LAY OFF

By

R. Richard

EXCERPT

IF YOU'RE GOING TO understand what happened, you have to go back to the beginning.

My wife and I grew up as two kids in a medium sized city. We weren't average kids, far from it.

My wife to be, Jade was either the best looking girl while we went to the local high school, or she was a close second to one Judy. Both Jade and Judy were active socially and could really handle people. However, Jade was an A student while Judy barely made C’s.

I was Jack, the President of the student body and, if I do say so myself, a tall, handsome kid who moved in all the right social circles and still made good grades. Oh yes, there was one other thing that continued to have an impact on the rest of my life. To get the votes of the jocks and their friends and hangers on, I began to work out with weights early on. I'm not a muscle man, but my body is strong and well defined.

Neither Jade nor Jack came from a wealthy background. However, neither of our families was poor. We each had all of the necessities and even a few of the luxuries.

Both Jade and I skipped a grade early on and we both graduated from high school at age seventeen. Each of us won a college scholarship. We both went to the same local college, so that we could live at home and afford to complete our studies without working full time while we went to school.

In college, Jade was the President of the student body and I was just an honour roll student. I worked very hard and made damn sure that I took the kind of subjects and got the kind of grades that would allow me to get a good paying job after I graduated.

As a result of our scholarships and quite a bit of hard work, Jade and I each graduated from college at the age of twenty.

By the time we graduated from college, Jade and I had been dating for some six years. Jade was the kind of girl I wanted for my wife and I was the kind of guy Jade wanted for her husband. Of course, we each had some questions.

Jade, I don’t think, ever really believed that I hadn’t fucked Judy back in high school. Whenever we had some sort of disagreement, Jade would accuse me. Then she would refuse to believe my denials.

When the question of Jade’s romantic involvements came up, she claimed that she had ridden horseback in all directions at once. Yeah right.

However, by the time we graduated, we had worked past the little problems and we realized that we could, by working as a team, have the kind of lives we really wanted.

Perhaps other events around us pushed us into the realization of what we really wanted out of life.

My parents got divorced just before I graduated from college. It was a bitter divorce and a financial disaster for both of them. As a result, I wanted to make sure that I found the right girl and avoided the problems my own parents had.

Jade’s father suffered a stroke just before her last year in college. He was forced to take early retirement. Her parents had enough money to live, but just enough. Jade told me that she suddenly became really aware of the idea of financial security when she saw what happened to her parents.