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This is a work of fiction, names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously and resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, business establishments, events or locals is entirely coincidental. Many thanks to my two fine editors
Barneyr
and
SimePop
, who corrected most of my mistakes. Although I did some final tweaking and as always, any mistakes are my fault. The is a free site and so are the stories. I do my best to present a readable and enjoyable story. So, I do hope you enjoy this story. Please remember that both myself and my editors are amateurs.
Copy Right 2017 Red Tempest
*
Chapter One
The ship had docked and I was standing by the gangway with my luggage waiting to get off the ship.
Where the fuck was Tina?
It was my first cruise and it was my cruise from hell. Just then she walked up to me without her luggage.
"Where's your luggage?" I asked.
"Tom, Wes and I are staying aboard ship and we are going back out for another cruise. Wes's cabin was available for us to stay in. I will be back in a week," she stated.
I gave her a pissed off look and just nodded my head. I handed her an envelope with two thousand dollars in it. "Here, this will cover my share of the cruise. You will have to cover all your own expenses," I said.
I turned and walked down the gangway and off the ship. I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me to the airport.
I guess I should back up and start at the beginning and tell you how all this mess started.
Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Thomas Paris; but everyone called me Tom. I am five feet-ten inches tall and weight one hundred and ninety pounds and I am sixty-five years old. I'm a semi-retired heavy equipment operator. I still work part time when my old company is shorthanded and needed some help. Even at sixty-five I'm in very good shape compared to most guys my age. I work out at least three days a week at our local health club, or when I can if I am working that week. Also, our high school has open pool three nights a week and I go there to swim.
I have been married twice. The first was to Dianne, she was my love during our high school years. After high school, I did some odd jobs for a year until I went to an Operating Engineering training school. I learned how to operate heavy equipment. I got a job in construction and worked forty-four years with the same company. Dianne and I got married a couple years out of high school. Our marriage lasted a few years and then we seemed to just flame out for some sort of a reason and got divorced. My second marriage was to Jody. We were married for thirty-five years.
She was married twice before and had four girls from the first and a boy from the second marriages. We had one son together. Our life together flourished and we were both very happy.
Eventually all good things must come to an end and it did when she got the dreaded news she had cancer. We fought it together for a while, until it became too difficult for her. Finally, she gave up and passed away. To say that I was devastated would be an understatement. I took it very hard and didn't do much for the next six to eight months. Finally, one day I had a heart to heart talk with myself. I came to an understanding that Jody would want me to stop feeling sorry for myself and begin to make a new life.
So, I joined a couple of internet dating sites, where I proceed to date several different women for the next year, until I met Kelly Christina Bundy. She didn't like to be confused with the TV character, she liked to be called Tina. They say opposites are drawn to each other, like a moth to a flame: which must have been the case with Tina and myself. I liked to golf and bowl and watch sports on TV. She liked to shop and watch those damn reality shows on TV, which I hated. So, how did we manage to stay together? I don't have a good answer, we just clicked.
After dating for almost six months, I moved into her condo with her in late June. I put my house up for sale, I was getting tired of taking care of the house anyway. It will be nice to have some else cut the grass and shovel the snow. Her condo was small with two bedrooms and it was a little over a thousand square feet of space. Not a lot of room for two people.
A month after I moved in with Tina, my mother passed away and I inherited her condo which was almost twice the size of Tina's. We updated Mom's condo with new carpet, appliances and painted the interior. When the renovations were completed in September and we moved in. Tina then leased her condo out. We have been living together for almost a year in the new condo.
Tina had been called the black widow. She had been married three times before and each husband had died. She was married to Mark for thirty years and had three boys with him. He was a smoker and suffered from lung cancer and died. Luis was her second husband. They were married for four years. He was involved in a pedestrian-vehicle accident and was killed. Robert was her third husband. Robert was a drug user and was killed when he was high and lost control of his car striking a utility pole. I can't say that she was the cause of their deaths, but the name tag seemed to stick whether it was her fault or not.
Tina has more experienced than I do in the dating game world. She dated between husbands. After Robert's death, she got back into dating. The first guy she dated was Carl and they dated for almost a year. The second guy she dated was Wes and they dated for a couple of years. Wes wanted to get married, but she didn't. She never did elaborate on why she didn't want to get married to Wes. She would talk about her dating life in general, but she never went into any great details. She did talk about her past husbands, but she hardly ever talked about Robert. I guess that was a black mark in her life. The way I figured it, what happened in her past happened and there wasn't much that I can do about her past life. I am only concerned about present and what we can achieve together.
Tina stands five feet-one inches tall, and her hair is blonde and she has green eyes. She has an exceptionally beautiful face, for a woman of her age; as she is five years older than I am. Her sign is Cancer and she believes in that astrology crap. She's slightly on the chunky side; I would call her pleasantly plump. Her breasts are 38dd, which I would find out later.
Tina and I finally met in January after a few weeks of chatting on the dating site. We met at her condo, which was on the other side of the river from my house, about five minutes away. We dated on and off for the next five to six months. I found out that she had spent most of her life in the township, not more than few miles from my house.
In her earlier years, she owned a reality company and was also a mortgage broker. It was odd we never ran into each other living so close together. I guess we just ran in different circles.
I remember just before the Memorial Day weekend, when our first time in bed happened. It was late at night. Let me rephrase that, it was early the next morning, like 2:00 am. and we had been making out for a couple of hours.
"Well, I think it is time for me to go home and get in a four-hour nap before going to work," I said.
"You could nap here with me if you want?" She replied, as she walked into the bathroom to get ready for bed.
Wow my eyes popped open and a grin started to creep across my face, as I waited for her to come out of the bathroom. I could visualize the passionate sex we were going to have.
She came out of the bathroom wear her pajamas, "but no sex," she said.
That sort took the wind out of my sails for a moment, but then what the hell at least I'm in her bed and that is better than going home.
Chapter Two
I was back to work and it was Friday, the start of the Memorial Day weekend. The company had given us a four-day weekend. It was always nice to get a four-day weekend. Our company was always great in giving us the extra day off if it was possible.
The old company president said to me one time, "Tommy me boy, you have to sometimes give the fellers an extra day off over the holidays, so they can spend their fucking money. That way whens they come back to work, they're fucking broke and hungry for more money. They will work fucking harder to earn their money."
(Those were almost the exact words that he spoke to me, funny how a statement like that stays in your mind. When I asked him about the statement, he said that was how his granddad said it to him.)
Tina was planning a cookout with a few friends and her family on Saturday. It was to be a party to usher in the summer months and for me to meet some of them.
Friday night she was drinking some wine and talking about what needed to be done for the party tomorrow. I offered to get my electric leaf blower and clean out the patio of leaves and other debris. Tina was drinking white wine, chardonnay was her favorite. She was on her way to becoming moderately buzzed drinking the wine. This was the first time I had seen her drink any volume of alcohol. When we go out for dinner, she usually had a glass or two of wine with her meal.
She became very talkative after a few glasses of wine. She talked about many topics, including some of what had happened in her past.
"This happened to my friend Priscilla a couple of years ago at our annual 4
th
of July party. I was dating her ex-husband Wes. He showed up at my party and it was after midnight when we ended up in my bed having sex. He spent the night with me. Priscilla spent half the night searched for him, before giving up and going home. The boys had hidden his car out of sight. Priscilla must have thought that he had left the party. Now don't tell anyone that I told you about this. I had been dating Wes on and off for a couple of years before you and Priscilla and her children did not know that I had been dated him. I want to keep my good relationship with Priscilla and her family and if they found out I had been dating Wes, it could cause some hard feelings," she told me.
We finally went to bed, where she continued to ramble on. After talking about several subjects, including our relationship she said this out of the blue, "You know the only way that I will ever have sex with you is if I am drunk."