William Shakespeare wrote a story called Much ado about Nothing. Translated into today’s English we get, “A lot of fucking drama over a tiny bit of shit. I keep thinking about it over and over again. It plays repeatedly in absolute crystal clarity on the giant sized 8k screen in my mind.

Although the play is supposedly a comedy, I didn’t find it funny when it happened to me. I sit here in a shitty hotel room wondering for at least the bazillionth time where it all went wrong. The tiny blond bundle of fury, snoring on the other bed in this furnace-like room is after the same thing I am. Right now, we’re working together, but when we find it, I’d anticipate a brutal, bloody battle with no holds barred. She is the very definition of a frenemy.

When we met, I hated her on sight. But for now, we need each other. This is how our little Shakespearian drama began.

At thirty years old, I was just entering the sweet spot in my life. I’m married to the man of my dreams. I’m working in the career I chose, which is also the career I got my degree in ... and believe me there are lots of people nowadays who end up doing something they either don’t like, or just never thought about, just to make ends meet. It’s that kind of world, people.

But back to me, I’m kind of hot, in a modern way. And I am begining to think that it’s time for me to give up the day job and give my mom some grandkids. She’s been begging for them. She even has names picked out for three kids in any array of genders and even an oops baby, since Waldo can’t seem to keep his damned hands off me.

The funny thing about it is that as much as she seems to be urging ME, to have kids, her greatest fear is that my older sister will have some.

Patty, though older than me, isn’t nearly as far up the ladder in terms of her life. After a series of forgettable, temporary jobs, mostly waitressing part time, along with an even longer series of forgettable, temporary boyfriends, my big sister made a move to inject some maturity and stability into her life.

She moved herself and her latest forgettable, temporary boyfriend back into my mother’s house and for the last six months, neither of them has found even a forgettable, temporary job.

My hubby and I help financially, but my mom’s greatest fear is that Patty will beat me to the maternity ward and add yet another mouth to feed and even more financial stress on her tiny house and fixed income.

It’s hard to see Patty as my older sister. We barely resemble each other. Patty is tall and bean pole-like, with shoulder-length, light brown hair. She has fine, sharp features and resembles our father, God rest his soul.

On the other hand, I’m 5’5” and while I’ll never be voluptuous, I’m curvy. Waldo loves my boobs and butt. He’s always telling me how he hit the jackpot. He describes me as being “PERFECT.”

In his opinion, I’m like the goldilocks case. I’m not too tall and not too short. I’m in that perfect zone between being too thin like my sister and being a chunky girl.

I have more than enough in terms of boobs to have to watch the types of shirts, blouses and bras I wear, but not enough to have to worry about knocking myself out if I go out to run with him.

He considers my ass to be a work of art. It’s rounded and just fat enough to jiggle a little bit, but not fat enough to sag. It looks awesome in jeans and seeing me in a thong has caused him to lose his God damned mind a time or three.

My hair is black, collar length and longer on one side. There are a few streaks of lavender mixed in for fun. My eyes are very blue and the contrast between those blue eyes and my black hair gives me a unique look.

I also have a very bubbly personality. It comes in handy at work because I’m very good at pulling a team together and keeping everyone working together.

I do tend to be a tiny bit flirty, but no one at our company would even think about making a move on me. For one thing they know that I’m very happily married. And for another, my husband is the company’s golden boy.

My husband, Nathan Waldon, is a dual threat. He has degrees in electronic engineering AND software engineering. So, he can design both the hardware and the software for most of our projects.

He’s a secret nerd. In other words, when you see him running around the plant with his athletic, but slim body and boyish good looks, you’d never suspect that he goes home and binge watches episodes of BSG and GoT.

He has that surfer boy, slightly disheveled look that makes you think he’s probably one of those vegan guys who care about the environment and drives a Prius.

You couldn’t be more wrong. He’s not even close to being a vegan. Nate has been known to eat cows raw ... okay seriously though ... the man has never met a steak or any beef product that he doesn’t like. He’s been known to eat whole chickens by himself and he eats bacon on everything.

He really does care about the environment, just not enough to give up his Mustang. During the winter when the car is stored, we carpool in one of our Ford Escapes. He’s done the math and figures that by the two of us going out in a four-cylinder crossover vehicle for seven months of the year, it balances out the five months of him driving his Mustang during the summer.

As far as the Prius goes ... he refuses to even park near one.

Besides his Mustang, Nathan also obsesses over a certain 5’ 5” extremely sassy brunette, who loves him right back.

Our life is perfect because we both know how lucky we are to have each other. I think that our relationship has allowed both of us to relax and develop into the people we were meant to be.

In all my previous relationships, I never really felt comfortable. I mean ... I’m not really anyone’s idea of a goddess. What I am is cute, with just enough of everything to be noticed, but not enough for men to go crazy over.

All through school, I was pretty much invisible. I was always over-shadowed by either the slutty girls, or the really pretty girls, or the girls who were built like strippers.

The girls who were smart, attracted the nerds. The girls who were athletic, attracted the athletes, and the girls who were crazy ... somehow, they got all of the sensitive guys, who thought they could fucking save them.

In college, I became a practice girl. That meant that most of the guys I knew practiced fucking me until they met the woman they wanted to marry. I think I set a record for the number of friends I was introduced to.

It just seemed like every guy I got with, broke things off with me by introducing me to one of his God damned friends when he met the woman of his dreams. It wasn’t that they cared about me or didn’t want me to be alone or unhappy ... they just wanted to keep a foot in the door.

That way if things didn’t work out with miss perfect, they can always just come back and start fucking me again. Surprisingly enough, I never got any type of bad press or a reputation about it.

I guess nobody really saw me as being a whore. I mean ... I didn’t do gangbangs or anything public. And I only slept with one guy at a time. And I think that everybody knew that I was just looking for the one guy who wanted to take me off the market permanently.

There were tons of girls just like me all over every campus in the country. Statistically we were the norm. If a campus was stew, we were the broth. If a school was a bowl of cereal, we were the milk.

In order for a girl to be considered either really pretty or really ugly, she had to be compared to something. So, if a girl was prettier than us, she was beautiful. If she wasn’t as attractive ... you get the picture.

The same was said for body parts. If her breasts were bigger than ours ... or smaller, it let you know where she fit. We are the statistical bar that others are compared to.

But it wasn’t just the guys who used us. The pretty girls all had an array of friends who made them look good. And strangely enough, it wasn’t the goddess-like beauties who did it. It was the girls who were just barely prettier than us.

The above average girls seemed to need to keep a bunch of normal or average girls around them so everyone could see that they were, in fact, above average. It was almost as if they were carpenters and we were their tape measures. They kept us in their pockets so if a guy came along, they could whip us out to show their above averageness. The really pretty girls were all so far above average that no comparison was ever necessary.

So, all through college, I got a lot of miles on me while looking for Mr. Right. It was really depressing and weird.

It just seemed like men and women were looking for the same thing, but we went about it with different parameters. Women were looking to settle down with the perfect guy. We wanted to find him as quickly as possible, with the least number of candidates. In the football game of love, we wanted to win quickly and end the game.

Men on the other hand were also looking to find their perfect mate. But they wanted to go through as many women as they could on the way to finding her. In that same football game, men wanted to keep playing the game for as long as they could.

So, with that in mind, women lied about how many men they’d been with, and men bragged about how many women they’d had.

When I met Nathan, during our senior year, I was already sure that I would never meet anyone in that place. We met as part of a dual class project. The project took both engineering and marketing students and combined them into teams. Our goal was to design a real-life product and a marketing campaign to sell it.

It was funny, but that class seemed to have truly prepared us for real life because that was exactly the situation, we found ourselves in.

From day one, I was attracted to Nathan. He was good looking and seemed not to realize it. He was funny without trying to be and was the only guy in our group of five who didn’t try to hit on me.

When the project ended, I missed him, so I tracked him down and asked him to go out.

He shocked me when he told me that he’d think about it and get back to me.

I asked a few people about him and found out that no one had ever gone out with him. The few people who knew him said it had something to do with a bad break up with his girlfriend back home.

Hearing that made me realize that I’d found myself a unicorn. The fact that Nathan never got back to me about the date, forced me to change tactics.

I waited a week and approached him again. But this time I sought his help for my physics class. I didn’t actually have a physics class, but my roommate did, and Nathan helped me do all her homework.

The time we spent together, taught me more than physics. I became decent at physics, although it was nothing, I would ever need in my career in advertising and marketing. The true thing I studied was Nathan or Waldo as his closest friends and relatives called him.

By the end of the semester, we were solid friends, and with Nathan that was more than any other woman on our campus had ever accomplished. He was just as likely by then to call me to hang out as he was his other friends and that gave me an advantage.

The advantage was my gender. By that time, most of the students on campus had pretty much paired up and a lot of the goings on were things for couples or at least dates. So, although I wasn’t his BEST friend, if he wanted to go to a party thrown by a sorority or a dance, I was a shoe in.

We went places together so often, that people around us began to assume that we WERE a couple, and that made things even easier for me. He got so used to being with me that he started to ask me out. And it wasn’t always to parties or things like that. Sometimes it was just intimate little picnics or drives in his rusty beat up Mustang.

Ours was a strange relationship, but it was exactly what I’d been looking for. Nathan was attentive, respectful and caring. He took a lot of time getting to know me and finding out what I liked. He often surprised me with things, when I least expected it.

He once showed up in the middle of the night with a big box of chocolates for me when I was on my period. Every girl I knew was jealous of me then. It marked Nathan as being the kind of guy you could count on, the kind you married, not just some guy you fucked occasionally.

There was the time when my parents showed up unexpectedly to check up on me. Nathan bit the bullet and went out to dinner with us. Not only did my mom love him, my dad really liked him. My dad liked him even more when he found out that Nate and I had not even considered having sex.

It turned out that Mary, one of the girls I’d gone to high school with, had gotten pregnant and had to go home in disgrace. Her parents had been friends with mine and they somehow ended up sharing information. So, my parents had been on a mission to check up on me and intervene if necessary, to stop me from ruining my life and possible future if necessary.

They left grinning from ear to ear, believing that despite what they’d heard, I was in a stable relationship with a nice young man, not spreading my legs for every possible candidate, the way Mary had been.

Truth be told ... I’d dated from the same pool of guys that Mary had and had behaved the same God damned way. Had I not set my sights on Nathan, I might have been in the same boat.

The situation had shown me the danger in that type of behavior though and made me glad I’d quit.

Strangely enough, the thing that really got us out of the friend zone was the flu. I came down with it and was so weak I couldn’t get out of bed. Nathan showed up, took one look at me and went back out in the snow to bring me all kinds of cold and flu medicines. He also got me fresh fruits and a pot of my favorite homemade soup, from my favorite restaurant.

My dorm mother even let him stay past visiting and socializing hours to care for me. I lay there, occasionally vomiting my guts out, while the poor man held a bucket and read my assignments to me, so I didn’t get too far behind.

We also talked. I learned a lot about him then, and most of it reinforced what I’d already been told. Nathan was awesome. It was like finding a diamond on a scrap heap. The ONLY reason I’d gotten close to him was that I’d been in the right place at exactly the right time to ease my way into his life.

Some very stupid woman had hurt him so badly that he hadn’t wanted another relationship. She’d been his girlfriend all through high school and they’d stayed together, long distance-wise for his first year of college.

We were in our senior year, so he’d had three full years to get over her. He must’ve loved deeply for it to take that long. I’ve known people who’d had a spouse of over twenty years die who got over it in a shorter time.

And he was still guarded about her then. I couldn’t get much information about her and absolutely nothing about why they broke up. He always clammed up tightly whenever I mentioned her. So, I was very certain that his wounds were still raw, and the situation was unresolved.

I learned more about it when I met his mother than I ever got from Nathan. I learned that she was a tiny blond girl named Angelia and that the two of them had been obsessed with each other. So much so that during the time that they were together, they were rarely apart.

Nate’s mom had no idea how they’d found each other or what happened to break them up, but she’d been afraid for years that they were gonna have a brood of little blond kids before Nate could graduate and get his degree. She was absolutely sure that it would have happened if they hadn’t broken up that first summer of college.

She was even more certain that if he’d had a child with that woman, no force on earth would have been able to separate them.

It wasn’t that she disliked her. Angelia was definitely devoted to Nathan. And if they’d met after Nathan had graduated and gotten his degree, his mom would have welcomed her with open arms, but a relationship as intense as theirs had been, rarely ends well. “Those types of things, that burn that brightly almost never last,” she’d told me. “They’re almost certainly doomed when they start with two people who are that young. They’re just not emotionally experienced enough to handle it,” she said.

As time went on Nathan and I got closer, became a real couple, got engaged and even got married, but I was always looking over my shoulder. I always felt as if I was living on borrowed time.

I guess as time went on, I relaxed some. At thirty, Nate and I had been together for eight years and had been married for six of them. We had almost everything you could think of. We had careers, cars and even a mortgage. We had all the things that symbolize long germ stability.

We were always together, we even worked for the same company. It seemed as though we had a charmed life. None of the typical rules applied when it came to us.

We’d gone to our five-year college reunion a few years ago. All the hot guys and cheerleaders were burdened with the adulthood we’d sought. Those tall thin cheerleaders with big boobs were bloated with sagging boobs and weighed down by the weight of adult expectations.

Nathan and I seemed like rock stars compared to them.

All those rules about couples not working for the same company or at least not the same division or office... ? We had a waiver because we were both so important to the company.

And I think the thing I loved most was that finally ... for once in my God damned life ... I was on top. I was the hot girl. I was the pretty one. I was no longer a practice girl, I’d become the one that men wanted to practice for. The men all wanted me, and the women all wanted to be me. I was no longer on the periphery, I was the life of the God damned party and I loved it.

That was the real reason I’d delayed having kids. I loved sashaying my ass across the office and having every guy in the place watching every twitch of it.

I especially loved all the stupid things that grown men did, just to get me to notice them. But I made sure that every one of them knew that although I flirted ... a lot ... only Nate got any. I had perfected that longing little glance that built up their egos.

That lilt in my voice when I spoke to them that told them, that the only thing stopping us from going further was the fact that I was married. And most of them fell for the fantasy. And all those bastards deserved it.

In a way, I was just getting back at them for the way I’d been treated. All those guys who strung me along, getting my hopes up and just fucking me, when I never really had a chance. What goes around ... fucking comes around!

I had decided, though that it was time to end the game. And it wasn’t the moms, both Nathan’s and mine and their constant whining that had convinced me. Call it my biological clock or any other stupid name you choose, but I had a craving. I wanted several miniature versions of me and Nathan running around our house for me to spoil.

Every time we had sex, I was driving myself onto Nathan so hard that I finally realized what I was trying to do. My insides were subconsciously trying to make babies. It was time.

There was also the fact that in some ways, I’d waited almost too long. If I had a baby this year, I’d be forty-eight years old by the time it went off to college. And I’d be in my fifties before they were all grown. That meant that I’d be sixty or so by the time I became a grandmother. I had to get busy.

So, I’d decided that the project we were working on now would probably be my last. Some bazillionaire, Richard Riche, the eight richest man in the world had a new project that he’d decided that our company, Dalton manufacturing would produce and market for him.

He’d had his own team of engineers come in a few weeks ago, with designs and specifications to see if our electronics arm and manufacturing division could make them. He figured that we would probably subcontract some of the parts and do the final assembly ourselves.

He liked spreading his projects around to small U.S. manufacturers. He also loved the tax breaks and having local politicians kiss his ass. That way in a few years when he decided to run for congress on his way to the presidency, he’d be able to point out how much he’d done to help bolster our country’s economy.

He’d also be able to tell all the bigger companies how he’d always found a way to make all of his products in this country and still be able to both keep costs down and make a profit.

He’d done things like this a hundred times. And just like all the others, he’d sent his team in. I guess he expected us to be stymied and mystified. His team would break the product down into simple components and walk the locals through the processes necessary to manufacture it.

Then he’d send his own New York based Ad agency in to help us with the stresses and demands of marketing a product this important, because after all ... we were just a small Michigan company. Heck us yokels couldn’t possibly have gotten the fucking hay out of our teeth long enough to handle a product as work changing as his ... right?

But it didn’t quite work out that way. From the moment his team stepped into Nathan’s lab, something was different. Nate was so far ahead of them that he not only started telling them exactly how we’d manufacture their widget ... he floored them by telling them that a lot of the circuitry they had was redundant.

He showed them ways to not only save manufacturing time, but to make the product more robust, and cheaper. He also discussed the possibility of adding several more functions than they currently had.

I think he scared them. In fact, I know he did. It was all over our building. Almost everyone who worked for us was laughing and bragging about the fact that they had to call their boss to get clarification on how to proceed with the project. Nathan was not like anything they’d expected from an engineer with a medium sized midwestern manufacturer.

My hubby had knocked it out of the fucking park, as usual. I could hardly wait for his advertising and marketing people to come in so I could do the same.

The weird thing was that he was so impressed with what Nathan had shown his people, that he decided to come to us personally. Rumors were running around the plant that he was probably going to come to Michigan and steal Nathan away. He was probably going to throw a shit ton of money at Nathan and move us to New Yorkifornia or wherever the fuck his corporate headquarters were located.

I was chomping at the bit and waiting for my turn to impress him. Of course, that was where my advantage helped. Even though the product was supposed to be a top-secret thing, Nate had spilled his guts to me. So unlike with Nate, who’d really had to do all that impressive shit, on the spot with absolutely no fore-knowledge of the doohickey or its functions, I already knew about it and had started coming up with ideas to market it.

I was stoked because as soon as they showed it to me, I’d just start gushing ideas and plans the same way my brilliant husband had.

I was sooo ready to impress the guy that I was chomping at the fucking bit. I was ready to knock his fucking socks off.

But the day that the guy actually showed up, everything went fucking wrong.

First off, rich guys like that never do anything on anyone’s schedule except for their own. He’d been so jazzed ... as he put it ... about working with Nathan, that he just fucking showed up. No one knew he was coming. He just landed a fucking helicopter on the roof of our building and took over.

Naturally, he brought his entourage with him. It included, several burly body guards, that all looked like pro-wrestlers who’d joined the FBI. They all head their heads on swivels and looked in every direction for threats. There were a couple of assistants who looked both nerdy and supremely confident at the same time. There was a secretary, who seemed to be recording everything he said and adding every idea and impression he came up to some kind of running list.

And finally, there was an extremely bored looking teen-aged girl, who rolled the huge corn flower blue eyes she had hidden behind a pair of giant sunglasses at everything she saw.

Of all of them, not one of them intrigued me more than that little girl did. Her dad was filthy stinking mega rich, but I’d seen that before. Although not to this extent. Let’s put it this way ... a recent article claimed that Donald Trump is the 259th richest man in America ... Richard Riche is the 8th richest man in the entire world. Trump could be his butler.

But none of mattered in the face of that tiny girl. First off as I looked around, I noticed that no one, not one single fucking person in the room could look away from her. She was incandescently beautiful. Her long golden hair extended to her waist. It was wavy and thick and just looked incredible. The girl’s hair dresser probably had more money than Trump.

And she just seemed to exude sexiness, even at her age. And it wasn’t her body. In this age of teen-aged girls with breast implants, who looked like strippers, she stood out. First off, she was tiny. At 5’ 5” I’m not exactly a giant, but this girl couldn’t have been taller than 5’ 3” and that was with her wearing heels.

She had almost no boobs at all and her ass looked like it would fit inside of a teacup. Her legs were well shaped and tight, but as thin as the rest of her. But somehow, I got the impression that every guy there, and some of the women, wanted to fuck her.

Then there were her clothes. She wore a clingy dress in the richest shade of red I’d ever seen. The dress, without being very tight, clung to her slim curves and added to that air of sexiness. Every time she moved, the material highlighted and emphasized, her breasts and that tiny well shaped ass.

As if she needed it a tiny belt around her waist, highlighted her elongated but still vaguely hour glass shape. I would have died to wear that fucking dress just once. But then there was no way I could ever fit it. I’m very well built ... shit I’m hot remember? But next to her, I felt like a fucking Clydesdale. Me and every other woman in the room felt as if we were from a totally different species, next to her.

The thing that galled me the most were her fucking shoes. The girl was wearing Louboutin heels, but they were like none I’d ever seen. They were the exact same shade of red as her dress, with black soles and as she stopped and nervously tapped her toes on the carpet, I noticed something about those fucking shoes. They had her fucking initials inlaid in the soles in what looked like real gold.

The normal Louboutin heels cost somewhere between $800 and $2000 depending on the model and the color, but I was sure that those fucking shoes cost more than everything in my fucking closet combined and I was a grown ass woman with a college degree and a very good God Damned job.

The worst part about it was that the little bitch was just standing there tapping the toes of those fucking shoes against the floor like she didn’t give two fucks about damaging them or wearing them out. She was bored and it showed.

My boss was at a loss. He’d had no idea that Riche would just show up out of the blue. He shook the man’s hand and introduced himself and the rest of us. It was not our finest moment. Most of the men were too busy staring at Riche’s daughter to even react when their names were mentioned, and the women weren’t much better.

I think we all felt the way that primitive tribes probably had when the extra-terrestrials came down and helped us build the fucking pyramids.

It took way too long for me to get my head out of my ass and realize that my boss was waiting for me to do that thing I do where I become the life of the party and make everyone feel comfortable.

“Hey!” I exclaimed, while suddenly getting it together. “Why don’t we head over to manufacturing and take a look at some of the ideas they have for building your product!”

My boss smiled and nodded. Like me he was counting on my husband’s brilliance to rescue us and save a really embarrassing situation.

And fuck, it wasn’t like we were throwing Nathan under the bus. It was simply the way things worked. From football to business, when shit got ill, you wanted your best player in the game. And my hubby was our best player.