The Story of Us

  
Good Monday-  This is our first post and just a quick introduction.  My long term girlfriend and I have been maintaining a thread on a GBLT site called AfterEllen.com for nearly 10 months now with quite an amazing response.  We recently have been threatened by the moderaters that we will be shut down since we're technically writing a story rather than asking for advice.  To avoid losing all of our posts not to mention the entire history of our relationship we have decided to pack up and move to somewhere more permenant.  One of our followers suggested blogger so...here we are.  For the beginning portion we'll be copying and pasting our posts and eventually we'll be writing new ones.  There will be a lot of posts in a short period of time so, any new readers will have a lot of material to catch up on!  I hope the response here is as wonderful as it has been there. 
Happy Reading!

Posted August 17, 2010:

*cracks knuckles*


Well Hello there Bloggers.  My name is Jen and I was speaking with my long-term girlfriend this morning, Sheri, and she suggested that I write our story here.

I am a long-time blogger of 10 years on my blog site which I hold very near and dear to my heart-I will sometimes email Sheri what I write and most of the times it cracks her up.  She enjoys my writing, why I'm not quite sure, I'm no...umm...who's a good writer...eerrr....well this is embarrassing, I don't know of any writers off the top of my head.  Anyahoo she said that I should write here-tell our story, show you all that we have a smooth, oh, let me quote what she said "We have a very unique, generally smooth (unless [I] haven't shaved in a half a day) running relationship."  I got a chuckle out of that because it's a long running joke that I am a hairy manbeast.  Haha, not really but I am Italian and I am cursed with the dark hair.  She also gives me goose bumps all the time and revels in the fact that even though I shaved my legs that morning she can give me a five o'clock shadow within a matter of minutes.  It's a blast, really.

She just wanted me to copy and paste what I write in my other forum here.  I said "No no no dear Sheri, you can't just jump into the middle of a relationship.  You need to give a back-story, introduce the main characters, set up a plot" and all other writing mumbo-jumbo.  So gather 'round Blogspot, I am going to tell you our story.
It all started in November of 2005.  I was young, just turned 22, and I was working at Petsmart while I was a junior in college and I was with my boyfriend for 2.5 years.  My store had recently just went some major overhaul on the management staff where every single manager was fired.  I along with two other people were the only ones in the store who were left employed.  A series of temporary managers were paraded through our doors, most only staying a few weeks before someone else thankfully took their place.

It was that fateful November that we had a new manager coming in, one who would be permanent.  Our store manager had known her previously and said "She's quite the perfectionist" and I thought "Oh fantastic, another manager I can hate."

I was walking up the aisle between dog food and our grooming salon and straight ahead was the manager's office.  I saw this tall drink of water standing in the doorway and I thought Well HELLOOOO LESBIAN.  I smoothed my shirt and walked right up to her and stuck out my hand.  "Hi," I smiled.  "My name's Jen...welcome to the store.  If you need any help finding anything just ask me."

She turned to her left and gave me a quick look up and down and in a very loud booming voice said "Hi Jen, I'm Sheri." And she smiled a smile and laughed a laugh that would soon become addictive. 

Little did I know that she had heard of me too.  My temporary store manager, let's call her Patch, had a little sit down with Sheri and told her that I am a very hard worker but I can be, how shall we say it...difficult.  I got along with Patch well enough-she had come from the restaurant business and I don't think really had an inkling how to handle retail.  I somehow thought though that I was the bees knees and since I had survived the store clean-out I obviously was indispensible and I won't lie, I had a bit of an "I'm-better-than-you" attitude.  That may have been because I was always the boss's pet but that's neither here nor there.

I quickly came to realize that Sheri was harmless.  She had brought a huge container of Twizzlers in and my brown eyes lit up.  She saw my obvious excitement for food and she bellowed "Oh you like food?  Oh we'll get along just fine!"  And she laughed her hearty laugh.  I just smiled and nodded as I quickly unwrapped two twizzlers and shoved them in my mouth and thought to myself Man this woman is loud!

We hit it off relatively quickly, our friendship nearly instantaneous.  She was in control of my schedule so she would make mine mirror hers, something I was unaware of in the beginning.  We really started to get close when we would take our lunches together.  The first time we went to lunch we had gone to Friday's and I asked her if it was alright if I ordered a beer.  I know, lunch with the boss, I'm asking if I could drink?  I told you I was brazen.  I had said I had gone out with other managers who would drink with me and she said as long as I didn't get sloppy that it was fine.  After that, lunch was a regular occurrence.  If we didn't go out to lunch she would stop off at our favorite Deli and bring us sandwiches and we'd sit in the break room and talk.  I learned that she was a divorcee, had two children and was *hold on to your seats* 18 years older than me.  I was shocked because here I thought this woman was a straight up muff diver but she had a long history with being with men.  Huh...guess you really can't judge a book by its cover. 

We were connected at the hip.  If anyone needed to find Sheri they said "Just go look for Jen."  Our store was a relatively low-volume store so we had a lot of downtime.  And I mean A LOT. After a few lunches together she told me that she hadn't touched alcohol in some 16 years.  Say wha??? You don't tell a 22 year old that.  She knew a boy who gave her a drink of an apple-martini so one day we went to lunch and she ordered an apple-martini and I would order a Peach Cosmo.  We started off slow just having one with lunch.  We would sit there and just talk for the hour.  Soon after the hour turned into an hour and a half, the one drink turned into two, and the hour and a half would turn into a two hour lunch, some 4 drinks each, PLUS going back to the store and throwing the football around in the stock room for another hour.  After playing football I would retreat back to my register she would stand there and we'd continue to talk.  She'd even help me bag and we would bicker and laugh like a married couple.  Customers would get a kick out of us.  I nicknamed her Slave Driver because she would have me do all these things around the store.  I'd bow and say "Yes Slave Driver, whatever you want Slave Driver."  What's worse is after we'd spend all day together we would go home, get on AIM, and then talk all night.

Christmas break rolls around and I had accumulated some time off that I was going to use during the holidays.  I put in my schedule request and I hear SD come storming out of the office.  She looks pissed.  "Jennifer!"  She bellowed, "Can I see you in here please?"
I clicked off my light and walked into the office.  "What is this?"  She asks, pointing to my request.
"Umm....my request for my time off."  I said.  I mean, couldn't she read?"

Why are you requesting time off during the holidays? That's a blackout period-no time off."
I scoffed at her.  "Really, Sheri?  We work in PetSmart.  It's not like people are going to be tearing down the doors to get in here.  I have saved this time off and I'm putting in my request."

I think I saw her blue eyes turn red at this point and she may or may not have had steam coming out of her ears.  "No time off." She said through a clenched jaw.

I crossed my arms incredulously and said "You can't do that; we don't have a blackout period here for a pet store."

"Fine," she said, defeated, "do whatever the fuck you want."

OOhhhhhh.  Oh no she didn't.  I turned on my heel and stormed out of the office fuming mad.  Who the hell did she think she is cursing at me like that?  I didn't care if we were buddy buddy, I didn't care if she bought me lunch nearly every day.  My friend, Martin, saw that she was visually upset.  We stayed on opposite sides of the store that day and he came up to me and said "What the hell happened between you two?  You guys hooked up didn't you and are having a lover's quarrel."

I whipped my head around and shouted "ARE YOU KIDDING ME?  ABSOLUTELY NOT.  Dude, she's 18 years older than me, I have a boyfriend, that's gross that you'd even think that!  No, she's pissed because I put in for my vacation time and she can't say anything about it."  Me thinks I protested too much.  I made a couple of faces to convey the grossness that he would even suggest such a thing but on the inside my heart and stomach were doing this weird thumping-butterfly thing that I tried to ignore.

After a few awkward hours of glancing down the aisles to make sure she wasn't in them, and if she was, stopping and turning to go somewhere else, I decided it was enough of this BS.  I called her into the Cash Office and she stood there with her back against the wall, arms crossed, and a stone face.  I took a deep breath and said "Listen, I know we're friends and all but I do not appreciate the way you spoke to me.  I have done absolutely nothing to deserve being cursed at like that.  Bottom line you are my boss and it is extremely unprofessional what you did."

I saw her tough exterior waver a bit and she dropped her arms.  "Well I'm sorry for cursing at you but you pissed me off!"

"Why?!" I exclaimed.  "I didn't do anything wrong!  And even if I did you still don't talk to your employees that way."

Her shining eyes met mine and she opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again.  She sounded angry when she said "I have no idea why...but I really like you right now" and turned and walked out of the office, leaving me sitting in my chair wondering what in the hell just happened.

It was after that day that it all turned around.  Our mutual friend, Luis, had asked me one day "Do you think that Sheri would ever have a shot with you?"

Again I put on my theatrics of "Eww, no..ewww...gross...oh my god no!"  But inside my head I went "hmmmm".  I had a dream of her that night and we had gone away to some hotel.  We for some reason were sharing a room and she had gone into the shower but the bathroom door was half open. I peeked in and I saw her standing in the shower, naked, dripping wet, and I just stared at her.  Just then another manager, Bobble, came storming into the room and looked at me and asked me what I was doing in the room watching Sheri shower.  I couldn't stammer out a word but the next day when she walked past me I saw her in a whole new light.  I said to myself "Huh...I wonder what it'd be like." 

After that day I still tried to ignore my feelings for her, but obviously to no avail.  We did play some horrible games with each other, jealousy, manipulation, rage.  But there was such an underlying sexual tension that the closer I became to her the farther away from my boyfriend I pulled.  Sheri had and has this magnetic personality that I am unbelievably attracted to and after a few months I did break up with my boyfriend to be with her.  We had a very, VERY rocky start to our relationship.  There was no trust, there was only hurt and pain and betrayal.  And there was passion along with this undeniable need to be with one another.  And despite the heartache and bullshit we put each other through here we are, three and a half years later, surviving all odds, incredibly stable and still very much passionately in love.  Oh yeah, and the sex is FANTASTIC.