expect you all at the engagement party Friday night!” Lucille suddenly exclaimed with a dramatic flourish of one hand like she was waving for a waiter at The Ritz but her arm weighed two kilograms heavier.

“What?” I asked, catching another whiplash as my mind snapped back into the present.

Joy twitched in her chair and gurgled, then looked groggily around. Had she actually been asleep with her eyes open?

But Lucille ploughed into her audience like a Formula One racer. She was relentless like that.

“I know it’s such short notice, being only two days away,” she said, touching my arm, “but it would mean so much to me if you were all there, especially you, Carlos.”

“Especially me?”

Her grip on my arm tightened, but not in a threatening way. More like a “I’m trying to be supportive, but I don’t know what to say, so I’ll just squeeze your flabby biceps instead.”

“Of course! I was the first editor you were assigned to when you first started here, and I have seen you grow into such a hardworking young man. I would like you to be there on my engagement party and my wedding day.”

That...was actually really nice of her. And for a moment, a warm feeling filled my chest.

But then she said, “Oh, and I’m sure you’ll find a nice young man at the party.”

I sighed. It wasn’t the first time she was trying to hook me up with any man who was remotely interested in other men, never mind that they were too old, too young, or just weren’t interested in me or weren’t my type.

“And Jude is very open-minded. He’s very friendly with the gays!”

I’m sure he is, I thought bitterly.

“I told him about you, how you were such a nice young man but had never been with anybody--”

“Wait, you told him what?”

“A thirty-year-old virgin--”

“I’m thirty-two, and I’m not a virgin--”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of, dear. Anyway, I told him you’ve been single all your life and what a pity--”

I tuned out again, but this time, I was stuck in a nightmare, my heart beating fast and beads of sweat prickling the back of my neck like the tiny pinpricks of a needle.

In my mind’s eye, I saw Jude as he was the day he dumped me: cruel and sneering and calling me names.

I had slowly come to accept, over the years, that no longer being with Jude was a good thing. And I was no longer that insecure twenty-seven-year-old who thought himself lucky if he could get a second look from someone at a bar.

But finding out that Lucille told him I hadn’t been with anyone after him, I imagined Jude’s smug face, and it made my blood boil.

So I blurted out the first thing that popped into my mind: “I have a boyfriend.”

“There’ll be so many--huh?” Lucille cut herself off and blinked at me.

Joy’s chair creaked as she leaned forward, curious. Sasha, who had been inching slowly towards her slush pile, paused and raised both brows at me.

“I have a boyfriend,” I said again, louder this time, like it was one of those self-validation mantras my best friend says every morning. “I’m not single. I have a boyfriend.”

Lucille’s thin eyebrows rose.

“And we’ve been together for a year now.”

A slow smile creeped over her face, and for a moment, I suddenly felt like I had fallen into a trap laid out by a tarantula.

“Well, that’s good news,” she said, a strange twinkle in her eyes. “I’ll put you down for plus one.”

I took a deep breath and smiled shakily at her.

Well, shit.