By the time I started wondering whether my manager could become my boyfriend, we'd already slept together a few times. I liked him. Then I heard he'd also slept with two other women who worked at the bar, and something that had felt fairly simple stopped feeling that way.
I'm 22, and I work as a bartender. He's 44. After we close at 10 p.m., the staff are allowed two free drinks. Those drinks have given me a chance to get to know the people I work with beyond whatever needs doing during a shift. That's how he and I got closer. We hit it off, and eventually we slept together.
It wasn't just a single night, either. We've kept sleeping together, and somewhere in that arrangement I've started to like him in a way that makes me wonder what comes next. Sex is something we've actually shared. A relationship is something I'm still trying to work out whether I can even picture with him.
The part about the other women came through work gossip. One is 20 and still works with me. The other used to work here; I don't know her age. I assume she's around mine because she was a bartender, but that's an assumption, not something I've confirmed. I haven't been given a reliable account of when these things happened or what those connections meant.
Still, hearing it changed the question in my head. Before, I was thinking about the two of us. Now I'm wondering whether this is familiar territory for him: getting close to a younger woman at work, having sex, and leaving it there. That's a possibility I'm worrying about, not an explanation he's given me.
The age difference is part of that worry. I keep coming back to the fact that he's twice my age, and that the one other woman's age I actually know is close to mine. I wonder what draws him to women this much younger. But I don't know whether those few pieces of information tell me anything definite about his preferences, let alone his intentions toward me.
He's also my manager, which means this isn't someone I can neatly keep separate from my working life. The place where we got to know each other is also the place where other people know things about him, or think they do. My private uncertainty has a workplace attached to it.
I've had sex before, but I've never had a proper boyfriend. That distinction matters to me. I'm not trying to understand a first sexual experience; I'm trying to understand the possibility of a first relationship. I don't have much experience of how two people move from sleeping together to being together, or how they discover that only one of them wants to.
For now, the part I can speak for is mine: I like him, and I'm interested in more. I don't know whether he sees the same possibility. We've slept together a few times. I still don't know whether he wants to date me.
