The Cabin: Chloe's Story (Book Two) (The Cabin Novellas)

by Stark, Natalie

  Chloe Wells! I chided myself again. What are you thinking!

  I did love Ben, he was a good husband in so many ways, but he had become so boring. Sometimes I hoped that he was having an affair. I wouldn’t be happy about it, but it would justify me having unattached sex with someone else without guilt. It would make us even. But Ben was never going to have an affair – he didn’t even go to the office Christmas party anymore. He had become dull. He was obsessed with his banking career. He didn’t have time for me – let alone another woman.

  I headed towards home, the last fragments of my dream flitting around in the back of my mind. I thought of that guy again and what we had done together in my dream. Some chance, I thought, the memory of it making my skin tingle and turning me a little wet. Feeling a bit horny as I remembered my dream, I pushed a little harder on the accelerator and sped up. Glancing at my wristwatch, I knew that Ben wouldn’t be home for another hour or so. That would give me time to relieve myself of that tingly excitement I felt at the thought of that guy fucking me on the train. I’d bought a vibrator a year or two back on the suggestion of a girlfriend. She said her and her husband used it during foreplay. Apparently it had really done things for their sex life. It had done jack-shit for mine, and I’d taken to using it on myself when alone in the apartment. Did I care? A little, if I were being honest with myself, but looking on the bright side, the vibrator was always willing, it never went soft before I’d come, and it never got a fucking headache!

  So racing home, I planned to spend the next hour or two before Ben got home and raided the medicine cabinet, fantasizing about that guy fucking me on the train.

  Two

  Ben

  Leaving the office, I made my way out onto the street. That pounding had started in my temples again and I knew within ten, fifteen minutes, my brain would feel as if someone had set loose a herd of buffalo inside my skull. They would charge around the corridors of my mind, kicking up flaky lumps of grey matter with their giant hooves. Rubbing my temples with the balls of my hand, I headed away from work for the day and set off in the direction of home for the weekend. I wouldn’t take my car, my head was hurting way too much already, and sometimes the headaches could be blinding. I had enough shit in my life without wrecking the goddamn car and me along with it. Chloe really would freak out if I truly became permanently paralyzed below the waist. I was so tired most nights, I could hardly raise a smile, let alone anything else. I knew that pissed Chloe off, but she didn’t have the worries I had. The credit crunch had hit the banking sector hard, despite what the distrusting public thought. To them we were all just greedy bankers, but that just wasn’t true. The shareholders probably, but not the guys and girls at my level. It was a hard slog, and with redundancies looming daily, I had to work hard if I wanted to avoid the axe when it inevitably came swinging down. I just wish Chloe could see that. The receptionist job she held in town wasn’t going to pay the mortgage on the apartment, the two cars, and everything else. No, the buck pretty much stopped with me and it stressed me out. I wanted more from life than just a one-bed apartment overlooking a car park. I wanted a house big enough to one day raise a family in, and a garden for them to play in. These days, that didn’t come cheap.

  But these days, Chloe just seemed to be obsessed with sex. What guy wouldn’t want a wife like that? Most I guess, but not me – not right now. The pressure at work had not only caused me to suffer from migraines, but it had affected the old pecker, too. It had nothing to do with how I felt about Chloe. Shit, she was hot when she wanted to be – which was most of the time. She always had the knack of being able to turn me on, so the fact that I found it increasingly difficult to get a hard-on now, had nothing to do with Chloe. It had to do with me and my job.

  It had started slight at first, and whereas I’d once been able to get hard at the sight of her in her skimpy panties that she liked to wear, I now noticed that my dick would barely twitch, let alone get stiff. But the more I worried about it – the more I thought Chloe would think I was some kind of sexual inadequate – the less able I was to get a hard-on. So I started to make excuses. I was tired, my head ached, or there was a football match on the TV. And it’s funny because before you knew what was happening, the football had become more appealing than watching Chloe writhe around on the bed in her silk panties. Football had become safer – there was no expectation on me – it was all on the players. But secretly, I stressed about it and I stressed about work. I really did start to get headaches and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a hard-on. And on it went, around and around in a big circle. I knew me and Chloe were drifting apart. I knew she had taken to using that sex toy on herself. I woke one night on the sofa where I had fallen into a drunken stupor. I could hear the sound of it buzzing as she rubbed it frantically against her clit in the bedroom. But instead of going to her and giving her what it was she really craved, I rolled onto my side, and closed my eyes against the tears which stung them.

  There was a chemist on my way home, I went inside. The pain in my head now making me feel sick, I staggered inside. Beads of sweat covered my brow. I took a pack of painkillers from the counter and paid for them. The pharmacist gave me a worried look, and I headed back out of the store before he had the chance to say anything. Back on the street, I took two of the white tablets from the packet. I popped them into my mouth and bit down on them, my teeth grinding them into a white powder. They tasted bitter and I grimaced. Placing the packet into my pocket, I headed up the street towards home.

  Trying to block out the pain, I rubbed my temples again and thought of Chloe. She would be home by now, and I wondered who she was fantasizing about today. I knew she did that now, and I knew she had checked out Internet porn, too. I’d checked her browsing history. I wasn’t spying on her. I was scared of losing her. I feared I might lose her to another if I wasn’t careful. She was young, pretty and very sexy. Plenty of guys would like to take her off my hands. I knew my fears weren’t unfounded.

  To my horror and disgust I’d discovered she had checked out some kind of website for people who liked to partner swap. What did they call themselves? I tried to remember through the foggy pain. Swingers – that was it. Chloe had checked out a website called Bed-Swappers. I found the whole thing disgusting and I told her so. We rowed when she had discovered I’d checked out her browser history. She accused me of spying on her and not trusting her. I told her I’d discovered it by accident and she said she found the website the same way. I didn’t believe her and she didn’t believe me. There you go – we were both lying to each other. What next? I feared.

  So I knew there was every chance that one day soon I would arrive home to find Chloe had left me for another. Someone who could keep his dick as hard and as long as a twelve inch lump of vibrating plastic. Lucky guy. I winced at a sudden stab of pain in my head. Rubbing my temples again, I shuffled on towards home.

  Three

  Chloe

  Breathing heavily, I lay on the bed and let the last tremors of the orgasm trickle through me. With my eyes shut, the guy on the train was still holding me in his arms as I sat propped on the basin. With my chest rising slowly up and down as I drew breath, the last glimpses of my fantasy trailed away like faint smoky embers. The vibrator hummed beside me on the bed. Fumbling for it, I switched it off.

  Although bringing myself off had gone someway to sedating that sexual longing I had deep inside of me, it wasn’t like having the real thing. I wanted to feel a man against me, deep inside of me. I wanted to hear his deep guttural grunts as he came. I wanted to hear a man tell me how much he wanted me – how much he wanted to fuck me. I wanted to know that I turned a man on – I wanted to feel sexy and desirable. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I’d felt like that. Hearing a make-believe guy say those things inside my head wasn’t enough any longer. It was like sticking a Band-Aid over a deep cut – it would only help for so long. With my naked body gleaming with a sticky sweat, I swung my legs over the side of the
bed and stood up. My legs felt weak. I thought about hiding the sex toy in the drawer beside my bed. Nah, I thought. Let Ben see it. If he knew I was frigging myself off, it might stir him in to giving me the real thing. I doubted it – but it might.

  I left my bedroom, and switching on the shower, I stepped inside and closed the glass door. Tilting my head back and closing my eyes, I let the warm water rain down on my face. As I washed my body, I searched my mind for any way that I might be able to get Ben interested in me again – how I might get any man to be interested in me again. I feared I had become as mundane as the life I now led. There didn’t seem to be any excitement anymore. The women in those erotic books I had started to read were getting fucked pretty much every day. But that was just fiction, right? But was it?

  I’d listened to some of the girls talk at work over morning coffee and none of their lives seemed to be as dull as mine. They were getting fucked one way or another. A couple of them were having flings with guys in the office. Another had an Italian lover who she visited in Rome once a month. I sat and listened with envy as she explained how, once a month, she booked a ‘no frills’ flight online and flew over to Italy for a long weekend.

  “Three nights and days of unadulterated fucking,” she smiled. “No strings but plenty of thrills!”

  She then returned home to a flat full of cats, satisfied until her next trip out to Italy. All of them seemed to have much more experience with men than me. Sometimes they talked about ex-boyfriends and what they had gotten up to with them. I had no such stories. My only sexual experiences had been with Ben, and to be honest, there wasn’t a lot to tell, even if I had have wanted to. These days there was nothing at all to tell unless I wanted to confide in them about my sad little fantasies I had about the guy on the train. That was the closest I came to having any fun these days.

  Turning off the water, I took a fresh towel from the rail on the bathroom wall. Drying myself, I looked at my reflection in the mirror. I was pretty enough, I thought, staring back at myself. My breasts were pert and still upright, and my stomach was as flat as a board. I turned slightly and looked at my own butt. That looked okay, too. I could remember Ben calling it a ‘candy butt’ when we first got together.

  “A candy butt?” I had giggled. “Why a candy butt?”

  “Because it’s so freaking sweet,” he would smile, turning me over and entering me from behind.

  Those first couple of years had been good. We had had fun. Wrapping the towel about me, and telling myself that the guy I had first met was still deep inside Ben somewhere, I went into the living room and switched on the laptop. As the screen flickered into life, I knew I had to try one last time to bring that guy – the old Ben – the man I had fallen in love with back into my life. Going online, I hit my history browser. The ‘Bed-Swappers’ website appeared on the screen.

  “Now why did I even bother looking at that page?” I wondered out loud. “Ben wouldn’t screw his own wife, let alone someone else’s.”

  I clicked off the page, and chewing my lower lip, I typed ‘romantic secluded weekend break’ into the search engine. I hit the search button. Google chucked up pages and pages of possible locations. I scrolled down the page then clicked onto another, hoping that something would jump out at me. By page ten, and figuring I would never convince Ben to come away with me, I was just about to snap the laptop shut when I saw an advert which simply read ‘The Cabin’. Guiding the cursor over the link, www.thecabin.org.uk I clicked onto it. Although the webpage was simple in design – no frills here – there was a picture of a rustic-looking cabin surround by rich green trees. The cabin looked to be constructed from wood with a porch and small set of steps leading to the front door. It didn’t look pretty, grand, or anything special, but there was something about The Cabin. I read the description to discover that it was set in the Lake District, some way up a remote Cumbrian Mountain called the Cross Fell. The nearest village was a few miles away and was called Lufton. I’d never heard of the place. The Cabin was described as an authentic log cabin, in a forty-two acre mountain paradise. It had a stone wood-burning fireplace, comfortable furnishings, and a veranda with mountain views. There was a romantic Jacuzzi tub for two and a romantic master suite.

  Starting to get a little excited, imagining Ben and I shut away in that cabin together, I knew that if we could go to such a place, I might be able to save my marriage. In such a place, miles from anyone and anywhere, fantasies were made. It would be the ideal place for Ben to shrug off his fears and worries, stresses, and concerns about his career. The online description didn’t say anything about there being a TV, either, so he wouldn’t be able to watch football. Why would such a place need a TV anyhow? I thought. Anyone going to such a romantic and remote place would be too busy fucking to watch TV. Hopefully, Ben and I would be too busy, too.

  With a nervous twinge of excitement, I placed the cursor over the ‘Book Now!’ icon. Even as I put in tomorrow’s date, I knew it would already be booked up for the next six months or so – such places always were. They were being used by people like the girl from work and her Italian lover. But much to my surprise, my dates were accepted and a message flashed onto the screen, asking me to submit my credit card details. Reaching round in my chair, I snatched up my handbag from beside the sofa. I fished out my credit card and entered the details online. Once approved, I printed off the receipt, which came with a map giving directions up the side of the mountain to the cabin. There was also an instruction to collect the keys from a pub named the Slaughtered Lamb situated in the village of Lufton.

  Folding up the receipt, I placed it into my bag. Turning back to the laptop, I knew all I needed to do now was to persuade Ben to come with me to the cabin.

  Four

  Ben

  I twisted the key in the lock and pushed open the front door. I staggered into the hallway of our apartment, my head feeling like someone had buried an axe into it. Kicking the door closed, I passed the bedroom. With one hand to my temple, I glanced into the room, half expecting to find Chloe halfway through her sex aerobics with that pink pulsating lump of silicone thrust between her legs. Chloe wasn’t there, but I could see her joy-toy lying alone in the centre of our bed.

  Turning away, I headed down the hall and into the living room. Chloe was sitting at the table by the window, staring at the laptop screen. What was she looking at now? I wondered. Probably her favourite website ‘Cock-Swappers’ or whatever it was called. I couldn’t remember now, my head hurt too damn much. Whatever the name of the website, it was revolting and disgusted me.

  Chloe looked up as I collapsed onto the sofa. I lay back, swinging my feet up onto it and crossing them at an angle. I heard Chloe snap the laptop closed, pushing her chair back from the table and cross the room towards me. I glanced up to see she had a towel wrapped about her slender frame. Probably been washing off the sweat worked up from her afternoon of dildo-gymnastics, I thought, the pain in my head almost crippling now.

  “You poor thing,” Chloe hushed, kneeling down beside me and gently stroking my brow with her fingertips.

  Why was she being so nice? I wondered. The onset of one of my headaches usually had her reaching for her sex-sabre and slamming the bedroom door shut in my face.

  “Have you taken any painkillers?” she soothed, brushing the side of my face with the back of her hand. Her touch felt nice, cool and soft against my feverish hot skin.

  “Two,” I groaned, closing my eyes against the fading sunlight filtering in through the living room window.

  “Let me get you a glass of water,” she said softly, getting up and heading for the kitchen.

  I heard her turn on the tap and the sound of the water sloshing into the glass felt like spikes being dragged across the front of my mind. Why was she being so nice? So understanding? I couldn’t help but feel suspicious. Maybe she had taken a step up from the imitation cock lying on our bed and had found herself a real one with a proper man attached to the end of it. I screwed my eyes shut.
I didn’t want to think about that. The thought of Chloe being screwed by another man made me want to vomit. Maybe she had found a new guy while browsing ‘Cocks ‘n Gobblers’ or whatever the fucking site was called.

  Chloe knelt beside me again, offering me the glass of water. Easing myself up against the sofa pillows, I took the glass from her and popped two more pills from the packet in my pocket. I swallowed them whole, followed by a gulp of the ice cold water Chloe had fetched for me.

  “Poor Ben,” Chloe said, rubbing my thigh with her hand.

  Oh God, she wasn’t going to suddenly grab for my cock, was she? Chloe wasn’t being kind purely to get at my dick, was she? I gently brushed her hand away.

  “I was only trying to be nice,” she whispered, tightening the towel about her as if to prove the point.