After a long stretch of bad luck, a little good luck finally decided to grace me with its presence. I have had several things go wrong lately and when I bid on an auction for a cruise on eBay all I had to pay was for the incidentals so I could afford a last minute cruise to the Caribbean. I had bid, hitting the buy it now button, and while I didn’t expect the seller to take my bid, what I had offered was a sum that I could pay. If I got the cruise ticket it would be for such a low price, I could not afford to let it pass me by. Much to my surprise I was the winner and the ticket for the Caribbean cruise was going to be in the morning mail. I would wait for the ticket to arrive, and it was going to take me less than an hour to pack my suitcase so I could leave early the following morning.
The next morning arrived and I moved out of my condo to be ready for the early morning flight to Florida where the cruise was going to start. And yes, I said moved out, because my rent for the next month was due, and my choices were to either take the cruise or be homeless because the price of the cruise ticket plus some spending money was all I had left to my name. I didn’t have quite enough for my rent, and things had gone so poorly for me over the past month I would have been out on the street. A couple of hours later I was boarding the cruise liner. “Hello Mr. Peters” the hostess at the help desk greeted me. She checked the computer and said: “ Mr. Peters you bought your ticket out one of our auctions on eBay. Your ticket is valid so don’t worry. We place tickets we are unable to sell in time out to auctions on eBay and you were lucky enough to win one of our smaller suites aboard our ship. Although, at the moment we have a small problem, and you could help us out if you don’t mind”. “ What’s the problem,” I asked her”. “ Well Mr. Peters only this morning we realized that we are slightly overbooked due to a computer failure” she said. “Does this mean I can’t have the suite” I asked her. “ No Mr. Peters, but would you mind sharing the suite with another person?” she asked me, continuing to say: “ You would only have to share the bathroom as these suites are designed to be separate cabins for sleeping and we often put another bed in the living room if there are couples traveling together.” “We can offer you quite a discount on your on board expenses if you should be willing to help us out with this problem” she said. I relaxed because I had thought that my bad luck was continuing to plague me. As long as I had my own bed it would not be a problem for me to help them out and in the end, I would be a winner. The rebate would help me save a lot of money. “OK” I said, “let’s share the suite then”. “Mr. Peters that is very kind of you to help us with our problem. I’ll show you the suite now and I will have your luggage transferred.” “Mr. Christy Wellington, your roommate will be here later this afternoon. The group he travels with is a little late because their plane has just landed.”
The room was not as small as I had thought it would be and I wondered how big the larger suites were. I had my own bedroom with a large almost king seize bed and a couch. They had brought a bed into the living room of the suite and another TV set for the bedroom while the hostess was showing me around. As I was not planning to stay inside the suite for much the of the cruise, I was going to be very comfortable. And who knows maybe Mr. Wellington would be good company even though I would have preferred to share the room with a nice young lady. After the hostess had left me alone, I unpacked my suitcase and arranged my stuff in the bathroom. It was a spacious bathroom and there were two sinks. There was a mirror over each sink and large cabinets at each side of the two mirrors. One cabinet was a bit larger than the other so Mr. Wellington would have enough space for his things also. When I had finished, I went for a walk around the ship to familiarize myself with the layout of everything. Time passed quickly and if it wasn’t for the sound of the engines and the slight rocking of the deck, I might have missed that we were leaving the harbor. The cruise liner was towed off the pier and slowly turned into a position where its powerful engines would drive her out of port. There was another hour or so left before dinner would be served. This would give me enough time to see the ship’s purser to get my onboard credit card that would supply me with the promised rebate. The purser thanked me again for helping them out of their problem. I returned to my suite to change into a bit more formal clothing for dinner. Maybe it was also a good occasion to meet my roommate.
When I returned to my suite the first thing I noticed was the smell of perfume. I was a bit puzzled as I couldn’t imagine a man using a woman’s perfume. I reached my part of the suite and sat down. I was happy that finally the holidays were beginning. I heard a knock on the door between my room and the bathroom. I got up and unlocked the door and standing in the open doorway was a beautiful woman. Mr. Christy Wellington turned out to be a Ms. Christy Wellington. Now I knew the reason why I had smelled perfume upon entering the suite. “Well, I wanted to thank you personally for sharing the suite with me,” said Ms. Wellington. “The Cruise company, along with overbooking the cruise, had also messed up my gender,” she said with a chuckle in her voice. I told her that it was nice surprise to have such beautiful neighbor. We discussed how we were going to use the bathroom, which could be accessed from both rooms of the suite. It was easy enough to arrange and we agreed to leave both doors unlocked. Only when one of us was using it would we lock the corresponding door. As women usually have more items they need for their daily regime I suggested that she may want to use the bigger cabinet. She gladly accepted. I was happy that we sorted out this agreement in such a polite and calm way. I felt that destiny seemed to have more favorable plans for me in the future. It had been a while since I had conversed with such a beautiful woman.
Christy had suggested that we should attend the welcoming reception together. This way we could get to know each other better as we would be together for the coming two weeks. I gladly accepted and we left the suite together.
Christy was a nice person and she too had had a couple of setbacks in the past. She had lost her job, because she had to take care of her sister who had suffered from terminal cancer. She had been off work for such a long time that they had let her go. She was lucky enough that her uncle was a very well respected lawyer, so she was getting a substantial payout from her former employer for letting her go. Like myself she had decided to relax and book a cruise to the Caribbean. So far so good. It was wonderful to meet such a sweet character like Christy. Best of all was that she was single at the moment and so was I. I could only hope that good fortune permitted me to stay on the sunny side of the grass again. I thought that it would be just the icing on the cake if Christy were wearing glasses. I have this weird attraction to women wearing glasses. Almost all of my former girlfriends had worn glasses or contacts. I have also had relationships with some girls that didn’t need glasses. In fact, Judy my last girlfriend didn’t need glasses. However, she was a person with very intuitive feelings. She must have realized that I was often glancing at girls that were sporting glasses on their noses. She never said a word about it. But she must have known it for sure.
One evening when I came home from work, Judy was dressed like one of these mousy secretaries. I was surprised, wondering why she would dress up like that. She hadn’t heard me coming and was standing with her back to me. I greeted her and she turned around. I almost fainted. She wore thick black horn rimmed glasses with a substantial minus prescription in them. She was wearing them a little bit down her nose and was peering over the rim towards me, squinting her eyes a tiny bit. To make the long story short she wanted to surprise me with a little role play. This was a fantastic evening that ended with us in bed having the best sex we ever had before. From this time on she would wear those glasses she had gotten from a lady coworker of hers every now and then. But most things that are way too wonderful to be true come to an abrupt end. I was away for a week for work and when I came back Judy was gone. She had just taken her stuff and moved out of our apartment. She had left the glasses she had used for our role playing along with a note wishing me well and expressing the hope that I might eventually find a girl who really needed such strong glasses. I was depressed and very sad. But it became even harder for me. When I had unpacked my stuff there was a knock on the door. I opened the door. There were a couple of men dressed in suits standing outside the apartment, and they handed me a search warrant. I was totally surprised and let them in. It turned out that my boss was involved in some tax manipulations and the IRS doesn’t have a lot of humor about such things. They found nothing in my possessions to help them, but apparently, I had lost my job during this investigation, because they shut down the company I had been working for.
I had been without a paycheck for a couple of months. I had always been paid on time and also had money in the bank so I never worried. And there had been Judy living with me and paying her fair share of the rent for our apartment. In just a few hours I had lost all that was important for me. I would have had to move out of the apartment, but my landlord was a nice person and gave me some time to organize my life.
Contrary to what I had thought it was very difficult to find a new job. I was more than willing to work hard, and I had taken a temporary job. I thought I had proven myself to my new boss by taking the shift for another worker that had an accident while playing soccer. This helped my coworker keep his job and it was positive for me as well because I helped my new boss finish a very important job. But once the job was finished and the other worker was ready to return to work, I was laid off. I had been able to catch up on my back rent, but my landlord had already promised to rent my apartment to another tenant. Now I was without a home and after working double shifts for almost three months, I was going to go on my first holiday in years.
I wasn’t accustomed with having nothing to do. I had to learn again to relax, and I was sitting with a wonderful woman at a table in the cruise-liner’s luxury restaurant.
I had only noticed a few women wearing glasses. I tried not to make it too obvious that I was staring at them, especially not to Christy. The welcome party was nice, and we were told what to expect in the weeks to come. The lights were dimmed, and a big screen was lowered from the ceiling. They showed us a movie introducing us to the islands we were going to visit on our cruise.
When the movie started, I realized that Christy squinted her eyes. I was on alert. The movie was informative as it was the type of movie you see in commercials. I hoped that I could do some of the trips together with Christy. So far, she hadn’t told me anything personal. I hoped that she was not romantically attached as it would be nice to have a girlfriend again to share life with. The movie was finished, and the lights went back on. Christy’s eyes had turned a little red, and she blinked them a little bit more frequently. As I had avoided to bring anything concerning eyesight into our conversation, I was hoping she would. The personnel were distributing printed reservation forms for the upcoming excursions.
I decided to leave it up to Christy to make the first move and simply commented on how nice the places seemed that they had shown us. I was right to let her make the first move. She asked me how it came that I was traveling alone. Now it was me talking for the next five minutes to tell her my unhappy story. I told her about the auction on eBay that I had won and about that Judy had left me, carefully leaving out the story about the glasses. I thought about the glasses Judy had left behind, which were securely stored in a case at the bottom of my suitcase. After I had finished my story there was a moment of silence between us.
“I bet you want to know why I am on this cruise,” Christy said. I told her that I would like to know, but that it was just fine if she decided not to tell me right away. She seemed very pleased with my answer and said that indeed she would like to wait a little, because she still felt that she wasn’t ready yet to talk about her life. I just felt her story could wait until she felt confident and was ready to open up on her own. She stood up and said that she was a little bit tired after the day and wanted to go to bed. It was just fine with me. I said good night to her. I needed a fresh breeze to clear my thoughts and so I decided to take a stroll on the vast promenade deck of the cruise-liner. The air was so fresh and relaxing, and I was just beginning to calm down. I could sleep in tomorrow because we would be at sea the whole day and I didn’t have a job to go to. This was a wonderful thought. Finally, I headed for bed. I entered my half of the suite and once again I could smell Christy’s perfume. “She must be in bed by now,” I thought, and this was confirmed because the bathroom-door was unlocked. I entered and the smell of her perfume was more intensive. I decided to take a quick shower. To reach the shower I had to pass through her part of the shared bathroom. Lying on the shelf under the mirror I spotted a contact lens case. I was right when I thought that she was having trouble seeing in darker surroundings. I also saw a half open glasses case beside the contact lens container. My curiosity was over the top and I drew closer to inspect everything. In the glasses case I could see a sheet of paper that was folded. I carefully pulled it out and unfolded it. It proved to be a contact lens prescription. I didn’t know anything about the numbers. There were combinations of letters like OS and OD followed by several numbers. I only knew that higher numbers had to be thicker glasses. And there was a minus symbol before each of those double digit numbers. I read the bottom line of the prescription which read: “The use of contact lenses is limited to a maximum of 6 hours per day”. I carefully folded the paper and put it back where I had taken it. Wow this meant I probably could see Christy in glasses the next day. I was in love. I quickly finished my shower and went to bed.
So far so good. I had taken the pair of glasses Judy had left out of my suitcase. Looking at the powerful lenses I wished that Christy’s glasses would be of equal strength or maybe even stronger. In the middle of the night, I woke up. I heard Christy in the bathroom. I thought I heard her crying and speaking to herself. I got out of bed and moved toward the bathroom door, so I could hear what was going on. She actually was crying and talking quietly to herself. I could barely understand what she was saying. " Oh, poor me why are my eyes so bad. Now that I have met this nice man, and I have to wear these horrible glasses. He won’t look at me twice when he sees me in them." My heart was pounding, and I could hardly believe what I had overheard. I could tell that she unlocked my bathroom door and could hear her door on the opposite side being closed. I returned to my bed and thinking that this must have been a dream I fell asleep again.
I woke up early in the morning and checked if the bathroom was free. I was lucky as my door was unlocked and I entered. I checked Christy’s side of the bathroom and saw that the contact lens container had disappeared. I opened her cabinet and saw the container resting on a piece of cosmetic tissue obviously to dry. The glasses case was on a small shelf right above the container. I couldn’t resist and opened it. Inside was a pair of red plastic frames holding lenses that seemed to be substantially stronger than those Judy and I had been playing with. I carefully put them back, making sure she didn’t notice that I had been snooping in her cabinet. I was quite sure that if I played my cards properly, I could win the lottery.
Christy seemed to be an early bird like me I thought. I remembered what I had heard last night. She was probably on a walk on the promenade deck to clear her thoughts. I finished my morning toilet and got dressed. I went to have breakfast and found my way to the room that was assigned to our section of the ship. I pulled my credit card out of my wallet to register. The friendly girl gave me a big smile and told me that my roommate was already waiting for me. Well, I thought, the play is about to begin. The best way was to act like I had done the evening before. It was her turn now. I had already told her a lot about me and now it was her turn to reciprocate. I only had to be careful not to mention anything about her vision problems. But I was quite sure I could handle that easily.
Christy had selected a nice table near one of these big panorama windows with a beautiful view over the ocean. She gave me a big smile when she saw me arrive. I still liked what I saw very much. And as I looked at her in bright daylight, I liked her even better. She was a gorgeous woman and I wondered how nice she would look in her red glasses. I knew that sooner or later I would see her in glasses and looking at her eyes my guess was that it would be sooner than later. Her eyes looked tired and a little bit irritated. She was continuously blinking her eyes.
I sat down and gave her my cheerful good morning. At this point we were only exchanging pleasantries. We both chose to have the breakfast buffet, which from the distance, looked well equipped. On our way to the buffet, we had to cross a darker area of the restaurant. This seemed to irritate Christy who drastically slowed her pace. I had stayed a little further back because I was enjoying looking at her well formed butt and nice legs in her short skirt. Fortunately, I avoided bumping into her as she quickly slowed down in the shaded area. It was only for a moment while she gained her bearings, and she continued on her way to the buffet. We almost had the same preferences in food that we selected from the buffet. We both liked coffee, just plain black hot and without sugar. I was enjoying my breakfast and waiting for Christy to tell me something more about her. We chatted and were thinking about all the beautiful islands that we were going to visit. Still nothing personal about Christy’s life. Thank God I’m gifted with patience. I was not going to spoil this occasion because I couldn’t wait.
The next few moments rewarded me for my patience. Christy said: " Well Frank, you have been very patient with me by giving me time to overcome my reluctance to talk about myself". I just sat there in silence looking at her beautiful face. Her eyes were a little more on the red side by now. One thing I knew for sure - the time for her wearing contacts today was rapidly approaching the end. After nervously blinking her eyes again she continued. “You seem to be the first man I’ve met in years who is as attentive and polite as you are. I have to believe you won’t be scared off if a woman you met had to wear glasses.” I thought I was in a daydream, that became reality.
“These are probably the last few hours I can tolerate my contacts.” she said with a slightly trembling voice. I gently took her hand and said that she shouldn’t worry if she had to wear glasses.
“Not all men are like you Frank.” Christy answered.
She told me a rather sad story that in the past she had always been dumped by her partners when she was forced to wear glasses instead of her contacts to allow her eyes to rest. I didn’t want to reveal my secret yet as I thought it might be a little bit too early. The best thing was to let her talk, which she did. When she paused I took the occasion to answer.
“Look Christy,” I said, “I don’t understand why glasses would change a person’s character. It looks to me as if you have been going out with some very superficial guys. They must have known beforehand that you at least needed glasses sometimes. They were not very nice people if they dumped you when they found out you had to wear glasses. I told you my story yesterday evening. From what I see I could imagine staying with you. We would have to give it a try, but honestly, I wouldn’t ever dump you because you need glasses.”
Her eyes were watering badly now. As we had already finished our breakfast, I suggested that it was time now to give her eyes a rest. Christy gladly accepted and we went back to our suite arm in arms because she couldn’t see well with her smeared contacts in.
When we reached the suite Christy rushed to the bathroom. But this time the doors remained open. Christy washed her hands and quickly took her contacts out. She put on her glasses and turned her head to look at me. The red glasses looked very good on her and matched very well with her dark blonde hair.
“Those glasses look gorgeous on you and are absolutely not a reason to dump you Christy,” I told her.
She smiled and came slowly towards me and gave me a passionate hug and kiss. After we separated from each other she said: “Hang on Frank, I have something for you.” She crossed the bathroom and went to her room. She was right back and handed me a sealed letter. “To Frank” was written on it. I took the letter and inspected the handwriting. The writing looked familiar, and I realized it was my former girlfriend’s writing. My curiosity reached a point where I absolutely had to rip the envelope open.
The letter read as follows:
Hi Frank, by now you already know Christy. She won’t have given you my letter if she didn’t feel an attraction toward you and vice versa. She gave me her old glasses with an outdated prescription that I used to wear sometimes for you to give us a special kick. I have never told you that I was assigned to a new job overseas and had to decide rather quickly, while you were away yourself. Christy, my colleague was never very lucky with her guys. She was in the middle of a nasty separation when I had to make my decision. As I knew of your preferences in women wearing glasses, I showed Christy a photograph of yours. She liked your picture very much and thought you could be the ideal match for her. I know you well enough Frank that you would never be with a woman that wears glasses unless you actually liked her a lot. I thought Christy would be an ideal match for you and I planned and paid for this little test for you. I knew of the difficulties you went through because I watched you without you knowing. A friend of mine who works for a travel agency helped me plan the auction and also the overbooking. I hope that you are not angry towards me for fooling you a little bit. But Christy deserves a decent man. I hope both of you have a nice cruise and the chance to find out if you have a future together. Love Judy
I was speechless and the letter fell from my hands. I went towards Christy and gave her anther passionate kiss. Oh, those glasses looked so wonderful on her, and I told her that I liked her just as well, and maybe even better in glasses. We sat down and asked each other a million more questions. Later we had the suite changed back to the original state. Later in the afternoon we gave Christy’s contacts a sea burial by throwing the container and contacts overboard.
Thanks to Judy, we have found each other. We had a wonderful cruise and enjoyed each other in bed as well. Judy and her friend from the travel agency had also arranged several other special events for us. Prologue Christy and I have been married now for 7 years. Christy has never touched contacts again and her eyesight seems to not only have stabilized but has improved by almost 2,5 diopters. We now have two healthy boys. We see Judy regularly as she lives very close to us. Judy’s letter hangs framed in our bedroom just to remind us how luck had a helping hand.
Specs4ever, edited from a story by Andy Nov. 26, 2021
https://vision-and-spex.com/the-big-surprise-a-story-by-andy-t2155.html