Corpse Submission 4

And the story continues...

To him this was a great accomplishment and while he normally used the women he dated and then moved on, this was different. There was a lot to gain from being around Amy. She was beautiful, but beyond that she had a charisma that made people take notice. She was the perfect accessory for Jonathon and while he didn’t consider her a trophy wife that was exactly what she was. She would do the one thing he wanted her to: she would make him look even better.

He also found that she had other things to offer. She was a motivated student and had plans of her own, wanting to go into physical therapy. She came from an affluent family herself, so she had an appreciation for money. She understood the importance of hard work, being well taught by her parents and that appealed to Jonathon. The most important trait however was as much a bane as it was a boon.

Amy was madly in love with Jonathon and this simply annoyed the hell out of him. On the other hand, this infatuation made her completely subservient to him. He knew better than to openly exploit this however. He knew he could make demands of her (like the time he made her cancel her vacation to the Bahamas with her parents in order for her go to his five year high school reunion with him) and while she whined and fussed about it, she always gave in to his demands.

She was also very accepting of Jonathon’s career. She knew that he was serious about making a good living and openly accepted it. This made it easy for Jonathon to have women on the side because he could use his job as an excuse whenever he needed to and Amy never questioned him.

The relationship with Amy worked out well and Jonathon found that he could certainly live with the arrangement. He lived sixty miles away from her so his independence was never really in jeopardy yet she was close enough to him that he could go down and see her when he felt like it.

Everything worked out well as Jonathon graduated and got his job as a design engineer. He worked while Amy went to school while she wished they could spend more time together, he insisted that their relationship could not get in the way of her education. She cried when he suggested they take some time off because he felt that with him moving back down to Detroit, that he would take up too much of his time.

This simply cemented Amy’s dedication to Jonathon. He made her a deal: he would visit her on weekends but during the week he would concentrate on his job and she would concentrate on school. “I am not a selfish person, Amy,” he remembered telling her, “I love you so much, but I could never come between you and your career. I know how much it means to you.”

With Amy out of the way, Jonathon could concentrate on work and not worry about having a boat anchor like Amy holding him back.

It wasn’t until two years later that Charles Gant, an executive in logistics hinted to Jonathon that every successful businessman had a wife. It made a person look more stable, less power hungry. Gant was a thirty year employee and told Jonathon in confidence that he understood what he was doing, but that he was losing his identity.

“Find yourself a good woman and marry her,” Gant had told him in the elevator one morning. “A woman at home, a few pictures of the wife and kids on your desk, a coffee mug with ‘I love Daddy’ on it makes people think you are working hard for something other than yourself. Right now you seem to be motivated by nothing more than power. You need to quit being so damned mechanical and start showing the big wigs that there is a person under all that intensity.”

That evening Jonathon drove to her apartment, took Amy to a nice Greek restaurant in downtown Detroit and proposed to her. He had been so intent on taking the advice from Gant that he didn’t even buy a ring. He gave her the excuse that he wanted her engagement ring to be perfect and that they would go out that weekend and pick one out.

“I’ve loved you since the day I met you Amy, and I realized today just how sad my life really is. I’ve allowed my job to dictate how we should live our lives and I know you’ve been thinking the same thing. I accept that you want an education, and you want a career, but I need you, and I need you to make room in your busy life for me.” He had rehearsed that speech a dozen times before he recited it to her.

Amy simply nodded and cried. When he asked her to marry him she burst into tears and threw her arms around him, repeating, “Yes, yes, yes,” over and over again until he had to peel her arms out from around his neck.

Since that day he had been annoyed by her constant prattle about the wedding. “What colors should we have? I’ve always wanted traditional colors but I really love a pale pink. Would you be upset if my bride’s maids wore pink dresses? I wouldn’t ask the guys to have any pink in their tuxes, although a pink rose corsage would look really pretty. What do you think Jonathon?”

In the end he just gave in to whatever she wanted. This was her wedding and frankly he didn’t really care, he just wanted to get it over with. He knew he couldn’t tell her that though, so that’s how he found himself pulling in to her apartment complex tonight. She wanted him to be there when a friend of her mother came over and talked to them about wedding cakes. So rather than go to the bar to catch the Wings’ game, he was going over to Amy’s.