Note: This is an absolutely true story. It is as accurate as a fallible human memory can be regarding something that happened 20 years ago. Consequently, there will most likely not be the amount of explicit, sexual detail that Literotica readers have come to expect. Oh well. But there is an important moral at the end of the story that I think everyone here at Literotica can agree with.
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My wife and I were married in '92. At that time Kat & I had known each other for 20 years, knew in fact everything there was to know about each other. I doubt a man and a woman have rarely, if ever, known as much about each other sexually without actually having had sex as Kat & I knew about each other. When I asked her to marry me, Kat had been living in Fairbanks, Alaska for ten years. She had an 8 year old son and had finally gotten a good handle on her manic/depression. Initially, the reason we decided to get married was so she could move to Las Vegas and continue her education and use my health insurance, something that she badly needed. But the first psychiatrist she saw (the only one available under my health plan) took her off all of the medication she had been on in Alaska. She plunged into a full-fledged depression. And being in Vegas it was natural for her to resort to self-medicating herself as she had in the past. And all of this was achieved at the price of a $125 a week. That was our co-pay for the psychiatrist. I'm really not sure how we survived the first few years. She was constantly struggling with substance abuse issues -- including alcohol -- and money was always tight.
But after 3 years of marriage we were finally able to afford our honeymoon -- a wonderful two week vacation. The first week the three of us went to Orlando, Florida and did the Disney World and Universal Studio theme park experience. We had a great time. Then we put her son on a plane to her parents and spent the next week just the two of us.
We went to the Antietam civil war battlefield and memorial (we were both serious civil war buffs) and stayed at a wonderful bed and breakfast where we enjoyed one of the most pleasurable and intimate periods of our marriage to that point.
Then we went to New York City. The only reason we could afford this trip was by taking a package deal from Holiday Inns. Unfortunately, that meant we couldn't actually stay in NYC -- the closest we could get was White Plains, New York, which meant having to take the train in to NYC. It never occurred to me there might be a problem with that (and I don't think it occurred to my wife either) but the first morning we took the train into NYC my wife hated it. HATED it!! Did I mention my wife was maniac/depressive? That one train trip turned her mood around 180 degrees. And it stayed that way the entire time we took in the sights of the city. Nothing perked her up. I suspect the whole time we were sightseeing she was dreading the return train trip. The one sight she kind of responded to was Central Park. But then we couldn't pass up seeing Strawberry Fields -- the Tribute area to John Lennon in Central Park right across from where he lived and was assassinated and that darkened her mood again. Her mood was so sour that we headed back to the hotel much earlier than I would have liked.
We had planned for us to go back to NYC that evening to see a Broadway musical I already had tickets for. But she flatly refused to get on the train again. She insisted I go see the musical alone and, being a dumb man, I went. I really shouldn't have gone -- I really didn't enjoy the show anyway! When I got back she was in bed asleep.
The next day there was no thought of going back to NYC. I had been in NYC once, years before we were married, and had loved every second of it. And I had really been looking forward to sharing it with her. But if I couldn't share it with her there was no point going alone -- I wouldn't have enjoyed it one bit.
Then two more problems surfaced. We were running low on money and had to be careful. And we were stuck. To change our plane tickets and go home earlier would have cost a lot of money. We simply had to sit tight in White Plains, NY and wait a couple of days for our scheduled return flight. All this made Kat's mood even worse.
And so, early in the afternoon of a Saturday -- the day before we were due to fly back to Vegas -- while sitting in our hotel room, reading books, not speaking to one another, my wife announced, somewhat defiantly, that she was going down to the hotel lounge for a drink. Alcohol was a major red flag for her and she knew it would alarm me. But she also made it crystal clear that she was going regardless.
By this time I was very concerned. I felt like our marriage was hanging by a thread and that we were at that stage where saying the wrong thing could easily escalate into a true catastrophe and I couldn't think of any right thing to say. The question was how much was my wife going to drink and how bad were things going to get. And what would I do then.
But much to my surprise she came back to the room fairly quickly. And she wasn't alone.