Corpse Submission 3

Here is the next installment of my current story: Corpse.

At 7:00 pm Jonathon told the team to knock off for the night, that they could have the rest of the night off (it was not unlike Jonathon to make his team work until eleven or twelve, berating anyone who complained about the hours). “Make sure you guys are in here on time tomorrow, I want to go over the aerodynamics first thing tomorrow morning,” he reminded them as they left. It wasn’t necessary as everyone in the office knew that if anyone was going to be late in the morning, it would be Jonathon. First thing in the morning simply meant whenever Jonathon showed up, typically thirty minutes to an hour after everyone else had gotten their morning coffee and started with the days’ work.

While Jonathon refused to recognize them as so, his team was a very talented group. He drove them hard to meet deadlines, go beyond the norm to address issues and make every draft of an assignment as polished and professional as the final product. Jonathon was the driving force, refusing to accept anything less. He was a perfectionist and demanded it of his team. Once the man locked on to a project he made it his, and his team was responsible for getting it done the way he wanted it.

To a fault, Jonathon also refused to give up on anything. Many times designers were given a target and if they were able to hit the target, great. If not, they literally went “back to the drawing board” and started over. Jonathon was undaunted in belief that every problem could be overcome. He truly believed that time and effort could win out in the end, every time. It was this ideal that caused the most consternation for his team. Jonathon had no problem forcing extra hours, including weekends in order to figure out a problem facing the team. Failure to figure out a problem was not an option. You don’t give up, you don’t give in; you only give it more thought and figure it out. No exceptions.

It had been a short day at the office, not because there was nothing to do, but because Jonathon had promised Amy he would stop by this evening and spend some time with her. She was so demanding of him on the weekends that it infuriated him when she persisted on having him stop over at her place after work. He made note that he needed to have a talk with her about how things were going work once they got married. She needed to learn that he had to have his time and space. It wasn’t a whole lot for him to ask, or so he thought. There was nothing that frustrated him more than someone else dictating how he was going to spend his evening. She needed to understand that while he loved her, he had other things that he enjoyed doing and he wasn’t going to allow her to make demands that would keep him from doing them.

In actuality he didn’t have anything going on tonight. He was going to go to one of the local bars and watch the Red Wings game with his brother, but it had turned out that his brother couldn’t make it so it wasn’t a big deal. He wasn’t going to tell Amy that though. For all she knew he was still as pissed off now as he was on Sunday when she had insisted he swing by. He figured he could parlay this into something he wanted from her later on. Maybe he could use this to skip out on another boring meal with his future in-laws?

Amy would be considered a real catch for just about anyone but Jonathon. To him she simply served her purpose. She was beautiful, smart and independent, yet she was wholly infatuated with Jonathon. He had met her at a post game party when she was a freshman at the University of Michigan and he was a senior at GMI. He had never intended on starting a relationship with her. He had spent the night trying to get her to come back to his parent’s house with him and she had resisted. The farthest he got was having breakfast with her at 3:00am at a local greasy spoon before she gave him her phone number and made him promise to call her.

Normally he wouldn’t put that much of an effort into scoring with a girl, but Amy was different. She came across as the girl next door who was just starting to explore her adult life. That appealed to Jonathon’s sense of conquest and he decided then and there that he would have her.

It took six dates for Jonathon to finally attain his goal. She had given herself to him in the back seat of his Dad’s Cadillac and professed her love for him the same night. Jonathon had rolled his eyes as he was on top of her, thinking how sad it was that woman always had to relate love with sex. He didn’t feel any guilt telling her that he loved her too, knowing that this was just a game and he would do whatever it took to win the game.