Author's Note: Need to lose weight? How about some incentives? That was the conversation I had with DFWBeauty years ago that spawned this story. This is a long Brownwood story about cheating, betrayal and recovery, and isn't much of a BTB. It's more a man's long road to reach a place where he can survive between his fantasies and the real world. It's a long one, about 20 Lit pages, so I didn't feel I could submit it all at one time. All three chapters are finished and submitted, so they should appear over the next few days. Since it's a Brownwood story, you should expect a number of crossover characters.
My thanks to blackrandl1958 and LadyVer for their editing, and Mostera1 and outofshadows for their beta-reading and input. All these individuals made this a much better story! As usual, any errors are mine.
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Spring 2014 - Brownwood
I closed my eyes and pressed my back against the bench as I strained to push the barbell up away from my chest. With a muffled groan, I succeeded.
"Good, Tommy Boy!" A harsh feminine voice pierced my concentration. "Again! Give me another one!"
I opened my eyes and beheld a stunning golden goddess. She didn't quite make Amazon status since she was a couple inches shorter than six-feet, and although very muscular, she wasn't musclebound.
I tried not to leer as my gaze followed the skin-tight yoga capris that sculpted her rock hard thighs and led to a tantalizing jogging shorts covered intersection. I was mesmerized by the sexuality this incredible woman exuded with every movement. Her taut abdomen flexed and relaxed with each breath as my eyes trailed up her form. If her womanhood could be described as the Valley of Paradise, then it would've rested in the shadow of her massive Twin Peaks.
Eventually, my gaze rested on the same focal point every male who'd ever met Angie Myles eventually focused on. Her proud 40DD-sized breasts were stuffed into a sports bra that was no doubt rated industrial.
So how did I come to be looking up the shorts of this walking wet dream? Why by paying $40 an hour, of course!
Angie was my private personal trainer at Main Street Fitness. Well, at least she was mine three times a week from four to five.
"Come on, Tommy Boy," she barked. "Give me one more. Push! Harder, harder!"
She certainly had the ability to motivate and inspire! With a grunt, I pressed the barbell high above my chest again. Unfortunately with the view I had, the barbell wasn't the only thing rising.
I questioned my sanity for putting myself in this embarrassing predicament. My motivations were simple: sex. More accurately it was sex, love and happiness, but sex was the primary motivation at that time.
Like most divorced men, I'd once again gone back to the gym to try and make myself more desirable to the female of my species. Without question I'd let myself go these past six years. While I was never in body builder shape, even in college, the lack of exercise over the years had taken its toll, especially in the fifteen months since my divorce.
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Fall 2012 - Brownwood
We seemed to be the perfect couple, the football player and the cheerleader. Well, that's not completely accurate. Leah wasn't exactly a cheerleader; she was a part of the dance team. I fell for her pretty face immediately. Her long brown hair flowed in ringlets all the way down to her waist, and while she was moderately well endowed, her bubble butt was easily the thing that drew my attention, initially. It was natural since it was almost on display atop a pair of beautifully sculpted legs.
Myself? Although I was a football player, I certainly wasn't the star quarterback heartthrob. I'd been the starting left guard for the St. Catherine College Crusaders, a successful, small-college football team. My 280-pound playing weight fit my 6' 3" frame well enough. I certainly didn't have a six pack but my arms and legs were rock solid.
In the years since, muscles that were created to crush opponents had softened into flab, and my weight had skyrocketed. That tends to happen when instead of spending hours in the gym you spend hours behind a computer screen.
My name is officially Thomas Patrick Swanson, but everyone calls me Tommy Boy. I guess there are some similarities. From the round face to the stock of unruly dirty blond hair, I've been told several times I resembled Chris Farley. I'd tried to grow a beard to separate myself from that image, but all I'd accomplished was looking like an Amish farmer. Of course, since I didn't like the way it looked, my wife loved it. So, like most husbands, I kept it.
Leah and I married shortly after we graduated. I was able to get an entry-level position with Silent Network Solutions, SNS, and Leah was promoted to assistant manager at the Macy's department store in the Lakewood Mall.
SNS was a local company that installed, monitored and maintained networks for other businesses. One of their biggest contracts was with St. Catherine's College, and that's where I'd interned with them. It was owned by Maria Grymm and her silent partner Ryan Thorpe. Ryan was a venture capitalist in his late thirties, but had the Thorpe money to back him. Maria was a petite, quiet woman who was in her mid-fifties but looked much older. Still, she was damn intelligent!
She'd been a part of Grymm Engineering before the two Grymm brothers parted ways several years earlier amidst a nasty scandal. Her ex-husband, Victor, his brother, Roland, and Maria were at the center of countless rumors. Whatever happened was never made public, but ended with Victor and Maria leaving the company and Victor never speaking to his brother again. Maria and Victor divorced soon after, as well.
After all the dust settled, Maria got together with Ryan and formed SNS. With Ryan's money and connections and Maria's intelligence, SNS quickly took off and has been doing very well. It's where I've called home for the past five years.
Looking back, I thought Leah and I had a good marriage those first three years. The last two years were rough, with the last six months being downright hell. We seemed to fight about almost everything, and it was obvious she wasn't happy. I won't lay all of the blame at Susie's feet, but she certainly was a big part of Leah's unhappiness.
Susie was Leah's best friend from college and to put it bluntly, she was a slut... a very beautiful, very sexy one... but still a slut. She was on the same level as the JCP's found in Brownwood. Those Johnson County Princesses are local legends and are basically gorgeous little elves with huge tits. Susie, however, was that petite auburn-haired, sexy co-ed who is the wet dream of most college guys and countless older men, and, yes, she was a cheerleader!
I can call her a slut because the facts don't lie. Susie had been with at least a dozen of my ex-teammates at one time or another since I'd known her and several of them at the same time. I'll have to admit I'd hooked up with her a few times myself; hell, she really was hot enough to be a playmate. However, everything between Susie and I happened a year before I started dating Leah.
Now, I don't believe the 'once a slut always a slut' adage, but Susie had never shown any desire to change. At that time, she had three broken marriages under her belt and that was only in the previous two years! The first divorce was hers, and in the other two, she was the other woman.
While I wasn't excited about her hanging around my wife, they'd been best friends before we were married and still worked together at Macy's. Keeping them apart would've been next to impossible. Besides, I really didn't have much of a problem with Susie until after her divorce. Leah and I had been married about two and a half years when Susie caught her newlywed husband cheating, which started a nasty divorce which left Susie broken and very bitter. Susie changed during the divorce, and not for the better. Now, all men were pigs in her eyes.
What's worse than having a slut as your wife's best friend? Having a man-hating, bitter, vindictive slut as her BFF!
Leah spent a lot of time going over to her house and consoling her. Soon, my wife informed me she needed to get Susie back out into the world and they started their 'girl's night out' on a weekly bases. It wasn't a big deal, and Leah and I set up some basic ground rules to avoid any problems. There was to be no slow dancing with other men, and she wouldn't let any guy kiss her or allow his hands to touch her inappropriately. She was also going to guard against flirting too much. Most importantly, she agreed to NEVER be alone with a man.
Some would say I was stupid for agreeing to a girl's night out, but let's be real. I sure as hell wasn't going to keep my wife under lock and key. I'd seen too many couples break up because distrust had poisoned their relationship until it'd become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Besides, at the time I still trusted her, and she'd never given me a reason to doubt her.
The nights with Susie started off being on Tuesdays, but ended up being every Saturday night. I hate to admit it, but my job helped it come about.
You see, working with networks whenever we'd do updates or changes for our customers are typically done over the weekend or late at night so as not to interrupt daily business. That meant I worked nights, Saturdays and Sundays frequently.
It was when their nights out changed to Saturday that things turned from bad to worse. The switch in days came about six months before my marriage crashed and Leah and I were already starting to argue all the time. It seemed I couldn't do anything right in her eyes. I don't know when I became the ENEMY
,
but I had a pretty good idea of who planted that thought in her head.
By then, my wife's relationship with Susie had become a constant source of most of our arguments. I didn't like the influence Susie was having on Leah and I was very vocal about it. Since I threatened her friendship with Leah, I soon became Susie's number one enemy.
I wish I could say I hadn't been such an easy target, but things at work and home joined together to make it that way. I'd recently been promoted to Network Administrator for several of our smaller clients, and was working extra hours trying to get a handle on the job. Being on call all the time made things even worse.
Personally, I'd also added about twenty extra pounds by then, and Leah wasn't happy about it. She'd added a little extra weight herself, but it was mostly in her hips and butt. It might've bothered some guys, but I still thought she was sexy as hell.
I won't tell you my failed marriage was entirely my wife's fault. It took both of us to let the marriage get that weak. I will say, though, when it got rough, only one of us seemed to fight for it. Leah retreated more and more into her friendship with Susie as our communication kept breaking down.
During those last two years I begged, pleaded, yelled, and threatened. I even suggested counseling several times, but it always seemed to fall on deaf ears. Initially, I'd started trying to lose the weight, but it seemed like my wife was already giving up on me, so I quit trying. With my anger, frustration and depression, I needed an escape, so I ate junk food and drank more beer. Like I said, it takes two to tango, and we were caught in a nasty cycle.
Even though I knew my marriage was in trouble, the way it ended still caught me off-guard. I'd known Leah had been unhappy, but at times during those last couple of months she'd been in a much better mood.
Maybe I was stupid, or maybe I was simply afraid of what I might find if I started asking too many questions. I didn't think Leah was cheating on me yet, but I knew things were headed there if there weren't changes. What I was really afraid of was that Leah might choose her friendship with Susie over me, and that would've killed our marriage.
I found out I was too late.
I'd come home early Saturday evening and found Leah and Susie sitting in the living room of our apartment having a drink. Yeah, we were still living in an apartment. We'd decided when we got married to save up for a house those first several years. We now lived in one of the nicer apartment complexes in Brownwood, the Shadowdale Apartments.
Unfortunately, even though we'd had enough money for a nice down payment a year ago, any thoughts about buying a home had faded with our marital problems. Now that dream was crumbling.
It was obvious the pair was getting ready to go out, since both of them were dressed to kill. I figured they'd planned to go to either the City Lights or the Strobe, Brownwood's primary two night clubs.
Susie had always been a knockout with the morals of a bitch in heat, but it'd been years since I had seen my wife dressed up like that for anyone else but me. She showed too much cleavage and her skirt was way too short to ever pass the husband test.
When I walked in on them they were laughing and talking. They abruptly stopped when they saw me.
Leah looked at me and smiled while I noticed the look on Susie's face was closer to a smirk.
"Honey, you're home early," Leah said cheerfully.
