Another Unromantic Love Story

I was certain that I knew more about Biff/Hannah than Julian did. Biff and I had interacted soul to soul for two years without any of the distractions of the physical universe.

And husbands never pay that much attention to their wife anyway.

What puzzled me was why Biff/Hannah had decided to take on the guise of Julian Appleby's loving wife.

Julian clearly didn't know that he was living with a very rare and in many respects daunting intelligence. And I knew Biff well enough to know that what I had observed on Thanksgiving was a complete act. Biff simply wasn't wired that way.

After thinking about it I concluded that she had contrived the entire marriage for some purpose of her own. But I was pretty sure that she had not shared that little nugget with her loving husband.

I was not going to enlighten Julian about his wife. If I had done that there would be no way it would end well.

But it was extremely uncomfortable to be around the guy now, knowing what I did about Biff/Hannah.

I finished the project and brought it in as Christmas approached.

I was trying to get out of the building before Julian found me. But they must have called him when I got there. He was waiting with the usual gregarious smile plastered on his face.

He said, "Beer buddy?" I thought, "Why not, how much worse could it get?"

I quickly found out.

As soon as we got situated he regarded me with something approaching a serious look and said, "What did you do to Hannah? Since Thanksgiving she has been trying to fuck me to death."

Great! That was something that I positively DIDN'T need to know.

The picture of Julian and Hannah entwined in a sweaty heap of passion was very detrimental to my soul. And the detailed description of her sucking his cock to get him ready for the next round was making me throw up a little in the back of my mouth.

But I am robot-man so instead I said, "Why in the world do you think I have anything to do with it? I wasn't exactly at my best bolting out of there. You might as well blame Buster. He was there too."

Julian said, "No dude, all she has done the past three weeks is ask questions about you. And the more I tell her the more she wants to fuck me. You are the one causing it, not that I'm complaining. Are you sure you aren't some kind of long-lost brother separated at birth?"

I thought to myself, "Man, if you only knew?"

I said, "Your wife is the most smoking hot gorgeous woman I have ever met. She is so far out of my league I wouldn't even be allowed to be a bat-boy on her team. I was nonplussed to see how easily Julian believed THAT.

"Whatever has gotten into her; ahem, so-to-speak, it isn't me. But YOU should go down to St. Mary's and light a few candles that you are the only stud in her life."

Julian got a weird look and said, "I hope so. Sometimes I wonder."

I thought, "Oh Shit!" but I said, "What do you mean by that?"

He said, "I have NEVER had the slightest reason to doubt that she is anything but a devoted wife."

I thought to myself, "If you knew her like I know her you wouldn't put much stock in what you see."

He added, "We are rarely apart, except when I go to work. And she has never given me less than her best when we are together.

"But there are occasional times when it feels like she isn't really there."

My little voice was very smug. It knew something he didn't, "She has NEVER been completely there my friend."

Then the guy drove a stake through my heart, "When she is in one of those moods it is like she is some kind of phantom spirit. I know that she spends too much time on the internet. I wonder if she is carrying on some sort of virtual affair with somebody out there."

THAT thought ratcheted my blood pressure up to cerebral embolism status, "She was fucking around on-line?"

Suddenly, I was the cliché of the spurned lover. Except it was a virtual betrayal. It wasn't that Biff was getting intimate with another guy in the physical universe. She was fucking around like we used to do in the cybernetic one!

I am so repressed that Julian never saw any of the raging battle that was going on inside my head.

Instead I said as casually as I could, "I can find out if you want me to."

He looked like Buster does when I get out his treats. He said, "What would you need?"

I said simply, "Access to whatever computer she is using."

He said eagerly, "Come over tonight. She only uses the workstation in our den and her own laptop. But she keeps that in the den as well."

I said, "Isn't she going to be a tad suspicious if I just show up out of the blue and head straight for the den with my cracking tools?"

Julian said, "Wait until we go to bed. You can sneak in then. I'll leave everything unlocked and available."

I said, "Is she a heavy a sleeper? Aren't you afraid that she will hear something?"

He said with hearty confidence, "If she does I'll distract her. Just wait until about 11:30 tonight. I'll turn off the outside light on the patio to signal that the coast is clear."

I said, "This is a big favor dude. The last thing I need is for your wife to find me doing a black bag operation in your den.

"And if one of your neighbors sees me and calls the police I am going to rat both of us out."

Of course my motives were actually anything but pure and altruistic. I had the once in a lifetime chance to find out everything I needed to know about Biff/Hannah.

Moreover, I was suffering from a lot more sheer jealousy than Julian could ever comprehend.

I know that sounds creepy. But I had to have closure. And I was going to get it tonight.

I knew that Biff was smart but I am too. She had been dealing with Julian the past three years so I was hoping that her guard would be down.

I probably didn't need to wear the black hoodie, gloves and camo face-paint as I lurked in Julian's rose bushes that night. But I was being more adventurous than I had been in my entire repressed life and I wanted to dress the part.

The outside light flicked off. I waited five more minutes and approached the patio doors. They were unlocked.

I quietly made my way toward their den. I flicked on one of those little headband LED lights that bikers wear. They must have gotten the idea from a mining helmet. I was also carrying a backpack with every kind of electronic gear I would need.

As I opened the door to the den I was a study in ninja stealth. It squeaked noisily. I heard a whispered female voice from the nearby master bedroom.

I thought, "Great! I'm not here two minutes and I'm busted!"

The voice was insistent. I was frozen in place.

Then I heard a male voice. There was a little furtive discussion. Then I heard a fretful, "No, don't! Stop it!! Go check first!!"

That was followed by the sound of very heavy and rapid breathing and a loud moan.

Then she started muttering, "OhGod-OhGod-OhGod" over and over in a semi-dispassionate voice. It was like she was making a comment about religion, not firing up.

Then there was a loud, AHHHHH!!" That was followed by the sound of thrashing.

I thought, "Julian definitely knew what he was talking about when he said he could distract her."

Given my obsession with Biff/Hannah, the LAST thing I needed to hear were the increasingly louder sex noises coming from that room. But at least I could go about my clandestine business without worry of interruption. And I could keep track of the available time by the sounds of the fuck.

I booted both devices and found the reference monitor and system logs. They gave me a detailed second by second picture of what had gone on in each computer. I dumped all of the data.

While I was doing that the noise in the other room had built to wall-banging proportions. The pounding, rhythmic sound of the bedsprings was almost hypnotic.

She was crying out and gasping loudly with each thrust. She was also getting more and more vocal, in a very, unsettlingly explicit way.

I dumped the log files for both computers and began to mirror both hard-drives using my own homegrown compression algorithm. It captures the sectors that had something in them but had been marked "deleted". It even picks up the contents of sectors that have been wiped but not degaussed.

And it does it in much less time than any other application on the market.

Finally I dumped her e-mail from every account including the hidden one that she had on TOR. She was very good. But my Kung-Fu is unbeatable. And I was a lot more motivated.

The action inside the bedroom had gotten white-hot.

I had to admire Julian's stamina. He had been pounding her for 20 minutes. The wet slurping and slapping noises and her grunts and guttural moans were driving me nuts.

Then there were faster and even more intense effort noises. From the sounds she was making she was getting wilder.

Finally, she yelled, "OH SWEET JESUS! Fuck-Me-Fuck-Me-Fuck-Me!! Don't-Stop-Don't-Stop-Don't stop-Oh YES! CUMMING! CUMMING!! OHHHH YEAHHHH!!"

That was my Biff in there orgasming her brains out. Her wild finishing cries were tearing my heart out.

Even though she had been nothing but an abstract entity all the time I had known her. I felt like hanging myself by a handy Cat-5, right there in her den.

The hard-drive mirroring process finished with a beep. I hastily closed up everything and put my cracking tools away. I could hear the murmuring of the afterglow in the other room.

Then I heard almost right next to me, "You filled me up Baby! I've got to go clean up."

Her voice was so close that I almost yelled in surprise. Shit!! I had to get out of there.

The door of the bedroom opened abruptly. I was plastered against the wall next to it as she emerged.

She was hurrying up the hall to their bathroom running in that odd hippy fashion that all naked women do.

I lingered for a leer. Her body was exquisite. Her big full breasts had large brown nipples, still erect from her fucking.

As she continued down the hall I admired her tight round apple shaped ass and those gorgeous long legs. I bolted for the patio the instant she closed the door of their bathroom.

I couldn't believe how upset I was. It tore my heart out to discover what the woman in that bedroom was capable of.

I wondered how Biff's exceptionally well-honed and rational mind could give itself over to such out-of-control passion. But of course I don't have the relevant technology so I will never know.

At the same time I couldn't believe how much what I had heard in there had turned me on.

I have had my share of one-night stands. And a few of them have gotten pretty hot.

But I have never in my wildest dreams experienced the kind of fuck that Biff seemed to be capable of throwing, just as an everyday example of marital relations in the Appleby household. It was extraordinary.

If I had known how much it would hurt to listen to the only woman I had ever loved having sex, I would never have volunteered to do the operation in the first place.

But the upside was that I NOW had all of the information I would need to make Biff/Hannah's life an open book.

Good old faithful Buster was waiting patiently for me in the Rover, "Hello Boss, pant-pant-pant-drool-drool-drool pooling on the seats."

I scratched his grey muzzle as he slobbered on my hand. I slung the backpack in the back of the vehicle and drove home.

It was too late to do anything constructive that night. But seven hours later, in the cold light of morning I was dumping last night's ill-gotten gains.

I have a collection of servers and monitors in my spare bedroom that would make the bridge of the Starship Enterprise look amateurish.

And I buy expensive things off hacker websites that will let me crack anything from a cell phone to a Cray XK6.

My only real extravagance in life is the stuff that I have on-board my condo.

Thanks to our virtual affair I felt like I knew more about Biff than anybody in the world including her husband. So I was sure that if she was up to something it would be tucked away on her laptop.

Their desktop computer was too communal. She would put the stuff that she wanted us to find on that. And indeed, I quickly discovered that there was nothing suspicious there.

Her laptop was very high-end. And most of the things on it were password protected and encrypted, which raised some red flags.

But then again, maybe she was just careful.

The crack took almost 15 hours, which was a new record for the time to break into another person's stuff. But I wouldn't expect any less from my virtual lover.

The real problem was that, once I got in I learned NOTHING. Her SecureMail account, which I was sure would hide a smoking gun, was empty, no messages in or out. No history.

Seriously!? That made no sense. Nobody sets up an anonymous e-mail account on the Onion Router and then doesn't use it.

A completely empty and apparently unused anonymous message platform just reeked of mischief. But that was the only dubious thing I could find.

The fact was that after three days of intensive analysis I came up with a big blank.

I knew that Biff/Hannah spent a lot of money shopping on-line. But there was no proof that she was buying anything clandestine, or setting up love affairs.

She did the obligatory social media stuff and corresponded frequently with close friends and relatives. But those were all plaintext messages about everyday life. They were a lot more boring than they were enlightening.

She visited some very naughty sites. And that was for extended periods of time.

Of course! I knew about all of them.

We had shared those together for days at a time. And they were all bookmarked on my own system.

And, unfortunately for the well-being of my very soul. I had already had the opportunity to witness a far too graphic exhibition of her real-time sexuality.

She DID chat a lot in public rooms but never anything private. That was clear from the system logs.

So I could only conclude that there was nothing going on with any on-line love affairs. I could not begin to convey how relieved that made me feel.

In fact, I was astonished to see how normal and apparently average Biff's life was.

I knew from personal experience that she has a superb and voracious mind. But there wasn't more than the barest hint of her exceptional intelligence in her conversations with others.

The girl was either very good, or she was as wholesome and ordinary as her user-profile made her out to be.

Knowing Biff I was prepared to go with what was behind door number one. But I had no evidence to support that conclusion. For all I knew, she might really be the vanilla yuppie wife she was depicting.

My explorations did convince me of one thing.

Over the past weeks I had wondered if it was just an unfortunate coincidence that Julian's hot wife had happened to adopt the same handle as Biff.

The three days I spent wading around in her computer history DID manage to convince me that I WAS dealing with my virtual lover.

Biff might be pretending to be a housewife for her own reasons. But the mind that was occasionally revealed in her correspondence and on-line activities was clearly my girl.

It was like seeing the occasional flash of a stalking Bengal Tiger in the surrounding jungle.

I picked up the phone and called Julian. I said, "How about a beer old buddy and we can talk?"

He said, with more emotion than I had expected, "Thank God!"

I said, "What's the matter? Problems?"

He said apprehensively, "I'll tell you when I get there."

Two hours later I was sitting in our usual booth with a pitcher in front of me.

Julian walked in as dapper and handsome as ever. He saw me and rushed over to plop down opposite. He looked distressed.

I poured him a mug. Beer will soothe all manner of distress.

I said, "Do you want to talk first or shall I?"

He said nervously, "Tell me what you found out."

I said, "I just spent the past 72 hours living on Skittles and Mountain Dew digging into your wife's life. And I can say with absolute confidence that there is nothing suspicious on either computer."

I was not going to mention the TOR account because I had nothing substantive to say about it.

I smiled and added, "And thank you very much for the live sex-show. Given my unfortunate state of enforced celibacy that was a little hard to take."

He grinned back at me and said, "She IS the hottest piece of ass on the planet isn't she?" I gave him a "no shit" look back. It was a tender guy moment.

I said, "So what's the problem buddy?" The obligatory guy-banter was beginning to get a little tiresome.

He said, "She keeps a diary."

I looked at him inquiringly, "Really!?? You mean like paper and pencil? How delightfully primordial."

He said, "I have been getting a vibe that she is thinking about somebody else.

"I don't believe she has acted on anything yet. But in the past she has always been all-there for me. So much so, that I can tell when she is distracted.

"And something has come between us now. So I went hunting for evidence and I found an old diary in the stuff she kept when we moved in together."

My ears perked up. Now, that was moderately interesting!

I said, "Do you have it?"

He produced a small, cheap, leather bound book that looked like he had gotten it directly out of the prop closet for the Partridge Family.

It was kind of quaint and cute in a little girl way. It even had that miniature lock on it that all pre-teen diaries have.

To say the least, the concept of a woman with Biff's killer body and sexuality ever being a sweet little girl was a bit disquieting.

I took it and opened it. It was almost full.

There were entries for several years, ending about the time the two of them got married.

It was in the neat, precise handwriting of an elementary school teacher.

I said curiously, "What did she do before she married you?"

He said, "She taught third grade". D'oh?!

I said, "What has you so bothered? This was all before she met you?"

He said, "I read the whole thing. She had a man in her life back then who she claims she loved so much that she had to break it off with him."

I said, "That's crazy. Why would she break up with somebody she supposedly loved?"

He said, "It was too all-consuming for her. She felt like she was lost in the way she felt about him.

"I think he was married because there are a number of references that indicate she could never be with him.

"The whole relationship got so painful that she couldn't stand it any longer. So she ended it."

Pangs of jealousy were bouncing around in my skull like a ball made out of silly putty.

She was having a red-hot affair with a married man while we were conducting our own little electronic romance. I was about as devastated as I could be at that revelation.

I was fighting hard to keep my nerd cool. I said, "And I repeat, why should you care about a crush she had before she met you? Didn't you have a few hotties you couldn't live without back when you were younger?"

I might be the only male exception to what I had just said. Excluding Biff of course. But she was virtual.

The irony wasn't lost on me.

He said, "You haven't read it. If you saw how she felt about this guy you would not want to even THINK about what might happen if he ever resurfaced."

I "got" that line of reasoning. That was because I was feeling exactly the same way he was. Both of us were seriously threatened by Biff's mystery lover since, according to Julian, he was the absolute true love of her life.

I normally make it a point to stay out of everybody else's business but Biff had made me vulnerable in that one place. So I said, "What can I do to help?"

Noble self-sacrifice was not what was behind that offer.