The Call of Blood

The questions swirled around my brain the whole week Amy was away. Should I confront her? Should I change the locks? Should I divorce her? It wouldn't be easy throwing away four years of marriage, but I wasn't going to stand for her cheating, not when we'd worked so hard to patch things up after the first time, not after she'd sworn up and down that it would never happen again.

This hurt. Her first affair had thrown off our schedule for starting a family, as we devoted months to building trust. The funny thing was that Amy had come to me and told me she'd cheated. I didn't suspect a thing and probably would never have guessed. That she told me helped us get through, though it hurt like hell at the time.

I remember the moment clearly. We were in the car on the way back from her mom's. Amy had been quiet at dinner, more quiet than usual, but her mom was so talkative that no awkward silences or breaks warned me something was up.

"Honey, you know I love you, don't you?"

"Yeah, I do. You feeling insecure?"

"No. I have to tell you something bad." She paused, not for dramatic effect, but to gather herself. In the hard shadows cast by passing headlights, I could see her struggling. "I had an affair. It's over. It didn't last long. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I wish I could take it back."

My first reaction, other than gripping the wheel very hard, was to ask questions: with whom? why? where? I'm glad I did because she was vulnerable at that moment so she let out a flood of information. Her friend Jesse's fiancé had been hitting on her. She agreed to meet him for a drink, only to get evidence to expose him to Jesse - so she said and at least partly believed. She said she discouraged him and tried to convince him that Jesse was all he should want. A couple of week later, when I was traveling on business, she went to a party at Jesse's, got a little lit, and they hooked up for a quickie in Jesse's and his bed.

She saw him twice more, both times at their place, before her guilt overtook her. She ended it. She swore she ended it. Two months later, we went to their wedding. A month after that they moved to Chicago and a month after that Amy came clean to me.

I can understand how it happened: a handsome guy hits on you, a guy you already know wants you, your husband is working long hours, traveling too much, you drink some alcohol and you're on your back. I had trouble with the repeat performances. I had more trouble with him being Jesse's fiancé. It may be common that people betray their best friends, but to me that indicated a real weakness of character. How could she walk down the aisle in a bridesmaid's dress to celebrate her friend's wedding when she'd been sleeping with the groom?

Things got worse between us over the next few days. I didn't want to be home. I didn't want to touch her. When I tried, I found myself thinking about how we'd been having sex while she was fucking her friend's future husband, how she'd kept that secret from me, how I'd been gullible, how I'd been the fool. I cringed at the memory of my congratulating him at the wedding, at the commentary I'd given him about what marriage is really like.

After two weeks of barely speaking, Amy asked if I'd go to counseling with her. She told me she was afraid, afraid that I'd leave her, afraid that she'd blown it, afraid that she'd hurt me so badly I could never forgive her.

The sessions were painful but after several months I was able to put the mess far enough behind me that our relationship was growing again. A lot came out. She mistrusted our marriage because I traveled. She was insecure about her sex appeal. I was too passive, not in bed but in the relationship. I preferred not to discuss what was happening between us, and my silences contributed to her feelings of inadequacy.

It's funny how what someone else does becomes your fault. I interpreted the counseling process as the spreading of blame until it rested evenly on both our shoulders. The balance tipped back and forth for a few months as anger and denial worked themselves out. Then we hit a happy medium and started once again to be happy.

The part of therapy that stuck with me was the commitments we made to honesty, to trust and to earning trust, to fidelity and to communication. I tried. I really tried. I scheduled some of my trips so she could meet me late in the week. We started working out together, just to share the extra time. If I had to work long hours, we'd meet for dinner.

Now all that was gone. I'd stumbled on her cheating completely by accident. I had to send a file but my mail account was down, one of those frustrating moments that make work life thrilling. It was 3AM and Amy was asleep. I realized I could copy the file to her laptop, connect to her work network and mail the file through her work email. I did that.

The preview pane of her email was open. I just happened to glance at it as I was moving the mouse to close the window. The words "You are so unbelievably sexy" jumped out at me as if they were printed in 48 point bold. The sender was one of the other associates in the firm, so my first guess, though my heart was pounding, was a flirtation or a joke or maybe a teasing game. The rest of the email said very little, but it was suggestive of a deeper relationship.

"Okay," I said. "This could be friendship. It could be. Don't lose your cool."

I searched for the guy's name in her account. Oh no. Oh shit. Oh fuck. She'd saved dozens of emails from this guy and had sent him dozens more. I picked one at random from him. "Yesterday was the absolute most amazing time of my life. You are a goddess." This was not good. I picked another, this time from her. It set up a date and said "Jack will be out of town. I have to be home by 10 for his call." Another from him: "You are a bad girl. And I love it."

Oh fuck. Goddamn it all. My blood started to boil. The idea, "I should strangle her right now," came into my mind. I sat at the keyboard wondering if I should read all the emails.

"I need some time to think about this," I muttered. My first thought was to forward all his emails to my account, but that would leave tracks. Instead, I laboriously copied each email onto my key drive.

I tried to go to sleep but couldn't get in bed with Amy. I tried to lie down on the couch, but that felt worse, like I was being evicted by my loving, unfaithful wife from my rightful bed. I ended up slumped over the kitchen table, flipping the pages of magazines, until dawn. Then I hopped into the shower, roused Amy, told her I'd had a problem with my document which could only be fixed at the office, and left.

Sitting at my desk, hours before anyone else arrived, I printed out all the emails between my wife and this guy Rob. They were a novel in letters of a sexual affair, stuffed with the kind of innuendo that stirs adolescent loins. It was obvious the affair had begun three months earlier, that it was not dying out, that she had no intention of letting it go, that it wasn't casual or infrequent but as regular and often as they could make it.

The best part was that Rob had a camera. He sent Amy pictures of them, mostly her sucking his cock, but a few of them fucking, some taken in the mirror so you could see their faces. I had trouble looking at them. They bothered me so much, my finger almost hit delete.

The next best part was that Rob and Amy were heading to the same conference the next week - this week - gone together Monday through Friday at a hotel in Phoenix. They talked bluntly about sleeping together for a whole night. They'd have to be careful about the time because Amy could never miss her calls with me - or as Rob put it, "your loving husband's check-in ritual."

Those calls were part of the commitment we made to be faithful, to be open and honest. I guess commitment is only a ritual to some people.

I decided not to say anything to Amy. I wanted that week while she was away to make up my own mind about what I felt and wanted. The last time - which she'd sworn would be the last time ever - she'd sprung it on me. I had no idea where a confrontation now would lead but I knew from experience it would be very difficult to think straight for a long time after.

I looked at the calendar on my computer. Wednesday. "All right. I've gone through anger. I've gone through denial. Time to pick a pony. What the hell do you want?"

The answer welled up from the deepest recesses of my mind: revenge. I wanted revenge. She'd lied to me. She'd sworn fidelity and then betrayed me. I had trusted her. I had invested two more years of my life in her only because I believed what she had said in counseling. Two years I would never get back.

I could divorce her, but what would that do? For all I knew, she was only staying with me out of guilt or a strange sense of loyalty. Maybe she couldn't leave me because she'd committed to stay with me. If we divorced, she'd get half of not very much. She'd still be a lawyer, still be an attractive choice for another man. I wanted to ruin her, to crush her hopes and dreams.

I thought about hiring someone to throw acid in her face. I considered a range of violent options, from death to removal of limbs, but each ended with me as a monster facing a minimum of 35 years to life without parole.

My nightly check-in call went smoothly. I was becoming a good actor, pretending to be happy but missing her, cooing the right responses to her catalogue of boredom about seminars held in over-cooled lecture halls. "Becoming a good actor. That's the ticket," I thought. "I'll be a great actor. I'll set her up and then destroy her." Now the trick would be to come up with the right plan, something genuinely clever and yet truly destructive.

They say that God is in the details. Well then, so is the devil. It's not easy to come up with a convincing plot that won't give you away, that you can carry off. Remember "Dial M For Murder"? Ray Milland hires a man to kill his wife - Grace Kelly of all people - but as she's being strangled, her hand finds her scissors and she stabs her attacker in the back, killing him. Oops.

I realized you can only work with what you know. I know computers. The temptation is to do something completely out of your realm in the hope that distance will cast less suspicion on you. Truth be told, unfamiliarity means that you're going to make obvious mistakes. Better to stick with your expertise and hope you pull it off right.

Through a roundabout, very hard to trace method, I set up a web account which drew on servers located in Russia. I set up a web site - nothing creative. I surfed some sites, picked a fairly amateurish design that worked and copied it. The site had only a few static pages with a minimum number of hyperlinks.

This short description belies the amount of work involved. I didn't whip up this scheme overnight. It took a couple of weeks to get the account and work out the rest. During this time, I worked on my acting skills. I realized, as I got into the part, that being duplicitous is an actor's dream role.

"Honey," I sighed. "Your being away made me think about our relationship." Amy was lying next to me in bed. I'd found my double life made me horny so my darling wife had been getting it from me often and with intensity.

"Mmmmm," she murmured.

"I've been thinking that maybe we should have a baby." Amy perked up. "Not right now, but maybe we should start trying in a few months."

Amy's hand caressed my chest. She lifted her head so she could look into my eyes. "That's a great idea." Her hand touched my chin. "I've been wanting to bring up the baby subject but . . . I was worried you . . . that we weren't ready."

I smiled a perfect, loving, lying smile. "I think I'm there. You've been everything I could hope for." I ran my hand up and down her arm, cupping her elbow. "You've been open and loving and I really feel that you've been completely committed to me." Amy dipped her head, as if embarrassed at the praise. I continued, "I think we should talk about this some more, see how it feels, make sure it's the right choice. Not long, maybe a month or two."

Amy leaned forward and kissed me. Then she pushed her head under the sheet. Her warm mouth engulfed the head of my cock. She sucked and let my cock out of her mouth with a popping sound. I tossed the sheet back and watched the back of her head as it bobbed slowly, purposefully. She licked around the head and ran her tongue down the sides. She pulled up with her hand as her head slid down. I was hard as a rock.

Amy turned toward me, swung her leg over me and leaned forward. I grabbed my cock and slipped it into the opening of her pussy. She was dripping wet. Her hips rocked back until I was deep inside her. She straightened up and, as I grabbed her tits, she leaned against my hands and ground her pussy in small circles. I pulled her to my chest.

"Fuck me. Fuck me hard," she whispered in my ear.

"I'll fuck you so hard you won't be able to walk." I kneaded her ass roughly and then spanked her hard once, twice. She writhed. "Lift up a little," I commanded. She raised her butt an inch or two.

"Ready?" I asked.

"Give it to me. Give it to me."

I stroked my cock into her, smoothly at first then faster and faster and then a hard slam and another and another. Then I slowed down, letting her rock back, then faster again, faster, faster, harder, harder. Then I slowed down again.

"You tease," Amy breathed heavily against my cheek. My loving wife. "I love what you do to me."

I picked up speed. "Get ready for a big finish," I said and suddenly started to fuck her faster than before. I kept up that pace and then accelerated even faster, my back arching with the effort as I drove my cock into Amy. As the blood began to pound in my ears, I could hear Amy nearly screaming "Oh, oh, oh, uh, oh." I could see the finish line and fucked her harder, as hard and fast as I humanly could manage. I grabbed her ass hard and then spanked it.

"I'm coming," I gasped.

"Yes, yes, yes," Amy panted.

I spent in her. As we recovered, Amy said, "You are my fantastic lover."

Like I said, acting is fun when you have a meaty part to play. Our sex life improved the more detached I became from actual emotional intimacy. Seemed the less I cared about Amy as a person, the more I enjoyed fucking her like a hot piece of ass. We talked at random moments about having a baby. I wanted her to make the right decision, which meant understanding the effect it would have on her career, on our relationship, on our ability to take vacations. The more we talked, the more moony-eyed Amy became. She really wanted to have a baby.

Once my website was ready, it was decision time, to go through with my plan or not. Bless Amy's heart for making the choice for me. I decided to check her email again to see if she and Rob, whom I had decided to call her hot sexy stud, were still at it or if things had cooled with the baby talk.

I waited until Amy was asleep. We'd had a great fuck and then I'd excused myself to work on a document that absolutely needed to be right by morning. I roused her laptop, logged in to her work network and checked her inbox. Nothing unusual. Nothing from hot sexy stud. I ran a search and lo and behold, there my loving wife was, right there in her own words.

"Baby - not that I've ever called you that before, but you'll see why - you know who and I are probably going to get pregnant soon. (Get the baby now?) After I go off the pill, we'll have to cool it when I'm ovulating. Don't worry, baby, I'll be using a basal thermometer to tell me when the little egg drops, so we won't suffer too much." Hot sexy stud wrote back, "We can test condoms. Maybe some of those ribbed ones. And think how long I'll last." Jeez, stamina had never been my problem.

Amy and I had been banging like we were teenagers grabbing for a quickie before her parents got home but she was still going at it with hot, sexy stud. Ah well. Thanks, honey. You made it easy for me.

Operation Destructo went in motion. Amy and I had a romantic Friday night dinner at her favorite restaurant. As we waited for coffee, I held her hand and lovingly said, "I think we should go for it." I nodded meaningfully.

Amy's face lit up. She gulped. She reached toward me with her free hand. "I so much want a baby. Thank you. I love you."

"I love you too, sweetheart."

We agreed that she'd go off the pill when her next cycle came around. She could be fertile within a month. Little did she know that Monday morning she'd be visited by some very bad guys, unscrupulous Russian mobsters - or maybe pimply-faced teenage hackers trying to look hard.

I called my site "Black Mailed Wives". Not a bad porn idea, if you think about it. I had surfed the net and pulled off pictures of youngish, but not teenage, pretty but not stunning women, mixed with a few more mature women, all having sex. I chose pictures where the woman's face was almost visible and - this was a nice touch - I chose some shots that showed the faces clearly and then blurred them with a heavy hand. The blurred faces made the images look that much more pornographic.

My site, hosted in Irkutsk, had a nice front page showing three different women in what are commonly called compromising positions. These included Amy sucking dick with her face blurred and, of course, Amy getting fucked with her face cropped just below the nose.

"Real wives having on Real Sex!" I tried a dozen different typos but that one felt right. It was a voice I could write in.

"Real wife having good sex with lover not her own man!"

"Bad girl, BAD GIRL. What you gonna do? What you gonna do when they come for you? Bad girl, BAD GIRL. What you gonna do? What you gonna do when they come for you?"

"Cheating Wife Must PAY!!!!" My favorite line.

The front page contained a few links, one to a standard link page asking you to visit different sites. The big link, the important link was this one:

"Make Contribution Here!" A "click here" symbol accompanied the words.

If you clicked on that link, you were taken to a page that contained very simple, badly worded instructions. You were asked politely for a credit card number, complete with expiration date and security code. Below was another button, which read "Rules for Cheating Wife." I kid you not.

That link took you to another page.

"You cheating wife know why you are here. Pictures of you not with husband. Pay or all will know. We have names, email for everyone. Rule is you pay else we show all loved ones what a cheating whore slut you are.

Not believe us then check your email again. Better fill in card number or else!! Ha! Ha!"

More than a little ridiculous, isn't it? But still, they're Russian. The site is hosted in Irkutsk. They have your pictures. What you gonna do when they come for you?

My first concern was getting the message to Amy. It had to get past any spam filter and the subject line had to compel her to read the message. To get past the spam filter, I spoofed an email address from a business contact. To get it in front of Amy's eyes, the subject line read "I know about you and Rob." I sent the message through a server that provides anonymity. The FBI might be able to trace it back to me, but it wouldn't be easy.

My message, oops, the Russian mobsters' message, included excerpts from two different emails as well as a picture from a third. Then there was a list of five separate email addresses for business contacts, not in alphabetical order but selected at random from her address book. Definitely enough to let her know her account had been cracked. "We have everything. We know all you do with lover boy. Go to this website and you'll see. Cheating wife pays." There was a link to "Black Mailed Wives" and a little joke - "You should have come to us first. We make you cum over many times, you sexy whore you."