Vaporware by Richard Dansky

expression that I’d long since grown familiar with, then gotten weary of. It
was the look of “What am I going to do to Ryan for his own good,” as portrayed
by widened eyes, a mouth turned down into a concerned frown, and an
ever-so-slight head tilt to the right.
    “You
go,” I said, feeling myself falling into the steps of a familiar dance. “I want
to see if Eric's got any docs on the new project I can look at. You know, get a
head start on tomorrow.”
    “God,
you're bad at this corporate rah-rah shit,” she said, gently re-attaching her
hand to my arm and then closing it in a grip that told me she’d been studying
with fiddler crabs. Not-so-gentle pressure drew me down the hall and toward the
door. Leon was already there, holding it open and blessedly doing so without
comment. “We can do this one of two ways. Either you can say something stupidly
noble, which will piss me off enough to argue with you in the middle of what is
really looking like a shitty day for everyone, or you can just let me drag you
off peacefully.”
    “Those
are my only choices?” I asked, barely bothering to try to slow the pace.
Honestly, there wasn’t much point to it.
    Michelle
shook her head, hair going everywhere. “Not much of a choice, to be honest.
Either way, you end up at Montague’s, completely shitfaced, before lunch. The
only question is how long is it going to take to get you out the door.”
    I
looked at her, bemused. “Yeah, whatever. I’ll be fine.”
    In
response, she spun me, shoving far harder than someone her size should have
been able to and slamming me up against the wall. My head hit maybe an inch
from a framed poster celebrating one of our early games, a misbegotten
platformer starring an anthropomorphized vulture named Varney. It had tanked.I
had about six-tenths of a second to consider that before Michelle was up in my
face, furious with me. “You listen to me, Ryan Colter. You will not be fine. You
are not fine right now. You are having a really crappy day, and the best thing
I can do for you, as a friend, is take you someplace where you can shut your
brain off for a couple of hours and tell everyone how you really feel about
what just happened, because today you get a mulligan. Today, you can be a dick
and no one will call you on it. So even though you’d rather pretend to be noble
where everyone can see you, you might as well take advantage of this one time
offer and the fact that you actually have people in this office who care about
you.” Her volume had been rising as she went along, until by the end it was a
full-fledged shout. She stood there, red-faced, and glared at me. Somehow
during this exchange, her hand had moved from my arm to the front of my shirt.
It looked for all the world as if I were being mugged.
    “You’re
not supposed to care about me anymore, Shelly,” I said. “It’s very sweet, but—”
    She
slapped me. The crack of skin on skin echoed like a pistol shot, deafening in
the enclosed hallway. “You stupid son of a bitch,” she said, and took a step
back. “I don’t. Leon does.”
    And
she turned and walked away, out the open door, while I stood there and felt all
the eyes on me. Leon shot me a glance that said everything that needed to be
said, then let the door swing shut and walked down to the parking lot, a few
steps behind Michelle.
    “Ow,”
I said to nobody in particular and rubbed my cheek. It stung where she’d popped
me, and I was quite certain that the left side of my face was now fire-engine
red. “Brilliant,” I muttered and headed for my office. There was no sense in
heading home, not until my face got its usual pasty sheen back. With my luck,
Sarah would decide to come home for lunch, and explaining to her that I’d been
slapped at the office by an ex-girlfriend was simply not something I really
felt up to doing.
    Instead,
I figured, I’d get a head start on tomorrow’s work. I’d archive all of the Blue
Lightning documents and prepare the