Jay Brixey was having a really bad week. Saturday his lovely little daughter Misty got hit in the face with a softball and he took her to the emergency room. She would ultimately be OK, but he and his wife Jen were counselled to look into plastic surgery something not fully covered by their health insurance.
Sunday when Jay stayed home with Misty to make sure she was OK and Jen drove with their sons Bill and Andy to church, she got rear-ended at a stoplight. The other drive looked like a drunken teenager and he took off. Jen got his license plate number and reported it to the cops. When they caught him of course he had no insurance for his jalopy so that meant that Jay and Jen would likely have to absorb their insurance deductible when they got their car fixed. Fortunately Jen and the boys were not injured.
Monday was bad at the office -- and not just for a Monday. Apparently everyone there had a weekend as bad as Jay's and everyone was short-tempered. It didn't help that the client in charge of the second most important account that Jay worked on notified the company that they were moving elsewhere -- in response to a screw-up by someone who handled one matter for the client when Jay wasn't available.
Monday night Jen was in a sour mood and voiced a number of her normal complaints about Jay not pulling his weight in doing housework and child care while Jen's job was just as challenging as his.
Tuesday night was a disaster when he got home to three bawling children. Their dog Luna had been hit by a car right in front of Bill and Andy, and died on the spot. When the sitter called with the bad news Jen left her office early and took the dog to the vet to be cremated. That left her in a really bad mood.
By being as silver-tongued and conciliatory as he could be early Wednesday morning, before the kids got up, and by giving her a 15 minute back rub, Jay had gotten Jen into an amorous mood, something that had happened all too infrequently the last year. After he brought her to an orgasm by sucking her clit and rubbing her G-spot he was about to mount her with his very hard penis anxious for some relief when Misty came bursting into their room complaining of pain in her face. While Jay rubbed one out in the shower it was about 1/10th as satisfying as laying pipe in Jen would have been.
Wednesday morning at work Jay got the news that there was a conference he had to attend more than one hundred miles away -- on Friday and Saturday including staying over both nights. That was really going to frost Jen since she would have to make arrangements to get all three kids to ballet, soccer, etc. that weekend, and he wouldn't be able to go with her to a play that they had tickets for on Saturday night -- he just hoped that her sister could go with her otherwise he was toast.
Jen was as pissed as Jay expected her to be when on Wednesday night he told her the "good news" about the conference. Even by groveling like he never had before she still was pissed at him when they went to bed, her in a long cotton nighty despite the mild temperatures making it clear that he was not getting a chance to resume his amorous activities of the morning.
Considering all of the shit that happened since Saturday Thursday actually looked good in comparison; just one flat tire, a spilled drink on his pants at lunch, and nothing at all good happening during the entire day or night. He was almost grateful, even though Jen was still more like an Ice Queen than a wife that night.
As Jay started driving the 110 miles to the conference starting out at 5:30 Friday morning he thought to himself "This has been a week from Hell; and this conference looks to be boring beyond belief and I wonder if my boss is sending me to it just because he hates me since we lost the Jenkins account, through no fault of mine."
Unfortunately, the first day of the conference was as boring -- and useless -- as Jay had feared. That night he bypassed the dinner at the conference venue and after calling Jen and the kids went to a local Olive Garden on Prince Street a few blocks from the hotel conference center.
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Susan Driscoll entered the Prince Street Olive Garden hoping for some time to collect her thoughts. The conference she was attending that Friday couldn't have been more tedious and inadequate. After the week she had up to that point she needed something to take her mind off of her troubles. The Air Conditioning at her house blowing up, the death of a co-worker from a heart attack at the desk next to hers, the conference with the principal from her son Johnny's playground fight, her husband Tom's bad mood since layoffs had started at his office, the fact that he had actually turned her down for sex despite the fact that she had just completely recovered from a UT infection when she was normally the one "too tired or upset" for sex, the news of her favorite aunt's (fortunately non-fatal) stroke she was apprised of on Wednesday, the cat puking on her prized living room couch as she was getting ready to leave Friday morning, and the funny noise her car made the last ten or fifteen miles during her drive to the conference, had her thinking of trying to hop the next train out of town. It may have been the shittiest week of her life.
The last thing that she wanted was to talk to someone at dinner which is why she had eschewed dinner at the conference venue and walked a couple of blocks to the Olive Garden. She was a little surprised when she got to the door about the same time as a guy she recognized from the conference, but had not interacted with. He was just ahead of her and looked as morose as she felt. The only bright spot in the last week was when he noticed her behind him, opened the door for her and waved her to go in first, and almost had a smile on his otherwise glum face.
The hostess advised Susan that there was a table for one available in about five minutes. When Jay approached Susan overheard the hostess tell him that he would have to wait at least twenty minutes. As his morose expression got even dourer and he turned to leave she stopped him. "You got to the door first and you let me in front of you; you should take the first table," she said trying to evoke a smile.
Jay thought that this was the first good thing to happen to him that week, but he was not inclined to accept since the woman -- who he thought he had seen at the conference -- looked as sullen as he felt.
"No, I couldn't do that..." he started to say when the hostess interrupted him.
"Pardon me for eavesdropping," she smiled, "but it is a table for two so you could share it."
Susan had her first laugh of the week when she said "I wouldn't want the week from hell I'm trying to recover from bring you down with me," she said to Jay.
"My week was worse than yours," he chuckled -- his first chuckle of the week. "Maybe misery loves company."
They agreed to be seated together and chatted about the conference for five or ten minutes until they were shown to the table.
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Jay and Susan are not "beautiful people" -- but they both are relatively, and equally, trim and attractive. They independently decided to make the most of their situation and after a few minutes of conversation -- and seeing that they liked exactly the same things on the menu -- the pall over them lifted slightly.
As they ate salad and munched on breadsticks, Susan said "Maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment but why don't we tell each other about our weeks form Hell and see if we can agreed to who had it worst and make that person pick up the tab?"
"Wow, you are really a nut for punishment, aren't you," Jay replied as he buttered a breadstick. "Either that or you're short on funds and just looking for a way for me to pay since I'll certainly win."
Maybe it was because they consumed an entire bottle of wine, plus an extra glass each; maybe it was because they couldn't feel lower so they had nothing to lose; maybe it was because misery really does love company; maybe there was a subtle attraction to each other; and maybe it was all of the above, but in any event by the time dinner was over they were actually laughing at some of the ill fates that had befallen them. They decided that their weeks were equally awful and split the check.