Hello again, faithful readers. I decided to write something lighter than my normal story, something a little lighthearted and fun, rather than the darkness that usually swallows up my stories. Strange for me, I know, but bear with me. It is an all human story, obviously, and it is just a silly little idea that has struck me. Like 'Innocence or Lack Thereof', its going to be a short story. Maybe this is the story you read after IOLT, seeing as that is incredibly sad. This one should lighten you up. I hope you enjoy it. Tell me what you think!

your humble author

"Frank, you cannot be serious. I am a reporter, a journalist, I report the news. This," I said, holding up the latest edition of what my editor in his endless state of being convoluted thought I would be working on, "is not the news."

"Maybe not, but I need a copy editor for this section, and you are the only person who does not currently have a story to work on or something they are already writing. You are the staff member I have free. Not to mention I know what I perfectionist you are. Alice will be on sabbatical for six months and I need someone over whose shoulder I don't find myself needing to look constantly."

Frank stared at me. He knew I hated this. Alice, my best friend, had loved being copy editor for this section. The idea of looking this over every day gave her a tiny thrill; she loved the idea that what she was doing might be helping people find love. She thought that everyone should be as happy as she and Jasper were, married for two years, together for almost eight, just about to give birth to her first child. She wanted to help people find that happiness.

That's right; Alice was the copy editor for the personal ads.

"I'm begging you Frank, anything but this. I will work wedding announcements; I will work obits, but please don't make me do this." I was begging now.

"Bella, Alice made me promise to have you work on this when she was on sabbatical. You know how she is, and pregnant to boot. She wouldn't take no for an answer. She threatened bodily harm, and in her condition I thought she was likely to kill me and go into labor doing it. I had to say yes. And besides that, everything I said was true, you are a perfectionist. You can't hand in an assignment without needing to proofread it seventeen times before you give it to me. And because of that, I know you can handle being the copy editor for this. If you do this well, when Alice comes back, I might bump you up to some higher priority stories. If you can prove to me you are responsible enough to handle them," he bribed. I frowned and furrowed my brow. It wasn't fair, him using the idea of my getting more exciting stories to pursue against me. He knew I had been dying to get some real, important journalism in. But I sighed. If at the end of six months, I could get better stories and it would make Alice happy and less likely to throw a fit at me like she had been known to do, I would be the copy editor for the stupid personal ads, no matter how ridiculous it seemed to me.

I sighed, but agreed. Frank smiled at me and I glowered back but said nothing else before shuffling off unhappily to Alice's office. That was one perk of this new assignment; I was going to get my own office. It was the only perk. There was a letter addressed to me on the desk. When I opened the envelope, it was from Alice, explaining the job to me. She had today's copy already set up, the copy for the next day's run would be brought to me at noon every day for me to look over and approve, at which point I would pass it on to my immediate superior, the editor for the entire classifieds section to be run. All I had to do was make sure all the p's and q's were straight; no one's grammar was too atrocious to be put into the paper.

Basically, Alice spelled it out to be a job that played on my almost unhealthy attention to detail and obsession with perfect grammar and spelling. Alice knew me too well.

It was only ten in the morning when I made it to Alice's former office, and so I knew I had about two hours before my first assignment arrived. I decided in that time to clean Alice's office for her. She was not what I would call tidy. Her desk had previous copies of her work spread over it, letters, pens, paperclips, highlighters, pictures, notes about successful matches made through the personal ads. It took me the whole two hours to organize her office, but I successfully filed away every last paper and put each and every paperclip and staple where it belonged.

Just as I was done organizing, a knock came to the door of the office. I called for whoever it was to come in, and a slight female figure entered holding a stack of papers.

"Hi, you must be Bella," the woman said, laying down the papers on the desk before me. "I'm Angela. This is the copy for tomorrow's paper. If anything needs to be changed, just red pen it and we can fix all your corrections in no time. Is there anything else you need?"

"I would kill for a cup of coffee," I said with a joking smile. Angela nodded.

"Cream, sugar?" she asked. I looked at her questioningly.

"I was joking, Angela," I assured her. She laughed a little.

"Did Alice not tell you? I was her assistant, which means that now I'm yours until she comes back. So if you need a coffee, I can get you one. If you need help finding something, I could help you, although it looks like you did a very thorough job of reorganizing her office, so I'm not sure you'll need help on that front. But anything you need, Bella, I can help you."

"Why did Alice need an assistant?" I inquired. She smiled and shrugged.

"She convinced Frank that I was necessary. You know what a pushover Frank can be, especially when Alice is trying to get her way. She saved my job though, I was the assistant to a copy editor for the lifestyle section, but that editor left the paper, and when her replacement showed up, he told Frank he didn't need me. I was going to be fired. But Alice and I were friends, and she told Frank she was more than in need of an assistant. After some wheedling, Frank agreed to keep me on as Alice's assistant. She has even gotten me a raise in the last year."

"You have to love Alice, she can be a force of nature when she wants something," I agreed. She smiled.

"But, I will leave you to your work. Alice told me you are meticulous and will probably take your time reviewing things. Would you like a bagel or a muffin with your coffee, Bella?"

I laughed.

"If you got me a coffee with milk and two sugars and a blueberry muffin, I would be eternally grateful," I told her. She smiled, nodded and then left the room. Fifteen minutes later she returned with exactly what I asked her for and said to just ask if I needed anything at all.

As I sipped on my coffee, perfectly mixed with credit to Angela, I began to look over the copy for the personals that were to run the next day. Most of them were from men and women from their late forties to their early sixties. Every once in a while was an ad from a man or woman in their early thirties, but those were rare. And to the credit of the people who set up the personals and the people who wrote them before they were given to the people who now worked directly beneath me they werent written all too awfully. It took me about two hours to look through the pages of copy given to me, which would turn into about four pages of personals in the classifieds section. On Sundays it would jump to about eight pages, which would mean a little more work for me.

I red penned every page, making the corrections necessary to perfect this set of copy. At three, I called for Angela and returned the copy to her. She looked at the papers I handed her, which were riddled with red marks, more than Alice's usually were I'm sure and then back at me.

"I guess I shouldn't be surprised. She told me you were a perfectionist," Angela said flipping through the pages. She smiled up at me.

"I'll have this back to you within the hour," she assured me. I nodded and went back to my office to eat my muffin.

Angela was incredibly punctual, and almost exactly an hour later she returned the copy to me with every correction I had made fixed. She even returned the original copy with the new copy so I could compare them. There was a reason Alice had given her a raise―she was good. With everything I needed fixed having been done; I left the office and went directly to the office of my immediate superior.

I knocked on the door once before opening the door and coughing loudly. The editor for the classifieds looked up and beamed at me.

"Alice warned me you would be taking her place while she was away."

"I sure am, Emmett. Now I have the copy for the personal ads, would you like me to leave it on your desk?" I asked. He nodded.

"Sit down, stay a while, Bella. I haven't talked to you since Rosalie hosted Alice's baby shower a few months ago. How have you been?"

"I've been making it, you? How is Rosalie?" I asked.

"Oh we have been just fine; now that Alice is having a baby she has been seriously considering getting pregnant, too. I've always seen myself as a father; I could handle some rug rats."

I smiled. Emmett was a huge man, tall and solid and imposing if you didn't know he was really just a big teddy bear. He would be an excellent father.

"But what about you, what does 'I've been making it' mean? Why don't you come out with us anymore?"

"Emmett, one experience with you four, downing too many shots of tequila and losing a high heel after table dancing was more than enough for me."

Emmett's booming laughter filled his small office. I smiled along with him but mentally I shuddered. Emmett, Rosalie, Alice and Jasper had convinced me to come out to a bar with them one Friday night, sighting my need to 'relax and have a little fun'. The night had ended with me spraining my ankle when my heel broke while I was doing a rather elaborate table dance to White Snake's 'sweet cherry pie'. Counting that and the debilitating hangover the next day, I vowed that tequila would never again enter my body, especially not in the form of the six shots I had taken that night.

"That is fair. But I don't think there will be much of that in the near future, Bella. Alice just having had a baby and Rosalie looking to get pregnant, big nights out drinking aren't really in the cards."

I nodded.

"If something tamer, like dinner, is involved, I will be more than happy to come see you all," I assured him. He laughed again and nodded. Before he could say anything else his phone rang. He held up a hand for me to wait and then picked it up. He had a short conversation with someone and then hung up the phone.

"Well, as much as I love to catch up with you, that was my boss. I'm going to have to go collect the other copy from the other editors. But I am going to talk to Rosalie about having you over for dinner. I'll talk to you soon, alright?"

"Sounds delightful," I said sardonically. As I left the room, I heard his laughter follow me out.

I had been in personals for a month, and every day of work seemed to be less interesting than the last. It had gotten so boring that I almost wanted to cry. I had reworked the layout; I had gotten a head start on the Sunday edition so we wouldn't be backed up and scrambling to finish on time. I had even taken on minor editorial work from other sections to fill my time. But the time before and after I finished my work were miserably dull. I had nothing to do.

Angela joked with me that I finished going over the copy in less time than Alice had but I always had more corrections than Alice did. I couldn't imagine what she must have been doing to fill her time with this copy that I wasn't already doing.

I didn't want to bother Alice with my queries. She had given birth to her daughter, Lillian, no more than a week after I became her temporary replacement. I wanted to give her a reprieve from working, not bombard her with it when she should have been bonding with her baby. But I had to ask someone. Emmett was the editor for all of classifieds so he had plenty of work to do, and all the other sections did stories that required more actual doing than mine. Other than the office and oh so helpful assistant Angela, I couldn't find a positive to the job I had taken on. Some people would have been happy to not have to do work and have the opportunity to goof off all day long. I on the other hand hated having time when I was supposed to be working that I had to fill with meaningless drivel instead of something to justify the pay I was earning. I knew I was a rare commodity, and yet I was still desperate to fill my time.

And so on one particularly uneventful Monday, the Sunday rush too far away to start preparing for, the work for the day already have been done and still hours before deadline, I called Alice on her home phone. When she picked up her voice was soft, but she sounded happy.

"Hi Bella, I'm so glad you called. I know you said you wanted to give me some time to recover, and believe me I appreciate it. But I think if you wanted to come over and see Lillian now, you could. We are both okay to have visitors," she assured me. I had gone to see Alice in the hospital, of course, because she was my best friend and it was duty to be there for her. But after that I promised her I would let her have some time to recover from having her daughter and let her and Jasper have some time together as a new family. She had been grateful, and I told her to call me whenever she thought she was ready to have anyone over.

"Are you sure, Alice? I don't want to come over there if you aren't ready to see people," I said. I heard her laugh softly.

"I absolutely want you to come over. In fact, you should come over tonight after work. I will make Jasper make us dinner and we can catch up. I want to hear how work is going," she told me.

"That is actually one of the things I was calling you about, Alice. I just don't know―"

"Bella, oh I'm so sorry, but Lily is crying. Can we talk about this when you come over tonight, around seven?"

"Sure, no problem, Alice," I said, defeated. She thanked me and quickly hung up to go see to her baby and I sighed. I wasted the rest of the day taking work from Emmett's desk and going over it for him so I could at least pass the time in something other than utter boredom. When the day was over and I could finally go home, I said goodbye to Angela, gathered my things and dropped off Emmett's work in his office. He was on the phone with his wife and so he merely mouthed 'thank you' and I smiled and left.

I went home, changed out of my work clothes, read a little in my current book and then went over to Alice's at seven as I said I would. She greeted me with smiles, as did Jasper. Lillian was asleep in her basinet, but she was just as adorable as I remembered her being. Alice said she would be up in about a half an hour to eat, but Jasper had made us dinner—homemade macaroni and cheese with garlic bread and for me a large glass of red wine. We ate and caught up. I asked her about the baby, which she told me all sorts of stories of the terrifying first days of parenthood. She loved the baby, and so did Jasper. They were happy.

Almost on cue Lily began to cry from the other room and Jasper went to get her so Alice didn't have to get up. She looked a little tired, but otherwise outrageously fantastic to have just had a baby three weeks prior. He put the baby in her arms and she began to breast feed her unabashedly, saying it was 'nothing either of you haven't seen before'. We all laughed.

"So how is having my old job?" she asked excitedly, as though she expected me to gush over it. I smiled politely.

"To be honest, Alice, I find myself bored throughout the day. There isn't enough to do. I get done with the copy in a few hours and after that I don't have anything else to do. I've cleaned your office; I even do some of Emmett's work. I just don't see how you could possibly fill all your time with that," I confessed. Alice smiled a knowing smile like she had some information that I didn't.

"Do you actually read them, Bella?"

"Of course I read them."

"I mean do you pay attention to what they say, to who these people are? They are looking for love in one of the most admittedly cliché ways possible. But they put themselves out there. You have to admire courage like that. But if you are still unhappy with it, try to shake things up, make it different. If that doesn't work, well, it's only a few more months and maybe you could spend your extra time giving yourself a manicure or planning a redecoration of your apartment."

I spent another hour with Alice, Jasper and Lillian before I decided to head out for the night. I spent a good long time that night and the day after trying to think of some way to make things different in the personals that would still get across what was necessary and make it a little more interesting.

When Angela brought in the next day's copy for me, I stopped her before she left.

"Angela, I'm trying to figure something out, and you have worked in this section long enough to tell me if this is a good or a bad idea. I was thinking, to shake things up a little, give it some new life and make it a little less cliché, perhaps on Sundays, when we have the most room for personals, we could do it a little differently than we used to. Instead of hundreds of tiny ads, perhaps there could be a full blown profile, like they have on the dating websites. That way each person could give a little more information on themselves than just their age and what they look like and what they want. It would be a way to make each person a little more interesting, and if we split it twelve ads a page instead of thirty or forty, we would still have the money to run them and it would just be…something different."

Angela looked at me for a good long moment without saying anything, her expression unchanging.

"Forget it," I said eventually, "it was a stupid idea."

"No! Oh, no, Bella, I think it is a fantastic idea! We should run something about that in tomorrow's personals that from now on Sundays will be structured differently. I think it is a fantastic idea. So many people are using dating websites, if we bring in an element of that, people might be more likely to go through us and place an ad in the paper instead. Run it by Frank of course, but I think it's a fantastic idea."

I smiled and she smiled back, closing the door behind herself as she left the office. I called Frank as soon as she was gone, and much to my surprise, he agreed with Angela. He thought it was a great idea and would make things different enough to maybe attract more people to place ads. I was glad that what I had come up with wasn't a flop at least in the eyes of the paper. And so when I went over the copy, I made a note to create an announcement about the new Sunday format in the final copy. Angela returned it to me within the hour as she always did.

The next day, we were flooded with responses. People loved the idea, and had begun sending in their readymade profiles. By the time Saturday morning came around we had hundreds, far more than we could possibly print. I came in early because it was going to be my job to decide whose ads went in and whose we were going to have to print the following week or save for another time. I spent hours sifting through the ads, and trying to do what Alice said and 'really read them'. I had gone through every new batch each day we got them, along with my usual copy work, and had found the ones I liked the most, the ones that seemed the most honest, and set them aside to a 'maybe' pile so I could look at them again today. I had fifty four in my 'maybe' pile and another seventy that we had gotten by the time I got to the office that morning. We could run about ninety ads, leaving room for the editor's note I wanted to include on the top about the response to the new Sunday layout and anyone whose ad hadn't made it to this week's paper.

I looked through the new ads first that morning and found another forty three I liked and added to my 'maybe' pile. I pared it down to exactly ninety when Angela knocked on my office door. It was about eleven in the morning, and I hadn't even begun to look them over or think about the order and layout they were going to go in.

"Bella, I have six more ads that got sent in this morning for the Sunday run. Do you want to look at them or should I just save them for next week?" she asked. I thought about it and then held out my hand. I might as well just look at them. She put them in my hand and then told me to call if I needed anything, like she always did.

The first five ads were nothing special, nothing I wanted to change my original plans for. More of the same—late forties to early sixties, same general hobbies with some random fact buried in there about them to make them different.

However, when I picked up the last ad, I knew almost immediately that my layout was going to be changed.

Since we are not supposed to give our real names, I will call myself The Doctor. With that all settled, I have to be honest and say I do not know why I am doing this. I do not date as often as my mother thinks a 'young, successful man' is supposed to, and to appease her with some form of effort, I am doing this. It costs less than joining a dating website but doesn't involve me going to a bar, so it is, in a word, perfect. But I am supposed to describe myself. I am about six feet tall; with green eyes and copper colored hair that does not ever do what I want it to, no matter how much I will it to. I am thirty one years old. I am a doctor working at a local hospital in the Children's Ward. I do not like piña coladas or getting caught in the rain, but I do love going to the symphony, cooking and eating fine Italian food or just ordering a pizza and watching a movie. I'm a romantic in the most traditional sense of the word and I pride myself on being a gentleman. I would love to find a woman who is up for an adventure, whether that is cliff diving or just trying something new in the kitchen. I like a woman who is smart, who loves to laugh and doesn't take herself too seriously. If you think you are that woman, please, feel free to respond and make me, and my mother, very happy.

I found myself laughing throughout his ad, and smiling when he mentioned being a gentleman. Too few men were these days, in my opinion. I wasn't looking for a monk or someone who would treat me like a porcelain doll, but it would be nice to find someone to open doors and pull out chairs. I almost didn't want to run the ad, but knew that I couldn't possibly pass up putting this into the paper, with all the responses it would receive.

So I withdrew one of my previous choices and put this man's ad into the layout and then proceeded to edit them all for various mistakes or layout changes. The Doctor's was the only one I did not need to touch. I gave the finished to copy to Emmett in time for deadline and then I went home for the night, tired, but happy to have actually have done work. I had decided, for once in my career, to take a day off. I had gotten done the copy for Monday's run so I wasn't worried about the ads that were going to need to be done the next day, and so at the end of a very long week, I took Sunday off, slept in, and relaxed all day. It was nice, after a week so filled with work, for once, to have some time off. I had become unaccustomed to the demand of a job where I actually had things to do all day long. I had to do the day's copy edits every day, but before and after I was finished with that, I would look through the Sunday layout ads and put them into my 'maybe' pile. It had been a long, exhausting, but fulfilling week.

On Monday I walked into my office, refreshed and ready to start Tuesday's copy to find both Emmett and Frank sitting there.

I looked at them both inquisitively.

"Can I help you?" I asked nervously.

"Bella, do you know how many responses we have gotten to your Sunday personals?" Frank asked me. I shook my head. I had only just gotten in.

"One hundred and twenty," Emmett answered.

"But it was just yesterday," I said. But Frank handed me a large manila folder filled with responses to the ads put in yesterday. "That is not including the other ads that have been placed for next Sunday, or the regular personals that get sent in every day. The response to this idea has been tremendous. If it remains so impressive, we may have to expand personals on Sundays to a bigger section."

I gaped at him.

"You can't be serious! You want to expand it?"

"Well think about it, Bella. You are going to need room to print the new ads every Sunday, but also you will need room to print the responses to the ads posted the Sunday before. It only makes sense. See how it goes this Sunday, and if you do not have enough room, we will see what we can do about expanding your section."

"Emmett, are you on board with this?" I asked.

"Of course I am. We haven't had something to get such a tremendous response outside editorials or nasty letters in a very long time, not since I have worked here. If you are able to come up with something to spice up the classifieds section, be my guest."

I smiled. I could not believe this was happening. This had been just a random idea of mine, and it had become something far more than I thought it would be. As soon as they both left my office with words of congratulations, I called Alice. She commented on the new layout and how much she liked it and congratulated me. I made a promise to see her again soon, told her to give my love to Jasper and Lillian.

The next day I got another eighty responses to the ads placed on Sunday, along with every other day's regular ads and another fifty ads for this upcoming Sunday. The next day was almost exactly the same. I called Frank and Emmett and they agreed to look over the layout of classifieds to find room for the responses. By the end of the day, Frank called me back and said they couldn't push anything out of classifieds to make room. They were just going to expand it for me. We were getting double the space for our Sunday layout. I almost fainted.

It gave me a lot more room to look into the ads and responses, so I took every ad and looked them over again, knowing I had enough room for so much more than I originally planned. I went through the new ads we had and put some in the maybe pile, and then I went through the responses we had received so far. There were plenty of replies for the other people who had sent theirs in, but a surprising percentage, almost thirty percent when I counted them up, were for The Doctor. I was not surprised. I weeded through them all, and the more I read, the more disheartened I felt. Somehow, I felt a strange tugging that made me want to reply.

And at first, when the thought occurred to me, I cast it off as ridiculous. But as I read through ads from women who couldn't spell properly and didn't know the difference between 'your' and 'you're', I felt the tug getting stronger. It didn't make any sense. I had never met this man, I had never seen him, I knew very little about him, other than his being a doctor and apparently having some varied interests. And still I argued with myself about writing up a stupid ad; what would I say anyway? I told myself to sleep on it.

The next morning though, I knew what my answer would be. I had to do it. I didn't want to be thinking what if should I decide not to. So I sat down at my computer to write my own response to The Doctor.

In response to The Doctor—I argued with myself about replying to you, but in the end I could not help myself. I will call myself The Bookworm. I am about five foot six, with dark brown curly hair and brown eyes. I am twenty five years old. I agree with you about piña coladas and other clichés. I have never been to a symphony, but I love to cook, Italian and otherwise, and I cannot argue with pizza and a movie. I work at a newspaper and find it very interesting that you work with children. I love to read, drink good wine and swim when I can find the spare time. To be honest with you, as you have been so gracious as to be honest with us, I haven't dated in a while. The idea of your being a gentleman is truly what drew me to your ad, as well as your varied amount of hobbies or interests. I think a true gentleman is hard to come by. Although I should warn you, were we to go cliff diving I am sure it would end in some catastrophe for me, as I am incredibly accident prone. You seem a truly interesting person, and I think even if I am not your perfect woman, I would very much enjoy getting to know you so we could be friends if nothing else. If you are interested, please respond.

I looked at my handiwork, and of course went over it several times before saving it and then printing it and adding it to my pile of responses. I argued with myself that putting myself out in this response would do two things. The first of course would be giving me peace of mind. I had done what I dreamt of doing—I took a leap, took a risk. I would never sit and think to myself how I had wished I had sent in a damn response to the personal ad of some anonymous doctor. The second was that it made it easier for me to be impartial now. I knew that I had thrown myself into the ring along with whomever else, these other hopefuls that had gotten their attention caught just as I had. I wouldn't have to hate them if I knew that I had a chance just like they did.

So I did the regular copy every day until Saturday night and I picked what new Sunday ads to print, as well as the responses to run. It was the first sixteen page personals spread ever and I was simultaneously ecstatic and terrified. I had given Angela back my response along with the others in the middle of the pile hoping she wouldn't notice it or know it was me. I prayed no one knew it was me. If they thought that I was using this job to get myself a date I would never live down the shame.

But Angela didn't say anything when she flipped through the copy, nor did she say anything when she came back from dropping it off to Emmett. I was safe.

The next day I looked through the paper and admired the work I and the rest of the people who worked in personals had put through. I admired my new idea. And I found my response, along with the four others I had allowed myself to put into the layout. I reread what I wrote and thought for a moment that it sounded stupid. But in reality, there was nothing wrong with it, I was just being overly critical now that other people would be able to read it. I just had to remind myself that no one knew it was me.

Now, I told myself, I just had to wait to see if The Doctor would respond, and to whom.

As it turned out, I didn't have to wait long.

Silly, I know. Hope you liked it :)

(normal disclaimer applies, no copyright infringement is intended, I'm not stealing shit, just messing with it for a while, you know, the usual)