Ch. 1, The First 48

This is not so much a sex story as a story about the rippling effects of an adultery in one community. People are hurt, emotionally and physically. Just so you know, with one exception (Ch. 5) there isn't much sex. Now, I have a reputation for being biased toward reconciliation in my betrayal stories. If you're worried that may foretell the ending here, then maybe just walk on by. My take? It's more complicated than a straightforward BTB or RAAC story. See what you think and let me know.

I welcome comments and stand by my policy of not deleting any of them, even those anonymous ones that just throw around insults. If you post comments using your Literotica account, whether critical or not, I promise to reply personally--and I don't insult.

If your name is by chance "George Mathis," I apologize to you in advance. I chose that name for the creep more or less at random.

Consequences

By H. Jekyll

CHAPTER 1: The First Forty-Eight

There is little sex in this chapter, but much conversation.

*****

Eight nights before their confrontation, John and Laura Reynolds had sex.

John got to see Laura naked, his pretty wife whose body he loved because it was a lovely woman's body and because it was Laura's. Not voluptuous but proportioned and soft. Her tummy had never entirely shrunk back after bearing twins, so it was softly rounded, just a little, and therefore--John thought--perfect. Her breasts were neither large nor small, basically (again, he thought) perfect, her milky skin showing soft blue veins, with nipples that were sensitive to touch by fingers or tongue.

But the night's loving was like it had become so often, when it happened at all: lukewarm. Kiss, strip, fondle, stroke. "Why don't you just come inside me, honey?"

John stopped what he'd been about to do next, which would have involved his mouth. Not again. So, I can't smell you anymore? I can't taste you anymore? Laura guided him in and they did it, and when he finished he could tell--once again--that she hadn't come. Along with the absence of everything else there was the lack of that little catch way back in her throat that happened just as she was starting to crest--as much a part of Laura as her fingerprints. It wasn't at all like before, when they'd play with each other's bodies for eons and Laura could get loud. There was that memorable night when she'd cried out so loudly he'd worried a little that she might wake the kids, though he hadn't worried enough to want her to stop. That was then. This was now. They were in the same bedroom, on the same bed, and it was the same them, but it was different. On Thursday Laura appeared content enough and she continued to kiss him and said "I love you, honey," but the sex--well, anyone could tell. It had been over a week, with two refusals, since their previous lovemaking. Then, the next day, her period started.

John was planning to try for sex the next Thursday night. There had been longer droughts. He didn't recall exactly when this new regimen had begun but Laura clearly wanted it less often and wanted it to be finished quicker.

Thursday, though. He'd been thinking, maybe tonight.

*****

You may know families like them. A middle-class couple, moving upward, with a lot of friends and activities. A couple for eight years, two in college, six married. Two kids, twins, just starting pre-school. Everything was good, fine, great. Both working. He'd joined her church while they were dating. She was a believer. He was and he wasn't, but he threw himself into it wholeheartedly because of her. That probably even ratcheted their sex life upward because, according to their church, God intended it and said it was very good. Well. Maybe that made a difference to them and maybe it didn't, but it didn't hurt. Who's to know? Laura was all those hackneyed things to John: his soul mate, his life partner, the love of his life. His sexual delight. And they were happy.

If the sex had fallen off, it was enough to concern him but not enough to truly worry him. Until Thursday, that is. If you count Thursday, this beginning isn't forty-eight hours long but more like three full days.

*****

Thursday, 3:35 p.m.

"Honey? Will you click the link on my Messages? It'll have the presents I found for the kids." These would be for their birthday. Laura was with the children in the living room, whereas John was at the desk in the bedroom, where he could look at the pictures without the kids demanding to see the phone.

Sure. 'Honey' got Laura's phone from her purse on the bed, went to Messages, and clicked the link. There were the toys. The kids would love them. Kyle's dinosaur was green and Kayla's unicorn was pink. But, at the very bottom of the screen was a message from George Mathis. That was curious, so John clicked it and that changed his life.

It had come in that morning: "1 tomorrow, ur house!"

Tomorrow? George? What? It was the latest of a long thread of messages. Laura's to him, from a few hours earlier: "Tomorrow @ 1? My house." From George, yesterday: "friday?" By then John had started to shake.

He checked to make sure Laura wouldn't walk in on him, then went back to the thread. It couldn't be what it seemed, but it was. About a week earlier, amidst other lists of suggested dates and places, George had written the clincher, "prepare 2 b fucked!" and John needn't have read further. He put the phone down and looked out the window and tried to control his breathing. He forgot to keep checking for Laura.

There was more, much more, messages every day or two, all just in the past month. They were having an affair. Laura? With him? Him?! Anything earlier had been deleted. John knew because he checked carefully. What did they say? They set up assignations at John and Laura's house, at George's house, at a hotel. They negotiated times and places, working around everyone's hours and the kids' pickup times and George's wife Margery. Not many were salacious, but there were enough. "i want ur mouth," from George, and "I'll milk you dry!" back from Laura.

John remembered again that Laura was nearby. Yes, he was worried about her finding him reading about her trysts. Jesus, how it goes! He closed the thread and scrolled back to the top of the Messages app and closed it.

He felt queasy and went into the bathroom but couldn't throw up, so he went back out to the bed.

He had an idea to check Laura's phone logs. There, the numbers picked up. John didn't even try to sum up those to and from George since--Oh my God! --September. It was now early March. The math was easy. Half a year. Half a fucking year. 'Fucking' indeed!

After it became clear to him, John sat on the bed, head down, staring at the carpet. Laura? A half year of betrayal? Laura? How could you do that? But no! Of course not! Not Laura. She hadn't of course. Of course she hadn't! This was a practical joke. Sure! Ha-ha! She'd set him up and he'd fallen for it! But he knew it wasn't a joke. John scrolled back up to the most recent call, one from Laura to her mother, and closed the phone app.

He wanted to stop, but there was always more. Check Laura's voicemails! There were not one or two but three explicit ones from George that Laura must have saved because of how thrilling they were. We can list them as to the topic: what he would do to her ass (sodomize it), what he would have her do with her mouth (suck him), and finally what they would do together--dine at "Mirabile Dictu" after a good bed session to build an appetite. What's the date on that one, when they had an entire evening together? It was when I went to Chicago in February. A crappy meeting for me, but she'd gotten a fine meal and a fuck out of it. John remembered her calling him later that night and telling him how much she missed him. So she'd said.

*****

Thursday, 4:52 p.m.

John didn't do anything else until Laura came into the room to ask about the toys. "Oh. Yeah. They seem great. Why don't you order them?" He gave her back her phone. He was careful not to touch her.

"Are you okay? You don't look well."

"I have a little headache. I've taken some Excedrin."

"Oh, my poor baby. Here. Let me massage your scalp. You know that helps." Ultimately, he let her do it. She stood in front of him, her breasts almost touching his head, running her hands through his hair, massaging his head, using her fingernails, and pulling softly on his hair. If he weren't feeling that his world was ending and that he didn't want her to touch him ever again, and if he'd actually had a headache, it would have been terrific. It wasn't his head. It was his stomach and his chest and the strange feelings of both emptiness and something swirling within them. He thanked her after a bit and they went into the living room to watch something on Disney+ with the kids.

What John really wanted to look at was spyware. In a half hour he had changed from being a guy who never once in their relationship had ever considered the possibility that his wife might do something like this, to being a determined investigator hunting down evidence that she had done it and was still doing it.

Finding spyware online was easy enough. There were all kinds of things, small enough or disguised enough to unobtrusively get the job done--the job being to make sure your babies are safe or to catch your mate with another person. He searched on his phone while they watched some kids' show, sitting as far from Laura as possible, and found a local tech store that had devices in stock. He called them from the bathroom and arranged to pick up a video spy-cam in the morning. He'd try it out before buying anything else. It was hidden in a desk lamp. He would put it on the desk across from the bed, and it would be ready for action long before Laura and George were. He could record whatever they did, either continuously or via sound activation, and save decent-quality videos to a microSD card or to the cloud. Or both. He could even watch them in real time, though he didn't think he could stand that.

John certainly wouldn't try for sex now--would he?--and if for some godforsaken reason Laura wanted to initiate it, he'd beg off with the old, housewife's, headache excuse.

For now, he just had to be pleasant. He had to get through dinner and have things to talk about with the children. He had to get in bed with Laura. Under the same covers as her. He had to kiss her goodnight. There was that Prohibition-era quotation: "Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine." Laura's lips had touched George's cock, apparently often, and they'd touch John's lips that evening. He had to endure a whole set of intimate behaviors while he was living as a hollow man. Well, she had faked it for at least half a year. He could probably fake it for a day.

The very next day John got incontrovertible evidence, from their very own bed, in their very own house.

*****

*****

Friday, 7:15 p.m.

"You're a fucking slut and a whore!"

"No, I'm not! I've never done anything like that before! I'm a good wife who just made a mistake."

Chew on it a bit. She's waiting for some response, for an acknowledgement that it's somehow not as bad as it is, that she's not as bad as she is. Well, drop the insulting words. Drop the sharp voice. Don't retort but talk evenly. Fucking control yourself! All right. Just control yourself. I will. Take a deep breath. I know she's a slut, or a whore, or whatever. And I'm wearing the horns. Just drop the attitude and lay it out calmly. I can do it.

"No." He took a breath. Time to get it said. "You're not a good wife." Another breath. "And it could maybe be a 'mistake' if you fell off the wagon once but vowed to yourself to never repeat it, and you never repeated it. I might accept that."

"Honey, no."

"Don't 'honey' me!" No. Try again. Control! "Don't call me 'honey.' You lost the right to call me that, so use my name. What you did was decide to fuck another man," he emphasized the word 'fuck,' "George Mathis. Repeatedly."

"No."

"At least admit it."

"Don't!"

"Over and over."

"Please."

"Over and over again. Just admit it and we can keep talking. Otherwise, let's stop."

"Please, stop."

"Him instead of me."

They were in the same bedroom, such a peaceful place, a sanctuary with suffused lighting, intended for intimacy, not for fighting. He could prove she'd used it for intimacy with the wrong man, so they were fighting.

"Please, honey. Please. I love you. Can't you let me make it up to you? Please give me another chance."

"How many chances did you have with him? A hundred? Hundreds? There aren't any more chances. You've used them all up."

That was the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning, or some equally godawful thing, and it came during the confrontation, after he'd watched the video that afternoon, watched it while sitting in his workshop in front of the tiny screen, crying and not knowing what to do next, banging the workbench with his hand so hard that Laura had come out to ask if anything was wrong. "No. I just dropped a can of paint." He'd managed to hold himself together until after the kids were in bed. It's not the whole scene, but you get the gist. It was very, very bad, and it would get so much worse.

*****

*****

What were John's feelings? It was a few weeks later that he laid them out for his therapist. She'd asked him, "I'd like to know more about your feelings toward your wife." He wasn't lying on a couch but sitting on a padded, wooden chair and the therapist was sitting facing him, across a coffee table, on an identical chair. There was a couch, but it was hardly ever used. It mainly told clients--or were they patients?--that it was there if they needed it. Everything was dark wood. There were several large potted plants around the room, some understated paintings, quality wooden paneling, and beautiful bookshelves. It was somewhat old-fashioned, intended to suggest solace, and John needed all the solace he could get. Except for a large desk and the therapist's computer, it could have been a living room.

"Are you kidding? You think I feel different from any other cuck?"

"Cuck?"

"An ex-friend called me that. Some others make little noises, like chickens, when they see me. They think they're being so damned cute and I want to gun them all down. But if my ex-friend had called me a cuckold? I guess I'd have had to accept that."

"Let's just call you a husband who's having to deal with infidelity. Okay? Okay. Now, let's try this. What did you feel about Laura when you first found out about the affair?"

He knew how he'd felt but not how to say it. It was too strong for mere words. He didn't even hate or despise her. It went deeper than that. "I mean," he strung some words together, "she sucked my whole world away." He sighed. "The short version? I wanted to hurt her."

"You mean physically? Batter her, or maybe worse? Kill her?"

"No. I didn't think of killing her. Never. I didn't want her dead. Do most cu- ... husbands? The idea of beating her, though? Yeah. I had that idea. I had it a lot. I almost hit her once, really hard, with my fists, but something stopped me."

"What was the moment?"

It was right after he had told her he knew and had shown her some stills from the video. They were arguing about it. Arguing! He'd thought the video would make everything a slam dunk, but she had fought it. What was there to argue about? In the video Laura and George kiss, strip, and play with each other's bodies, she sucks him, and he licks her, and they finish with straight coitus. Reasonably vanilla stuff. John still has the video. Maybe he's watching it at this moment. Laura-in the-video comes. It's obvious, and she's pretty loud, and there's that little catch in her throat.

John couldn't miss it. He had heard it hundreds of times over the years. Apparently, so had George.

John was furious that she would argue about it at all. "She had no right, damn it!" She'd ultimately implied that the problem was with him, not her. "She said that if it weren't for my fragile male ego, we could get past it. Get past it! Oh God I wanted to kill her."

"Kill her?"

"Yes. I said 'kill.' I didn't really think of her dead, but I wanted to beat her. I don't know where it might have ended if I'd started hitting her. Jesus!"

"What stopped you?"

"I don't know. Something. Maybe my cuck side."

"John..."

"Sorry. It seemed funny to say that. I guess it wasn't. Anyway, I don't know why I didn't do it. Instead, I slammed her about the ego thing."

"How?"

"I told her she knew how fragile it was, and that you don't fuck around with fragile things. Excuse the word. I said 'fuck' because it was a play on words. Then I brought up wine glasses. I'm not sure why. I said anyone could accidentally knock over a glass of wine, and most people have, but you don't toss them across the room. By the time I finished I'd gotten control of the urge to hit her. I don't know if it helped her understood me any better."

"I like the wine glass analogy."

"Thanks. Feel free to use it. Anyway, back to my answer. Mostly I wanted her to hurt emotionally."

"Meaning?"

Sigh.

It was still hard to get the words right, even with the topic narrowed down. He wanted her alone, lonely, sad. More than sad. Depressed. John thought some more. The therapist was patient. Finally, "I wanted her to feel hopeless. That's what I wanted for her. Hopelessness!" He was happy to find a word that worked. "Hopelessness! That it was the end of her world. I wanted her suicidal."

"Is that like what you were going through?"

"Yes. Yes. Just like that. But even worse."

"Dead?"

"No. Not dead. I already said that. But suicidal? Yes. I wanted her to have to live with that feeling."

"John, if you ever feel like you want to hurt yourself, you need to call me right away. Or call 9-1-1."

"It's not like that. I wouldn't. There are my kids. They come before me."

*****

*****

How did that first night end? John kicked Laura out after their confrontation. She left with an overnight bag and nothing else. She'd kept her engagement ring and wedding band, though he'd demanded that she return them. That was about it. What followed was a period full of phone calls and conversations. Later on, there would be a lot more empty time.

*****

Friday, 9:47 p.m.

The first call was from Laura to John. It was quick.

"Don't call me again, you fucking whore!"

He hung up and blocked her number. Almost immediately he got a call from his mother-in-law's number. It was Laura again.

"John. Please let's talk. Please!"

"Go fuck yourself! If you call from this number again, I'm going to block it, too!"

*****

Friday, 9:53 p.m.

Laura did what you'd do next if you were a woman. She called her best friend, Stacey Abramson, who was home, reading in bed while her husband listened to classic rock and played video games in the den. That's what a best friend is for, talking with when you're at your lowest and need a shoulder and some advice. Stacey could tell from the start there was a problem. "What's wrong, Laura?" She asked. "You sound awful."

Could she bring herself to actually tell her best friend she'd an affair and been found out? What about saying she'd had a fight with John and was at her mother's house? Laura tried that. Stacey wondered if, somehow, she'd left the bastard, but when Laura said, "No. Not exactly..." Stacey took her words and put them together with her knowledge that John wasn't a bastard to draw the right conclusion. "He kicked you out?"

"It's complicated." Of course. 'Complicated.' After that, how could Stacey not dig for information as to why John had kicked her out, and when Laura had been silent for a very long time, she'd guess that, too. It became a little cat and mouse game, digging pieces of information out of Laura, bit by bit, and filling in gaps with guesswork.