Zoe, the bargaining chip

Matt and Zoe had enjoyed a pretty much perfect relationship for the five years that they had been together. Everything just seemed to go right whenever they were together. About one year ago, Matt had asked her to move in together, and their lives had been so much better for it. The only remaining steps for them to lock in their perfect little relationship was to get married and have some kids.

Unfortunately, there was just one problem getting in the way of that, Matt's gambling addiction. It had started when he was just a teenager and him and his friends started playing some poker games together. From there, the stakes had gotten higher and higher. At first, he had been going to some of the big casinos in town, as soon as he turned 21 of course. The thrill of a big win was far too strong to outweight the sting of all his losses. Unfortunately for him, the weigh scale tipped much too far in one direction. Eventually his losses started to rack up, to the point that he had chewed through his savings and found himself with only one option, and it wasn't to quit.

In order to feed his addiction and get that big win that he knew was all it would take to make him a rich man, Matt found himself in more and more seedy parts of town in order to find a venue that hadn't banned him from their services. These venues preyed on men like him, offering predatory loans and high stakes tables where addicts thought they could win back all the money they had lost so far in life.

Of course, Zoe knew about absolutely none of this. He had done a good job of hiding it all from her, just barely managing to pay his fair share of the cost of living for the young couple, whilst plunging further and further into debt to the somewhat dangerous gambling dens that he had fallen victim to. As for how he explained away all that time that he spent at the poker table, it was a little more complex. He had fabricated whole friend groups and innumberable activities in the web of lies that he had spun to his girlfriend in order to keep her off the scent of his decline. It had been painful lying to her at first, given he really did love her, but that had faded away with each lie that he told.

The more time he spent in these shady venues, the more his morality was slowly eaten away at like the cliffsides by the shore getting eroded over time by the waves. Over the last couple years, he had found that gambling wasn't the only vice he was susceptible to developing a fondness for. It had started with alcohol, the perfect substance to drown the soreness of a bad loss at the table. Most of the places he frequented would let him start a tab, only adding to his ever growing debt to them. From there, it was a small jump to a far more potent form of taking the edge off, cocaine. It wasn't surprising that he eventually tried the stuff, given it was so readily available in the joints he frequented. Thankfully for him though, it was so expensive that he was only ever able to afford it after a big win, though this did mean that he was never truly able to pay off the debts he racked up every other night.

The worst of them all though, was the women. The venues he frequented liked to turn a profit in pretty much every shady way possible. That meant that pretty much all services were performed by scantily clad women, whether it be bartending, serving drinks or dealing. All these services and more were performed by some of the most drop-dead gorgeous women Matt had ever seen, and of course, if you were willing to fork over the right amount of cash, they would do pretty much anything. Whether it be private dances, blowjobs, or straight up whoring, these girls did it all, and with the way they looked in the outfits the venue had them wearing, it was only a matter of time before Matt had the right amount of alcohol and cocaine to tip him over the edge of cheating on his girlfriend.

He had never felt more ashamed than that first time that he cheated on her. He really did love his girlfriend, but something about that combination of disinhibition from the alcohol and cocaine combined with the way these women looked just led him to make a terrible decision that night. From there, he found that his shame was eating away at him, and on nights where it got to be too much he would manage it by letting one of those very same girls provide him with some 'relaxation' to calm himself down.