Winning the Lottery

"Faster, Bobby, faster!" Louise panted as she felt the need begin to build up inside her, in that special place that felt so good.

Bobby must have felt a similar urgency because he began to pump her even more frantically. The slap of his thighs against her buttocks filled the room.

Her hands clawed at his back without regard for the scratches her fingernails made digging into his skin. She arched her own back and neck, and then held her breath as the pressure built and built until she gasped out, "Ohhhh!" and then collapsed on the bed.

The fact that his partner had gone limp didn't even register on Bobby. He was now in the grasp of his own orgasm and nothing short of a gunshot to the head would have stopped him from those last final thrusts into her depths.

Afterwards, they lay there stupefied, panting hard, unable to move or think. Finally, Bobby rolled off of Louise and lay beside her. She looked at him with a mixture of admiration and satisfaction. "God, baby, you are really good. Every time I think it can't get any better, and every time it does."

Bobby reached over and rubbed her nipple. Even after just having finished, his touch sent a little thrill through her. "Hey, LouLou, am I better than Marty?" he asked.

She didn't even hesitate. "So much better," she said, and reached across to fondle his shrunken cock. "So much better," she went on, "that I'm hoping you can give me a repeat before I have to get home."

He could.

By the time Marty slipped into the house, Louise was already in bed. He poked his head in the bedroom door, but her rhythmic breathing told him she was sound asleep. He wandered back into the kitchen and sank down at their dinner table. "Now what?" he asked himself rhetorically. He knew he should get into bed himself, but he was still too wired from the night's work at the printing plant to sleep. He thought about waking Louise to see if he could get a little loving, but he quickly discarded that idea. She'd get really cranky if he woke her. "If I asked her for a blow job, she'd probably bite my dick off," he thought.

"Damn, workin' the 4:00 to midnight shift is really screwing up my life."

It had seemed like such a good idea when Bobby had suggested it a month ago. There were things Marty wanted to do to the house, but money always seemed to be tight, in no small part because Louise spent money like it grew on trees. Marty had been griping about the situation at work when Bobby unexpectedly suggested, "You oughtta think about goin' on the second shift. That shift differential would come in real handy for you two."

It had seemed like a great idea, and Marty was pleasantly surprised to find that Louise had no objections when he'd brought it up. So he'd volunteered to make the switch, and the jump in his first weekly paycheck made Marty feel pretty clever. For the same number of hours per week and only a minor inconvenience he was now taking home a nice increase in pay.

But it didn't take long for the "minor inconvenience" to become more major than Marty had foreseen. In the first place he had a difficult time adjusting to his new sleep routine. For his whole life Marty had been used to coming home from work or school and having hours to relax before going to bed. Now that he was getting home after midnight, he found it almost impossible to go straight to bed after work. Soon he was becoming a night owl.

Marty also found that the new schedule substantially reduced the time he had to spend with his wife. By the time he awoke on week days, she had long since left for her job as an aide at the retirement center. Consequently, the only chance they had to spend time together was on the weekends.

One major result was that the new working hours cut into his love life significantly. To make things worse, instead of increasing her libido, the lack of action during the week seemed to reduce Louise's appetite when they did have time together. On Saturday nights Marty found himself having to wheedle and cajole her into a little fun between the sheets.

Finally, to add insult to injury, Marty found that the two of them weren't actually saving much of the increase in pay for which he'd sacrificed so much. To Louise, money in their joint checking account was money that needed to be spent, and she seemed to fill even more of her time shopping. To make matters worse, Marty was hesitant to sit down and talk with Louise about her shopping habits. The only chance he had for such a conversation was on the weekend when he was hoping to get lucky. There's nothing like a lecture on overspending with the wife to kill any chance for a night's passion.

Marty had hoped to put the extra earnings into their older Victorian house with the nice big yard. They'd been able to buy the home because the widow who had previously owned it had let the place fall into serious disrepair. Marty and Louise had stretched their budget to purchase the old place, and Marty spent much of his spare time renovating it. He was quite proud of what he'd accomplished, but he had even bigger plans for remodeling. As he sat in the dark living room tonight, those dreams seemed further away than ever.

"I don't know how much longer I can keep this up," Marty moaned to himself. It took him an hour before he had unwound enough to slide into bed next to his sleeping wife.

By the time he awakened, it was mid-morning. After a hasty breakfast, he pulled on some old clothes and went out to mow the lawn. Pushing the old mower around the acre lot in the Georgia heat took him a couple of hours and a lot of sweat, and he wished heartily that they had enough money to purchase a riding mower.

That afternoon on the way to work, Marty stopped at the convenience store near the plant to fill up the tank of his truck. As he waited at the counter to pay for the gas, he noticed the sign for the Georgia State Lottery. "Add in a couple of lottery tickets, Millie," he told the old lady who owned the store. "I'm overdue for some good luck."

"You just made the deadline, honey, the drawing is tomorrow. Hope you win," she smiled at him as she gave him his change and the two tickets. He tucked them in his wallet and forgot about them.

That evening's shift was a bear. Normally, the big Heidelberg press pretty much ran itself. But the evening's schedule called for several short press runs, each of which required Marty to clean the rollers, affix four new color plates and then carefully monitor the print run until all four were in registration. One job required a fifth color, which made set-up and registration just that much more time-consuming. By the time his shift was over, Marty was exhausted, but when he got home, once again he found himself too keyed up to sleep.

He slumped in his favorite chair and picked up the remote to turn on the television, then decided against it. Instead, he sat quietly, sipping a can of beer and thinking about his life.

Growing up, Marty was the third child of the family, behind an older brother and sister. He grew up as the quiet, practical one, a good student and an avid reader. He had friends, thanks in part to his popular older siblings, but he was on the periphery of the popular crowd in high school. Not gifted athletically, he volunteered to be the manager of the basketball team. During the summers he'd often go hunting with his father, and he liked the quiet and solitude. But those outings mostly stopped once he reached the age of sixteen. A friend of his father arranged for Marty to get a summer job at the big printing plant in town. As a result, Marty toughened up his slender body wrangling large pallets of paper from the loading dock to the appropriate presses throughout the sprawling facility.

Perhaps those changes in his frame were part of what attracted Louise Luttrell to him. She was one of the prettier girls in the popular crowd and used to date some of the players on the football team. But something about Marty attracted her, and during their senior year the two of them began to date and soon became a steady couple.

Marty had planned to attend the local community college after graduation, but during his senior year, his father, a carpenter, fell through a ceiling on a job and was permanently disabled. Worker's compensation and his mother's job at the discount store enabled the family to get by, but college was no longer an option for their youngest son. Marty swallowed his disappointment and went looking for work. Fortunately, he'd made a good impression on management at the printing plant during his summers, and he was able to land a job as an apprentice pressman.

Louise went on to community college, but she and Marty continued to go steady. The two of them married in a small ceremony when she earned her Associate's degree. By then, Marty had saved enough money for a down payment on the fixer-upper, and the two of them started married life in their own home. Children would wait, they'd agreed, until they could get themselves financially established.

They'd had great dreams, but over the next few years those dreams seemed to fade like a photograph left in the sun, washed out by the bills they had to pay, work to be done on the house and the day-to-day routine that life imposes.

"Where did it all go?" Marty asked himself, "and more important, what can we do to get it back?"

Rousing himself from his reverie, Marty tiptoed back to the bedroom, got undressed and slipped under the covers. Even in sleep, Louise looked beautiful to him, and he hardened involuntarily. "I can't wait till this weekend," he thought to himself before closing his eyes.

When Marty finally awoke the next morning, he was shocked to discover it was almost 10:00 a.m. Once again, Louise had left for work without disturbing him.

Today he had planned to finish some of drywall installation in one of the rooms that they didn't use, so he quickly fixed himself breakfast and then got out the tape and the drywall compound. He'd already hung the big sheets with the help of his friend Terry Cummings; now he had to tape and mud the seams. By the time he had everything ready for sanding, it was 2:30 p.m., so he put his tools away and made a sandwich for himself. After lunch, he prepared some supper to take to work and then hopped into the shower. By then it was time to head for work.

Thankfully, the evening's shift was pretty normal, so Marty wasn't too tired or stressed out by the time midnight came. Nevertheless, he wasn't ready for bed when he got home, and he turned on the television quietly so as not to wake Louise.

He'd just settled back in his chair when a spot for the Georgia Lottery came on. The pretty woman standing in front of the $10 Million sign read out the winning numbers that were displayed on the screen below her. Idly, Marty pulled the tickets out of his wallet to compare -- and his breath caught in his throat. Quickly he grabbed a pencil and scratched down the numbers displayed on the screen, then compared them again to the ticket he held. They were a perfect match!

He scrambled out of his chair and ran back to the bedroom. "We won, Louise, we won!" he shouted, shaking her vigorously.

"Leave me alone, Marty," she mumbled, "I want to sleep."

"No, no, you got to wake up," Marty insisted. "We won the lottery!"

"Yeah, and I'm the queen of England," she said. "Now let me go back to sleep before I get angry!"

"Baby," Marty shouted, "I'm not joking -- we won the lottery! We're millionaires! Look at the ticket."

Louise struggled to sit up and looked suspiciously at her husband capering about beside the bed. "Let me see that," she said, and took the winning ticket from his hand. She went over to their home computer and connected to the lottery website. When she saw the winning number and compared it to the ticket in her hand, she jumped up and began to shriek. "Oh my God, Marty, we just won $10 million!"

They hugged each other and began to dance around the room until they lost their balance and fell on the bed. The couple kissed each other in happiness that quickly transformed into passion. Marty grabbed at his wife's nightgown and ripped it apart in his haste. "That was my good nightgown!" Louise cried out, but Marty just laughed. "It doesn't matter, baby, I can afford to buy you another."

She laughed and pulled him to her more tightly. Soon the two of them were making love with a frantic passion that matched their first years together. They didn't last long, but both were so excited that it didn't matter -- they came together. Exhausted, they collapsed and quickly fell asleep.

When Marty awoke he could tell it was late by the angle of the sun through the window. When he rolled over, he was shocked to bump into his wife's sleeping form. "Louise, wake up!" he said anxiously, "You're late for work."

She opened her eyes and then gave him a big grin. "No I'm not," she said, "I called in and quit my job. I'm never going to have to take care of those old farts again."

Marty was surprised, but he decided not to say anything. He wished Louise hadn't been so impetuous; he felt they needed to think things out carefully before doing anything rash.

After breakfast, Louise wanted to call her family to tell them the good news, but Marty urged her to wait. "Baby, we need to get with the lottery people and have them verify the numbers before we go crazy. And even if we have won, we need to go slow and think this thing through."

"Oh, Marty, you're just being silly," Louise shot back at him. "We both saw the winning number on the website, and we've got the winning ticket right in our hands. All we need to do is to go down and pick up that $10 million check."

"That's another thing, Louise," Marty said. "I don't think we should take the whole thing as a lump sum. If we take it as a monthly check, we'll still have more money than we've ever had in our lives, and we'll make sure we don't blow it all on something stupid."

Marty could tell that Louise wasn't happy with what he was saying, but she didn't argue with him, for which he was grateful.

After a while she looked at him with a grin and asked, "So what are you going to do today, Mr. Millionaire?"

"My Dad knows an accountant here in town. I'm going to try to see him after lunch to get some advice on what to do with the money. Then it'll probably be time to head on to work," Marty answered.

"Why in the world are you going back to that place?" Louise asked incredulously. "You're rich -- you don't ever need to work again."

"I just think we need to take it slow, Baby," Marty said. "I don't want to do anything quick that we might regret later. Let me get with this guy and see what he says. Then we can decide what we wanna do, okay?"

Louise gave him a stubborn look, but didn't say anything. That made Marty nervous, but he figured that was the best he was likely to get out of her, so he went to make his call.

The accountant's advice was eye-opening. Marty soon learned that many of his initial assumptions were wrong. The accountant even gave Marty a copy of an article from CPA Practice Adviser about lottery winners and the pitfalls they face. It was sobering stuff, and Marty began to realize that things were not going to be as simple as he had thought.

From the CPA's office Marty headed on to work. The shift began normally enough, but shortly after the dinner break, a buzz became apparent in the background. Then Marty heard raised voices, and even thought he heard somebody shouting his name. When he turned away from the press where he was working, he saw Terry, his best friend in the shop, heading for him with a big smile on his face.

"You lucky son of a bitch!" Terry yelled. "Why didn't you tell me you won the lottery?"

Before Marty could think of what to say, Terry was pumping his hand and other employees were crowding around to slap him on the back. The questions flew fast and furious: was he going to quit his job? What was he going to buy first? Was he going to take the lump sum or the monthly installments?

Marty was dumbfounded. He turned to Terry and asked, "How did you find out? We were going to keep it a secret until we could figure out what to do."

"Well forget about that," Terry told him with a laugh. "It was on the Six O'clock News, so everybody in town knows about it now."

Just then the plant manager came over to try to break up the commotion, but with little success. Finally he turned to Marty. "Listen, why don't you take a sick day and go on home, Marty? Otherwise, we'll never get any work done tonight."

Mary apologized for the disruption and headed out to his truck. He was upset at the premature revelation of their good fortune, and he couldn't wait to ask Louise what had happened. But when he got home he found a circus on his front lawn, complete with a crowd of friends and relatives, reporters and a news truck. The minute he opened the door to his truck he was pulled into the center of the commotion.

Louise was standing in a pool of illumination from the lights that the tv crew had set up. As he made his way toward her, Marty couldn't help but note that she'd brushed her hair and was wearing her nicest dress. Obviously, she had not been caught by surprise by the news crew. His blood pressure went up a few more notches.

He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away from the reporter who was trying to interview her. "What in the hell is going on, Louise?" he demanded. "We agreed that we were going to keep this under wraps until we figured out what we're gonna do."

"Don't get upset, Marty," Louise said. "It's just that I had to let my family know, and I guess they passed the word along, and the next thing I knew Channel 4 was calling to set up an interview. Anyway, it's too late now, so we might as well enjoy it."

With that she turned back to the reporter and continued with the interview. Marty could do nothing but stand there sullenly while Louise happily babbled away to the cameras.

The ordeal didn't end when the news crew finally packed up and left. A number of their neighbors and friends continued to mill around, everyone wanting to get a chance to congratulate Marty and Louise on their good fortune. Even after the couple had finally retreated to the safety of their house, the phone continued to ring with calls from well-wishers until Marty finally turned down the ringer and let the answering machine handle everything.

He slumped to the sofa and looked over at his wife. "I sure wish you hadn't told anyone yet," he said ruefully. "Our life has just gotten a heck of a lot more complicated."

Louise was unfazed. "Don't be such a worrywart, Marty. There aren't any complications that $10 million can't fix."

Marty shook his head. "In the first place, Louise, the accountant told me we aren't going to get $10 million. Uncle Sam and the State of Georgia are going to take their cut before we see a penny. And second, if you take all the money at once, they only give you a portion of the total. I think we'd be a lot better off taking the money in installments than all at once. We'd get more that way, and besides, a lot of winners have gotten into trouble trying to handle so much money."

Louise shook her head in exasperation. "Now you're just being silly, Marty. There are lots of things I want to do, and now we've finally got the money to do it. There's no good reason to turn off the spigot when we've got a lake-full to draw from."

Marty just shook his head. "We'll talk some more about it when things calm down a bit," he said, and went to open a can of beer.

Over the next few days the frenzy over the news began to die down some, but Marty and Louise continued to be besieged by callers and visitors. They also began to receive solicitations from luxury car dealers and high-end real estate brokers, each of them hoping to make a big sale to the newest millionaires in the area.