Indecision couple

Please complete the required fields.
Thank you for taking the time to report this Report submission to the webmaster. Please let us know why you are choosing to report this Report submission and then click the submit button at the bottom of the page



One of the things I hate most about international travel isn’t the jet lag, it’s the immediate fatigue and borderline hallucinations I experience due to total exhaustion. I can’t sleep on planes even with a sleeping pill, so by this point, I had been up for nearly 30 hours continuous. But, I had to admit, sitting here on my hotel balcony, overlooking the beach and a bunch of gorgeous women sunning it up, I was already in love with Australia.

“We should move the business here,” Jim joked, gesturing with his beer to a particularly leggy young blonde in a bikini. As she turned our way, he raised his beer in a salutation, and she waved back cheerily and smiled before turning back to the beach and her friends. I guess they were right when they spoke of Australian hospitality, I thought.

“Yeah, that’ll make your custody battle go great,” I retorted.

“If I got to look at this every day, I might care less about it.” We chuckled briefly and clinked bottles in a joking toast. “At the very least, we might have some fun this week.”

“You enjoy that,” I countered.

“Marcus, it’s the other side of the world. It doesn’t count. I understand you’re hanging on for a bit, but at least have some fun while we’re here, and leave your problems in Seattle.”

“I don’t know about that. Seems like a really dumb idea, I think.”

“Whatever, brother. I just want to see you happy.”

Jim and I had been friends for over a decade at this point, and I trusted the guy with my life. We met at a work flag football league, and bonded after a particularly long game filled with talking shit to each other, each struggling to one up the other with creative insults. Three years ago, he came to me with an idea for a simple logistics application that would drive massive amounts of saving for shipping costs of freight, with a simple question—can it be done? We created a company, with a simple division of labor—I’m the tech mind, and Jim is the business and sales guy. What started in our respective homes quickly moved to getting investors, an office, and now we had a staff of over 45, with a respectable profit. We were in Brisbane for a week for a summit on entrepreneurship, and hoping to triple our sales and potentially double our business in the coming year. We’d even been the subject of a couple of articles in the technical press, and were releasing a subscription-based mobile application in a couple of months, as soon as we got a few vital bugs fixed. Not bad for two guys who just turned 40.

Everything was going great on the business front, but there was a lot on the personal that was difficult. Jim had gotten divorced just before we started the company, and his ex-wife was currently doing her every other yearly “we need to revisit custody and child support” tour of the court system—pretty rough, considering he was one of the most devoted fathers I knew, and his ex seemed to be using the children as a bargaining chip for money, especially since her alimony had run out. Plus, my own marriage was now on the rocks as my wife had cheated four months prior, and copious marriage counseling didn’t seem to be making things any less tense. I had my part in it, to be sure, as I had been putting in insane hours to build this business into a money maker, and when I came home, being a dad trumped being a husband regularly. But now, as things changed, I was slowly realizing the only reason I was still in the relationship was that I didn’t want split custody and to lose a lot of my money. We hadn’t had sex since her affair, and while I was still extremely angry with her and occasionally contemplated giving her a taste of her own medicine, I would never give her the satisfaction of stooping to her level.

I realized I’d been zoning out, and I hadn’t answered Jim for a few long moments. I was just about to look back and give him my pat answer about being reasonably happy in life, when I saw him gesture down to the beach and say, “Marcus…brother, I think I see your happiness moving her way down the beach.”

Please follow and like us:
0 0 votes
Story Rating
Pages ( 1 of 20 ): 1 23 ... 20Next »
Subscribe
Notify of
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x