The Boss Project by Vi Keeland

I covered my laugh with my hand. “Oh shit. And that nurse now has a cast that matches Kitty’s.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

I sat down at the table across from Merrick. His eyes fell to my chest and lingered, causing me to look down. Shit. I’d forgotten to put on a bra. It was warm in my bedroom, but the kitchen window was wide open, and the temperature change had my nipples peaked against my thin T-shirt.

Merrick cleared his throat and looked away. “Anyway, Kitty asked me to ask you if you would mind bringing her some monkey bread. I don’t know what that is, but she said you’d know.”

I smiled. “It was my grandmother’s specialty. It’s sort of like a cinnamon bun, but made into a cake. My grandmother made it with southern-style biscuits and loads of sticky cinnamon-sugar icing. Not exactly healthy, but everyone loved it, especially Kitty.”

“Where do we get some?”

“I make it.” I stood and walked over to the fridge. “It doesn’t take very long. If she has all the ingredients, I can make the buns and then hop in the shower while they cook.” I started to pull out things I’d need. “It looks like she only has one stick of butter, and I’ll need more than that.”

“Make me a list. I’ll run to the store.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Not at all.”

“Okay.” I finished searching the cabinets and wrote down three things I needed. “I’ll get in the shower while you’re gone to save time.”

He nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”

A little while later, we were back in the kitchen together. I tossed the biscuit ingredients into a bowl and started to whisk. “Can I ask you something?”

“No.”

I turned to look at Merrick. He grinned. “I’ve learned that whenever you say, ‘Can I ask you something?’, it means you want to get inside my head.”

“I think you’re exaggerating.”

He sipped his second cup of coffee. “I’m not. But I was teasing. What do you want to ask?”

“Last night you said you’d had a bad experience with therapy. Why do you feel it didn’t work out? I’m not asking to pry into your problems but to understand your experience in a clinical way.”

Merrick rubbed along the rim of his coffee cup a moment. “I’m not sure you can fix things the patient doesn’t perceive as broken.”

“Are you referring to Amelia or yourself?”

He shrugged. “I don’t even know anymore. To be really honest, it was my idea to go to couple’s therapy, but I didn’t feel like we needed therapy. I mostly did it because I was hoping someone could fix Amelia. She was the type of person you could only get so close to or get to know so much. She had a wall she kept up. I guess I thought the therapist could help break it down or something.”

“Was she receptive to therapy?”

Merrick shook his head. “In hindsight, I think she was doing the same thing as I was—going so the therapist could fix me.”

“She thought you were broken?”

“Just like I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get closer to her, she couldn’t understand why I would want to.”

I nodded. “If you go into couple’s therapy hoping it will change your partner, that’s usually not a good sign. You have to be in the mindset that it will help you.”

Merrick tilted his mug at me. “Which is why I had an issue with my employees being required to go to therapy. They need to believe in it and want it for it to work.”

“True. But what we’re trying to accomplish in the office isn’t all that different from couple’s therapy. If you look at management as the people on the other side of the relationship with the employee, the goal is to get both parties to take ownership for things that happen and make changes to avoid a repeat in the future. Just like with couple’s therapy, if one side thinks it’s all the other side’s fault and are just waiting for them to change, it won’t work.”

Merrick nodded. “Okay. I get it. I’ll try to be more open. Can I ask you a question now?”

“Uh-oh. Does this mean you’re trying to get into my head?”

Merrick smiled. “I guess I learned from the best.”

I finished the biscuit mix and began spooning dollops into a muffin pan. “What’s your question?”

“You seem to get a solid grasp on people’s mental state so quickly. Yet you didn’t see what was going on with your fiancé?”

I shook my head. “Didn’t you ever hear about the plumber with leaky pipes?”

Merrick laughed. “I guess.”

“The bottom line is therapists are human. We’re trained to help others and look for certain things, but sometimes we don’t examine our own relationships enough.”

“How do you learn to trust again after going through what you did?”

“Are you asking for me or for you?”

Merrick shrugged. “I’m not sure anymore, doc.”

I smiled. “I think there’s always a risk in love. But when the right person comes along, we’ll feel like it’s worth taking that risk.”

Merrick looked into my eyes. My heart raced, and my belly felt all melty at the same time. But then his cell phone rang. He looked down. “It’s my grandmother. She probably wants to make sure I asked you about the monkey bread.”