My name is Teresa Dawson and I am an alcoholic.
My alcoholism made it easy for me to be seduced into a sleazy relationship with my husband's boss, who used me as his personal whore and all-around slut, to the point where I let him pass me around to his friends, until my husband found out about it.
We aren't divorced yet, but it's pending, and I think we've both accepted that our marriage is probably over.
I hope you will understand that I am not trying to absolve myself of my share of the blame for the trouble in our marriage. What I did was wrong, I knew it was wrong from the beginning, and I did it anyway. I would give anything to take it all back.
However, I believe with all of my heart and soul that Steve was manipulated, and I was seduced by a master con artist, George Fazekis, who deliberately set this entire episode into motion from the very first.
I was not the first woman George duped in the manner that I was, and Steve was not the first man he manipulated for his own selfish ends.
At this point, I guess I should first tell you about myself and my husband. I'm now 38-years-old, 5-foot-6, and I still weigh 125 pounds. I have dark hair and I wear it very short. We have two children, a daughter aged 14 and a 12-year-old son.
Steve is 39. He is 5-foot-10, weighs 195 pounds, with blond hair that is thinning on top. He is currently employed with a family-owned company based in this city, with offices and branches scattered across the country.
He was hired from another company in another state almost seven years ago, and was promoted to executive vice president for sales under George three and a half years ago, which is where this story really begins.
Where do I start? I guess, at the beginning. I met Steve in high school, when I was a sophomore and he was a junior. We had a world history class together, and he was the smartest person in the class. It wasn't quite love at first sight, but it was pretty close. I was immediately attracted to him and him to me.
Steve is definitely a case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. He's nice-looking, but not movie-star gorgeous; fairly well-built, but not a fitness freak, and he certainly wasn't a jock; smart, but not necessarily a genius; open, but not particularly gregarious.
I think his biggest attribute has always been his ability to mix and get along with anyone, in any group. In high school, Steve was friendly with every social class in our school, the jocks, the nerds, the brainiacs, the dopers, blacks, whites, and Hispanics. He just has a way of making people like him, and that's carried over into his career.
Our first date was the homecoming dance my sophomore year, and when he kissed me at the doorstep of my house that night, I think that was when I realized I was falling in love with him.
Steve and I went steady all through high school, and right before he went off to college, a week before the start of my senior year of high school, we finally went all the way.
We'd been working up to it for a long time, making out heavily and feeling each other up, and stopping before we went too far. I was pretty religious at the time, and I wasn't sure I wanted to lose my virginity, but finally, one night we were alone at his house making out and we just didn't stop.
Of course, we both felt guilty as hell afterward, and I sat on pins and needles for the next few days, waiting on my period, which thankfully arrived on schedule. However, later on, I quietly got on the pill, and when Steve came home for weekends, or for holidays, we did it every chance we could.
We loved each other, and didn't want to wait. And I quickly grew to enjoy sex with Steve. I found that I had a well-buried carnal streak that took awhile to get to, but once it came to the surface, I could really do some damage in bed. That's an area I'll explore a little bit later, because it has a lot to do with what happened to me with George and his friends.
When I graduated from high school, I went straight to the same university as Steve, and after my first year, we decided to get married. My folks urged me to wait, but we were hell-bent on being together.
It wasn't that they didn't like Steve; to the contrary, they've always loved him. It's just that they were concerned that I really hadn't broadened my scope, so to speak, and looking back on it, I think they were right.
I've thought about this, and I firmly believe that the seeds for what has happened to our marriage were sown very early in our relationship, and let me stress that they weren't anyone's fault. It was just the way things happened.
Steve was the only boy I ever dated, and, until George got to me, Steve was the only man I'd ever had sex with. I had some offers for dates from other guys my senior year, while Steve was off at college, but I turned them down.
Maybe if I had seen what some other guys were like, I wouldn't have had that tiny kernel of curiosity buried deep in my psyche. Maybe.
I think another thing was the fact that I always had a vague inferiority complex, especially where Steve was concerned. Steve was always so successful, made friends so easily, and did so well in school, that I felt like I could never quite measure up to him.
Let me stress that he never did anything overt to make me feel that way. He always treated me like a princess. But I was a little shy, and school work came hard for me, so much so that when we got married, I quit college and got a job at a department store to help get him through school.
Until Steve accepted his promotion to his position as George's top assistant, our sex life was quite good. We'd make love several times a week, sometimes just fooling around the house, other times after going out together, which we did quite a bit.
Although we were pretty active sexually, we weren't terribly adventurous, in that there were several things I wouldn't do for Steve. Looking back on it, that's one thing I truly regret about what happened, the fact that I denied my husband pleasures that I subsequently gave away to others, such as oral and anal sex. I just wouldn't do those things, because I thought they were "dirty." Pretty funny, huh?
I truly believe that George set me up from the first day Steve started in his position. As executive VP, Steve reported directly to George, basically serving as his right-hand man, and George quickly set about driving a wedge between Steve and me.
Steve became George's troubleshooter and chief negotiator for new contracts. In this capacity, he traveled all over the country, even overseas, to the company's various plants, and to the company's vendors and other material suppliers. When he wasn't traveling, Steve was working long hours and was bringing a lot of his work home.
As a consequence, our sex life dwindled to a rarity. Either Steve was out of town, or at work, or too exhausted to do anything when he came home. Our social life together declined as well. It seemed like the only time we went out was to a work-related function, either a business dinner or employees' party of some sort.
