Penny's Promiscuity Ch. 33-34

August is a strange month at work; both staff and patients tend to be on holiday and are in relatively short supply so there is an eerie quietness about the place. For a research scientist like me it's a good time to catch up on the formalities of editing papers for publication and liaising with PhD students about their progress.

The reduction in pressure and the consequent ability to catch up in this way was one of the reasons Pete and I tended to take our holidays in July.

Since our return from France three weeks before, I had taken maximum advantage of the opportunity to get ahead of the game as far as work was concerned. Though sometimes it was still hard to believe, maternity leave was only a matter of months away and with research projects often lasting several years, I needed to be fully in control.

I looked at the clock in the corner of my computer screen; Friday evening, five forty-five. I leaned back in my chair with a sigh. The office was empty; it was time to go home.

If I was lucky, dinner for three would already be cooked. If I was unlucky, my daughter Izzy would have spent so long packing and re-packing her suitcase that she would have forgotten all about dinner and, with Pete working until seven, either I would have to start from scratch or we would have a take-away again.

I sighed and thought about my daughter for a moment.

Since our return from France, things between us had been difficult to say the least. Surprised, shocked and disgusted by her fifty-one-year-old mother's unexpected pregnancy, all her much-vaunted political correctness seemed to have gone out of the window.

Whereas it was perfectly acceptable for other women my age to have sex lives, my own was beyond discussion -- even if as far as Izzy knew, the only lover of my life had been her father.

Whereas it was laudable for other women approaching middle age to have the right to have IVF or even surrogate babies, in my case, a perfectly natural conception was something to be ashamed of.

And of course like all Generation X, Y or Z -- whatever the PC term was -- she had no problems passing judgement on me and my generation and voicing it loudly.

What she would say or think if she ever found out that within the last year, her mother had had four extramarital lovers, two of them little older than Izzy, and that the baby in my belly she considered so controversial had been sired not by her father, but by one of those young lovers, was the stuff of nightmares.

But my mind, far from being understanding, confirmed my position in that middle-age bracket by being full of resentment about the 'younger generation' and its outrageous hypocrisy -- thereby demonstrating clearly my own, equally outrageous double-standards.

Still, I would soon have a break from my daughter's disapproval soon, if only for a couple of weeks.

For me, it couldn't come soon enough!

Currently unencumbered by relationships, Izzy was going on holiday with her friends in the morning. I was unsettled. As a family we had visited Spain's Costa del Sol many times so I knew Torremolinos wasn't the sort of holiday destination nice girls went to on their own. I consoled myself with the knowledge that she was going with a group of female friends from University and would be staying in a villa some distance outside the town but even so, memories of things we had seen going on in and around the town's night-time streets in the past did not bode well.

I had seen for myself what heat, alcohol and a severe shortage of clothing could encourage girls to get up to. Still, Izzy was over twenty now and was no naïve virgin as her rather chequered history proved only too well.

Although her father still believed her to be his sweet, innocent, wronged Princess, she had in fact lost her most recent and longest-term boyfriend by cheating on him rather publicly after a student ball. The noisy, all-night session with her seducer that had followed had earned her the soubriquet 'Izzy-Oh-God', a nickname that appeared to have taken root among her University acquaintances.

If she did behave badly on holiday, it wouldn't be the first time. I believed her to be on the pill and had seen with my own eyes the intimidatingly large pack of condoms she thought she had concealed in her toilet bag so was under no illusions about the type of activity she had planned.

But she was officially a grown-up, and I had my own problems to worry about.

Now five months pregnant, there was no way of disguising my condition, so I had abandoned all attempts at doing so. Indeed, the rate at which my bump was now growing meant that the dreaded maternity clothes could only be a matter of weeks away.

In a strange, perverse way I was actually looking forward to breaching this final barrier. It would mark the end of deceit; the overt acceptance that against all probability, I was actually pregnant at my age. The world could think its worst and probably would; although I wasn't going to flaunt my condition, I wasn't going to try and hide it any longer.

The news had already spread round work and our group of friends like wildfire. In the hothouse of a hospital, any form of scandal is eagerly received so the idea of a fifty-one-year-old Senior Scientist being accidentally pregnant was too juicy a titbit to remain secret for long.

I knew there were rumours about how I had got myself in that condition too. Though considered scandalous, those that I had overheard were too tame to be anywhere near what had actually happened, but I tried to remain above all such scurrilous gossip for fear of letting the truth accidentally emerge.

Still, as I walked along the impersonal corridors towards the car park, I couldn't help noticing several of the white-coated colleagues I passed giving me rather closer attention than I was used to receiving.

I smiled inwardly; I was getting used to my tummy being stared at surreptitiously by disbelieving eyes, searching for signs of the rumoured bump. The open adoption of maternity clothes would soon remove any doubt. For a while, the staring would be blatant but it would soon become 'old news' and the pressure would relax.

Though none said so to my face, of those friends and colleagues who knew for certain I was pregnant, many were horrified but others were surprisingly impressed and supportive. All without exception were baffled both at the conception and the fact that at our ages, we were planning to keep the child.

I sat myself in the driver's seat of my SUV, dumped my over-large handbag on the seat alongside me then frowned; the wheel was definitely getting closer to my tummy. I fiddled beneath the steering column until it was a more comfortable distance away then started the engine and pulled into the rush-hour traffic.

My back ached as it habitually did these days. Despite the warmth of the day, I flicked on the heated seat to try and ease the pain as I worked my way through lines of slow-moving cars towards the open road that led home, wriggling on the warming leather beneath my bottom.

A wave of unexpected sensation rippled outwards from deep between my thighs followed by a shiver of pleasure, a warm glow in my belly and a slight burning in my cheeks.

A broad, guilty smile crossed my face as I thanked God I was alone in the car.

As my pregnancy progressed, my already-high libido had simply soared. Now, more than five months gone and with a tummy almost impossible to hide, it took almost nothing to bring me to massive arousal. Even as I sat putting on my seat belt, the soft pressure of the gusset of my knickers on my over-sensitive vulva was making me distinctly aroused.

Something similar had happened when I had been carrying Isobel over twenty years ago, but then I had been a girl barely in her thirties; younger and sexier. Now that the effect was even more pronounced, I was distinctly middle-aged and not in the best position to make best use of my increased desires.

Nonetheless, my dreams were haunted by images of the men I had fucked during the sexual madness of the last year. Sometimes my gorgeous husband Pete, sometimes my seducer and first lover Tony, less often Will, the young man who had tried to blackmail me but most often by far, the man above and inside me was Darren, the one all-night stand who had made me pregnant.

I wondered if all pregnant women fantasised about the man whose baby she was carrying.

Often as I lay in bed in the darkness, I remembered vividly his athletic, gym-fit body between my wide open thighs; his young, attractive face with the striking, olive-gold skin that made him irresistible to so many women of all ages; his well-wielded cock buried deep in my vagina as he filled me with his youthful, fertile seed.

I would remember the many orgasms he had induced in my middle-aged body for the rest of my life.

Living with a wife who needed raw, energetic sex on a daily basis, my ever-patient husband Pete had originally thought Christmas had come early and had stepped up to the mark with determination. But as the weeks went on and my demands became more exhausting than exhilarating, even he was beginning to see sex as a chore rather than a treat and had started complaining of soreness and back ache.

But that did not mean I was going to let him shirk his duties. With the baby due in a mere sixteen weeks and my belly growing larger every day, I wasn't going to let any opportunity pass. As I drove home that evening, both my mind and body needed to feel Pete's cock and semen inside me within a few hours at most.

It wasn't just lust. Okay, it was mostly lust but there was also the slight but growing and unsettling feeling of insecurity that most pregnant women feel at some stage; the worry, however unjustified, that the father of her unborn child might desert her when she was at her most vulnerable. In my case, that worry had led to a constant need for physical unity and emotional reassurance.

However much a man might try to convince her otherwise, no woman feels at her most attractive when her belly is swollen, especially if she has gained weight in other places in the process. In my case, the weight gain was minimal and my belly was still within the bounds of reason, but to my mind I had to deal with two significant challenges that most expectant mothers are spared.

The first and most important was that my husband, the man on whom I had become so dependent was not the genetic father of the child growing inside me. Although Pete both knew and accepted this, I could never truly get the idea out of my mind that he might one day wake up to the reality of bringing up another man's child, decide he couldn't cope with it after all and leave me both literally and metaphorically to lie in the bed I had made for myself.

The fact that he showed no sign of this whatsoever did little to reassure me.

The second problem, closely associated with the first was that, thanks to my original infidelity, my husband now knew what it was like to make love to another woman. The fact that Julie, the woman concerned was and remained my closest female friend did not help. Knowing that she was highly demanding and adventurous in bed made my insecurity more severe but worst of all was the knowledge that my husband's performance in her bed had apparently been impressive.

That last revelation had come from Julie's own lips.

Ever since I had forced Pete to reveal more details of his one and only night of infidelity, I had been completely unable to free my mind from images of what might have taken place between my strong, handsome husband and my pale, china-doll-pretty friend.

I already knew she had introduced him to the joys of anal sex, the intense pleasures of which I had only recently discovered myself. As a result, I felt a certain insecurity that it had been her and not me who had taken my husband across that barrier.

Our current overactive sex life was at least in part driven by my constant need for physical reassurance that our marriage was still strong, as well as the emotional reassurance which I have to say Pete provided on a daily basis.

Even so, I was secretly pleased that Saturday, when Izzy's taxi full of friends pulled out of our driveway leaving Pete and me as a couple again. Needless to say, I had dragged him upstairs to bed within fifteen minutes and within thirty, was lying alongside him, both of us sweating, fresh semen oozing from my vagina onto the rumpled sheets.

Sunday began in much the same way, but eventually Pete managed to extricate himself from the clutches of his demanding wife to go and play golf with some colleagues. Left alone, I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and put the final touches to the presentation I had to make at work the following day. Free from distractions, it had been much easier to concentrate on my work and I had finished in barely half an hour.

This left me a couple of hours to finish the ironing and get the house tidy so Pete and I could spend the entire evening enjoying the last few episodes of the box set we had been watching.

As my pregnancy progressed, I have to confess that the home-maker within me was making her presence felt more and more. Jobs like ironing that I had until recently seen as a chore, were starting to feel soothing and calming.

I was enjoying cooking more too, much to Pete's delight and had been making plans for the house in preparation for the baby's arrival. These plans inevitably involved the purchase of large amounts of baby-kit, as Pete called it, and the redecoration of several rooms including the small one next to our bedroom which had been Josh's but which was now designated the nursery.

I planned to decorate this myself once I had stopped work, to help cope with the sudden inactivity and of course, as part of my increasingly-apparent nesting instinct. Pete could do the more demanding, physical stuff; I intended to potter about, in charge but only doing the bits that suited me.

And of course, I knew Pete would let me get away with this outrageous treatment.

I had hoped to get closer to my son Josh's girlfriend now the two of us were pregnant at the same time. I had always liked pretty, petite Samantha -- Sam as everyone called her -- but the two of them lived too far away for the two of us to have become very close.

Still, with the uniting presence of two unborn children to bring us together, we had at least arranged to go baby-shopping together next time Pete and I came south.

In an hour, the ironing was done. I carefully placed the folded items in a pile and carried them upstairs for distribution to their owners' bedsides. After putting my own clothes away and leaving Pete's outside his closet, I carried the remaining dozen or so items into my daughter's bedroom and, knowing better than to rummage through her wardrobe, placed them on the bed.

The room was tidier than usual but to my mind, still chaotic with the magazines, books and clothes that Izzy had rejected for her holiday strewn over the backs of chairs and on her unmade bed. It was impossible for me to leave her room in such a mess so I instinctively began to tidy the worst of it.

Beginning with the bed, I pulled the duvet over and straightened it. A collection of used underwear fell to the floor which, sighing, I picked up. The clean clothes I hung back in her wardrobe or laid neatly on the bed alongside the freshly-ironed shirts and clean underwear I had brought.

Retrieving books and magazines from the floor, I laid them on the desk against the window; the place where she had studied so hard for her recent exams. Her laptop was there and still open, taking up so much of the space that it was impossible to put the books down without joggling it.

When I did so, to my surprise, the screen sprang into life. The careless girl must have forgotten to turn it off before leaving. I frowned; it was on mains power so would have remined on for the entire holiday, wasting energy and possibly damaging the expensive machine.

I was just about to close its cover and put it away when I noticed a series of black dots in the password field as if someone had entered the code but hadn't yet pressed the 'enter' key. Izzy must have been about to do something before she left but had been distracted.

What I should have done was close the cover straight away, unplug the machine and get on with the work in hand. What I should have done was respect my daughter's privacy and minded my own business.

But I didn't. Something inside me made me do the unforgiveable. Instinctively I hit the enter key to see what happened. What happened was that I found myself successfully logged into Izzy's laptop.

I can't explain what happened next and why I did it. When the kids were growing up, I tried hard to give them their privacy, only going through their rooms looking for secret places when I thought something serious might be amiss, like drink or drugs. In all their childhoods, the most I had found was a small stash of soft, crinkly porn magazines under Josh's bed.

Why I should have abandoned all that respect now is a mystery but that's what I did.

As if on auto-pilot, I sat at Izzy's desk and for a good fifteen minutes, looked through the apparently disorganised mess that was her hard drive. I found her University work, several thousand nondescript photographs of herself and other grinning, pouting teenage girls, a few rather soppy poems she had written and two novels she had started to write but then apparently, and as far as I could tell with good reason, abandoned.

Something made me stop short of reading her emails.

I was about to tear myself away in shame and get on with my work when I casually clicked on the last uninvestigated directory called 'videos'. Inside were sub directories with innocuous titles like 'holidays' and 'friends' but alongside them was another called 'Special Projects'.

This intrigued me. I clicked on it and was confronted with a dozen or so files, each one equally innocuously named with a place and a date. I selected the top one called 'After Union Ball' followed by a date in October the previous year and double-clicked to open it.

The screen flickered then burst into life.

Chapter Thirty-four

It was, as promised, a video file -- or at least an edited part of a larger file. As the images became clearer and began to move, I stared unblinkingly at the screen in increasing horror, knowing I should immediately shut it down but quite unable to do so.

The picture that filled the screen was unquestionably a student bedroom, a room full of books, posters and many apparently empty wine and beer bottles. Boys' clothes hung from the handles of the closet; a girl's dress was draped over the back of a chair too but although my subconscious mind was registering all this, my attention was directed fully towards the unmade single bed that stood full-on to the camera's lens.

Izzy was sitting on the mattress, her knees tucked underneath bottom, smiling and giggling as a dark shape played with the camera. She was naked apart from a pair of tiny white knickers, her dark hair hanging loose around her shoulders. Once again, I was struck by how small her breasts were; the mere pimples on her chest making my own meagre endowment seem impressive.

The picture was obscured for a moment as a large shadow passed between Izzy and the camera before resolving itself into the clear, colour image of a young, strong, fit male body standing alongside the bed wearing only a pair of tight, black shorts.

The boy's face was out of camera shot, as were his lower legs but his muscular thighs, flat tummy and powerful chest and arms were clearly visible.

Was this her boyfriend Steve? Ex-boyfriend I corrected myself.

It looked very much like him, having seen the two of them in the pool on holiday. From what I could remember, he had had a fantastic body. The young man on the screen in front of me certainly had an impressive physique, reminding me for one exciting, arousing moment of Darren, the Personal Trainer at the sports club who had knocked me up during an amazing one-night stand in his squalid bedroom.