Sweet Romance13 min read
I Accidentally Texted My Boss "Be the Boss's Wife" — And Then He Turned My Life Upside Down
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I have a talent for social disaster. If disasters were an art form, I'd be a master painter. Today’s masterpiece began with a trembling thumb, a half-finished sentence, and the wrong contact.
"Heave me a lifeline," Heidi had typed half a minute earlier, all caps and a string of crying emojis, because she was bored and wanted me to join a game. I meant to send a joke back to her.
I typed, "If you want not to work overtime, be the boss's wife," then paused, smiled at my own joke, and hit send.
The phone betrayed me.
My thumb slipped. The message whooshed across the ether and went to the one person I thought had been assigned by fate to make my life simple and efficient: my boss, Callahan Brandt.
The name sat on my screen like an accusation. I yanked my thumb back, hit recall, but the little "Seen" beneath the message told me it was too late.
"Callahan?"
"..." Silence felt loud.
I stared at the office ceiling fan, at the mug I had stirred too many times, at the stack of files that had been waiting for me to care. The kind of regret that tastes like bitter coffee settled over me.
Heidi's reply pinged immediately.
"Heehee. Whoops? Did u just—"
"Don't say it," I muttered, then to myself, "I want to die. Very thoroughly."
A few days earlier I had been freshly single. Clay Contreras and I split cleanly enough that people called it mature, but my heart had that sour, ledger-like feeling of numbers not adding up. The silence of the blank bedroom was heavy. I was doing fine, in the practical sense. I still made my own coffee, paid my bills, and answered emails. But the ego bruises are funny things. They don't show until you stumble and someone points at the bruise and claps.
My phone vibrated with Callahan’s name. That vibration felt like a footstep behind me.
"Deliver that file in fifteen minutes," he said, voice flat as a tray.
I had been sobbing earlier—big, noisy sobs that left my face streaked and puffy—and I wiped my tears with the back of my hand like I was trying to erase evidence.
"I'm on leave," I told him, a small revolt in my tone. "I don't have to—"
"Double your pay," Callahan said, cutting me off as if he always knew how to end my objections.
Something shamefully small in me softened. The word 'double' is a dangerous siren to anyone who pays their own bills. I looked at the couch; then I looked at the file on my desk. I stood up and gathered myself like I could pin my dignity back into place.
"Triple," he added.
"Okay," I said before I could squint my pride back into shape. "Ten minutes."
When I walked into his office, cheeks still damp, Callahan took the file with an expression that said the sight of me should have been illegal.
"Did someone break into your home?" he asked dryly.
"My face?" I blinked. "What?"
"You look like the person who forgot a face-lift appointment," he corrected, deadpan. "Go fix yourself. Our clients shouldn't think they booked a ticket to the underworld."
"I'm working on it, Mr. Brandt," I lied, smoothing my shirt like a farmer smoothing rows.
"Callahan." He said it the way he used only with people who made him want to be less formal. He never used my name like that.
"Yes," I said.
He rolled his chair back and forced a smile that could have been sharper than a scalpel. "Go."
I left with my cheeks burning for a reason I couldn't name.
Back at my desk, Gloria Baldwin—gossipy, prone to dramatics, and a delight over appetizers—leaned in.
"You left the office on vacation and came back for the glamour," she hissed. "You went into Callahan's office? The man who calls us 'darlings' only when he means 'economy'? Tell me everything."
"I'm dying inside," I wanted to confess, but the confession would take the shape of a comedy sketch: I had texted my boss that joke meant for Heidi.
Gloria made a face that said the world was tragically funny, and Heidi's text lit up my screen asking for details. I said something cool—"It's capitalism, it seduced me"—which sounded much better in my head than on the Centrico coffee-stained office floor.
At dinner after work, the team voted to go out. We joked, drank, and ate like a band of people who believed food could dissolve shame. I pushed my plate away, not because I wasn't hungry, but because my stomach had filled with the idea that everyone was looking at me.
They were.
When I stepped out the restaurant door, my heel caught the curb and I stumbled. A pair of steady hands grabbed my elbow. I looked up and froze. Callahan’s face hovered inches from mine. He patted his pants like nothing had happened and then, with a look that meant something like mild chastisement and concern, he said, "You're clumsy. Be careful."
"I wasn't trying to—" I stammered.
"It's fine," he said. "You know I'm not angry."
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to be grateful for his soothing words. Instead I wanted to curl into a ball and vanish into the city pavement.
The next day, my email had twice the workload. The office clock mocked me with its slow tick and the distance between me and leaving seemed to widen. At eight p.m., Heidi texted: "Where are you? Come join us. I'm bored."
"I'm on the brink of celestial transcendence at the company," I typed. "Please, no."
"How do you escape overtime?" she begged.
I was exhausted, resentful, and tapping out a revenge fantasy when I wrote, "If you want not to work overtime, be the boss's wife."
Heidi sent back a laughing string of emojis. I breathed. Then I saw a new message at the top of my chat list. There was Callahan's name.
Callahan: ???
My heart did that weird flip that is not a flip, it's a full somersault.
"No," I whispered. "No no no."
I pressed and held and deleted and tried recall, but the message had earned its freedom. I could feel the room tilt.
Callahan walked in like a man delivering a sentence.
"You," he said, with the faintest rise of a smile. "Did you just send that to me?"
I froze like an actor who suddenly forgot every line. "It was a joke," I said. "Wrong person. Haha. Hahaha."
"Was it a joke?" He asked, arching an eyebrow.
"Yes, a joke between friends," I added, because that sounded safer. "I didn't mean—"
"Do you want to be my wife?" he asked now, teasing, and I felt like a rabbit caught in reflected headlights.
"No." I shook my head like a decisive child. "No, no, no. I—"
He sighed. Then his face thinned with mock offense. "You don't want to be my wife?"
I wanted to laugh until the world shook. With trembling pride I set my mouth to a defiant grin. "I might be vain, but I'm not that mercenary."
"Good." He nodded, then the expression ran across his face like a shadow, and he added, "Go home early tonight."
"Home?" I asked, like a question mark.
"Sleep. Rest. Stop doing your best impression of a lamp."
He left the way people leave rooms they mean to return to. I sat there with my pulse trying to dial me out of my body.
At heart I had more than one plan for my life. Plan A was to be competent and reliable. Plan B involved a bright career, independence, and not being defined by a man. Plan C involved getting slightly more sleep.
Over the next week, I oscillated between fighting and flattery. Callahan alternated between being a glacier of sarcasm and a stranger who brought me soup on bad days. He said terrible things with an expression like he was testing whether the world would ripple. He called me "Cora" in a tone that sometimes felt like an accusation and then followed up with a text that made my phone vibrate like it had cheap champagne inside.
"Double pay." "Triple pay." "Are you trying to bribe me?" I would shoot back, and he would reply with the kind of dry comeback that suggested he had a script for my soul.
"Do you and Clay still talk?" he asked one evening on the drive home.
"Clay who?" I played dumb.
"Clay Contreras." His voice was quiet. "The one you used to walk the dog with."
"His name is Clay." My voice faltered. "We broke up. He went to study abroad. Nothing fancy."
"Good," he said, lighter. "I don't like shadows that stay."
He said this as if he had always had a private map of my life and now, with a new pen, he was rewriting it.
A weekend came when I dressed up like cate blanchett in a random movie I had never seen. I wore heels too high for rational thought and makeup that felt like armor. Clay would be at the art studio to pick up my nephew—more like my little brother in spirit than my nephew—named Toby. Clay worked at the studio as a teacher, and I always turned the world into a careful pose whenever I saw him.
I walked into the studio like a woman prepared for a battle she intended to win by being fabulous. Then, as if fate had a sense of humor, Callahan was there. He had shares in the studio, he said, and when our eyes met I felt like someone had turned all the lights up too high.
Clay appeared with the slow, comfortable grin of a man who was used to being forgiven by the world. He frowned at my outfit. "Didn't you decide to wear the sensible sweater today?" he asked.
"What is that?" I snapped. "I'm single now. I can wear whatever I want."
Clay gave me that look people give when they're trying to decide whether you're a story worth continuing. "Be careful," he said. "Don't become someone who needs the spotlight to be seen."
Toby tugged on my sleeve. "Auntie Cora, don't fight."
"Auntie?" Clay rolled his eyes. "We aren't married."
"Not anymore," I said.
Then, in the middle of that everyday chaos, Toby pointed at Callahan and said in his clear, unfiltered way, "Is that Auntie's new husband?"
I clapped a hand over Toby's mouth. He knew too much. Callahan looked that shade of amused that shows he was taking a temperature and found it warm.
"He's cute," Callahan said simply.
That was the truth: he was cute when he didn't try. He was dangerous like wet pavement in the sun—slick and reflective.
I fell into a small streak of bad luck: I tripped, burned the kitchen, swallowed a fishbone, and basically became a walking collection of small disasters. I needed a break that involved incense and old bricks. I told Callahan I was taking a week to stay at a temple, just to cleanse the soul and stop the small tragedies stacking like bad receipts.
When I knocked on his office door to ask for leave, I caught him smiling with a man I didn't know. The unknown man looked at me and smiled like someone with a harmless secret. My first instinct was to back out the door.
"Come in, Cora!" Callahan called. The smile on his face was genuine and quick.
I took a step in. The man left. Callahan turned to me, and for the first time he sounded less like a boss and more like someone who kept a spare key for people's moods.
"Why do you look at every attractive man like a convertible?" he asked.
"I like pretty cars," I said. "And pretty people."
"Do you fall for them easily?" he pressed.
"Apparently," I admitted.
He looked wounded as if I belonged exclusively to him in my own little way. "You sent that message to me on purpose," Callahan accused suddenly.
"It was a mistake," I protested. "I swear."
"To be honest," he said quietly, "it has been nice having you around." He said it in a way that made my chest expand with something like hope and something like panic.
He took a breath and then did a surprising thing: he approved my vacation without a fight. "Go," he said. "Get your fortune realigned."
Maybe it was my resignation, or maybe it was the one time I had called him "Callahan" that broke something open. Maybe it was the fact that somewhere between the sarcasm and the deadlines we had built a small, private bridge.
I went to the temple. The week there was dull with peace. I slept more, saw fewer screens, and realized I had a small soft spot for anyone who brought me hot soup when I was sick. I returned to the office something like healed, hair tamed, humor gently restored.
The next thing I knew, Callahan was doing small things that made sense only if you loved someone in a practical way. He handed me his coat on a cold trip even though he could have said it was fashion suicide. He sat in the passenger seat while I drove (I had a license, I promise), and he quipped about everything like he had rehearsed lines from a musical he loved only in secret.
"Do you like my perfume?" I once asked, because human brains ask the strangest things when they want to be closer.
"It's not perfume," he said. "It's an ointment my cousin makes. It keeps mosquitoes away."
"Still nice," I said.
He watched me with an interest that felt like weight and warmth. "You have been useful," he offered once. "You bake honesty into my days."
We fell into a rhythm that had habits like grooves on a vinyl record. He was blunt. He was careful. He teased and then he sent the kind of texts that make your phone feel like a small fire.
One night, he called me. "Do you want to go out?" he asked.
"Where to?" I replied.
He said nothing, only came by and picked me up, one of the many little rebellions he allowed himself. He teased me about being too busy to change my profile picture. One night he reached for my phone and tried to set a couple avatar photos for me.
"Callahan!" I squealed, and he looked at me with a candid, ridiculous grin.
"You're my girlfriend," he said, half proud, half possessive, then softer, "and I like picking pictures of my girlfriend."
"I think I'm being digitally kidnapped," I told him.
"Digitally and physically," he replied. "Both are attached."
Sometimes he brought a friend, Bernardo Gross, a kind of quick-smiling, teasing man with a painter's hands and a too-generous laugh. Bernardo and Callahan had an odd camaraderie like they shared an inside joke the rest of the world had not earned.
One night Bernardo joked, "Callahan's told me all about you."
"All?" I blinked.
"All the embarrassing things," Bernardo said. "He says you have an entire compilation."
"What compilation?" I demanded.
Callahan looked uncomfortable like someone who had been caught balancing a plate of desserts on a narrow rail. "I said stuff," he muttered. "Only cute stuff."
"You lied on my behalf?" I asked.
"Maybe," he said. "But only truth dressed in silk."
I shook my head but felt the glow of being spoken about in a way that made the center of me feel less brittle.
Then the birthday came.
The company wanted to throw a surprise party for Callahan. The plan was elaborate and ridiculous in equal measure. I had been selected, unethically, to lure him to the conference room under the pretense of a team-building "truth or dare" game.
"Truth or dare?" he asked, reclining like a man comfortable in a leather throne.
"Dare," he said each time, perfectly. He liked risk the way other people liked sugar.
"When you are blindfolded, don't peek," I warned him. "We will do a little scene."
He trusted me. He let me tie the blindfold over his eyes as the others counted and giggled. The room was very quiet, full of the kind of silence that sits on the edges of goodness.
"Walk with me," I whispered, leading his hand because I wanted to feel his palm. My heart was doing the small, rapid staccato of someone who'd been running up stairs. We stepped and the floor shifted with the shuffle of decorations.
He tripped on a stray streamer. I steadied him by instinct and he caught me closer than necessary. For one ridiculous moment we were quiet and perfectly aligned, like two bookends with nothing between them.
He breathed my name, which he rarely did, and then, in a voice that trembled only a bit, he said, "Cora, will you be my girlfriend? Will you be my—" He swallowed. "Will you be with me?"
The room peeled off the blindfold in a collective motion. The look on his face was startled and raw and entirely unpracticed. He had not prepared a speech. He had not prepared a strategy. He had prepared a heart.
There were cries and clapping and the kind of surprised laughter that felt like an eruption. Coworkers who had been my enemies and allies clapped and whistled. Gloria whooped.
"Yes?" he looked at me as if the rest of the world had been removed and only I remained.
"Yes," I said, because I believed him. "Yes."
And then the office exploded into the kind of hum that comes when a light turns on in a room you've been walking around in with a candle. Callahan's face flushed, an honest shade of red. He looked like someone who had swallowed something very sweet.
After that, our routines renegotiated themselves. He sent messages that were more than sarcasm and spreadsheets. He texted me at night with terrible jokes and even worse poems.
"Now is the hour of our love," he wrote in one, and I rolled my eyes. "Now is the hour of our stomachs. Want ginger soup?"
"Yes," I replied.
"Then I am your soup merchant," he said. He came over with a thermos of ginger and honey. He sat at my kitchen table and told me about a new client. He listened when I decided nothing dramatic had to be said and that it was fine if we lived comfortably strange lives.
Callahan was both a puzzle and the answer to a crossword I had not written. He irritated me with his stubborn sense that he could fix anything. He charmed me with the way he remembered small facts: the way I liked my tea, the way I cross my hands, the way I said "sensible sweaters" like a joke.
I expected the world to punish him for being kind. The world is often cruelly efficient like that. But mostly the world adapted to us. Work kept being work. He still assigned impossible deadlines and wore the same shirts like they were armor. I discovered a new kind of freedom: to be silly in front of the man who used to make me tremble and now made me feel safe.
Our romance was not a grand declaration every day. It was small domestic revolutions: a coat on my shoulders when it was cold, a promotion that came because he saw a skill in me others had not, a phone call at midnight with a bad pun. It was being led blindfold into a room and then finding that the world had opened itself into warmth.
The accident that began it all—my stupid, mortifying text—became a private joke. Callahan teased me about it often.
"Remember when you asked me to marry you?" he'd say, eyebrows up.
"I meant it as a metaphor," I'd reply.
"Some metaphors are very forward," he would answer, and we'd laugh.
Sometimes I thought of Clay, of how the two of us had ended. No great tragedy. No huge betrayal. Just two parallel maps that no longer overlapped. He had been part of my past. Callahan was my present.
So, when people asked me years later in the stairwell, "How did you end up with Callahan Brandt? Was it drama?" I would say, "I sent a wrong message." Then I would smile and add, "And then he made me the luckiest wrong sender alive."
He still used to joke at parties, "If you want not to work overtime, be the boss's wife." He said it with the usual dry brand of humor, but now he said it holding my hand.
Once, in a meeting I almost forgot I had a life beyond contracts, Callahan leaned over and whispered, "Do you remember when you said that?"
"Of course," I murmured. "I remember."
He smiled. "Good. Because you are my favorite kind of right."
The world kept moving. People still gossiped; Gloria still leaned into doorways and spat treasure with her mouth. Heidi still texted about games. Bernardo still laughed and brought terrible wine to office parties. Clay called once from a new country and told me he was happy. I told him I was, too.
At the end of each day, I put my head down, sometimes on Callahan’s shoulder, sometimes under my pillow, and thought about the weirdness of life.
I had learned something small and large and bright: accidents can be the doorway to everything you never knew you wanted. Sometimes a wrong message, a clumsy heel, and the kindness of a man who used to be a boss become the scaffolding for a life.
"Do you want to grab coffee?" Callahan asked one evening, as he walked me to the door.
"Only if you promise not to talk about work," I said.
He laughed and suited his answer to my terms. "I promise. But I can't promise I won't talk about you."
I pressed my forehead to his palm like a child taking a secret vow, and he kissed my cheek in a public place where people were allowed to look and whisper.
As I walked away I typed a new message to Heidi: "If you want not to work overtime, be the boss's wife. Worked for me."
Heidi replied with a string of heart emojis and a single, scandalized, "No way."
I looked up at the skyline, at the streetlights and the small apartments, at the cafe where we would soon meet, and I smiled.
This is the story of how a single clumsy text and a thousand little mercies built a life that was as simple and as daring as soup and a coat handed over without fanfare.
The End
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