Betrayal

This is my first story for Literotica and I have tried to organise my thoughts for my take on an old, old story. You shouldn't expect to find anything very original here. I think it finishes -- so if you prefer the future tidied away neatly, please just imagine it for yourself or write your follow on.

It is self-edited using Google Review so if you don't like my grammar, please take it up with them. I welcome constructive feedback which helps me to improve my stories. I will delete any pointless or personally rude comments. If it's the sort of story you don't like, just don't bother to read it and, please, don't bother to comment or to rate it.

Betrayal

You know the way you think it will never happen to you.

Gerri, that's Geraldine in full, and I met at College. We had both been part of a wider group of friends who were studying various social science courses and sharing some lectures. We just sort-of gravitated towards one another. I ran into her one day in the library, we were both working on the same essay for one of our options, and asked her to join me for a coffee. The rest, as they say, is history. We discovered over that cup of coffee that we had much in common; similar interests, shared sense of humour and, vitally, we liked the same bands.

It was the 1980s. We were both romantics at heart so we graduated, naturally, to the New Romantic music; bands such as "Alphaville" and "The Lotus Eaters". We would lie together on her bed in her little student bedsit with the posters of Morton Harket, Duran Duran and Nick Lowe blu-tacked to her beige wall. Add a couple of candles, an enthusiasm for cider, and a rainy night and we got closer.

It wasn't my first time and she said it wasn't hers but I had never been "in love" when I had those embarrassed sixth-form fumbles. This was so very different. We, or at least I, felt a real connection. Sparks didn't fly, but we were both relaxed and at peace that night. It was strange waking up together in her single bed and discussing if we could share a toothbrush, she didn't have a spare one, before we kissed again. We spent a while re-exploring our bodies before dressing. Gerri peered cautiously out of her door to see if the corridor was clear, then we went for coffee and a roll before our first lectures of the day.

Fortunately Gerri wasn't pregnant. We had been a little too tipsy and eager as our bodies both responded that first night. We agreed that we would be better prepared next time. We were now, I felt, officially an "item" and we spent a lot more time working and relaxing together. I'd thought that I would be obvious and attract attention when I bought my first condoms but, in fact, no-one cares when you are at those machines in the gents. Our romance was a steep learning curve for both of us. I discovered periods and mood swings and she discovered the almost endless enthusiasm and readiness of a twenty-year-old male.

I didn't think that I was an emotional man, punk had defined my teenage years, but Gerri changed all that. I found myself pining and gazing out of the window during the Easter vacation and my mum said all sorts of unhelpful things like "you need to eat" and "I'm sure she'll ring tomorrow". Gerri and I talked almost every day, sharing the music we were listening too. I took it for granted that she was doing the same; she told me that she never went out.

Years later, St Etienne's "Over the Border" brought it all back to us. Even though we were in College rather than at school at the time, it didn't matter. That song was us.

Life then followed its typical pattern. Growing closeness, sex, commitment, engagement, more sex, marriage, even more sex, jobs to do, rent to find, and then a mortgage to pay on our little flat. Our bedroom activity fell off a little as we were living further from our jobs and we both had early starts and tiring days. We'd decided not to wait too long for children, so we started working on it. Strangely, it led to an increase in sex but a decline in spontaneity as we consulted charts and took temperatures. Pregnancy followed and we had the joy of welcoming Rachael into our lives. Two and a half years later Matthew joined our family.

Gerri took the maximum maternity leave with Rachael and we found a nursery place so that she could go back to work, we needed the money. Again, after Matthew's birth she took the maternity leave and then went back. With the two children both at nursery that took most of one salary, we earned similar amounts, and things were quite stretched until Rachael and then Matthew went to school. Both sets of grandparents were retired and lived some way away but they did help as much as they could. One or the other set came down, now and again, for long weekends so that Gerri and I could have some "us" time at a nice hotel.

Once both children were at school, life settled into a new routine. There were after-school clubs, weekend activities and school holidays. Over the years all the grandparents died, Gerri's father first and then my mother. Three years later their spouses left to join them. We found that their passing left a gap in our family, that generation was gone and we felt, strangely, responsible and on our own. We were in our forties and life was passing so fast. We did, though, make the time for a night out for a good meal once every fortnight where we could reconnect away from the interruptions of our young teenagers. There were always babysitters available, looking to earn a little money. This became easier as the children got older and, in theory, more sensible. We had a neighbour they could call on in emergencies -- and who would notice if they threw a party. Everything seemed to be going well for us.

Moving on a few years, Rachael was now in her second year at University and Matthew had found an internship in a bank, living in a shared flat up in the city. As the Uni wasn't too far away, Rachael would come home in study weeks for some peace to work and for the home cooking. She had a boyfriend, and we speculated gently about her life at Uni and our memories of our own College years.

One day I was feeling a bit under the weather at work and, as it was a quiet day, my boss told me to take off early. She hoped I'd be back at full strength tomorrow, so I headed home. As I let myself in, I heard the unmistakable noise of a bed creaking.

"Bother," I thought innocently to myself, "If Rachael's going to bring her boyfriend back here, she should at least give us some warning."

Then I realised what was happening. It wasn't Rachael at home. It was Gerri.

It wasn't just Gerri pleasuring herself either. I could hear a second, male, grunting and I realised exactly what betrayal meant.

As I said, I am not an emotional man, so I sat down in shock wondering what to do. Should I rush upstairs with the longest kitchen knife, should I slip out and return at my normal time, should I just go straight to the solicitor?

I waited a couple of minutes and then called out "I'm home love," thinking "that'll bugger up their orgasms".

There were the sounds of sudden panic and Gerri clearly telling someone to "shush".

She called down that she was resting and that she hadn't expected me back, in the circumstances I believed her, and that she would be down in a moment. I wondered if her lover was hiding under the bed or had jumped out of the window into the rose bushes. Still, that wasn't my immediate problem.

She came down dressed in her old woolly pyjamas and tying her dressing gown, looking a bit dishevelled, and said that she had come home feeling under the weather. "What a co-incidence" I said "that's why I'm here too."

We both sat down and looked at one another, wondering what to say next.

"Why don't you ask him to come down and introduce us to one another?" I said.

She looked at me blankly and burst into tears. She rushed upstairs and yelled at him to get out, get out. From my chair in the living room, I watched a fairly well-dressed man, quite thin and a bit shorter than me, hurry out. I am not a fighting man, otherwise he would have had a lot to worry about.

"So, what now?" I asked, now sitting across the dining room table from her. She just looked down.

In the short term we tiptoed around one another, not sure what to say. We stopped having sex, let alone making love, but we stayed in the same bedroom. I would come home to find her in tears but she never told me who, or why, or if she was still seeing him. Was this a new thing or had she been unfaithful throughout our whole marriage?

I did ask her if Rachael and Matthew were mine. She started to ask how I could even think that and then stopped, realising that I had every reason to question it. In the end, I didn't have the DNA tests done. The children looked like me; I knew their blood types and they matched mine and, anyway, how do you start a discussion like that with your happy twenty-year-old daughter?

After a few weeks of uneasy truce, we started to talk about divorce...