To the reader: I had a couple requests for the other side of the story "Running Away", specifically the wife's point of view. I wrote this as a follow up to that story so if you haven't read it you might want to before you get into this. Also, this story deals with incest and if that isn't your thing then maybe you should leave now.
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My ex-husband is a kind and gentle man and couldn't tell a lie to save his soul. So when I read his story "Running Away" I sat down and cried because everything he said was true and it made me look like some kind of heartless monster. I don't think I am. Maybe I'm trying to rationalize my situation here but I see myself as just as much a victim of my father's greed as Leo was. All I ask of you is for you to read my story with an open mind and judge me fairly. I will tell you every bit of the truth as I know it. I won't lie to you. If I did that it would make me no different than my father.
So, where do I begin? I'll start at the absolute beginning, when I was born.
My mother and father had a difficult time conceiving me. No one's to blame really but it took over a year of trying for my mother to get pregnant. All of my family's money couldn't make it happen. Oh, we had a lot of money. We were very rich. My father is Ezekiel Bloom and he owned just about the whole town we lived in and ran several businesses around the state. He was listed as one of the ten richest men in Pennsylvania. Mom's name is Clarissa. She was a ravishing beauty that daddy met and married on a business trip to Texas. During the time they were trying to conceive me there was a lot of tension between my mother and father. After I was born my mother suffered from postpartum depression. It lasted for quite some time and was one of the major reasons that my parents never got back to their pre-me loving selves. My father on the other hand was a typical doting father. He showed me off shamelessly to all of his friends and work associates. I was on display from the minute I came into this world. I grew up with everything I could ever want; my father saw to it that I was spoiled to death. My mother drank a lot. When I was six year's old mom went away to an alcohol rehab facility. She never came home. I didn't find out until much later that she was kicked out by my father and he divorced her. He also made sure that when she left she left with nothing, including me. I didn't see her again until I was in college.
As I said I had everything. All during high school I had the nicest clothes, cars, and boyfriends that money could buy. Yes, that's right, I said boyfriends. My father paid a couple of the 'right boys' to ask me out. I had a lot of guys that wanted to take me out but one word from my father and they just suddenly lost interest. I overheard someone say that I changed boyfriends like most people changed clothes. That's probably not too far wrong. I was fairly adventurous, after all having lots of money makes you think that you can do anything without any repercussions. I was fairly promiscuous too. I had sex for the first time when I was fifteen. I was more interested in boys in the backseat with their pants down than my studies. I think family money and my father's influence helped me to pass my classes and graduate. I was a rotten student. I didn't like to read or study or do anything academic. It wasn't until I was in college that I found the library.
During my teenage years my father married and outgrew two trophy wives. He had another after I was out of college. The first was a twenty-five year old waitress from Philadelphia. Her name was Laurindia and she was nice, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but sweet and kind. She lasted about two years until my father found her in a motel with one of her old boyfriends. I never found out where she went after he divorced her. She just disappeared. A couple years later he came home from a trip to Italy with a new wife named Françoise. He never explained how he found a French woman on a trip to Italy. She's the reason I can speak fairly good French. We got along wonderfully, probably because she wasn't that much older than me. She was just twenty-one at the time they were married. They were married for five years when she decided she couldn't take his rules any more. She yelled at him that she was 'suffocating' as she ran out the door to a waiting cab. She went back to France and I never saw her again. Later after I graduated college he surprised me with another one. Her name was Jennifer and like Laurindia she was a little vacuous. She could make a great Mai-Tai though. She was smart enough to graduate from bartender school at the tender age of twenty-four. It took her three years to graduate though. We didn't get along at all. Daddy threatened to write both of us out of his will if we didn't stop fighting. We had a tense peace but I still kept an eye on her. She left my father a couple years after I was married to Leo. She ran away with her personal trainer. The last time I heard the two of them were living in the Florida Keys on the money she had put aside while married to daddy. From what I'm writing it would seem that daddy had a fairly bad track record with women. I'm not sure. I think he loved each of them in his own way. Maybe he just used up all of their love and energy and discarded them like you would an old pair of shoes. I don't understand a lot of it.
Going away to college was the best thing that ever happened to me. I was free and on my own. I didn't have a nanny watching me or daddy weeding out the bad boyfriends for me. I was on my own. And I did some fairly remarkable things. Oh, I had boyfriends by the dozen but none that I took seriously. To me they were just toys that I could play with whenever I wanted. I dated two professors on the sly and found out that I enjoyed older men more that the boys my own age. I guess it had something to do with experience but the faculty members that I slept with were far superior to my schoolmates. I even had two gal roommates that I was deeply involved with. We had some wild parties where I was the center of attention. Some people might call them gang bangs but I prefer to look at them as parties with many partners. They were fun and exhausting. I even put on a show at one of the fraternities with one of my sorority sisters. Those boys were totally blown away by what they saw. You name it and I did it. And the most incredible thing of all is I went to class most of the time and learned something. It wasn't all sex and games. I actually enjoyed literature and biology and art and a couple of my business classes. I graduated in four years with a respectable average and a BA degree. I earned my degree without any help from anyone.
I've got to tell you about my relationship with my father. If you've read Leo's story (and if you didn't hit pause and go back and read it now) you know that my father and I were lovers. He wasn't a child molester. I was an adult when we started. It was after my junior year in college that I spent the summer at home by the pool. I was twenty-one that summer. Basically I was recuperating from a hard year of studying and sexual adventures. Between the two that didn't leave a lot of time for sleep so I spent a lot of time floating on the water in the pool trying to catch up. One particularly hot day I was in the pool in my usual prone position when I felt another float bump mine. I looked over and it was my father.
"I thought you were in Pittsburgh today," I asked.
"I left a day early. Those people are so boring that I had to come back here and be with you."
"Bullshit, you didn't get the deal you wanted on the contract offer and you're playing hard to get with them until they acquiesce."
"You know me all too well. So, what are your plans?"
"Nothing really, just stay close to the estate and read."
