Alec's Story
Jessica is a VP at the advertising agency where she has worked since we got married and moved to New York. She was English major in college and I had completed my MBA in finance at the same university at the same time that she graduated. We got married immediately afterwards and moved to New York because I had gotten a job with one of the large Wall Street investment banks. She subsequently got a job as a copy writer with the Parker-Ericson Advertising Agency. Our careers paralleled each others and I eventually became a Vice president in charge of corporate loans and she in charge of Account Acquisitions. We sold our suburban home after our twin sons graduated from college and we bought an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We were doing very well until it all began to unravel with the banking collapse in 2008/9. My employer was in imminent danger of bankruptcy and the Federal government forced us into a merger with a large national bank. Suddenly I was redundant. My salary of over a quarter of a million a year was too large for the new bank to swallow.
Jessica on the other hand was doing very well. She had landed a large new client for her firm the year before last, and another one last year. Her bonuses for those two years were larger than my salary. She was now making in the middle six figures and once I lost my job, she was the sole support of both of us and the new expensive condo. Needless to say, the stress of my job loss, and my subsequent dependency on her, did nothing to support my male ego. Add to that, the fact that I was unemployed and not able to find another position, played havoc with my libido.
To top it all off, this was the year of my wife's 25th college reunion. We met our friends there and we were sitting around reminiscing about old times and trading stories about when we were sewing our wild oats in our campus days. We were three couples who had kept close and we never missed a chance to meet at every fifth year reunion. We had all paired off during the last two years of school and we had gotten married within weeks of each other after completing our studies.
Ray started by telling stories of some outrageous sex escapades he had with a campus hottie on the stage at the campus playhouse and Jake tried to top it with a story of how he fucked the dean's secretary on her desk in the dean's office.
Jessica was laughing and turned to me and said,
"Tell them about the time you and I were on top of the Bijou marquee"
"Jess, I never thought you wanted it known. I imagined you would be embarrassed, you know I am." I knew we had been drinking quite a bit and I thought she was 'three sheets to the wind' already. "I don't think you want to tell that one now."
"Oh poo, these are our oldest friends and it's about us."
And in her mellow state she proceeded to tell of one of the most humiliating experience of my young life. It was at the beginning of her senior year and we had gone to what turned out to be a horrible movie, so Jess suggested we go out on the porch and have sex. When she was horny she never had any reluctance about being the instigator of making love. The porch she was referring too was the theater marquee that was easily accessible through the open window of the second floor ladies room. Everybody in the crowd used it at one time or another only this was my first time with Jess. I tried to be fancy and I tried to fuck her through a gap in iron work and my foot slipped and my leg got wedged in. Because of the angle and poor footing we couldn't get me out nor could I get my pants up. The fire department had to be called to rescue me from my semi-naked dilemma. It hurt like hell and the laughter and embarrassment was worse. I still felt the humiliation of that incident and wondered why she had to bring it up. There was laughter and some kidding from our friends and some one said,
"You must have been some stud to try to do it through some ironwork." to which Jess replied,
"He was......then."
The 'then' was said sotto voce and was covered up by the general laughter and repartee' going on around us but I caught it and I gave her a quizzical look. She quickly looked away and I made no further reference to it until we got back to our room.
"What was that 'then' all about?"
"What 'then'? What are you talking about?"
"The 'then' you added after you agreed that I was some stud back in college."
"Well you were then."
"But not now?"
"Come on Alec, you haven't made love to me more than once or twice a month for almost half a year."
"You know the stress I have been under been under since I lost my job. I have been busting my balls trying to get a new position. Besides, if you were not getting enough why didn't you ask, you were never shy about initiating sex or, for that matter, going without it for a long time."
Then the enormity of what I said struck me and it must have shown up on my face because I saw her blanch, she actually went pale. I said,
"Who are you fucking, Jess?"
"What....what are you talking about?" She stammered
"You heard me, who are you fucking?"
"Alec, I never wanted you to find out this way."
"How was I supposed to find out, when I walked in on you fucking him on our bed?"
She was crying now, "I would never do that to you Alec."
"So when would it be, for Christmas? On our anniversary? Or maybe Thanksgiving, so I would have something to be thankful for?"
"No I was waiting until I asked you for a divorce."
"Divorce! Jesus Christ, Jess why don't you just pull out a gun and shoot me? Who is the son of a bitch? Do you love him? Why do you want a divorce? Do you want to marry him?"
The crying stopped and through the sniffles and her regaining her composure, I got the story out of her. His name is Josh Andrews and he works on her copy team. He is 31 years old and yes, she does love him, and yes, she wants to marry him.
"Jess, he is fifteen years younger that you are. Are you crazy?"
"I'm crazy in love with him Alec; he makes me feel like a woman. Something you haven't done in years. I didn't want to hurt you Alec, but he makes love to me like you haven't for the longest time. He does things for me that you never did."
She was defiant now. The crying had stopped. She said,
"I am going to see a lawyer about a divorce as soon as we get back to New York."
I went to the closet and got out my suit case and started to pack.
"What are you doing?"
"What does it look like? I'm packing. Do you expect me to stay in this room with you? Maybe sleep in that bed with you? Are you going to give me a goodbye fuck?
It was two o'clock in the morning when I called the front desk and had them send a bellman with a key card for another room, but I couldn't go to sleep. I couldn't believe what had happened to me. I was happily married for 25 years and I thought she was too. I never saw this coming. So now I was jobless and dumped. It did nothing for my self confidence. I checked out at 6am and left the charge for both rooms for her to pay. Then I caught the earliest flight home. I beat her there by half a day, just enough time to move what I needed to a cheap hotel on the West Side. Her lawyer didn't even know where to find me.
But then I caught break, Sam Greenberg found me. Sam had come to the bank about three years ago looking for a loan to expand his small trucking company. He was turned down cold by the loan officer who worked under my supervision. He really was too small a customer for us to bother with. Sam was really pissed off and somehow wrangled an appointment with me. He then unloaded his resentment over the way he had been refused. In order to placate him, I told him I would review his application. It was a mess; he really had no idea how to present his finances or business plan. As I looked it over I saw that he was a good risk and I liked him so I did approve the loan for him. That good deed proved to be my salvation.
Sam needed new financing again, his business had grown as I thought it would and he wanted me to prepare a loan application for him with a commercial bank. He needed a million dollars for a business that was worth at best, two million. I told him that would not work but what would do it for him was if I invested the half million I had in my 401K to bring up his balance sheet.
"What do you want for the half million?"
"Twenty five percent of the business."
"I'll give you twenty percent."
"Deal."
We shook on it and I was now Chief Financial Officer of a going business and I was completely broke. Then Jess's lawyer found me and I was served with the divorce papers.
I contacted a divorce lawyer who, after I described my circumstances, smiled like a shark.
I had virtually no income and my net worth was my equity in the trucking company but my wife, who was divorcing me, had an income of almost half a million for the last two years. I was the one who was going to get alimony and in addition, since I could not afford the million dollar mortgage on the condo, she was going to have to buy me out for half of its net worth..
When we went for the final hearing, she was livid as the judge began to tell her what she owed. She cornered me in the lobby as we left.
"You bastard, how could you do this to me."
"All I got was a fair share of what we accumulated while we were married. It works both ways, did you think you could shed me when I was down and out and walk away scott free."
"And I have to pay you alimony too?"
"I didn't ask for this divorce, you did. I didn't fuck around on my marriage, you did. As the old saying goes, you have to pay to play, and now the bill is due. I hope your fuck toy is worth it because he certainly is costing you enough."
The upshot was that she didn't want to sell the apartment so she had to pay me half of the net value. I was also entitled to half of the furnishings. I really didn't want anything that reminded me of her but I had just leased a tiny one bedroom apartment for myself and I did need some furniture.
Josh was there when I came to pick out what I wanted. He is a good looking guy, I guess some women would call him a hunk, about six foot and one seventy five. Pretty much what I looked like when Jess and I got married. Now, compared to him I looked like a slob. I was paunchy, balding, close to fifty years old and I had ballooned to 230 pounds. Maybe she was trying to regain the youth that had passed us by.
