Surrogate Ch. 02

The office was abuzz with rumour that afternoon. Enough people knew the gossip and had seen how Paul looked when he left, that there was little need for speculation. No one noticed the sudden surge in internet usage. Most people knew poison when they saw it and many employees began job hunting before they got smeared by the wide tarbrush they knew was heading the company's way.

Rhonda contemplated calling Paul to see if he was okay but she was just too plain embarrassed to follow up on the thought.

Chapter 4 (mostly Mattb's work)

The next morning at 10am sharp, Paul rang the doorbell on the doorpost of the Briggs household.

An anxious looking Gary opened the door and ushered him in. They walked from the hallway through the door on the right, that went into the lounge.

The two women were waiting for him, sitting side by side. That puzzled Paul. He realised that if they could sit so closely together without tearing each other's hair out, that perhaps the message from Gary that he'd listened to had been correct when he had said that some stuff needed explaining. Paul stood, staring at them.

Gary stood awkwardly by his wife, it looked a little like one of those stiffly posed Victorian studio photographs. Paul said to them: "You three look like one of those bloody Victorian studio photographs. All very stiff and formal. Yet with all the corruption and vileness just bubbling away beneath the surface."

They didn't know how to respond to his off the wall remark, so remained silent.

"Nothing to say, anyone?" said Paul. There was a sardonic and almost brutal quality in his voice that unnerved them, but especially Beth.

"Paul," said Beth, "this isn't like you. Where is my husband, my lovely, kind, gentle, warm, loving husband?"

"He's dead. You killed him." Said Paul, cruelly.

Beth buried her face in her hands and started to sob. Sally cuddled her, comforted her. Sally looked at Paul, hard. There was something strange, different about him. He had a haunted look. He looked pale, deathly pale.

She swallowed before speaking: "Paul, I know what you saw must have come as a terrible shock but... how are you? What did you do last night? Did you get any sleep at all? Have you eaten?"

Paul trembled before speaking. "No, I haven't eaten. Couldn't eat. Sleep? Not really. None to speak of. And as for what I did last night, well, I sort of got to feeling very sorry for myself and in a moment of madness I am sad to say that I tried to commit suicide by drinking a litre of vodka and downing two boxes of tablets. Unfortunately, I was let down at the last minute. It appears I overdid the vodka. It made me vomit up all the fucking pills."

They looked at him, appalled at what he had said. Gary was the first to react. "Oh... Christ! Oh, Paul, mate. I am so sorry! We knew that what you saw would have upset you, hurt you, but driving you to try to take your own life? Oh, fuck!"

Beth looked at him, tears streaming down her face. "But what would have happened when we found your dead body? What would we have done?"

"You'd have all laughed at me, again?" asked Paul, shrugging. They all looked puzzled at his remark.

Suddenly he felt very, very tired and he sat down in an easy chair that was facing them across the room.

He looked at them. "Why? How long?"

They looked at him, Sally spoke up, first. "Look, Paul, I realise that us all being in a group together facing you is all wrong. It must be ramping up your sense of betrayal and loss and making you feel so much worse. Can I come over and sit by you, please?"

Paul shrugged his acquiescence. Sally stood up and walked over to him. Gary, to his credit did not make the mistake of sitting down by Beth. He remained standing where he was, a silent observer.

Sally sat on the wide and well-padded right arm of the chair and said: "Paul, I am so sorry for how things have worked out. But if you will let me explain how things got started and what has been going on, I hope that we can all move on and that we can help you and Beth stay together as a couple."

"Remember in the early part of last year when I was rushed into a private clinic with a gynaecological condition? Well, they had to operate on me and as a result of the operation, which I think they botched, I became physically unable to ever have sex again.

"I know that Gary is a very passionate man. He told me that he'd be perfectly OK with doing what he called the five finger samba. I knew that with my problem with my epiglottis that I could not dare try to perform oral sex on him.

"I knew he wouldn't want to, but I was frightened that he would stray, that he would have sex with someone else. Start an affair and perhaps even leave me. He assured me that he wouldn't and though I believed him, I still worried.

"I mentioned the problem to Beth when we were drinking tea one Sunday morning, I think you and Gary were out playing a round of golf, and she suddenly blurted out: 'I can help out, if you want. I can be your surrogate with Gary!'

"At first, I thought she was joking, but then she convinced me that she wasn't. We chatted about how we could bring it about. A couple of days later we mentioned the idea to Gary. He was in favour of it, of course.

"Pretty early on we decided that you would never be OK with the idea of lending your wife out, even if it were in such a good cause, so, and it pains me to tell you this, to admit to it, we decided to keep you in the dark on this.

"I am really so very sorry about that. But we were so sure that we could arrange things so that you would never know, that it wouldn't hurt you at all. But now, well, you are very hurt. We can all see that. The revelation that you tried to take your own life, well, that makes me feel so badly about what we did."

Paul glanced up, and then looked back down again. "When did it begin?"

Sally answered him: "It was twelve months ago. We decided that the first time would be at a barbecue that we held. If you remember it was a gloriously hot summer's day, we cooked and ate the food and we lounged by the pool and we drank. We... I am now somewhat ashamed to say that we spiked your drinks with something to put you out, to make you sleep. And, once you were asleep, Gary and Beth stood up. Beth came to you, kissed your head, whispered that she loved you and then she and Gary walked into the house, hand in hand. Before they entered through the patio doors, Gary turned and asked me if I wanted to come with them and watch? I said that it would be unwise to leave you alone, as you'd been drugged. They nodded and went indoors." She paused, the memory haunting her.

Paul looked even sicker. "Then what happened?"

She shook herself before continuing: "I stayed with you, I thought I owed you that much, at least. I held your hand and I stroked your head, I apologised to you for what we were doing to you, with your wife. I think I even cried, a little bit. I suddenly felt very guilty. After all, you were there, so very vulnerable. You were our good, very good, dear friend and we were betraying your trust.

"I felt it was my duty to watch over you to make sure nothing bad happened to you. I mean, how would we had felt if we'd all been indoors, with me watching my husband fucking your wife, and you'd come round and staggered into the pool and drowned? Or had choked on your own vomit?"

Paul shook his head. "Maybe it would have been better if I had just died, then? After all, if I'd died at your poolside I'd never have known that Beth was sleeping around on me."

Beth gasped: "But I don't want you dead! And I am not sleeping around on you; I am just sleeping with Gary."

Paul again shook his head. "Sleeping around in the plural or the singular is still sleeping around."

Paul stared directly ahead. "What happened, that first time?"

Gary and Beth exchanged glances. "We left you with Sally, then we went indoors and we made love in the guest room. I didn't think it fair on Sally to use our marital bed," said Gary.

Paul looked at them, before speaking again. "What happened when you came out?"

We walked back to the back garden; Sally was sitting at your side, holding your hand."

Paul whispered, "Did you laugh at me when you saw me?"

"No!" Shouted Beth. "We didn't! What makes you think we'd do that?" She sounded distressed.

"That's not true, Beth," Sally's voice sounded tired. "When you came back to the poolside, you both did laugh at Paul. I told you off, and you both became quite contrite. You explained that you laughed mainly out of embarrassment, but also because you found the sight of him, lying there, dozing in the late afternoon sun, amusing."

She looked at Paul, pensively. "Why did you ask that? Did you have a reason?"

He told them off the recurring dream of being near water, and people laughing at him.

They looked at him, they were all stunned and somewhat ashamed of themselves.

He could see Sally reaching for his hand and moved it out of the way. "I can't believe that you would risk my life by drugging me! For fuck's sake! None of you are medically qualified! You could quite easily have killed me! Didn't you stop to consider that?"

They shook their heads, obviously they hadn't thought about that.

Sally looked very embarrassed. "I am sorry, Paul. I really am. We didn't think that your life could be in danger. Gary had bought the drug from a reputable online source, so we did our best to protect you, protect your health."

"Won't the police be happy to hear that?"

Gary shrugged. "Good luck with that one buddy. I used an anonymous Darkweb account and Bitcoins to pay for it all. After all this time, there won't be a trace in your system. It will be your word against the three of ours. I suggest you don't even try it."

The conversation lapsed again until Gary again spoke up: "Look, we made sure that we never had sex at your house, only either here, at work, or in a hotel room. We also did our best to protect your marriage, too. I, well, we all talked and we realised that if you weren't getting any exclusive time with Beth, that this might hurt your marriage, so we worked out that we should let Beth be yours exclusively, every weekend."

Beth chimed in, then: "And that's why I began the idea of you and me only having sex at weekends, because I did not think it right to have my husband following my lover in bed with me, doing it, I mean having sex with me on the same day. Because, as hard as this might be for you to accept, it was never a cuckolding thing, this... relationship... of ours, mine and Gary. It was something separate from our married life. There was never any intention to humiliate you, in any way. You must believe me, you must believe us!"

"Fucking, hell!" Muttered Paul, loudly. "You just don't get it! How fucking patronising and condescending of you three shits! You allowed me to have the full and exclusive use of my wife at weekends, after you had been banging her like a rusty gate all through the fucking week? Shit! Don't you realise, Gary, that having my wife 5 days a week to my 2 made this whole thing fucking utterly unbalanced and completely unfair on me? Even if I had agreed to this, had known about it.

"And you say it was not your intention to humiliate me? Well, with you two fucking on Beth's desk, with her poor assistant knowing what you were doing, with her seeing how broken my discovery of you fucking around on me made me... hearing the nasty, vile things you said about me... how humiliating was that, do you think?"

Gary shook his head. "Sorry, that shouldn't have happened. And what I said about you being Beth's pathetic husband, I didn't mean it. That was just silliness on my part."

Paul looked at him, then scanned the eyes of the other two, settling his gaze on his wife. "And the kicker is, most people at work knew even before I did." He saw their surprised expression.

"Oh, yes. Beth, there was your assistant, she knew. And I have wondered why people on the shop floor were whistling that Laurel and Hardy theme, the March of the Cuckoos when they saw me? And why some people took to nicknaming me Cookie?

Beth looked bemused. "I'm sorry, honey, I don't understand... why'd they do that?"

Gary went red in the face and Sally gasped. Sally said: "Oh, my God! That's... dreadful! How could they have known?"

Paul replied: "Because you weren't as careful and as discrete as you should have been, were you? And for your information, Beth, they were mocking and deriding me as a cuckold, humiliating me without me knowing why!

"And even people who didn't know, they thought I'd been demoted because of the fact I kept having to go out to act as a useless shadow on lots of sales and engineering calls. Well, now they'll be able to surmise that the real reason I lost all my interesting project work was because my boss wanted me out of the way so that he could fuck my bloody wife!"

He stood up. "I am sorry. I can't cope with this, any more. I'm going home."

Beth stood up too, making a move toward him. She looked anxious. "You are looking after yourself, Paul, aren't you? You are feeding yourself?"

He gave her a withering look. "Yeah, right! Like you care a fuck about me!" Beth gasped and choked back a sob.

He turned to Sally, who was now standing slightly back from him. "Sally, despite your part in this, I do feel sorry for you. I really do. You thought they were only doing this so she could be your sexual surrogate, right?"

Sally nodded. Paul continued: "But that's not actually true now, is it? They are having a hot and torrid love affair. They aren't fuckbuddies, any longer, you poor idiot! They are lovers! Hot blooded, cold hearted lovers!"

He stormed out of the house. Sally caught him just before he got to his car.

"Can I come and see you or call you?"

"No! I'll contact you when I am good and ready. Tell those other two arseholes to stay away from me as well, unless the bitch has a really convincing argument why I shouldn't abandon the marriage."

Sally watched as he got in his car and screeched away. She turned to see Gary and Beth gazing after the retreating car. She just shook her head.

Chapter 5 (All Mattb's work)

After Paul left, all was not well at Damson Glade.

Beth was wandering round in a funk, consumed by guilt.

Sally had decided that things had gone too far. She was fully aware that it might be too late to save the marriage of Beth and Paul, but damn it, she was going to try!

Sally was addressing the two errant lovers. "I do not want you having sex at the moment. From what Paul told me, you pair of idiots are in love. Is this true?"

They said nothing, but glanced at each other, guiltily. "Oh," said Sally. Well, I suppose that answers my question. So... where do we go from here? Gary, are you going to divorce me and marry Beth?"

"No," said Gary. "I want the two of you, living here, with me. I know it's not ideal for you, Sally, not being able to make love and I'll try not to rub your nose in it, when I have sex with Beth. Really, I mean that." He nodded for emphasis.

"That's so fucking decent of you! So whilst you have Beth and me here as your wives and you live like a 19th century Mormon prophet... where does that leave poor Paul?"

Beth answered her: "Sally, I honestly don't know. I still love Paul, but I am no longer in love with him, like a wife should love her husband. I am sorry about this, Sally, but I am in love with Gary."

Sally shook her head. "So the fact that we upset him so much that we caused Paul to try to take his own life doesn't really matter to you?"

"Of course it matters to me!" shouted Beth. "I'm not a monster! Please don't think I don't care about him, because I do. It's just that it's the kind of love you'd have for a good friend, not a lover."

Sally folded her arms before she spoke again. "We really have fucked him over, haven't we? So there's no hope for your marriage? If that is the case, we had better get a meeting set up with him and try to work out what we can do to at least make the end of his marriage as pain free as we can for him. We owe him that much, at least."

Gary sighed and said: "I'll have to let him go, of course. From his job, I mean."

Sally glared at him and hissed out: "No!" It made Gary jump, such was the venom in that one word.

"But don't you see, Sal, I will have to let him go. He would not want to work there, not with everyone knowing that he... well, that his wife and I are having an affair."

Sally shook her head. "That's not good enough, Gary. If you do that, what happens when he decides to sue the company?"

Gary shrugged. "Christ, Gary," thought Sally to herself. "This having a lover has turned you from a number 1 business brain into a Class 1 idiot!"

She quashed her anger and replied to Gary: "You can't sack him! 'I have been fucking your wife' are NOT grounds for dismissal. If you haven't the guts to work with him, just put him on the books as a consultant. And to soften the undoubted blow to his ego, give him a massive salary rise. And don't tell me you can't afford it, as I know we can!" He acquiesced to her suggestion.

Meanwhile, Sally began to resent the fact that she, the cheated upon wife, as she began to finally realise she was, was having to try to do everything herself. And Sally was trying to keep her own marriage together, though she was beginning to wonder why she was bothering, to be frank.

Chapter 6 (All inserted by Van1)

Monday morning, Gary and Beth arrived at the office separately. Beth walked into the executive suite and noticed Gill's desk looked empty. No files, no coffee cup, nothing. She couldn't remember the last time she'd beaten Gill to work. She grabbed her cup and walked into the coffee room. Lisa, the HR secretary was there already.

"Hello Lisa. How was your weekend?"

Lisa just gave Beth a strange look, then walked out. Beth put it down to Mondayitis. It wasn't until another secretary walked in, took one look at Beth and walked straight back out that she knew something was badly wrong. She walked, with the coffees, into Gary's office.

"I think word might have got out Gary. I've just been cold shouldered by two office girls and I'm worried about Gill, she hasn't shown yet."

Beth totally missed the sudden look of worry that crossed Gary's face as she continued into her own office. He shouted after her.

"Prepare the paperwork to make Paul a consultant will you."

"Sure thing boss. How much am I giving myself?"

Beth immediately regretted this flippant question. If it came to that, she knew the idea of no longer being Paul's wife would take a while to sink in.

"Just leave that blank for the moment. I'll talk it over with Bruce. Speak of the devil, what can I do for you Bruce?"

The very sombre Operations Manager, having brushed past Beth with a scowl, sat at Gary's desk. He threw an envelope to Gary's side of it. He was exaggeratingly not touching the desk.

"What's this Bruce?"

"That is my resignation, effective immediately."

Gary was stunned. While he was the head of the company, Bruce effectively ran it. Over 80% of the employees reported either directly or indirectly to him. He ran design, manufacturing, sales and distribution.

"What the fuck. You have a two month notice period."

"Well I'll be gone in an hour. If your conscience allows it, then sue me. Wait, what am I talking about? Any man that can send another man out on useless errands just so he can screw that man's wife in her own office, obviously doesn't have a conscience and is completely beneath contempt. Sue me, asshole, I have the press release prepped and ready to go."

Bruce Cullen then arose and walked out through Beth's office. He was going to contemptuously walk right past Beth's desk but changed his mind at the last moment. He stopped and stared down at her.