The Usual Disclaimer: This is a work of fantasy. All characters featured in sexual situations are over 18. The characters in these stories are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons living, dead or undead is purely coincidental. Do not try this at home
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When Johnny was really young, he could remember his mother constantly saying, "The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math." It was mildly funny to him, but she often said it twice a week, usually when her husband would spend too much of their hard-earned money on lottery tickets.
"Shut up," he would snarl, usually after the winning numbers were revealed. Most of the time, he won nothing. Occasionally he would have three numbers that matched, and he'd win a few dollars. Overall, though, he was losing several hundred dollars a year.
It was a constant source of friction in his parents' marriage, but Johnny didn't understand why it was such a big deal. He had no grasp of the family's finances, nor did he understand that his father was a problem gambler. Then, "being bad at math" actually paid off. His father won a Powerball lottery which had reached a massive payout. It was over sixty million dollars!
That was an unforgettable night. His father cackled and danced all over the house, yelling "We're fucking rich!" over and over again. At the time, Johnny was only twelve. He grinned, but had no idea what it meant. His mother seemed a lot less happy about it than his father. When his father called and told his boss, "Fuck you! I quit!" his mother lost it.
She sent Johnny to bed, but he could clearly hear the yelling and screaming that followed. It went on for a really intense twenty minutes, and then Johnny's dad stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind him.
Less than a week later, Johnny's dad moved out and filed for divorce. It was a devastating blow to Johnny's mother. Outside of his addiction to the lottery, she had truly loved her husband and felt lucky to have him. She had expected they would work out their differences, and that the money would allow them to have an amazing life together. When the lawyers showed up to deliver those divorce papers, it felt like she'd been kicked in the gut.
Because he was so young, Johnny struggled to make sense of it all. It wasn't that he was stupid; merely that he had no understanding of some of the more complicated issues in life. He thought his mother was an attractive woman and wondered why his father would leave her. It was even more mystifying when his father briefly reappeared at their house with a pair of younger, skinny women in tow. To Johnny, those women weren't nearly as attractive as his mother was. It wasn't even close.
That incident was like a slap in the face to Johnny's mother, Crystal. She had already been approached by several lawyers who had offered to take her side of the divorce "for free." Once her husband showed up with those skanks in tow, making it clear he was sleeping with both of them, she decided to contact a couple of those divorce lawyers to try to get a better deal than what her husband's lawyers had offered. What sealed it in her mind was when she made that last, desperate plea.
"Tony, why can't we talk about this reasonablyโlike mature adults?" she asked quietly.
She held his hand in both of hers, looking into his eyes. He sneered and jerked his hand from hers.
"Shit, I'm rich now," he chuckled. He pulled one of his barely-twenty girlfriends to his side and gave Crystal a cocky grin. "Why should I settle for a fat old bitch like you when I can have hot young women who love having sex all the time?"
"Get out," Crystal whispered.
It was all she could do to restrain herself, and after her soon-to-be-ex drove away, she broke down and sobbed for an hour in her bedroom. After that, she called the lawyers.
Crystal and Tony were woefully ignorant of legalese. Although they read the contracts those law firms put in front of them, they missed those key, obscurely-worded little passages that spelled out what the lawyers would get as "compensation." Tony hadn't even been aware that, since he had taken the lottery winnings as a lump-sum payment, he had to hand over 39.6 percent of it in taxes to the federal government. Their state would help itself to another six percent.
After the lawyers hashed out that divorce agreement, they took almost all of the remaining lottery winnings as "compensation." By then, Tony had moved to another state with his new girlfriends. Not that it would have made Crystal feel any better, but his outraged howls when he discovered how rich he now