Jim and Laura: Quid Pro Quo

Okay. This is version 2 of the story of Jim and Laura and Amanda. I fixed the obvious mistakes (especially the one at the end where I got the names buggered up) and added some dialogue to satisfy those of you hungry for more words. I did a bit of refining and editing and thus this is a somewhat better product.

I got lots of good feedback on the story when it went online and for that I thank you. I hope that I found all my errors but I'm sure that all the keen editors out there will help me find other mistakes.

Enjoy

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So, I have a story to tell you. It's about me, and my life; such as it is.

My name is James Lewis Kennedy. I go by Jim most of the time. I'm a mixture of Scottish and Irish heritage. I like to think of myself as smart and determined; I have a strong work ethic and I come with a well developed sense of right and wrong. I don't normally broker bullshit. My forefathers, if they could talk from the grave, would tell you all about the determination of the Scottish people; just look at the continuing drive for independence that is still runs deep in Scotland today. My father was a man that didn't put up with stupidity and even though he is now dead and gone, I remember his lessons well.

My mother is alive and well and living in Arizona, away from the snow and rain of upstate NY. She lives with her sister, also a widow. I talk to her weekly. I have a younger brother and an older sister but they are scattered around the country and have families of their own and busy lives.

Now back to my dilemma.

You see, I figured out a few months ago that my charming wife of nine years, Laura Grovsner, was involved with other men (yes, plural) over the past four years. Seems that she decided one day that I wasn't enough of a husband for her and her needs were greater than what I could provide for. Now, I'm not one to cry in my beer, so I decided that I needed information. So I got information. From two sources:

First source: an investigator -- I paid for an investigation into my wife's extracurricular activities. For my $2500 I got confirmation that my wife was having a weekly liaison with another man. Some guy named Jason McDonald. She was fucking him (or he was fucking her) at hotels, houses that were being sold by my wife, and his apartment on the edge of the downtown. We live in Albany, the state capital of NY.

Second source: a lawyer -- Armed with the information of my wife's activities, I got a family law expert, LeeAnn Miller, a friend (yes, I know, you get what you pay for) to tell me that I would get financially fucked in a divorce. You see, I have two children, Thomas aged 7, and Rebecca aged 5. And the fine courts in NY State are especially predisposed to give custody to mothers. Doesn't matter that the mothers are cheating sluts. No, that doesn't matter at all.

NY Judges are ravenously keen to award custody to mothers rather than fathers. For a father to get custody, the mother would have to be a serial killer, or worse. The courts are heavily weighted in favour of the mother. The father gets short-shrift just about all the time. The father's abilities as a parent are pretty much ignored in any court proceedings. Judges would rather give custody to a mother who is a crack-whore prostitute than a father who is a corporate lawyer. That's me, the corporate lawyer. My wife isn't a crack-whore prostitute, but you get my point. She's a real-estate agent, dealing in mostly commercial property and high-end residential properties.

Don't get me wrong; I think that for the most part mothers are probably great people to raise children. But I also think that fathers that love their children are also perfectly fine to raise them. In my case, they're my children too. So, why shouldn't I be equally considered qualified to be the one to raise them? No; not according to the courts of NY State. To them I'm automatically a deadbeat asshole. Fuckers!

My lawyer was able to impart her especially important advice to me: Do nothing. That's right, you heard me, do nothing. Because if I do something to right the wrong of my wife's infidelity, at the end of the day, I'm the one that's gonna get fucked. Fucked by the Judge, fucked by NY state family law, and fucked by the cheating-whore leaning Court. You see, popular opinion and historical precedent holds that my wife will take me to the cleaners in a divorce. NY law permits her to fuck around, and for her to fuck me in the divorce. Now, I'm a liberal minded sort of person. I believe in justice and fair play. But, No! The divorce laws of this wonderful state do not believe in the same. They believe that fathers, even ones who are the victim, should be further victimized. That anyone with a penis and who is a father; well, let's just say that they get fucked, or more aptly, fucked-over.

By now you're beginning to sense my frustration with NY divorce law and the inequity of this whole damned thing. She gets to cheat with her lover and get rewarded for doing it. American jurisprudence at its finest.

So, my highly trained and vastly experienced lawyer (that friend) gave me some sage advice. Do nothing. Or better yet, do the same thing that my wife is doing. But don't get caught. Because even if my wife's infidelity is revealed, if she were to have evidence of my infidelity, the court would have further cause to fuck me around. Jesus!

So, where does that leave me? Fucked; that's where. So, I left my lawyers office, went back to my own office, closed the door and sulked for the rest of the day. How could this happen? What did I do wrong? Why would she do this to me?

My sense of...failure, was putting me in a deep depression as the realization of the state of my marriage came crashing down on my head like a tsunami wave. It rolled over me and made me feel like I was drowning. I know, that sounds stupid but it's what I felt.

I mulled, over and over in my head, the singular statement that my lawyer had repeated, 'do nothing.' But how could I do that? And for how long? And when will I know it's time to end it? What will happen then? The uncertainty of it all made me physically ill. I was hollow inside as the realization pounded the inside of my head that my marriage was a farce. My wife was using me for her own ends and was willingly betraying me and our children. Her sexual satisfaction meant more to her than her marriage and her children. Was I making more out of this than I needed to? Did I just need to calm down and work on a plan? I knew that I had to make a plan of some sort, but right then and there I didn't have a clue as to what that plan would be. I would have to work on that.

At about 6 PM, I went home and pretended that I was still a happy husband and father. Indeed I made up my mind on the ride home that I was going to do nothing to give away the fact that I knew my wife was a traitorous slut bitch. No sir, I was going to pretend I was happy, happy, fucking happy.

And then I was going to do the same thing that my wife was doing. If it was good enough for her, it was good enough for me. What was that phrase? 'Quid pro quo.' Yeah, that was my new motto. Fuck her!

Pardon me if I tend to ramble incoherently by times; but all this has been burning a hole in my brain and it's good to get it off my chest. A week later I went to a psychologist for a visit and he just looked at me and asked about my relationship with my parents and did I hate my father. I quickly gave up on his psycho-babble and decided that I would do it this way; put my problems on electronic paper.

And so, a few months later, after some soul-searching, and coming to the realization that I had to do something to make myself feel better, to bring a measure of justice to this fucked up situation, I found myself in the position of having a Friend with Benefits (FWB) relationship with a woman that I worked with.

She's a lawyer in the same firm that I work for. Divorced, with two small children in Elementary School. Amanda Stuart is one year older than me. She's tall, slender, very fit, and beautiful and for the life of me I cannot figure out why she wants to have sex with me. I mean, she could have just about any man that she wants by merely using her index finger and beckoning them to her.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not exactly a fat, ugly, asshole. Quite the opposite in fact. I'm exactly 6 ft. tall. I weigh in at 165 pounds and I'm reasonably fit. I run, bicycle, and work out regularly. I have a full head of brown hair, all my teeth, I only wear glasses to read, I'm not hideously ugly and my wife was actually the one to want to start dating me.

As I discovered through casual conversation with Amanda, she had given up with the idea of trying to be happy at the same time as being married. Her husband, she determined after much soul-searching, was the wrong person to be married to and so after working to make her relationship with him survive, they both decided that they didn't want to be married to each other. It wasn't until later in our friendship that I found out that the father of her children is not her ex-husband. That was the main reason they divorced. I can understand how that would be a deal breaker. It would be for me if I discovered that I wasn't the biological father of my children. But that's not my problem. Indeed, I had mine DNA tested.

So, I get the benefit of Amanda's needs. Her needs and my needs just happen to be the same needs right now. I really enjoy the sex with her and we actually are able to talk a little bit after we get the fun part out of the way. She's smart and sophisticated and is the sort of woman that a man could really love in an easy sort of way. I don't feel pressure with her. Not the same as with Laura. We don't have a lot invested in each other. Not emotionally. Maybe the relationship that Laura has with the guy she's fucking is the same thing. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. I figured that if Laura ever decided to give up her affair with her lover, then I would do the same.

But, there was no indication that that was in her future.

Periodic checks by my investigator confirmed that my darling wife was getting it from her lover at least once a week, so I figured that I needed to get tested for STDs, just to make sure that she wasn't bringing home any unwanted germs. The tests were always, thankfully, negative. Maybe she was making her boyfriend use condoms or maybe he just wasn't a cesspool of disease. Whatever the case, I made a mental note to get tested every three months, just in case some little strangers tagged a ride in her vagina and got passed to me. Amanda and I always used condoms. Safety first.

Now, I need to also explain a few things. My wife is Laura (Grovsner) Kennedy. At work she goes by Grovsner. She thinks it's a bit more highbrow than Kennedy. But, come on, the Kennedy name is damn near royalty in the United States. But the Grovsner name went back centuries in England and she believed it to be much more upper-crust. It might attract more high-end clients to want to do business with the firm she works for.

We're both 34 years old and, like I said earlier, we live in Albany, in a very nice neighbourhood called Pine Hills. Our house is close to the university and not far from the downtown and the capital buildings. My commute to work is short, only a few minutes. Laura's office is not far from mine in the downtown but because she frequently has to be out of the office, she takes her car to work. I drive a three-year-old Subaru Outback and Laura has a new leased Mercedes. We lead, what looks on the surface, a perfectly normal life. We're busy with children, careers, and all the things that day-to-day life demand of us.

The house is about eighty years old but has been carefully updated and renovated over the years and is a three story, built in the Queen Anne Victorian style. We have so much space in the place that we could literally go the entire day and never see each other until meal time. We have five bedrooms and six bathrooms and way too little closet space The basement and the third floor have storage rooms so that takes the brunt of the places for spare clothing and Christmas decorations and boxes for Halloween decorations and costumes and sports gear. I have a separate two-car garage at the back of the lot that also houses the garden equipment. Laura is constantly getting something painted or redecorated. The small bedroom next to the master bedroom had some walls knocked out and it became the walk-in closet for the main master suite. We absolutely reeked of upper middle-class domesticity and thought we had it good. Or at least I thought we did. I was clearly wrong. Something for Laura was missing.

It was a while ago that I started to put together the little things that, one day, added up to my suspicion that Laura was having an affair on the side. She was very good at hiding it. I mean, when she got home it was almost impossible to see any outward signs that she had spent two hours that afternoon fucking her boyfriend. We made dinner for our family and talked about our day. We made plans to do things and talked about the schedule for the next few days. It was all painfully normal and boring. Maybe that was it. Normal and boring. No excitement.

It was all good until. Until I discovered her other cellphone. I was looking in her handbag for her car keys so I could move her car, it was blocking the garage door and I needed to pull it back to get some shit out, and there it was. It was turned off. So, I turned it on. It was protected with a six number code to open it. I tired a few numbers but when nothing worked, and after the fourth attempt it gave me a warning that it would lock me out from trying again if I entered a fifth incorrect attempt. I decided that I didn't want her to know that I had been fooling around with it so I turned it off and put it back in her bag.

I racked my brain for a while trying to decide what was her need for a second cell phone. Every conclusion that I drew told me that she was hiding something. What that was and why was the sixty-four million dollar question. It bothered me for days. I analyzed every aspect of our lives, our marriage and our work, to try to come to find an answer. At the end of the day I decided not to bring it up but to get better information. So, that's when I got the investigator involved. What they told me was my biggest fear.

Laura clearly wanted more. She wanted some excitement in her life and I wasn't the guy that she wanted it from. I mean, if you're bored, the normal thing is to maybe suggest a change away from the routine. Start a new hobby, take a trip, volunteer for a good cause, and maybe get active in the community. But no, Laura's solution was to start fucking some other guy. How do I deal with that?

I wracked my brain for a solution. The lawyer in me figured that I needed to approach this as logically as I could and take an unemotional approach. But that didn't account for my children.

The unemotional approach would see me confronting Laura, demanding she stop under threat of divorce. But what if she decides that she doesn't want to stop? What then?

What if, Laura decides that she does want a divorce and wants to battle it out, tooth and nail, in a protracted fight to take control of the kids? Who wins and who loses. Well, the lawyer in me can tell you that we all lose, all except our legal representatives. They win at about $300 an hour as we fight over who gets what pieces of furniture and how many minutes we each get with the kids and on what days and where. No, the kids will lose first and foremost, and so will both Laura and I.

No, if we parted, it would have to be on mutual terms and done in such a way that we don't burn everything down around us.

So, that puts me back to what my own lawyer advised; do nothing. I stewed on that for a few weeks, all the while trying to fathom why my wife decided to fuck other men. What were my shortcomings? Did I pay enough attention to Laura? Had the romance evaporated from our marriage? Was I just too stodgy and boring for her? And then, was my dick too small? Was I bad at sex? The self-doubts were killing me. But while I was trying to figure that out I decided that I needed to step up my game a bit. I had to do something. Just what that something entailed was right at that moment not immediately apparent. But I made a start.

I usually try and exercise two or three times a week, but with all the increased stress to deal with, I knew that I needed to increase my workouts. So, I'm running a lot more than I used to. I get up at 5 AM and lace up my running shoes and hit the running trails in my neighbourhood. Over the last two months I've dropped about eight pounds and about two inches from my waistline. I also have been using the gym that is conveniently next door to my office. Two days a week, I go there and use the weight room. I had a couple of sessions with an instructor to get me going and to make sure that I didn't injure myself early on with trying to pump too much iron. I started out with lighter weights and have been working my way up to more challenging weights. It's been a slow process but I'm starting to see an increase in my upper body strength.

If I was now unattractive to my wife I wanted to try and improve my attract-ability. By improving my physical self I wanted to let her know that I was wanting to be taken notice of. It was 'look at me, I'm fit and desirable and I have six-pack abs,' or something like that. I tried taking her out for romantic dinners with just the two of us, but her damn cell phone was buzzing and binging all the fucking time spoiling the mood. I tried sensual massages in bed with warm oil, candles, soft mood music and wine. Again that fucking phone ruined it. I tried turning the fucking thing off but when she caught me she complained that she might miss an important call or email from a client.

Everything I did met with a dismal failure. So, we all settled into a new routine. And I must admit that even that got routine and boring, at least it got that way for me. I mean, what was the point? Laura and I were keeping secrets from each other. She was getting it from Jason on a regular basis and I was starting a revenge relationship with a woman that was, until a couple of years ago, a serial cheater. So, any idea that I had that saw me occupying the moral high ground was now a myth. I was as bad as she was. But somehow it felt like the right thing to do.

A few months later I had a discussion with Amanda one day after we had enjoyed a lazy afternoon of sex. We were always considerate of each other, but some days we both wanted the kind of sex that was hot, sweaty, and urgent and came without all the foreplay and lovey-dovey stuff of people that were in committed relationships. Ours was just sex, we knew that, and we stuck to the plan. It didn't mean that we didn't talk, and it didn't mean that we didn't actually care about the other person. I did care about Amanda. At her core she is a wonderful woman and a great mother, but we both knew that our arrangement was not long-term, and it wasn't going to go beyond meeting our immediate needs. My plan was not to complicate my life.

Or so I thought.

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Six Months Later

So, things have been continuing to go on pretty much the same for the last few months. I've had the investigative agency continue to do a periodic check every two or three months to see what Laura has been up to. She's still having sex with her lover once or twice a week. With that knowledge tucked away in the back of my mind I decided that I wasn't going to be in any hurry to end my extra-curricular activities with Amanda. In fact, both Amanda and I had become a bit closer over the last few months, closer to the point where she met my kids and I met hers. I'll circle back to that in a minute.