by Vivi King
“Didn’t you put them on afterwards?” he asked, apparently disappointed.
“He broke the elastic.”
“But you had them on when he was fingering you, right?”
I didn’t ask how he could tell; after over twenty years of marriage, my husband was far more familiar with my vaginal secretions than I was myself. He took another long sniff then placed the ruined garment carefully in the top drawer of his bedside table.
“Another souvenir?” I asked.
Pete just shrugged, a little ashamed asking “Is that so bad?”
“Of course not,” I smiled, though I did still think it a bit weird and more than a bit yucky.
“But it’s not all over yet?” he asked. “With Will?”
From the tone of his voice it was hard to tell whether he thought an end to my encounters with the boy would be a good thing or a bad one. Perhaps he didn’t know himself.
“I’m not sure,” I told him truthfully. “He’s still got a hold over us.”
“Will he want to see you again?”
“Probably. How do you feel about that?” I asked.
“Angry! But proud at the same time! And massively turned on too if I’m honest; It’s not simple Penn.”
You could say that again, I thought to myself but Pete hadn’t finished.
“Sometimes when you’re with another man I just want it all to stop and for us go back to being a normal couple. Other times – most times to be honest - I get so turned on all I want in the world is to be there too and watch him fuck the life out of you.”
My husband’s long-standing desire to see me in bed with another man was still something I could barely understand but was apparently getting stronger by the month. The fact that this had not yet happened despite my now having had three lovers was a constant and growing problem in our new lifestyle.
“Have you thought about... what I said?” I asked.
“About prostitutes?”
“Escorts!” I corrected him.
He sighed.
“I suppose objectively it’s the solution to all our problems,” he conceded. “I’m just having trouble with the whole idea of...”
“Of paying for sex?” I volunteered.
“I suppose so. It seems so sordid. On the other hand...” he mused.
Without giving away the secret of my writing, I couldn’t tell him that my online friends and readers had assured me it was quite the opposite to sordid; that done properly, using an escort could bring all the physical pleasure we had both been seeking without any of the risks of being discovered or of falling in love as I had done so badly with my first lover Tony.
It seemed the only way I could give my amazing husband his dream fantasy in safety was to use a professional. And after all I had inflicted on him over the past months I badly wanted to make Pete happy.
“But we need to deal with this little problem first, right?”
At first I thought he meant the problem of Will and the threat he represented to our family. Then I felt my husband’s lips on my boobs, then on my tummy where Darren’s baby was still inexorably growing and thought he meant the problem of my pregnancy.
Finally I felt the touch of his tongue on my mound and realised that he meant a problem much easier to solve – the problem of my lack of orgasm.
I opened my legs instinctively and felt my husband’s mouth close in on my open, messy vulva.
Ten minutes later I was floating on a sea of orgasms.
Ten minutes after that I was asleep, naked, splayed out on the bed, my cuckolded husband lying alongside me.
20
Normality! Sweet, contented normality!
The next few days passed as if the previous tumultuous months hadn’t happened. My husband Pete and I got up together, had breakfast together and went to our separate places of work where, for the first time in weeks, I was able to concentrate properly on my job and not my impossibly complicated private life.
We had dinner with friends, we went for a walk at the weekend, we watched TV in the evenings; we even made love twice without my infidelities being mentioned.
I heard nothing from Will; I heard nothing from Izzy. All very dull, all very boring, all just perfect after everything that had passed.
I began to remember what a normal marriage could be like, even though I did not really have one and would probably never have one again.
I didn’t go to the gym at the sports club; the memory of what Will and I had done in the Ladies’ changing room was too fresh in my mind. Instead, I donned my calf-length tights and pink vest and went for runs along tree-lined country roads near our house.
I even began writing again, the ideas simply flooded in, demanding to be put down on metaphorical paper before they floated away to be replaced with even more vivid and even more extreme plotlines.
My email correspondence was resumed too, picking up conversations with several of my online cuckold friends and replying to messages from several readers. To my delight, one of my two long- term online female pen friends had written to let me know that her first act of infidelity had now taken place and had gone well – very well in fact. She was both nervous and excited and needed to tell
someone all about it. In my role as anonymous correspondent, I was a perfect confessor.
I have to admit I felt very envious as she poured her excited feelings into her words. Memories of my first seduction by Tony came flooding back into my mind as I read her words. Despite all that has happened since, that first passionate, unplanned step into infidelity remains one of the most arousing and exciting moments of my life.
I hadn’t heard from my other female pen friend for some weeks – maybe a couple of months. Her introduction into the life-less-monogamous had taken place perhaps a year ago at the instigation of her husband. Apparently an avid reader of cuckold stories, including mine, he had put pressure on his wife for a long time, much the way Pete had done with me.
He had introduced her to my stories as a means of showing her the pleasures a change in their lifestyle might bring, especially as many of mine were written from the female point of view. She and I had exchanged messages. Eventually, she had given into her husband’s pressure, an evening with a male friend had been arranged and, according to her messages afterwards, all had gone well.
I wondered briefly what had stopped her from writing.
There were, of course, a handful of troll attacks from the usual suspects too but among them was a second, vitriolic message from a new source. As before, the style of message was much more personal than the simple, obnoxious abuse most troll messages contain and for a moment it puzzled and upset me.
But I was getting much better at ignoring these horrible things and concentrating on the nicer parts of my online life; the only secret I still kept from my husband. I deleted the message and moved on with my extraordinarily normal day.
The only evidence that my life was not normal was the two hours of blessedly moderate nausea I suffered every morning courtesy of the baby growing in my womb. Try as I might, I could not prevent this discomfort from reminding me that the biggest decision facing us had still not been made; what to do about my pregnancy.
As the days and weeks advanced, the choices open to us were becoming more limited in their scope and more severe in their implementation. The magic twelve-week watershed was fast approaching; the time beyond which the pregnancy could be considered ‘safe’ and I was more likely to carry the baby through to term than to spontaneously miscarry.
Beyond twelve weeks, only a more serious miscarriage or the unthinkable termination would bring
my pregnancy to an end but more urgently, the bump in my belly would begin to be visible to more than just my husband and me. Given the high proportion of our friends who like us, had medical backgrounds, any sign of pregnancy would be spotted very quickly indeed.
For those few precious days, I was able to put even these issues from my mind but deep down I knew this domestic bliss couldn’
t last. So I should not have been surprised by the sudden, unwanted way in which it ended.
As so often in my life, it all began with the buzzing of my mobile phone, this time at eleven-thirty on Wednesday evening, thereby denying me the completion of even a single week of a life that might be considered unremarkable.
It was, of course, my daughter Isobel. Who else would call so late on a weekday night? Pete and I were in bed together but, as a testament to the degree normality had returned, we had not had sex, were in our pyjamas and Pete was already asleep. I was reading my book.
When the phone began to ring and I saw who it was, I quickly got out from under the duvet, carried my buzzing handset downstairs and took the call in the kitchen full of trepidation.
“Mum?”
Even from hearing that single word I could tell from her voice that my daughter was on the verge of tears and big ones too.
“Izzy! What’s wrong?” I asked immediately.
“I’ve been dumped,” she said with a huge gulp. “Again.”
And then the tears began.
“Oh, Izzy!” I exclaimed. “I’m so sorry.”
For several minutes all I could do was sit and make soothing noises as, four hours drive away, my twenty-year-old daughter sobbed into the phone. From time to time half-intelligible words would appear but then they would be swept away by resumed heartfelt tears.
Eventually, either my words of sympathy had an effect or she managed to pull herself together on her own but finally I managed to decipher the noises that filled my ear.
“I got hold of Simon. We just talked for an hour. It’s all over, Mum.”
“I’m so sorry,” I repeated.
“It was horrible, Mum. Horrible!”
“I’m sure it was, Izzy. I’m sure it was.”
She was calming down a little but was still very upset.
“Tell me what happened,” I encouraged her.
She sniffed and blew her nose down the phone before replying.
“He said it’s finished. It’s over. I’m history.”
“Was he as nasty as that?”
“Oh he tried to be nice at first, saying it wasn’t me, it was him; that the long-distance relationship wasn’t working...”
She paused.
“Was it working?” I asked
“We could have made it work,Mum.”
I had always doubted that a distance of five hours could be overcome so easily so early in a relationship but I also seriously doubted that this was the real reason for his change of heart.
“I told him we could manage it if we tried but then he said he felt guilty about breaking up me and Steve.”
That could be true but sounded unlikely to me too.
“I told him it that was okay too; that Steve was with Lauren but he said he can’t stop thinking about the two of us together.”
I could imagine that easily; after all, he probably had a video of the two of them fucking to help him
picture it.
“So you think it’s something else?” I asked innocently.
“It’s got to be the video, Mum. He all but admitted he’d seen it. That’s when I really got upset and things got nasty.”
“Oh Izzy,” I repeated, unsure what else I could say.
“We ended up saying horrible things to each other,” she began to cry audibly.
“It happens,” I tried to soothe her. “When we’re angry we say things we don’t mean and...”
“But he did mean them, Mum. He did. And what’s worse...” she took a deep breath. “He’s probably right.”
There are times just to keep quiet and let Izzy go on at her own pace. This was one of those times. I made a few tutting noises to let her know I was still there and waited for her to tell me whatever fraction of their row she thought would be appropriate for her mother to hear.
“He thinks I’m a slut. Soon everyone will think I’m a slut,” she eventually said, her voice low. “Even I’m beginning to think I’m a slut.”
“Why?” I replied, shocked to hear her say the words but not surprised to learn Simon had those thoughts.
“Once the video gets out everyone will have seen me being fucked!”
Izzy hardly ever used the ‘f’ word with me; it showed just how emotional she had become.
I loved and cared for my daughter but it was hard not to point out her own stupidity in filming herself in the first place. What did she think was going to happen with it?
“That’s not all he said, Mum,” she said uncertainly.
Oh God! There was more?
“He says I must be aslut because of how easy it was to get me into bed.”
“But he seduced you!” I protested. “Not the other way round.”
“I told him that,” Izzy wailed. “But he just said I let him into my knickers far too easily.”
“That didn’t bother him at the time,” I said angrily.
Once again the unfairness of life was driven home. For Simon to have seduced my daughter was simply part of him being ‘Jack the Lad’. For her to have succumbed made her a dirty slut. I was certain the same one-sided standards would apply if my own sexual history ever became known and that Izzy would be among the most censorious.
But then, in condemning Julie for her affair with Darren as I initially had, wasn’t I just as bad as everyone else?
Izzy was still talking.
“I know Mum, but after the video, he thinks I jump into bed with just anyone. I told him I’d only made tapes with Steve but he wouldn’t believe me.”
“You did say you couldn’t tell who the boy is,” I reminded her.
“I can tell,” she half yelled.
“I know Izzy,” I tried to placate her. “But Simon can’t. Would he not accept it was Steve? I’m sure he’s had plenty of girlfriends before you.”
“That’s what I told him. It’s not as if either of us was a virgin. But he wasn’t interested. In the end, we just said nastier and nastier things to each other until he said he didn’t want a slut who would do that sort of thing for a girlfriend.”
He had a point in my view but I knew better than to say this.
“He said couldn’t go out with a girl wondering whether every male friend of hers he met had either screwed her himself or watched her being screwed on film.”
Again in his shoes, I might have felt the same but Izzy was my daughter and maternal instincts overcome all moral judgments. Besides, I was hardly in a position to start throwing stones.
“Do you think anyone else has seen it?” I asked. “Has anyone mentioned it?”
“Well, no,” she admitted. “Not to my face at least.”
“Did he tell you how he got it? Is it just a clip?”
“I don’t know, Mum. There aren't many people it could be.”
“Have you asked Steve?”
“Yeah! Like I’m going to ask him that. Sorry, Mum, I can’t do that.”
I thought for a moment. Only someone close to my daughter or her ex-boyfriend could have leaked a movie as sensitive as this. Top of my list of suspects was Steve himself and her supposed friend Lauren - but I didn’t see what was in it for either of them. With Steve, it could be revenge but Lauren had already managed to worm her way into Steve’s bed long before the clip reached Simon.
“Do you want to come home for a while?” I asked in a voice I hoped she would find soothing.
“I can’t. I’ve got exams,” she sniffed.
“I could come at the weekend.”
“Tim is coming down,” she said.
Tim is the younger of her two older brothers; my middle child.
“He was due to come anyway,” she added.
This was a relief. Tim and Izzy had been close as children. At least she wouldn’t be on her own, she would have a shoulder to cry on and Tim’s work ethic would be good for her revision. I very much doubted she would tell him all she had told me, though. There are some things brothers don’t need to know.
“How long
is he staying?” I asked.
“For the weekend at least; he’s taking a few days off. I’ll be okay with Tim.”
She was beginning to sound a little better.
“You’ll call me straight away if you aren’t okay?”
“Yes. Thanks, Mum.”
Izzy was much calmer now. Although it was nearly midnight, I did not want the call to end with my daughter still in a state of agitation so I deliberately changed the subject to try and restore normality even more. For ten more minutes, we chatted in as close to our usual fashion as was possible under the circumstances.
My mind, however, was troubled; what was it with bright, intelligent, capable girls that made them behave so stupidly when it came to boys? Given my own recent behaviour, it wasn’t only young girls that had this problem but still it troubled me.
Once I was convinced she was stable enough not to do anything stupid, we were drawing the conversation to a close. I was about to say goodbye and hang up but something made me ask one more question.
To this day I don’t know what made me think of asking my daughter this but I’m so glad I did.
“Before you go, do you know someone Keeley?” I asked as casually as I could.
“Yes. Well, I know a girl called Keeley. I don’t know if it’s the Keeley you mean. Why?”
Izzy seemed completely wrong footed by the question. So was I by her response, suddenly having to make up a reason for asking her.
“Um,” I stammered, hoping for inspiration. “The name came up during the day. I thought you were at school with someone called that I but wasn’t sure. It’s not that common a name.”
“Well if it’s the same Keeley I know, she was a year below me. Her brother was in my year. I didn’t know her well but we’re friends on Facebook now.”
“Does she have a boyfriend?” I asked casually though my chest was tight with excitement.
Izzy laughed hollowly.
“You might say that.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s engaged. It’s going to be the wedding of the year according to her. She’s getting married in September and making the biggest deal out of it. It’s all over her Facebook profile. I think she’ll be upset if Hello Magazine doesn’t show up.”