The Ignored by Bentley Little - (ebook by Undead) Page B

thought about that. I did love her and I knew she loved me, but we
never used those words. Or at least we hadn’t for quite some time. We’d said
them at first, but strangely enough, though I’d told her that I loved her, I
wasn’t sure at the time if I meant it. I’d said it, but the words had seemed
hollow and clich�d, almost false. The first time, it had been more of a hope
than an admission, and I felt no different after than before. There’d been no
surge of joy or relief, only a vague sense of unease, as though I had lied to
her and was afraid I’d be found out. I’m not sure how she felt, but for me
“love” was a transitional word, an acceptable way to escalate the relationship
from boyfriend/girlfriend to live-in lovers. It had been necessary, and not
necessarily true.
    After we moved in together, I stopped saying it.
    So did she.
    But we did love each other. More than before. It was just that… it
wasn’t the way we’d imagined it. We enjoyed each other’s company, we were
comfortable together, but when I came home after work I didn’t rip off her
clothes and throw her on the kitchen floor and rape her then and there. She
didn’t greet me wearing nothing but a G-string and a smile. It wasn’t the
intense passionate romance we’d been promised by books and movies and music and
TV. It was nice. But it was not all-encompassing, not constantly exciting.
    We didn’t even make wild passionate love after an argument, the way we
were supposed to.
    We made love that night, though, before going to sleep, and it was good.
It was so good that I wanted to tell her that I loved her.
    I wanted to.
    But for some reason I didn’t.

 
 
FIVE
     
     
    At work, my duties became more substantive. I don’t know why this was,
whether my success with previous assignments had proved me capable of handling
more difficult chores, or whether word came down from on high that I should be
pulling my weight and earning my salary by doing real work. Whatever the reason,
I was given first one press release to write, then another, and then a full
overview for a set of previously written instructions for something called FIS,
the File Inventory System.
    Stewart made no comment when I turned in the first press release, a
two-page piece of unabashed hype modeled after a press release of his own. I
attempted to be a little less Madison Avenue in the second release, putting
forth the positive attributes of the product in a more objective, journalistic
manner. Again, no comment.
    The overview was harder to write. I was supposed to describe what the
File Inventory System accomplished and how it worked without getting bogged down
in too much technical detail, and it took me nearly a week to finish it. When it
was done, I made a copy on the Xerox machine and took it over to Stewart, who
told me to leave it on his desk and get out of his office.
    An hour later, he called.
    I picked up the phone. “Hello. Documentation. Bob Jones speaking.”
    “Jones, I have some things I want to add to your FIS overview. I’m going
to mark up the copy you gave me and let you type in the additions.”
    “Okay,” I said.
    “I’ll look it over one more time after you’re finished. I have to
approve it before we send it on to Mr. Banks.”
    “All right. I’ll—” I began.
    The phone clicked as he hung up.
    I sat there listening to the dial tone. Bastard, I thought. I replaced
my handset in the cradle and looked down at the original copy of the overview on
my desk. It was strange that he would even call to tell me something like that.
It didn’t make sense. If he was going to correct my work, why didn’t he just do
it and order me to type in his revisions? Why had he even called me with this
song and dance? There was a reason for this, I knew, but I could not figure out
what it was.
    Derek was looking at me. “Watch your ass,” he said.
    I was not sure if that was a threat or a warning—it was impossible to
tell