Reluctant Cuckold (13 page)

When I came back out, Ashley was typing on her laptop. She told me her friend Camilla would be coming in Friday night. “Oh, and she wanted me to tell you that her boyfriend Mark may have Yankee tickets for Saturday. He’ll invite you if he does, but the emphasis is on
may
.”

“Oh, right on,” I replied, “that would be cool.”

I made my way into the bedroom and snuck the photo back into her album.

The next morning, Ashley made no mention of finding the photo.

The following night she had a presentation to prepare. I left her in the living room, went into the office, shut the door, and turned on some music. I was done looking at porn and catching up on financial news when I noticed the “chat room” icon on the upper right.

It had been several years since I talked in Internet chat rooms. When I did, it was mostly to talk sports. I used to frequent a specialty room called “Yankees Baseball.” Sometimes Red Sox fans would infiltrate the room, and I’d join in the conversational Red Sox bashing. But the novelty of communicating with random strangers in real-time grew old pretty quickly.

I certainly never saw it as a way of meeting girls.

I clicked on the chat icon and went scrolling through the options. After a while, I found myself looking at the names of the “special interest” rooms in the User-Created Section. These were the adult-themed rooms and the majority of the room titles had something to do with sex. They had provocative names like “Women who Love Swallowing” or “Love Older Men” or “Submissive Women.” Others, like “Men Look at Daughter” or “Family Fun,” were downright creepy.

There was one called “Wife Likes Others,” which I presumed had to do with cheating. But then I saw another room simply entitled “My Wife.” I decided to check it out. There were about twenty-five people in the room, but most seemed on the conversational sideline. In the public scroll, only a few people were typing, and what they wrote was fairly generic:

“Jeremy 33, Kansas, any wives free to chat?”

“Mitch 49, Philadelphia, any swingers local—my wife’s 45, DD.”

“30m Las Vegas here—wanna talk phone about my hot Spanish wife.”

“Anyone wife swap in the Tucson area?”

“Who’s got pictures to trade tonight?”

I was about to exit the room, when I received a private message. “Hi Dave,” it read, “NYC here as well.”

“How did you know I’m in NYC?” I replied.

“I just looked at your profile.”

I had forgotten I even had a profile. I had created it a few years ago. It gave my name, age, location, and that I was in a relationship.

“Oh, I got you,” I typed.

“You married?”

“Yes.”

“I have a hot 43 year old Filipino wife, care to trade photos?”

“No,” I replied, “sorry,” and clicked off the message.

Another message popped up: “Brooklyn here, do you share your wife?”

“No,” I replied, “sorry.”

Another guy asked, “Your wife like black?”

This was getting pointless, so I figured I’d type something of my own in the public scroll.

I looked at what I’d written for a few minutes before sending it: “Anyone here learn your wife cheated and how did you deal?”

That prompted a flurry of private messages:

“Your wife cheated?”

“Have a pic of her?”

“What happened with your wife?”

But then someone messaged me: “Yeah, it happened to me, my wife cheated on me.”

“Hi,” I replied, “I’m Dave, I’d be curious how you handled it.”

“I was pissed but I eventually forgave her.”

“How long ago was that?” I asked.

“Two years.”

“And you’re still with her?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d be interested in hearing what happened,” I typed, “if you don’t mind discussing it.”

“Not at all,” he replied, “it all started with a cruise.”

“That’s where she cheated?”

“Yup.”

“Were you with her?”

“No, she had gone on a cruise of the Caribbean with a recently divorced girlfriend of hers.”

“OK,” I typed, “and?”

“Well I didn’t like the idea of her going, whatsoever. I even joked with her before about it being their ‘Girls Gone Wild’ week, but she assured me it was nothing like that, and that she was just going to be comforting a friend in need. I knew her friend and knew she would be looking for a rebound hook-up. But what was I going to say to my wife, ‘No’? All I could say was have fun, but not too much fun, you know.”

“Yeah,” I typed, “I know the influence a friend can have. So what happened?”

“Well, she sent me emails that week saying she was having fun, but pretend G-Rated stuff. How they took in a musical, how she won some money gambling, lay out by the pool. How her friend’s spirits were good. How we should take a cruise, the two of us, as a next vacation.”

“Well, anyway,” he continued, “when she got back, she seemed a bit depressed to be home. I understand the post-vacation blues, but this time seemed different. She was on her computer a lot the week afterwards and one day I saw she had left it on and was still signed on. She had written about her cruise vacation to two of her friends.”

“So you read the emails?”

“Yeah, her laptop was just sitting there on the kitchen table.”

“What did you learn?”

“Well,” he replied, “The very first night she boarded that ship, she met an entertainment director, a guy who works on the cruise. And the guy bedded my wife that first night. It seemed pretty torrid. She had sex with this guy the whole week she was there.”

“Wow,” I replied, “how did you feel when you read all this?”

“I was mad as hell.”

“Did you confront her?”

“Hell, yeah.”

“How did she respond?”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you, I don’t know what got into me. She blamed her friend, even blamed me in a backhanded way. I told her I wanted her to stop emailing the guy and she said, ‘Never again, I’m done.’ ”

“She was emailing him afterwards?” I asked. “You mean, when she got back home?”

“Yeah, she wrote him long emails about how fantastic he was and how she still thought about him all the time. But it was one-sided.”

“One-sided?” I asked.

“Yeah, his replies back to her were brief. Like he was really busy. Three-sentence emails. Not blowing her off completely. He said maybe he could see her when he was in Tampa in the summer. But it was clear to me that it was just a fun little vacation relationship for him. I’m sure he was off fucking a new wife on vacation the following week.”

“How do you mean?”

“I talked to a guy in this room who used to work for a cruise line. He said married women without their husbands are easy prey. He said he was constantly banging the married wives there alone. It’s like a contest with them.”

“Wow,” I typed, “so what happened after you learned?”

“Well, she swore up and down that nothing like that would ever happen again and I eventually forgave her. She swore he had used a condom, but I was like ‘Yeah, right,’ and had her get tested. Then a few months later, I started rereading those emails. I saved them all. And I got kind of fascinated by it. This happened two years ago. I must have reread those letters a hundred times now.”

“Were they graphic?” I asked.

“Not blow by blow, but there was enough for me to get a mental picture. It started to turn me on, the image of her with another man. This guy was young, around thirty, and she talked about how buff and strong he was, how well hung, how skillful he was in bed. How she knew that first evening he’d be sleeping with her that night. She was obsessed with this guy, but I think she meant nothing to him.”

“Meant nothing?” I asked. “How so?”

“Check this out,” he wrote. “The last day, she was out drinking by the pool and this guy took her to some secluded place on the ship. He works on the ship, it’s probably his usual spot. Anyway, they had sex there and she wrote how afterwards she couldn’t find her bikini bottom. So the guy told her he’d come back with a towel. Do you think he ever came back with a towel?”

“I guess he didn’t?”

“Nope, she waited an hour and a half for this guy to return and he never did. So eventually, she had to make her way back to her room in broad daylight, running for visual barriers with her hands trying to cover her ass and pussy. She told her friend it was twenty minutes of running from one thing to the next, with other passengers catching glimpses. She said she was mortified when two men walked passed her as she was trying to slide the key in her door. Can you imagine that? Guys checking out my wife’s ass as she’s frantically trying to open the door? Having just been fucked. What a slut she must have looked like. I swear, if I could have video of that afternoon of my bottomless wife running that gauntlet in public—”

“Wow,” I typed, “so did she ever see the guy after that?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, she did. You would think she would tell this guy to fuck off, right?”

“I would think so,” I typed.

“So would I. But instead she saw him later that night at the bar and said, ‘You never returned.’ And he said he was sorry but he got called to work on the other side of the ship and couldn’t make it back. And she said, ‘that’s OK’ and then joked about it. She ate up that lame excuse like it was apple sauce. Now, you know that guy left her stranded on purpose, right?”

“I don’t know, do you think so?”

“I’m sure of it. He probably had no intention of returning. Maybe he even tossed her bikini bottoms during sex. He probably enjoyed making that statement. Like ‘I’m going to fuck you, cum inside you’—I don’t believe the ‘he used a condom’ talk from her. And then he leaves her to walk back embarrassed and exposed.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because no other explanation makes sense and I know guys like that. It was the last day and he was telling her what he really thought of her, how little he ultimately regarded her. So you know what happened that last night, even after he pulled that shit on her earlier in the afternoon?”

“What?”

“She still wanted to fuck him. Where was her dignity? Instead, she wanted a final fuck goodbye. Or a fuck-off goodbye as I think it was for him, when he obliged her. You think he had any respect for her then? No, he was probably already thinking of the new blood about to come in the next week.”

“But it turned you on, you said?” I asked.

“Eventually it did. Like I said I became fascinated by it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanked thinking about her with that guy.”

“Do you still? I mean that was two years ago?”

“Oh sure,” he replied, “When I wank, that’s what I think about. It doesn’t matter how long ago it was.”

“Does she know it turns you on thinking about it?” I asked.

“Not to that per se, but she knows I’m now open to her being with another man. Only I would want to know about it, and there would have to be certain ground rules.”

“Ground rules?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he wrote, “something I would participate in setting up. It started as pillow talk, and she’ll indulge in the fantasy, but she doesn’t want to do something that jeopardizes our marriage or gives her buyer’s remorse.”

“Do you think she will do it?”

“I think with time, and some gentle encouragement, there’s a good chance. But we’ll have to see. I don’t want to jeopardize our marriage either. For now, it’s just a hot fantasy.”

“How’s your marriage now?”

“It’s good, it’s strong. I think we have our trust back now. In a weird way, it actually brought us closer. It’s definitely improved our sex life. That is, I find her more attractive, like she has this wild side.”

“That’s good, I’m glad,” I typed. “So would you say now that you don’t really regret it?”

“Regret is a tricky word,” he wrote. “It changed my view of her somewhat, that she allowed this guy to basically use her. But maybe it broadened her dimensionally for me. Just thinking of her being that wild. I certainly was hurt by it. But I think over time, assuming things remain good, whatever regret that might linger, will go away.”

“Interesting,” I typed, “I’m glad to hear that.”

“Is this something you’re going through?”

“Yeah,” I replied, “only mine was a lot more recent.”

“Turn you on?”

“Yeah, kind of,” I admitted.

“It happens. That’s normal. It hurts, but is a turn-on. Go figure, right?”

“Yeah,” I typed, “it’s a bit of a cluster fuck. Good to know I’m not the only one going through something like this and reacting like I have.”