Strange Days

As Jim Morrison of The Doors had once sung, "Strange days have found us". The banks were over extended and started to fail. Huge corporations, once the bedrock of the economy, started to approach bankruptcy and laid off large numbers of employees. Before you knew it the country was in a fast slide to chaos and recession. Then it got worse!

My name was Jim Mayfair and my job seemed secure. I had a high five figure job with the government and a nice but not huge inheritance from my father that I had invested in CD's and insured money market accounts as well as a couple of rental houses. It was just a bit of luck really that I had gotten disillusioned with the stock market six months before the entire world did.

If you figure that made me a happy camper then you would be wrong. Money and financial security are nice but don't really mean that much if you don't have a happy personal life. I had married a woman I had loved deeply and she had betrayed me. That is if you considered not being satisfied with our sex life and screwing other men to be betrayal. Funny thing but I was one of those who saw it that way.

I suppose in every other way she was a great wife and mother. The house was kept very clean and neat, she was an excellent cook who actually did cook no less than four or five times a week, and our two kids adored her. Sarah was eight and Mike was ten. My wife, Josie, would help them with homework and play games with them almost every night.

Oh sure I would be called in to help with the hard school stuff like Math and Science and occasionally I was the fourth in a board game or card game. But Josie did most of the child rearing and did it well. As I said, I think the kids loved me, but they adored her.

It might even be that she loved me in her own way. Certainly she was never less than pleasant to me and could even be affectionate on occasion. But she never loved me back the way that I loved her. I suppose it is hard for a woman to love or respect someone fully when she is sharing the intimacy of sex with other men. It stands to reason that she will look down on her husband at least a little bit if he can't satisfy her in that most manly of ways.

I should have been prepared for this outcome. Prior to my marriage my sex life had never been anything to write home about either. Oh I hadn't been totally cursed by Mother Nature. I had a very cute face that women liked, great hair, and broad muscled shoulders and arms. There were three areas however that I came up a little short in what women liked physically. I was relatively short at five feet seven inches, my body type was stocky and I could put on ten or twenty pounds of fat if I wasn't careful, and last but least my cock was only four inches.

When it came to a long term relationship I could maybe get past those first two but that last one seemed to be a deal breaker. In high school I only dated two girls and the first one never let me get past first base. But the second one was a lusty little thing and once you got your hand in her bra and started tweaking those nipples, she got turned on and ran like a well tuned engine.

Once we got to the point in our dating relationship where she unzipped my pants and pulled my cock out, I could tell she was disappointed. We still went ahead and fucked that night and I lost my virginity but it was the only time. After that she always had an excuse why we couldn't go out and soon I noticed her walking around school with her arm around another guy.

That sucked on many levels not the least of which was that I had really enjoyed the sex. My four incher hadn't stopped me from feeling pleasure and lots of sensation. I loved the foreplay as much as the fucking. Kissing, playing with tits and all the rest was just fun! Too bad she hadn't seen it that way.

When I entered college I found an environment that I could thrive in. In high school, my grades had been good but not great. In college I found my courses much more interesting and my intelligence seemed to grow and my mind opened up to many new thoughts. I started off in business courses but sooned switched to computer science as I found I was a natural at working with them.

My grade point was a 4.8 out of five in my major and a 4.5 overall. You would think I spent a lot of hours studying to get those grades but I really didn't. Somehow I could actually see the big picture right away and then only needed to learn a few specifics to round out my knowledge. Most kids were only memorizing things from the textbook and their notes so if they were thrown a curve on a test they didn't know which way to turn.

Since I understood what we were trying to learn and the mechanics of how it all fit together, I did a pretty good job of answering those kind of questions and my grades reflected it. Another thing I learned about this time was that girls in college had a different mind set than those in high school. Oh sure the jocks and cool guys were still high up on the social scale but the smarter girls were looking for guys that would be good providers and husbands.

I had gotten on an exercise program and was looking good as well as showing such great promise in the future jobs market. That along with my innate cuteness, funny personality and genuine sensitivity and niceness soon had my date card filled.

Man was I having fun. So many girls to ask out. So many of them that actually would put out with the right moves and attitudes. Okay so not many of them lasted more than a couple of months. I wasn't looking for commitment or a long term relationship either. Pass the beer and the bong and boy didn't that redhead look hot over there.

Eventually of course even a good thing can get a little old and I started looking for a more meaningful relationship. By my senior year I was getting a little desperate. For some reason I was having a harder time getting dates and the ones I got seemed to only last until we got to the sex part.

Finally one girl got very drunk when she was giving me the kissoff and told me the truth that it was little Jim that was the problem. She even told me that word had gotten around campus about me. The only reason she had gone out with me was because everything else about me was so great and she just had to see for herself if we could make a go of it. Talk about embarrassed and shamed!

My ego and confidence took a nose dive from the high board and I felt sorry for myself and angry at the same time. I never asked another girl out the rest of my time in college. My grades slipped a little too as I was depressed and didn't see the point of anything at that point. I put on five pounds, then ten and finally stopped at fifteen. My only exercise was lifting a beer can to my mouth as I watched tv.

I guess my appearance and attitude had a lot to do with the way my job interviews went. Even though my grades were still good overall, I wasn't getting the offers from the big high tech companies that I thought would be my future. My best offer was from a Federal Government Agency. Even though the starting salary was a lot less than I had once anticipated, the long term advancement showed a lot of promise and the benefits were excellent.

So I took the job, graduated from college and was off to Atlanta to start my new life. Soon I found that working on real systems and solving real problems was even more interesting and challenging than I had once found in my college studies. I was a success right from the start and had my bosses amazed at what a hot shot they had hired.

I got promotions as fast as the rulebook said they could give them to me and I think they may have gotten an exception to the rules on a couple of them. Financially I was doing quite well in no time at all. All of this boosted my confidence to where I once again started dating. This time I was going to be much smarter however.

Having determined my weakness, I decided that my only option was to find a virgin that would have no way to compare my size and abilities with other men. In this, of course, I was being terribly naive and foolish. Women, much more so than men, talk about their experiences in much greater detail. To think that I could marry a woman and isolate her forever from the issue of size and performance was just not logical thinking.

But it was my thinking so I went ahead with my plan. If I saw a woman who interested me I would try to find out everything I could about her before I even asked her for a date. I even went so far as to hire a private investigation company when I couldn't get information any other way. Needless to say that, in this day and time, there weren't many who could meet my qualifications so that I only went out with three women in a year's time and only two the next year.

There wasn't any spark of chemistry with any of them and so I was still alone and single. Then I met Josie and fell head over heels in love. She was five feet five and cute as a bug but not beautiful. She had a nice body but not a spectacular one. Her personality was laid back and mellow and always seemed to have a smile. She was smart and confident but not aggressive or arrogant.

I had to know everything about her. The investigators were brought in. She was brought up in a small southern town by very traditional minded parents. There had been a period or rebellion in her high school days but apparently hadn't gotten too wild and still seemed to be a virgin. After high school she went to a community college near her town and graduated from a two year course and then had to go to work as her parents couldn't afford anymore college.

We started dating and she seemed to like me as much as I liked her. Our make out sessions were spectacular but she refused to let anything go below the waist either on her part or mine. Far from being discouraged as most guys would be, I was overjoyed. I felt safe and secure with this woman and soon she was my wife.

The first two years were the happiest days of my life! Everything was perfect and I was totally satisfied with her and she said the same about me. The birth of Mike at the end of the second year just solidified our love and we both were ecstatic at being parents. We decided that she should quit her job and be a stay at home Mom.

She took to that lifestyle like a fish to water as her Mother had trained her well in the duties of a housewife. She exercised and got her figure back and I did too and lost ten pounds of fat. But our sex life did go down a little bit. We had made love four or five times a week in our first two years and now it slipped to three or four. This was due to her more than me. Oh sure my job could be demanding some times and I would be tired. But for every time when I wasn't in the mood there would be three or four times that she wouldn't be.

Her breasts had gotten bigger after the pregnancy but it seemed her pussy had also. Whereas I thought we had been a pretty good fit before, she now seemed a little looser and the friction wasn't as great. Oral sex turned her on and I had gotten quite good at it since we had been married. But she didn't reciprocate like I thought she should.

All of this had started to put little doubts in my head but then she was pregnant again and that took over our lives as it did the first time. Josie had a lot more problems with this pregnancy and our sex life went down accordingly. She had a great deal more morning sickness, tenderness and wild mood swings than the first time.

We still were both excited and pleased when Sarah came out though. I loved babies and toddlers and so did Josie. Now we had one of each and we glowed with our pride in them. My work was still doing well but the promotions had slowed a little as I started getting toward the upper end of my pay scale. Josie once again exercised and got her figure back and she maybe even looked better than before.

I had been 25 when we got married and Josie had been 21. We had now been married twelve years and Josie didn't look a day over 25. The same could be said of me as well I suppose. Well not the 25 but I had taken care of myself as well and still looked young.

When we went to parties we were both very popular. I was a good dancer and so was Josie but we never seemed to dance with each other very much. Josie seemed to enjoy dancing with other men more than I enjoyed dancing with other women. As the years went by she started dancing closer also.

And then about six years ago our sex life went down to maybe once a week and some weeks not at all. She would hug me and kiss me good night but rarely acted like she wanted any bedroom mambo. The kids were in school now, of course, and they would arrive on the school bus at about 3:30 every day. What she did with the rest of her day was a mystery.

When asked she would always say cooking, cleaning or shopping which of course was true but that surely didn't take up all of her time. Being paranoid from my earlier experiences, I hired the same investigators that I had do her pre-dating check up to come in and do some surveillance. Unfortunately my suspicions were correct. She was seeing two men while I was at work and the kids were at school.

One was a young, single guy of 24 who she saw on Tuesday's at his apartment from 10:00 to 2:00. The other was a married man of 35, only a year younger than me, who she met at a motel on Thursday's and sometimes Fridays from 11:30 to 2:00.

They asked if I wanted audio and video to document the infidelity and I said god no as the pictures I had in my head were already bad enough. Divorce wasn't really in my thoughts but depression was. I guess I was thinking that it was hopeless. I had been with many women and could apparently satisfy none of them sexually. Not even when I had learned to be good at oral sex and had given Josie a couple of strong orgasms every time I went down on her.

What good would divorce do? It just meant that Josie would get half of everything, custody of the kids and I would be paying a lot of child support and only getting to see them occasionally. I would have to move out and find a new place to live while still paying the mortgage on the old house so the kids would have a roof over their head. Then I would have to hire a maid and cook to take the place of the services that Josie did provide. After that would be loneliness and depression. Not that I wasn't depressed enough already.

So I took the investigative report and filed it away in my office at home and things went on as always. Except I was a little sadder. I wonder if Josie even noticed? It didn't seem she did.

There were two further precautions I felt I had to do at this point. One was that I got DNA samples of everyone when Josie wasn't looking. I carefully labeled those and sent them off to a testing facility. The second thing I did was go to a doctor and have a full battery of tests for STD's done.

The DNA tests came back and everything was good. Josie and I were the kid's biological parents. Thank god she hadn't done that to me. I know I wouldn't have been able to handle that and would have gone off the deep end and we would have had a violent confrontation. Likewise the STD's came back negative and my overall physical said I was very healthy.

I tried to take solace in my work and the kids. I had also looked into doing some work for myself outside of my job. I had a lawyer look at my contract and he concluded that as long as the work I did used no resources or information from work and didn't conflict with or compete with anything I did there then it was okay.

At that time one of my rental houses became vacant and I decided to leave it so and use it as an office. I could still write off the expense against my new income and I estimated that I should be able to make a lot more than I had been getting in rent. I told Josie that the rental house was vacant and it needed a lot of repairs done before I could rent it again. With a bit of irony I told her I would be doing the repairs on Tuesday's, Thursday's and Friday's. I looked carefully at her face as I told her this to see if she made any connection to her infidelity and those days but she didn't seem to.

My estimate of how much outside income I could make was low. There was a lot of work out there for someone with my experience and skills. I made a years worth of rent in three months. I incorporated myself and opened a new bank account in the business name where I deposited all earnings. Soon I had all the extra work I could handle and stopped looking for anymore after six months. I was averaging a couple of thousand a week when I cut off any new jobs. The balance in the business account was already over twenty thousand and growing fast.

Josie never knew a thing about it. We had a joint household account and a joint savings account that she managed but she had nothing to do with the rest of my finances. All she knew was that I deposited $4,500 a month into the household account and if she didn't spend that much then she transferred it into the savings. We had over $120,000 in the savings account due to an initial large deposit when we first got married from money I had already saved when I was single.

I had two money market accounts, some CD's and the rental houses in my name only. Everything except for one money market account was from my inheritance from my parents. The other money market was where I deposited the rest of my salary check, which was usually around $800.00. There was currently around $11,000.00 in that account. Hey, I was a frugal guy. I didn't spend much.

I also bought each of the kid's a $500 savings bond every month through my payroll check for their college education. Josie got those in the mail and kept a record of them on her computer and filed them in fire proof safe box she kept under our bed.

You can see that money wasn't a problem with us. Like I said previously, nothing was except for love, affection and sex. But that was only a problem for me. Josie was getting lots of it.

So the economy crumbled around us but we were like an island in the middle of the ocean. Calm and serene with a gentle breeze blowing. There were massive layoffs and young people had a very hard time finding a job when they got out of high school or even college. The government tried to help but they were huge, bungling and inefficient. People were getting desperate. The crime rate rose significantly even as some cities had to lay off police as they didn't have enough money to pay them.

So the emphasis went to violent, major crime instead of those good old social crimes of drugs, gambling and prostitution that politicians used to get elected on. A lot of women, unable to find work, started to turn to the oldest profession of them all. Suddenly Jim started to see a lot of hookers on the street.

Not only on the street but in ads for escort agencies and "massage therapists", etc. They were everywhere you looked. Having been pretty much deprived of sex at home I started to be tempted by these ads. I wasn't the type to pick up hookers from a street corner but dealing with an up scale escort agency seemed to be something I could do without too much embarrassment.

Hell, I had all this money, why not put it to good use? At least good use from my view point. I had no idea what Josie would think if she found out but so what? After her cheating I certainly owed her no fidelity. Besides it was her job as my wife to satisfy me sexually and if she didn't want the job anymore than I would just have to hire some contract labor to fill in the gap.

I was nervous as a cat when I walked into the Gentlemen's Choice escort agency. They had been chosen because they had the most upscale address and seemed to be the most expensive. My thinking was that the more it cost, the prettier and more willing the women would be.