To cheat or not to cheat on my wife, that is the question I need to face right now. I have been living in hell for the past six and a half years. Then I met two women from my past who have made me question if my vows are worth the agony I am suffering now. We have been married for twenty years now, and our 19 year old daughter, Melody, married her high school sweetheart, Sam Marlowe, last year. Their courtship was much like ours way back when. I hope and pray that their life doesn't end up like ours.
Let me go back to the beginning and then I can describe my dilemma of where do I go from here. My name is Bob Stone, I'm now 40 years old and I graduated from high school at 16, but turned 17 before starting college. When I was a sophomore in college, I garnered an internship with a local architectural firm doing design work and drafting on CAD. AutoCAD was in its infancy then and I was given the job of learning the system and then teaching the other architects once I was proficient at the system. My first house plan, of a three bedroom home, took me three months to do, learning all the ins and outs of the CAD system. My second plan took a month and my third one was done in two weeks. After that it was Katie bar the door. I continued my studies for an architectural degree and finished in just over three years. I went to school full time and worked too.
While in high school, I met Cathy Wood, my future wife. She was a senior same as I was and at the time I was 16 she was 17. I asked her to the St Patty's Day dance and she accepted. I was floored when she said yes. Then I was a geeky kid of 5'-10" and weighed about 115 lbs. Cathy was 5'-6' and about 110 lbs with a nice 37-24-32 frame. She had auburn hair that came to about four inches below her shoulders and the most beautiful hazel eyes that flashed either green or blue depending upon her mood. We dated the rest of the school year and even beyond into college. I didn't see her much while we were going to college, even though we did go to the same local college. However we dated when we could get together if our schedules coincided. We were two months short of graduating when we got a scare of her being pregnant. She was on birth control, but she missed two periods and so we were scared until she went to the doctor and he told her it would sometimes happen like that.
Anyway that scare gave us the incentive to marry after graduation. I started working full time at the architectural firm that I had been interning at. Five years later I tested and became a PE. After ten more years I was the lead architect of the firm, Perry and Associates, as all the other architects either retired or went off and opened offices of their own. Steve Perry, who started the company, had three sons and a daughter, Gerald the oldest stayed with the company until he retired and sold the company to me. I now had three new hotshot architects who were working under me and I just ran the business and did some design work now and then.
Cathy and I had a daughter during our marriage, Melody Alice Stone. She was born less than a year after we married. She was the apple of my eye and we both showered her with love. My marriage was great for the next fourteen years, we had an active and varied sex life, we loved each other madly and I tried to give Cathy and Mel everything they would ask for if we could afford it.
We found out after Melody was born that we could not have any more children. Cathy miscarried twice after Mel was born. It all stemmed back to when she had those problems with the missed periods. Something in her uterus was wrong or twisted or something, I never actually got a straight answer from the doctor about that. So we went on with life after I got snipped. Life was good until suddenly just before Cathy's thirty-fifth birthday she started complaining about not feeling well or tired or something whenever I wanted sex. From that day forward, sex stopped dead; nothing, no playing around, no mutual masturbation, nothing.
Well I really loved Cathy and so I settled for Rosie and her five sisters. I figured it would only be a temporary problem. We made an appointment with her OB/GYN doctor and we tried to see if there was a problem causing it, because the last three times we had made love she complained it hurt her during intercourse. We tried several doctors, even a couple of psychiatrists to see if there was a problem in her mind to make her think there was a medical problem. After a year I gave up hope of ever having a sexual relationship with my wife again.
During that year things changed at home. Drastic changes happened after we exhausted our pleas for answers. Cathy quit work, she really didn't need to work by now as I was quite successful and made good money building custom homes and working with several developers for starter homes and mid range homes too. I was bringing in about 165k a year and things were good on that front. Mel didn't know about the problems with Cathy and I about sex, but she did notice when Cathy quit her job and just stayed home. She would go to bed about nine or ten in the evening and then sleep the clock around. She would get up, eat a meal and then read a book and/or watch TV. She ate all the time and she gained almost ninety pounds over the next few years and she just looked like hell. Her shiny hair now looked terrible, yeah it was clean about every three days, but her hair had no luster anymore. Then she cut it short and started wearing house dresses like a muumuu or a robe all day. She didn't even cook anymore. I did the cooking for suppers and Mel had to make her own breakfast, if she wanted to eat. I tried talking to Cathy, but I got nowhere, she just wouldn't talk to me or she would say, "Everything is fine, now leave me alone."
To make a long sad story short, after four more years of this hell, I found an outlet for my frustrations. Mel had graduated high school and was going to college, and there was nothing at home for me, so I worked late quite a bit. It's not like I was welcomed at home, I would come in from work and say hi to my wife and she would grunt an answer, or she might say hi, but her nose was in a book or she was intent on watching something on the TV. I would fix us a microwave dinner and then I would go running to stay in shape. I hated those meals, but they were quick and easy and anything to get me out of that miserable environment was fine by me. Running became my sexual outlet for now except for occasional frantic masturbation sessions in the shower.
Rachel Fairfield was a girl who lived next door to me, when I was growing up. We saw each other at the grocery store one night and we talked and tried to catch up. It was the first time I had seen her since I graduated high school. She was divorced now and she was lonely. She had a sad story to tell and wanted to know if we could talk over coffee sometime. I told her that I would meet her at the local diner up the road from the grocery store the next night.
The Old Rail Car Diner was actually three cars that used to be box cars that someone had brought in and then made a u-shaped diner out of. The open end of the u was enclosed and was the kitchen and the dining area was inside the box cars. They cut windows and insulated the cars to make a really fine diner. The food was good and the coffee and pie were great. They had old railroad signs and advertising on the walls and lanterns and signal flags and all that stuff to make it homey and stylish.
Rachel Warring, nee Fairfield, was a year behind me in school, but a great tomboy. Tommy Southern, Bill Algren, Rachel and I were the terrors of the neighborhood when we were about ten to fourteen. When I was twelve I changed from being the carefree guy I was, to someone who knew that schooling was going to be very important to me. I went from fifth to seventh grade and then skipped eighth as well. But I still palled around with the neighbor kids until I gained high school, then I was the nerdy kid who left the rest behind and did nothing but study.
I met Rachel Thursday night after my run and we sat and talked old times and really had a great evening together. It was like I really missed the companionship that I lost when Cathy changed into a hermit. We closed the place at 9:00pm and Rachel suggested that we meet at my place or hers as the chairs would have to be more comfortable than the ones we had been sitting on all night. I explained some about my home life and she suggested her home instead as she lived only three blocks away. I said if she didn't mind a sweaty visitor I could stop by after my nightly run.
"But Bob, I normally run in the mornings about six, maybe you can run with me and we can talk as we go along. How does that sound?"
