Linda Jamison smiled as she wandered through the cocktail lounge where she worked. What she had originally taken as a job to save her sometimes indulgent lifestyle had turned into her salvation. She had made several new friends, banked a lot of money and indulged in a
lot
of heated sex.
The old Linda would only have cheated on her husband under the most drastic of circumstances. That Linda was gone forever and the sultry brunette wondered if she ever had truly existed. Had she been deluding herself in the first few years of her marriage to Michael? More and more, she was beginning to think that the answer was yes. Her most recent experience, with Bambi, Ken and delicious little Barbie made her think that perhaps she was more than Michael was capable of handling. She wanted a strong and commanding husband and that wasn't Michael.
Michael was trying to change and he wasn't succeeding. His addictions were still causing him trouble. While he was working hard to change, he wasn't working hard enough. He was weak-willed and easily overcome by his addictions. During his efforts to change and earn the money to pay down his debt load, he was also neglecting Linda. He spent a lot of time at Gamblers Anonymous meetings and when he wasn't at meetings, he was working or something. There were times his wife didn't know where he was. He still had yet to come fully clean about his problems. To make matters worse, when he was home with her - he was becoming mind-numbingly
dull.
Linda would never have dared to admit it to the counselor she was seeing because Rebecca would have told her she was crazy. Okay, maybe not in those exact words - but she would have told the woman that she wasn't being understanding and supportive of her husband. Why did
she
have to be the one that did all of the supporting? She'd been a loyal wife up until Mike's addictions had threatened to end their marriage. Hadn't it been Linda's sacrifices that had gotten Mike out of the jam in the first place?
Mike's gambling addiction had nearly cost them everything and he still didn't have the balls to settle his own affairs. Linda had been left to her own devices to settle his debt with Mr. Foswell. She'd had to fall back into old habits and return to her former life. Linda believed that a great deal of what had happened was Mike's own fault. Why should she shoulder the blame for things she had known nothing about? Linda wrestled with her conscience at each session she had with Rebecca. She wasn't being entirely fair and yet, she felt boxed in, trapped.
Sleeping with other people had reignited the old Linda, the one that Michael had fallen in love with. She was now sexually charged, horny all of the time. Working around sexy women like her fellow cocktail waitresses and their gorgeous friends constantly stimulated her libido. Michael didn't, not unless he was in one of "those" moods and wanted something special. Then the bartering begun. A lot of the time, he just wanted plain, vanilla sex. That was no longer enough for his sexy brunette wife who wanted to be the Baskin Robbins of the sex trade.
The past several months had brought out a vastly new Linda, one that was fully in charge of her sexuality. She made good tips at the Lounge, sometimes several hundred dollars a week. As her husband's debt was now close to being repaid, she was also bringing home a tidy little salary which she was banking. She could now easily have afforded a place of her own and wouldn't need alimony should she choose to divorce him. There was just one simple problem with all of that.
Despite his failings, of which there were several, Linda still loved her husband, at least she thought she did. Oh yes, the things he did and his machismo drove her crazy. He could be secretive and sneaky. He spent money that he shouldn't have. But he doted on her and would never have strayed. She was caught between two worlds and Linda knew it. Mike was the first man she had ever loved but the money and the illicit thrills of her other life were a huge temptation.
Mr. Foswell had made several unwanted overtures and his price kept rising, but he was an exception - Linda wouldn't have slept with him for any amount of money. There was something about him that scared her a great deal, even though she had no concrete evidence that supported her fears. The other girls who worked with Linda said he was dynamite in the sack, yet she had managed to keep him in check - for now.
A lot of Linda's clients were sexy women, women like Bambi and Colleen who knew what buttons to push. In her marriage's earliest days and during her "committed" phase, Linda had not slept with anyone but Michael. His libido and his cocksmanship had kept her well satisfied. Now, both were waning. In order to stay "faithful" in her own mind, Linda had slept with women only when re-establishing her presence as an escort. She was able to rationalize that by saying women offered something her husband could not. Now, she had admittedly cheated on him. She slept with men as formidable as Ken and there had been a lot of them since she put herself fully back on the market. Still, she still had a way to make even
that
justifiable by her own sense of twisted logic - to date, she had only slept with couples.
