5000 Miles

5000 miles

Can you be cuckold when you have never met?

Is this a true story? I am not going to divulge that until much later. I am interested in hearing the thoughts and opinions of anyone who reads it.

The unknown is a fearful thing. Whether it is a dark cellar filled with spider webs, or stepping into a dangerous situation that could easily take your life, we all, at some point, have that sensation that we are about to find ourselves in a place we don't want to go, or to stay.

I have been in a lot of those situations. You don't spend 25 years as a firefighter without facing a lot of those kinds of unknowns. They never really bothered me much. I was confident in my own abilities. I had no fear of death. I would charge headlong into the worst situations, secure that I could manage myself and the situation and come out like I went in.

Now, for the first time, I face an unknown that has me terrified. I am not so much paralyzed with fear as I am unsure about my abilities to cope with this situation and how best to approach it. Let me lay down a little background before I go any further with the details of my conundrum.

Ten or twelve years ago, I met a woman online. It was a casual thing. I was the moderator of a forum on a fetish website. My area was dedicated to writers. It didn't matter if it was erotic or non-erotic prose and poetry. The portion of the website that I moderated was only a small portion of the entire website. It was here that I also posted much of my own writing.

In the course of things, I got lots of comments, criticisms, and suggestions about my work. That was one of the reasons I liked that part of the website. It was a chance to get unbiased and often insightful reviews of new works. It was good practice and valuable information. One day I got a glowing comment from a recent subscriber to the website. She had commented on a piece of poetry I had posted.

My habit was to read these comments, look at the person's profile on the website, and answer if appropriate. That is just what I did. The person in question was a female, obviously well-educated and well read. There wasn't much in her profile to give me any more clues. I sent a brief message back giving thanks for the comments. A few brief messages passed, and before we realized what was happening, we had developed a rapport.

To make a very long story short enough for the recounting of the current tale, suffice it to say that over the next ten years, a deep and emotional bond developed between us. There were many high spots to remember. There were also low spots, a few that nearly severed that emotional and intellectual bond. However, in the end, we have managed to keep this relationship together.

So, you might ask, what is the big problem? The problem is five thousand miles. That is the approximate distance that separates us. Over ten years we have never met in person. We had done video calls of course, but in that span of time we have never managed to be close enough together to even touch hands.

Now, I'm not going to tell you that this has been the perfect romance or relationship. We have had our highs and our lows. But the attraction keeps us involved. As with any relationship that continues for a decade, it has changed over time. All too often as relationships evolve, the people involved find that interests change, emotions wax and wane, and life situations certainly develop new and oftentimes incompatibly.

So, here we are, ten years down the road. We are reasonably comfortable with one another. Things seem to have found an equilibrium over the past few years. But suddenly, I get the feeling that something has changed.

We use a variety of online apps to stay in touch. We have at various times depended on the chat provided by the website where we met. We have tried all the well known social apps at various times. For the past year or so, we have relied on an app called Signal. It has been one of the better ones in terms of reliability and ease of use.

What. you ask, has changed that has brought me to the point of questioning things? Nothing overt or earth-shattering. It is a host of little things. One in particular that both aggravates me and concerns me. And that is her sudden change in the way she communicated back to me.

In the past, no matter what app we used, we often exchanged brief messages during the day. Now you have to understand that when you talk about a 5000 mile separation, you are talking about six time zones. Typically, when she starts her day at 7 AM, it is only 1 AM for me. When she gets ready to go to bed at night at 10 PM, it is only 4 PM for me. Given that she works, has a child, and all the activities and responsibilities that go with a career and a teenager, a lot of that time when we are both active is consumed with those responsibilities. That I understand.

But for years, whatever app we were using, I knew that I could pick up my smartphone, or press a key on my computer and send a message to her that would, usually, be retrieved, in a matter of minutes. Almost anyone who uses these kinds of apps, at least reads those messages with minutes of them being received. The fact that almost all these apps timestamp messages when they are delivered to the recipient proves this to be true. Signal, in particular, does a nice job with this feature. The app graphically indicates when the message recipient's device is online, when the message has been received, and when it was read.

Of late, I have noticed that she doesn't keep the app active on her phone except when she is actively communicating with me. Even then, the app sometimes comes on, she sends a message, and the app immediately disconnects from the internet. Usually, this happens in the evening (Afternoon for me) when we usually have some time to spend together before she goes to sleep. There was a time when I could get in touch with her almost anytime and at least acknowledge that she was there. Not so much anymore.

Often, of late, the app on her phone disconnects from the internet as soon as we say goodnight and doesn't come back on until late in the evening the following day. There are many times when I tell her my final goodnight, and her phone is already disconnected and that goodnight message sits, undelivered to her until she opens the app the next evening for our all to often two or three sentence exchange.

It is that situation that prompted me to start thinking about the subject of this bit of prose. Last night, at the time we usually try to meet, I got a brief message telling me that she was feeling better (she finally told me just the day before that she had been ill. Not when she was ill but after she was mostly recovered.), and that she was going to bed so as not to chance a reverse in her recovery. I was sitting at my desk when the message came in and it took me less than a minute to reply. It is now more than 12 hours since I posted that message and it is still sitting on the system, undelivered because her app is disconnected from the internet.

This doesn't strike me as the way someone who is emotionally and romantically involved with someone would act. She couldn't even wait 5 minutes to see if I would reply. Signal shows you when the person on the other side of the conversation is typing. Had she waited even a few seconds, she would have known I was online and sending her something back. The more I have thought about these subtle and easily overlooked changes, the more it worries me.

I am sitting in my office, at my computer. It is a Sunday. I know she isn't working. I also know she has had time to be on her smartphone and active on some social media sites. I can see when she is posting and get the timestamps. Yet, our primary means of communication has not been opened since she closed it after that quick message last night. If our supposed relationship is so important and meaningful, I would think that she would be interested enough to at least check for messages when she got up, or when she had a break during her day. This certainly appears not to be the case.

It gives me suspicions that something else is going on. My problem? Five thousand miles. An ocean out of reach. I have no way of knowing what is happening. I am totally dependent on my acceptance that she is being truthful and honest with me. I want desperately to believe that there is nothing to this and that I am letting my over active brain think me into a funk over nothing.

I sent her a very long set of messages last night about an hour after I got her last message. My reply to that message is still sitting on the queue waiting to be delivered as are the subsequent messages I penned. She still hasn't opened the app, read the messages, much less replied. I expect that I will get a reply later this afternoon, maybe not until the time we usually meet in the evening just before she goes to bed.

If it goes as I suspect, she is going to reply in an almost angry and accusatorial manner. She will have a host of excuses why she is carrying on as she is. If her reply to my messages holds true to what has occurred in the past, I will soon find that I am the bad guy, she is the victim, and that my questions and concerns are trivialized and dismissed as nothing more than the paranoid or jealous meanderings that have no justification. I will probably get no cogent or specific answers to any questions I ask.

The question is to my readers, can someone in a relationship spanning 5000 miles where two people have never even touched hands, be a cuckold? Or am I really a lunatic with false expectations? Advise me. Would you be suspicious? Am I acting irrationally? Or am I just a deluded and stupid old man who wants to believe that there is still love in this world?

Watch for follow ups as this drama unfolds. As I finish this and prepare to post it on the Literotica site, she still hasn't opened the Signal app and the messages haven't been delivered for almost 16 hours since I posted them. She has had more than half a day to check that app, I know she has been on her phone with other social media sites. I am waiting. Updates will follow, if anyone is interested.