Lockdown with My Billionaire Boss - Sloane Peterson

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The Before Days

I’ve started thinking of that age as “The Before Days.”

It really wasn’t all that long ago, but it kinda feels like a lifetime at this point, doesn’t it? It’s like it was a completely different era.

Back when you could go out in public. Back when you could shop, go to restaurants, see a movie, go to a football game- not that I was all that sorry to see sports go. I never did personally understand the appeal...

Back when you could risk a single cough in the middle of a grocery store, and everyone didn’t suddenly turn around and glare at you with the evil eye. Back when you could make a trip to that same store, with the reasonable expectation that they would have an ample supply of personal bathroom tissue in stock for you to purchase, without having to fistfight another ten or fifteen customers for it.

God, I miss those days...

It’s strange, isn’t it, that those are the things we miss? How mundane everything was. How our boring, day-to-day lives were allowed to be just that- boring, day-to-day lives. We might have wished for some added excitement every now and again, but we never could have guessed what was on the horizon for us.

Could we?

Who knows, maybe if we’d been paying attention we would have seen the signs all along. Maybe we could have been prepared for it. Thinking back now, I’m starting to wonder whether that might be true, but I’m still not sure whether the past me would have believed the present me if I tried to go back in time and warn myself about all of this. I might have been more inclined to go and check myself into a psych ward, if anything.

The pattern of my life had seemed so steady, so consistent for so long, that it was unthinkable to me that my future would end up diverging in so severe a fashion as it did. And not just in the way that you’re probably thinking, either…

But maybe I should pause and rewind a little bit before I get into all of that.

I guess as decent a place to start as any is back during The Before Days, pretty early on in the New Year. My boring, mundane life was about as boring and mundane as it always was, save for one important exception- I’d just been broken up with by the man I’d been dating for the past year and a half.

Dennis was- well, he was fine. He was about as boring as I was. Boring face. Boring haircut. Even the way he talked was boring. I don’t mean to say he was unattractive or anything like that, just that he was monumentally unexceptional. He represented stability in my eyes, though. He was sort of middle-of-the-road ambitious- he wasn’t going to be the next president of the United States, or fly a mission to the moon. But he was reliable enough, with a steady, on-track career. And if you’d been brought up like I was, always making plans for ten, twenty, thirty years into the future, “on-track” was all you really cared about in a man.

And that’s really the key word, I think. “On-track.” My parents had pressured me a lot growing up. I did everything by the books. I envisioned my life as it would be far into the future, giving little thought to my present day needs or desires. Hell, for that matter I don’t even know if you could say I had present day needs or desires, seeing as how everything I aspired to was specifically pursued to bring me some future happiness, some far-off contentment in a more mature age of my life, which I simply had to trust would end up coming to me in time.

It’s not like I totally believed that a person could live their life like clockwork, but I think my breakup with Dennis was the moment that first shattered my faith in the idea that a person is in any way in control over the direction of their own life.

“This isn’t working out,” he announced without preamble one night as we were eating at a Japanese restaurant, his beady gray eyes fixed down at his plate.

“Here, you’re just holding them wrong,” I said, misinterpreting, and reaching for the chopsticks in his hand to correct the way he was gripping them.

I’d no sooner touched him than he pulled his hand away, and I looked up in surprise. He shook his boring, handsome face at