And I had tried. I’d told myself it was part of the job. That being a good assistant meant you had to know your boss enough to anticipate his thoughts. So I’d tried to mine him for anything I could use to get a bead on the man who paid my salary. My efforts had not produced much. For fuck’s sake, it took six months for me to even realize he was half Dominican and that only happened because I brought some breakfast to the office—mashed plantains with fried cheese and salami, my ultimate comfort food. Natasha—his other assistant—recognized the DR staple and commented that Theo’s mother was Dominican. When I asked him why he hadn’t mentioned it, all excited that we had something in common, he looked down his infuriatingly straight nose at me and told me that not everyone had to act like a walking, talking ad for Dominicans in New York.

See? Asshole.

The annoying thing was that despite Theo being a broody prick to me at all times, everyone in the office loved him. It seemed that a charming, warm, funny Theo Anibal surfaced regularly, as long as I wasn’t around. Natasha had been working with the Ganas family since he was a teen and basically worshipped the ground he walked on. But I had never seen any evidence of this lovable version of Theo. What I regularly got was a scowling despot—no, that was not too harsh—who didn’t even deign to make eye contact with me.

That first Christmas after I started as his PA, when I still thought I was working for a sentient human, not an evil droid encased in an insanely buff skin suit, I naively left a bottle of my abuela’s ponche on his desk with a very festive red ribbon tied around the neck. I even attached a little sprig of artificial mistletoe with my glue gun. It was adorable and sure, I might’ve been trying to score some points, but that ponche is the fucking nectar of the gods. It is extremely sought-after in all of Corona, Queens. How was I supposed to know the only person with Caribbean blood running through their veins that didn’t rock with ponche was Theo?

I still squirmed remembering that morning when I watched my boss walk into his office, stand in front of his desk for a full minute then walk right back out with the tip of the bottle pinched between his two fingers like it was an active explosive. And because sometimes I was that dense I smiled, thinking he was coming to gush about the present, and blurted out, “Don’t try it on an empty stomach it’s got a lot of rum!”