I've been retired for several years now, even though I'm barely 47. I was lucky, both in business and in the market. Like a lot of guys, one of the sacrifices I made (without realizing it at the time because I was so busy 'making a good life for us') was my marriage. From the start I'd told Mary that I didn't want kids. She agreed at the time, wholeheartedly. When we wed I was twenty five and she was twenty one.
About three years later she started talking about kids. I held my ground. In fact, without her knowledge, I had a vasectomy. I felt justified because she had agreed not to have children. The subject had caused quite a few arguments over the years but she eventually stopped talking about it.
By my fortieth birthday we were living in a great area in a five bedroom home she had picked out. She seemed to appreciate and enjoy the rewards of my work. It made it possible for her to lead a life of leisure: shopping, spas, lunches with her equally well off friends. I thought we were happy. We had sex several times a week, even then. And it was good sex, judging by my feelings and Mary's reactions.
Just before the Fourth of July the next year I came home from a three day business trip to Chicago to an empty house -- I mean empty. I learned from neighbors that Mary had hired movers to clean the place out. The only things left were my things and the appliances. Of course, other than the refrigerator where I found her note, she had no use for lowly appliances. We had help that did the cleaning and laundry.
The note explained that she had felt "unfulfilled" for years, racketa, racketa... Our life had become a cliché. She advised me to have my attorney contact her attorney and not to attempt any direct communication. She didn't say where she was going or if she was going alone. Then she told me the name of her lawyer. It wasn't even signed. I'd come to mean that little to her. I was stunned, to say the least. I settled with her and avoided paying spousal support. It cost me a bundle, but I was left with more than enough.
Anyway, all that is prologue, or maybe a 'pre-prologue'. The meat of this story starts two years later when I met Wendy. I'd been so badly burned by my marriage I'd shied away from serious relationships. I had female friends and 'fuck buddies', but I always broke things off when things started to drift toward exclusivity. I missed bareback sex, but I traded that pleasure for staying healthy.
Wendy was the cousin of the wife of a friend, Brad. I went to a barbecue at Brad's and we were introduced. She, like me, was divorced. Unlike me, however, she had kids: a stepdaughter of twenty nine and a son just turned twenty one. They were both out on their own, and in other parts of the country, so it didn't matter much. Wendy worked as an assistant to a local lobbyist on the state level.
For some reason, being around Wendy (she called me to go for a drink the next week after the barbecue and we started dating each other exclusively) hit my heart like a sledge hammer. When I was with her I felt light-headed and giddy. Yeah, yeah, I know. You don't have to make fun.
By the time I realized I was falling in love, it was too late. The feeling was so much more profound than I'd ever had with Mary, it was amazing. Brad didn't know what I was worth, since I never advertised it to anybody except my accountant. He knew I was well off because of my lifestyle, but had no clue to the reality. So I was pretty sure that Wendy wasn't after my money. From the way she dressed and spoke -- of overseas trips and other things, it seemed she had some bucks of her own anyway.
She was a tiger in bed and was eager to try new things. She was multi-orgasmic -- and let the whole world know it when she came. Her husband, she'd said, had been a 'once a week man' who climbed on did his business and climbed off. "I went a bit wild after we divorced," she confessed to me. "I had a stable of stupid studs who were only interested in my body. Of course, that was fine with me, since all I wanted was their dicks." Oh, that was another thing, Wendy was outspoken. In bed or out, she called a spade a spade. Sailors could have taken lessons from her.
Anyway, after we'd been seeing each other regularly for half a year, she consented to marry me when I asked. At our wedding I met Denise and Tom, Wendy's kids. They seemed accepting of me, a fact that was confirmed when Tom took me aside to say he was relieved his mother had finally settled down again. Tom was -- and still is -- an architect in San Francisco. He was unmarried at the time. Denise was married and a junior partner in an advertising firm in Chicago.
Denise, though not Wendy's biological daughter, behaved as if she was. By that I mean her gestures, expressions, and bearing (and swearing) were the echo of Wendy's. Nurture won out over nature in her case I guess, since Wendy had raised her from the age of seven. Physically Denise resembled Wendy not at all. Where Wendy had dark hair and complexion, Denise was fair and blonde. Where Wendy was a bit heavy, Denise was only a little bit broad from hips to knee.
Actually, that magnificent ass and her strong thighs were attractive to me. I guess she had what used to be called (in a complimentary sense) a 'pear shaped' figure. Where her hips met her thighs there was a slight angular break that I have always admired in a woman. At the reception my eyes kept scanning the crowd in the hope of catching her facing away from me so I could gaze at that ass. Oh, don't get me wrong, I paid mucho attention to my bride and she wasn't neglected. But even when Wendy and I danced, I would rotate us around to find my new stepdaughter, once removed.
Okay, so you get the idea by now. This has to be a story about something happening between Denise and me. You're right. Just after our third anniversary, two things happened almost simultaneously. The first was that Denise caught her husband in bed with his friend and racquetball buddy, Joe. She told me later that she might not have minded if he had asked her to invite Joe into their bed, but as it was, it was as bad as catching him cheating with another woman. "Hell, it probably would have turned me on to watch them suck each other's cock," was how she put it.
The second thing that happened to change things was that her boss got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. The Feds brought him up on charges and she was suddenly out of a job. Wendy told her to come and stay with us until she found something else. Well, I'd like to think it was me that made the choice for her, but I think by then Wendy had leaked the info on our (my) financial state. She didn't know exactly how much we had but she probably had an idea. So Denise knew she'd be no burden on us, no matter how long it took to get her feet back on the ground.
I went with Wendy to pick Denise up at the airport in Burbank. It was December and Denise was dressed for Chicago. The first thing she did was to drag Wendy into a restroom to change clothes for the 70 degree weather while I went to claim her bags. "I tied a purple ribbon to each handle, Frank," she told me. Even though the thought crossed my mind that I'd rather watch her change, I went down to baggage claim.
