HOME SWEET HOME
"Don't move, but turn your head slightly to look at me ... perfect ... hold it ... and smile. Yeah, just like that Izzy."
Using his mobile phone, Dominic Stadler clicked away as his wife Isabel complied to his request.
"Our first home," she said, beaming happily. Directed by Dominic, her pose had her standing at the half-glazed front door of their new house, looking out onto the street, one hand touching the middle strut of the quartered glass frame, the other just touching the glass pane to the side. They'd only picked up the keys to the house earlier that day from the solicitors.
"Perfect," Dominic said as he stopped taking photos and began to scroll through the pictures he'd taken. Isabel joined him and peered in over his shoulder. In her high heels she was taller than him.
"I like that one," Dominic said, stopping at the last picture he'd taken, "what do you think?"
Isabel smiled at her husband as she shook her head. "Don't you want to be in the picture too Dom? It is OUR house, not just mine."
"Nonsense," he smiled in return, "no-one wants to see a picture of ugly old me when they can look at a picture of you, now do they! Besides, IT IS your house. You were the driving force. This is all down to you babe."
She looked at the picture. It was a good shot that showed her as an attractive young woman with light brown hair and lovely brown eyes. But immediately, as she was prone to do, she began to mentally critique her appearance. On a good day she was smokin'. On a bad day ... well ... not so good, perhaps even ugly. Today was an in-between day.
Although she liked the fact she appeared so happy she was still hypercritical about her looks. She'd always felt that her nose was too long and her chin a bit too 'Desperate Dan' in appearance. Added to that she had high cheekbones and a fairly wide mouth but her lips were nice and pouty and she had nice teeth. Her body on the other hand was only just okay.
As usual Isabel Stadler was doing herself a disservice. She was tall and willowy, standing a touch over 5'9" in her bare feet. Her body shape could best be described as 'gangly' but bore testament to the many childhood hours spent in ballet classes. Her broad shoulders, long neck and tiny waist gave her a slender build that along with thin sensuous arms and long fingers had made her appear perfect for that art form.
That was until puberty kicked in and her breasts had first appeared. As she progressed through her teenage years they had just carried on growing, so much so that eventually her dance teacher told her that she would never be able to perform ballet professionally due to the size of her bust.
Now at twenty six years of age her breasts had developed into a sizeable tear drop shape, that at a bra busting 34F sat high and firm on her chest and looked much larger due to her slim upper body and flat tummy. Her thighs whilst extremely shapely were perhaps bigger than she would have liked and her arse wasn't a nice round bubble butt, but being heart shaped was still full enough to stretch out her tight fitting trousers in a good way that made men notice.
She may have given up her dreams of ballet but she had continued to dance. And whilst she may have been dismissive of her body shape, it was a fact that men saw her in a whole different light and really liked what they saw.
"I'll post it on Facebook and Instagram later tonight," Dominic said as he put his phone in his pocket. "Come on, let's get off home and do some more packing. We've only got a couple of days left before we move."
*
*
*
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
Trying hard to stifle her moans of pleasure, Isabel's body shuddered as she finally came to her climax. She twitched in her seat as the last remnants of her orgasm rippled through her body in ever decreasing waves of delight until finally she was still.
"Pheeew," she exhaled softly as she wiped her brow with the back of her hand. It had taken some effort to cum tonight. In fact it was becoming harder each and every night. She knew perfectly well the reason why but angrily pushed the thought to the back of her mind.
She lowered her legs and pulled her skirt back down over her shapely thighs. She stood; at first unsteady; before she made her way from the living room to the kitchen. Making herself a pot of tea she then took a seat at the kitchen table, nursing her cup whilst it cooled. She could hear Dominic snoring loudly upstairs and shook her head sadly as she looked around the kitchen. It still wasn't finished. The alterations they had enthusiastically started had never been completed and they now no longer had the funds to finish them, let alone decorate.
How had it come to this? At first everything had been fine but now ... just a few months later ... it was all falling apart. She shook her head again as her thoughts began to drift back in time.
Dominic was a struggling artist when she first met him. He was a romantic, an aesthetic, a passionate but gentle soul and she found herself drawn to him like a moth to a flame, quickly becoming besotted with his easy charm and rakish, boyish good humour.
They were intimate on their second date as she already knew she loved him. Within five weeks of meeting; and much to her parent's disquiet; they moved in together. But she didn't care what they thought. She was in love, nothing else mattered.
They flitted from flat to flat, living a happy Bohemian life, free spirits in an increasingly grey and sombre world. But when the need to procreate became all consuming for Isabel, it was she who determined it was time to put down roots. They soon discovered that in the grey world you needed a job to get a mortgage, which was fine up to a point as Isabel had always worked. The problem was that Dominic never had. As an aesthetic he'd not wanted his creativity stifled by such mundane things in life as the regimen of having a job. Isabel had never minded being the sole breadwinner, as it gave Dominic the time in which to express himself artistically.
But then, having discussed the urgent need for more income to support their mortgage application, Dominic reluctantly agreed to look for work. With no skill sets his opportunities were limited but he eventually found employment in a distribution warehouse. It was a menial task he felt was far beneath a man of his intellect. It paid just above the minimum wage but if it would get them what his Izzy wanted, his sacrifice to his art would reluctantly have to be made.
When his bad credit history came to light, Isabel had been devastated. Her dreams lay in tatters, for she had already found the dream house she wanted to make into their family home. Eventually they found a lender who would overlook Dominic's bad credit but it came at a price. A higher interest rate meant a much higher monthly payment and a much bigger deposit. Even with Dominic working overtime they barely had enough but they finally scrimped together the extra deposit, which totally wiped out their meagre savings.
They had only been living in the home for a couple of months when their next bit of bad luck occurred.
Despite Isabel knowing that Dominic hated his job, he stuck at it. They needed his money for a little while longer for all the improvements and alterations that needed to be made. And then he was involved in a car accident on his way home from work that left him incapacitated for several weeks. Not having been with the company for very long his sick pay ran out quickly leaving a big hole in their household budget. Two weeks into his rehab and it became obvious that he wasn't responding to the treatment as he should have been. The surgeons weren't too optimistic about a speedy or successful recovery, which left Dominic devastated.
He turned to his art as a way of soothing his pain but in his hour of need his artistic flair had seemingly deserted him. Many a time Isabel had returned home from work to find ripped up canvasses littering the floor of his makeshift art studio. Unable to express himself artistically Dominic became increasingly morbid as he sank slowly into a deep depression.
Just before his accident they had been trying for a baby, Isabel thinking that the time was right to start a family, but that plan too now lay in tatters. Not only could they now not afford to have an addition to the family but Dominic at the moment was in no position to even make love to his wife. Not only was it difficult due to his injuries, the cocktail of drugs he was presently taking had apparently lowered his libido to such an extent that he now felt little to no sexual desire or indeed feelings of intimacy towards his wife.
At first Isabel was unhappy although sympathetic about the situation. Despite the negative feelings she had about her angular body shape, her burgeoning breasts had ensured that she'd never lacked for male attention when she was younger. But she never slept around. Every relationship had been intense emotionally as well as sexually.
As a result she'd always given everything of herself when expressing her love of intimacy and had become a very sexual person. That need hadn't lessened and she still had desires that needed satisfying. So she'd clung to the hope that Dominic would soon snap out of his malaise and their problems would disappear. But sadly as the weeks became months there seemed no end in sight. It seemed Dominic could barely make the effort to kiss and cuddle his wife let alone make love to her.
Isabel took her marriage vows very seriously. To love and to cherish, in sickness and in health meant just that. She'd nursed him through from the beginning. But now that the physical signs of Dominic's injury had diminished there were still the mental scars that remained.
Even though he'd hated his job, Isabel knew that being unable to contribute financially had hurt him deeply. His feelings of worth were further diminished even further by his seeming inability to resume sexual relations with his wife and give her the child she so desperately wanted.