Play it Again Sam Pt. 03

Since Julie had been the only one to speak with the purchasing agent, I had no idea if this vanity had any hidden compartments. Julie certainly hadn't mentioned it. But this vanity was expensive over 200 years ago, and secret hiding places in furniture were all the rage for the wealthy back then. Ironically this furniture was actually cheaper than its modern equivalent, because someone in the last 50 years had refinished it. Crazy.

I dove back into my search. Only now, instead of just looking in the drawers, I pulled them completely out. I methodically looked over every inch of wood, using my fingertips to feel and press every crevice.

I found nine hidden compartments.

Some were too small to hold anything but a coin or folded piece of paper. Other were actually large enough to hold a book. Right away, it was obvious that Julie knew about them.

Holding two drawers side by side showed that one was shallower than the other. Pressing on the back-left corner revealed a false bottom that contained Julie's diploma from Rutgers. She must have a copy at work. Reaching up into the cavity of the removed center drawer, I felt a lever. I fumbled with it until it slid forward and another, hidden drawer, fell down into the recess. It held several of Julie's more expensive items of jewelry, including a broach that once belonged to her great grandmother.

In all, seven of the hidden compartments contained Julie's belongings. I had a moment of smugness that she must not have found the other two.

But no diary.

I went back over the entire vanity again. I found one more tiny compartment (empty), but still no diary. I sat back and huffed a sigh. My eyes were drawn to the armoire...

A matched set...

That's where it was. Under a false floor, there was Julie's diary, along with some personal paperwork- birth certificate, social security card, etc.

It was an obviously expensive volume, leather, with the year embossed on the spine. I opened it and saw my wife's almost calligraphic writing filling a little less than half the pages.

I was about to start reading, when I stopped myself. This diary would certainly give me a deeper understanding of Julie's mindset, but it only covered the last six months. Where were the volumes for 2015 and earlier? She must store the previous diaries somewhere. The hidey hole under my suits wasn't nearly big enough. If they were all the same size, they would fill a large box.

Hiding that many books would be difficult. We accumulated a lot of junk, like all married couples, but we also had a huge house that was way too big for us. We didn't have a basement or attic full of junk, where she could hide a box full of diaries unnoticed. And it was inevitably me, the husband, who was sent to store or retrieve items from said basement and attic. If they were there, I would have seen them.

I snapped my fingers.

Her parent's house. It had to be. Her parents kept Julie and Emma's old bedrooms untouched, in case one of their princesses decided to visit. Her old bedroom would be a perfect place for my wife to store her old diaries.

It was getting close to noon. I looked at the mess I had made of our bedroom. All the drawers of the vanity were spread across the floor, along with their contents. If I hurried I could get things cleaned up and put away before Julie and Dr. Dick arrived.

But why the fuck would I do that?

I left everything as it was. I left Julie's diary on the bed, open to today's date. I took a Sharpie and wrote CUNT on the blank page.

That should give her a shock.

...

I drove to the Bradley's home. Julie's dad, John, was a VP for one of Jersey's electric utilities. He would be at work. Her mother, Mary, would most likely be at church. I don't know why. She was just one of those women of advancing years, who seemingly went to church every day. And made sure to let everyone know about it.

What the hell do you do at church on a Friday afternoon? Gossip with the other church biddies, I guess. I'd seen her texts to my wife, and that supposedly god fearing lady hadn't said a word to her daughter about fidelity and the sanctity of marriage.

So, neither of the Bradleys were home.

If they kept a spare key, I didn't know where it was. Searching their yard in broad daylight seemed ill advised.

I didn't recall them having an alarm on any of my visits.

There were clouded glass panels on either side of the door. I picked up an ornamental ceramic frog from the lawn and threw it through the glass closest to the handle. After that it was a simple matter of reaching in to unlock the door.

The doorway was recessed and partially obscured by shrubs. Still, on the assumption that someone had seen me, I had to work fast. I didn't want to spend the rest of the day in jail, when I could get started on the diaries.

I made a beeline for Julie's old bedroom. I discounted anything in plain sight. I had been there before, so Julie wouldn't have left them out where I could see.

She had a pink steamer trunk at the foot of her bed, cover in a folded duvet. I just knew they were in there.

I tossed the duvet aside. The trunk was locked, with a small heart-shaped padlock. The kind parents buy for little girls so they can play at having secrets. I didn't know if the key was in the room, or if Julie carried it on her.

But fuck it, subtly was already out the window. I grabbed a trophy from off a shelf (Girl's Volleyball: Division Runner-Up), and started pounding the lock with the faux marble base.

The steamer trunk was cheap shit. The hasp tore out after two blows, revealing the trunk's contents.

There were Julie's diaries.

The earlier ones were a mismatched set. Julie must have bought the leather bound series in 2008, because that's when they became uniform. She had planned in advance. There were volumes dated up to 2028.

I wasn't interested in Julie's childhood angst. We met in March of 2009, so I grabbed the diaries from that year forward and got the hell out of there before any police could show up.

....

....

I'm not going to go into detail of seven years-worth of Julie's thoughts and feelings. I'll just lay out the broad outlines that I gleaned over several days of reading. It took me a while to get through them. It was painful reading.

When did Julie start cheating on me? It would be simpler to list the times she didn't cheat.

She stayed faithful for two months while we dated, and she didn't stray for six months after we got married.

And that's it.

That's. Fucking. It.

For seven years, Julie had cheated on me almost continually.

This explained why I had never noticed a difference in how she acted or how she treated me. I may not have noticed anything unless she stopped fucking around.

She felt bad about betraying me back in the beginning. Her diary was filled with guilt and recriminations for the first two years. But the amount of space she gave to self-doubt steadily declined as it became clear she was getting away with it. After three years, she quit worrying about getting caught. After five, she no longer wrote about having pangs of conscience. Over the last couple years, she wrote about her affairs conversationally with the same emotional weight as going to the spa.

I didn't know my wife at all.

The diary also confirmed that most, if not all, of our friends and family knew Julie was putting the horns on me. Julie recounted a lot of her daily conversations, especially the ones about her marriage or affairs. Sometimes she just wrote that she thought so-and-so knew. About the only people she hadn't mentioned were my parents.

The worst part.

The worst part was that the diary explained why she cheated on me.

I was a lousy lay. I couldn't satisfy her in bed.

...

Now, I can't just let that go unexplained. It paints a picture that I don't feel is fair to me.

First of all, I had a software problem, not a hardware one. Wait...That sounds like the opposite of what I'm trying to say here. To be clear, I am neither lacking in the trousers nor impotent. I'm not pushing a two inch soggy pickle.

I have the proper tools to get the job done. But when I met Julie, I didn't have the experience. And honestly, it took me quite a bit longer to find my groove in between the sheets than it should have.

When I was in college, I didn't have the typical student's attitude toward sex. It may seem anachronistic with some of my other traits, but I am a romantic. I've never objectified the women around me. I don't undress them with my eyes. I don't make sexual innuendo. Unless I'm in a relationship with them of course.

More importantly, I never really made an effort to get in girls' pants. The fastest I ever slept with a woman was after six dates, and that was with my future wife.

College is a hookup culture, and I didn't hook up. Any girl who wanted to sleep with me right away was a girl I wasn't interested in. By the standards of my peers, I was definitely a prude.

The girls I did date were what you would expect- fellow prudes. My high school girlfriend and I never had sex. I lost my virginity in the second semester of my sophomore year at college, after I had been dating a girl named Anne for five months. She wasn't a virgin, but she wasn't experienced. The sex was awkward and fast. We were more like teenagers than college students.

My next two girlfriends were a similar story.

Then there was Julie.

Julie was the first girl I dated that had what could be called a normal sexual history. We never supplied the details of our sexual pasts, but it was clear that Julie had had a lot more nookie than me. To be honest I was a little bit intimidated, but we meshed so well as a couple.

My problem was that I was playing for the pros and I still had a midget league skill set. I had all the inadequacies of a fumbling teen. I came too fast. I groped too hard. Everything I did was awkward.

I had too much pride to say "Hey honey, I can tell I'm not very good in bed, at least compared to you. Can you teach me?" What young man can admit that he isn't satisfying his girlfriend?

Similarly, Julie didn't have the guts to call me on it. Her diary made clear that she was afraid I would break up with her if she said something wrong. She didn't want to make me angry or shame me.

Looking back, she may have been right. Questioning a man's sexual prowess is sure fire way to make him feel emasculated. That's true at any age, but an older man might be able to rise above and think it through logically. At 21... I might have been so embarrassed that I'd break things off with her. I really don't know.

Of course there's an easy solution to this problem- patience. Maybe add in some gentle guidance from Julie.

I wasn't incapable of being a good lover, I just needed more time in the saddle. The problem is that both of us pretended that there was nothing wrong. Julie was afraid that giving any sex advice would expose the elephant in the room. So she said nothing, and in effect put the onus on the rookie, me, to fix the problem.

Since most of my problems stemmed from the penetration aspect of sex, I concentrated my efforts on foreplay and oral. I'm a smart guy. The groping didn't last long. I read Julie's cues, and over a time I could bring her to screaming orgasms with my fingers and tongue. And that was the extant of my repertoire for a while.

On our first wedding anniversary, we had a marathon session in bed. Julie was sleeping next to me, looking extremely satisfied. I was lying awake, troubled. Over two hours in bed, I had come three times, Julie five or six. Only about 10 minutes of that was actual fucking. Julie had brought me off once with her mouth. So I had cum in her pussy twice...in 10 minutes of missionary sex. We might as well have been a lesbian couple.

From that point I started making a concerted effort to become a better lover, not just mask my deficiencies with an agile tongue. I did research. I didn't quite have premature ejaculation, but you might be hard pressed to tell. So I read books and articles aimed at men who did. I did breathing exercises. I tried to masturbate for extended periods to build endurance. I watched porn, with a view toward reasonable things I could try with my wife, not just getting off. And I read a lot of self-help articles to expand my sexual knowledge.

It didn't happen overnight. It was probably another couple years before I could say with confidence that I had the skills and know how to satisfy my wife.

I can't blame Julie for not helping me with my sex-ed. I didn't ask her either. We were both young and stupid. But I do blame her for how she handled it.

She knew my shortcomings when she married me. If our sex life was a deal breaker, she shouldn't have said "I do." She had options. Break up with me. Try to help me get better. Or live with me as I was.

Unfortunately, she chose the slut path.

She loved me, wanted to marry me. But she wanted a more fulfilling sex life. So she sub-contracted for more dick.

She started soon after we began dating. She saw a future for us on the first date. Several dates later, when we consummated the relationship, she was already in love. But the sex was horrible.

One thing in her diary that I had to take exception with, is Julie's idea of cheating. She had the attitude that until a couple declares they are exclusive, they can continue to see other people.

Which is utter bullshit.

I thought that the default position, at least for anyone with functioning morals, was to either date one person at a time, or make it clear to their partners that they are seeing others. I thought only assholes used "we never talked about being exclusive" as an excuse to fuck around. But it is a prevailing attitude for young people who don't want to be held accountable.

I just never knew Julie fell into that way of thinking. She had seemed so honest and reliable, it didn't occur to me.

While she went along with my slow courtship, she continued to see a couple fuck buddies in her dorm. It was only after a few dates with me that she realized I was taking this seriously. She cut off the other guys when our relationship progressed to a physical one.

She may not have considered what she had done before then as cheating, but I sure as hell did. If I had known how casual she was about fidelity, our relationship would have ended right then. But according to Julie's accounting, her cheating didn't start until two months after the first time we slept together.

Julie thought I had been a virgin. I guess I was that bad. She never brought it up because she thought I might have been embarrassed about it. And she also didn't want to tell me how many men she had been with if the subject came up. Not because the number was ridiculously high, but because she could tell that my thinking was old-fashioned, and she didn't want to chance that I would react poorly.

Since neither of us was willing to talk about the problem, Julie resolved to just deal with it. She knew my problem was inexperience. She just didn't know that I was a slow learner in this regard.

After two months, her patience ran out. She went back to her booty calls. She didn't feel terrible about it at first. I was just a new boyfriend that she liked a lot. She figured either I would get better or the relationship would end, but she didn't need to deprive herself of a good sex life.

As the months went on, we got more serious, and she felt more guilt.

If Julie hadn't been getting her rocks off behind my back, she might have had more incentive to confront my deficiencies in bed. The longer we were together, the bigger the elephant in the room grew. If she had said something immediately, that would have been hard to take. But telling me I was a bad lover got exponentially harder the longer she didn't speak up.

She was able to rationalize her cheating up until we got married. By this time her diary was filled with declarations of love and dreams for our future. She declared that there would be no other men in her bed after the wedding.

We got married just after graduating college and settled into our lives together. I was slowly improving, but Julie was frustrated. She made it six months before she let a male nurse, who she had hooked up with in college, seduce her.

She was deeply ashamed of herself. Cheating on her husband did not fit with her self-image as an honest person.

But the sex had been great. She couldn't stop thinking about it. A few weeks later she went back to him. And then another few weeks after that.

She was racked with guilt, but she didn't stop. After every booty call she would write in her diary that it would be the last time. Then she would bemoan her lack of willpower when she failed again.

Eventually she stopped fighting it. She still said she would stop, but only after the sex in her marriage improved to where she didn't need it anymore. But she still didn't do anything to help matters in the marital bed. She still held her peace. She never said she was unsatisfied.

I knew I needed to get better. But Julie never complained, and to be honest, I was getting off. There was no urgency to up my game. Like I said before, it was a year into our marriage before I really buckled down and made a serious effort to get better. Not because Julie asked, but because I wanted to.

By then, Julie had come to terms with cheating on me. She second guessed herself less and less. She knew she was getting away with it.

Sometimes she would even comment that I was getting better. At first she said it gave her hope that she would be able to put the other men behind her. Then she talked about just cutting back. Finally she didn't even mention giving up her fuck buddies. By the time I had met her criteria for faithfulness to me, she had seemingly forgotten that her straying was supposed to be temporary.

She had had her cake and eaten it too for so long, that she saw no reason to stop.

Over the years she was caught a few times, by co-workers and friends. And every time, they kept her secret, either because they didn't care or didn't want to get involved. They gave their tacit acceptance.

Julie grew entitled. She started openly sharing her affairs with those closest to her (not me of course). The only times she would feel a hint of guilt were on special occasions like our anniversary or my birthday. And ironically, sometimes after we had a steamy session between the sheets.

By the time I had caught her cheating, Julie's diary had nothing but glowing reviews about my sexual prowess. The boy had become a man. She compared me favorably to almost all the lovers she had had.

But she didn't stop. Didn't even consider it. She hadn't written down a word about ending it in over three years.

Besides everyday minutia and her scandalous double life, Julie's diary was filled with writing on another subject...

How much she loved me.

Of all the reasons she gave for loving me, I thought one was missing: she loved me for being a perfect chump, who loved her too much to suspect what a tramp she was. She may not have voiced it, but in her heart of hearts, she must have viewed me that way.

No, her view of me, at least that she would admit to, was all rainbows and unicorns. You would think I was fucking prince charming, so long as you only read the G-rated parts of the diary. I consider myself something of a romantic, but even I had a hard time not gagging at her flowery sermons on the subject of Samuel Watley.

Then again, maybe I wanted to gag because they felt like the delusions of a schizophrenic. She betrays me, destroys my manhood, kills the respect of my peers. And loves me unreservedly...

I had always felt that I had hit the lottery with Julie. She complemented me perfectly in so many ways. She seemed to love me as much as I did her. She was almost the perfect wife. She had flaws of course, but nothing that I couldn't live with.