The Loving Wife Story

Copyright 2016 by PostScriptor

It was a bright and clear Monday morning when Chuck walked into the kitchen in the suburban ranch-style home that he and his wife owned.

He'd showered and dressed already so a quick breakfast was all that he needed to be out the door and off to work. It was going to be a beautiful, warm day.

He was surprised, though, to find his wife, Pamela — known to everyone as 'Pam', already in the kitchen cooking bacon and eggs for breakfast.

"Wow, honey! What's the special occasion?" While cooked breakfasts were a norm for Chuck and Pam on the on the weekends, it was a real rarity to go to all of that trouble during the working week.

His wife, a little startled by his sudden emergence, looked over at him with what he could swear was a look somewhere between guilt and fear. Her strained facial mask was only there for a second before Pam's face regained her normal cheerful, smiling face on the world.

"Oh sweetheart! I was wide-awake this morning, so while you were getting ready I thought I would fix us breakfast. Would you like a cup of coffee?"

"Please," he replied before he sat at the kitchen table. He pulled up his iPad onto its stand, logged in and began his usual morning routine of checking the news. She quietly handed him his cup, fixed, black with two sugars, just the way he liked it.

After a couple of minutes, Chuck noticed that Pam seemed to be throwing quick looks at him every twenty seconds or so before turning back to the task in front of her. He wondered to himself whether this was some recent sort of a nervous habit of hers that had somehow escaped his notice before.

At long last (well, in truth not so long, but it seemed that way) Pam slid a spatula under the scrambled eggs and moved them to plates where they were accompanied by a couple pieces of bacon, a couple links of sausage and a slice of toasted bread (whole wheat, of course, for health reasons.) Pam's version of a 'Grand Slam' breakfast.

Chuck certainly appreciated her effort, however unusual it seemed for a weekday morning.

They began to eat together, Chuck continuing to peruse his iPad while Pam sipped at her coffee, not really eating, just moving her food around on her plate while she continued to glance surreptitiously at her husband.

She didn't seem to be able to get comfortable in her chair either. She kept wiggling around like she couldn't get comfortable just sitting.

Finally, Chuck couldn't stand it anymore.

"OK Pam. What is going on? You are fidgeting in your chair like a three-year-old and you seem to be very nervous about something. What's going on? Is there something you need to tell me? You didn't dent the car again, did you?"

" Um. No honey, it isn't anything like that."

"Well just exactly what IS it then?"

Pam hesitated to get her thoughts in order before she sighed and began talking.

"Darling, you know that I read short stories online sometimes, right?"

Chuck nodded his head in the affirmative. They sometimes even talked about the stories if they had a plot or other story elements that Pam found interesting.

"Well, the main site I go to for my stories," she paused and her eyes dropped to the table, "has a lot of 'erotic' stories. You know, I've told you about them before — there are stories about lesbians and group sex, or people doing things for the first time..."

Chuck smiled as he nodded again. He had benefited from her reading some of those stories. The first time they tried out anal sex was an example of Pam getting an idea from a story and asking Chuck to try something new. And they both liked it enough that now it was a semi-regular addition to their repertoire.

They were pleasantly surprised at how hot they both got talking about some of the 'erotic' stories, although they agreed that a lot of the fantasies, intriguing as they might be to think about, were actually pretty risky. So they stuck to things they could do by themselves in their own bedroom.

"I don't know if I ever mentioned to you, but there is a section of stories called 'Loving Wives.' The stories in that section aren't always real sexy and they can vary quite a bit. Some of them are about 'cuckolds' — you know, men who are wimpy or who get off watching their wives have sex with other men. For example there's this one author, Matt Moreau who...well, never mind, it doesn't matter right now."

Chuck frowned when he heard her description of that genre of story. He said something under his breath that Pam couldn't understand, but she thought it was something like 'it would be a cold day in hell before...'

She continued, "Others are what they call 'burn the bitch' stories, where a man discovers that his wife is cheating on him and he figures out ways to get revenge on her. And fairly often he gets back at her lover, too!"

That thought seemed to cheer Chuck a bit.

"I could learn to appreciate those, I bet," Chuck interjected with a thoughtful look on his face.

"Anyway," Pam continued, "I was reading a 'Loving Wife' story late last night before I came to bed." She looked back at Chuck again who raised his eyebrows and tilted his hands outward in one of those 'OK, so just go on' gestures.

"It frightened me. It really scared me."

"How could a damn story frighten you so much?" he demanded.

"It just seemed like the story had been written about US!" Pam replied in a voice that was barely more than a whisper.

"What do you mean by that?"

"First, the characters. Their names were 'Charles' and 'Pamela'."

Chuck laughed aloud at that.

"Do have any clue how many couples named 'Charles and Pamela' there probably are in the U.S.? I mean, just off the top of my head, there are very likely something like 60 MILLION married couples. And out of 60 million, there could be literally hundreds of thousands of couples that shared our names! That's nothing to be frightened about!"

"Yes, but," Pam came back, "in the story they were the same ages we are: he was 31 years old and she was 29! And even more — he worked in corporate finance for a Fortune 1000 company, just like you, and the wife character was a real estate agent, just like me! And they were supposed to have been married for seven years. Just like us."

"OK," Chuck conceded with a smile, "So now we are down to maybe a couple of thousand couples."

"In the story, he is 5' 10" and weighs 170 pounds — just like you, and she is 5' 5" and weighs 125 pounds, same as me!" she added, triumphantly, as if this proved her case. "Although the author of this story never said anything like 'his wife was a walking wet dream'." Pam thought that had significance because Chuck often told her how 'hot' she was. So the story wasn't a perfect match.

"Honey, you should have studied statistics in college. The author made his characters just about as average sized as average goes! So what?

"We are close to the same as these fictional characters — we are both pretty average in height and weight." Chuck pondered for a second, "I wish I was over 6 feet tall, though. I swear the taller guys get promoted faster than me..."

"That wasn't all..." Pam hesitated as she started to speak again, but Chuck was already rising from the table. He grabbed his briefcase and folded his iPad up and took it with him as he stood up. He gave her a kiss on the top of her head as he passed behind her.

"Don't let some stupid coincidences in a fiction story rattle you."

Continuing out the front door, since for some reason he had parked his car in the driveway instead of the garage the night before, he continued speaking to her.

"Gotta go, I'm running late already. Hope traffic isn't too bad."

"'Bye!" was the last thing he said as he closed the door behind him.

Pam rushed to the door and opened it.

"Chuck!" she called after him, "You didn't even give me a proper kiss! Chuck? I love you, Chuck!"

Pam, now almost in a panic looked out the door after him, then up and down the street. There were no strange cars and no one in sight who she didn't know. No process servers waiting to pounce.

She collapsed into a chair in the hallway, breathing a sigh of relief.

"Oh god, Chuck," she said to the now empty room, "The woman in the story had a lover named Doug who worked with her at her office. Just like I've had. And they had an affair for three months — just like I've been having." She broke into tears and eventually into sobs.

At least she hadn't been served with divorce papers right after her husband left for work the way it had happened in the story.

"Chuck, I love you so," she said out loud, "and my affair is over. Finis. Done. Ended. And I am going to re-devote myself to you and our marriage. I'm going to make you the happiest, most satisfied man that anyone has ever known."

With that, feeling as if she had dodged a bullet in her marriage, Pam pulled herself up out of the chair and went back into the bedroom to get ready for work.

She was even humming to herself as she thought about the dinner of Chuck's favorite dishes she was going to make as well as thinking about the 'make up' sex she would have with Chuck afterwards. Even if he didn't know it was 'make-up'! And just thinking about it was making her wet...

Pam was always a consummate professional. She was at her desk when she was supposed to be, dressed in a professional and modest, yet feminine and attractive manner. She was always a pleasant person to be around and was quite popular in her office.

That Monday morning she was reviewing the Multiple Listing Service sheets (actually computer screens these days) to see what new listings had been added and which houses had been sold over the weekend. She was carefully noting the listing and sales prices in a couple of areas where she knew of people who were thinking of listing their properties. Later in the afternoon she might pay a call on them as well a checking out several of the new listings herself.

She was in fact so absorbed with planning out an efficient use of her day that she didn't even notice the young woman who walked into the office, stopping and speaking with the receptionist at the front desk before walking back to Pam's desk.

"Excuse me," asked the young looking woman with the lanky blond hair, chewing gum like a cow would chew its cud, "but are you Mrs. Pamela Anderson?"

Her 'auto smile' came on as she gave her standard reply.

"Yes I am — but not THAT Pamela Anderson!"

She expected the normal smile and chuckle, but instead the young woman just snapped the gum in her mouth and handed her a manila colored envelope.

"Mrs. Anderson, you are served," she said rather loudly, as if to draw attention from all of the people working in the office and then, wasting no time, she turned and walked back out of the office. The young woman only had one more set of papers to serve that day — to one Pauline French. She hoped to catch her at her office as well.

Pam stared at the envelope for several minutes before she could will herself to open it. She was embarrassed, chagrinned and hurt. Divorce forms spilled out of the envelope onto her desk. She looked around and it seemed to her that everyone in the office was looking at her as the tears began to descend down her cheeks.

Her hands searched her desk for her phone that she couldn't find right away through her tears. When she found it she went to her 'favorite's' contact list and called her husband at work.

Pam and Chuck didn't call each other very often during working hours. They thought it was undignified and showed a certain lack of professionalism, but given the circumstances those restraints went out the window. What Pam wanted more than anything at that moment was for Chuck to answer her call and give her a chance to explain and plead with him.

"Finance department, Chuck Anderson speaking," came her husband's voice.

"Oh Chuck!" Pam gushed, half in fear, half in gratitude that he had actually answered the phone, "I was just served divorce papers here at work. Oh god Chuck. I don't want you to divorce me!" She sobbed incoherently for half a minute while Chuck patiently waited for her to recover some of her normal poise.

"I thought this morning, when I wasn't served at home after you left for work, that the story was like you said: just some silly fiction, but..."

"Wait a second," Chuck finally spoke, "Are you saying that in the story you read online, the female character was served divorce papers at home in the morning, not at work?"

"Yes, Chuck. So I thought that I was safe..."

"Man, oh man. This is a big mistake. This was not supposed to happen!"

"Thank heavens, Chuck! I knew that there had to be some sort of mistake. I love you so much, I just knew you wouldn't just divorce me over some silly sex..."

Chuck was muttering to himself.

"Damn. I must have uploaded the wrong version of the story. I KNOW that in the final edit she is served AT WORK! Max embarrassment and all that sort of thing."

"Pam," he ordered, "Do you have the story open to check on that?"

"What? Why, uh, sure. Let's see: yes. The gum-chewing young blond with the lanky hair shows up at the door right after Chuck leaves for work and serves Pam while she is still in her nightgown and robe."

"Shoot. I'll have to take THAT version down and substitute the correct final version. How stupid can I be? I mean just think of all of the people who have already read and commented on the original posting — it will all be lost. Oh yeah, by the way, Pam: after finding out about your affair, I really didn't have a choice. The divorce is still on." The phone suddenly disconnected.

Pam looked back at the story on her screen. She realized as she reread the text on her screen, that, by now, her credit cards with her husband had probably been cancelled and half of the money in their joint savings and checking accounts had probably been moved. She was pretty sure that when she got home she would find Chuck's clothes and personal possessions would be missing from the family home. Thank goodness for one thing: in the story he didn't try to get a restraining order or anything. She assumed her keys would still open the house.

Right then, Pam's attention was drawn to a commotion at the front of the office.

It was her lover, or former lover, or whatever he was, Doug, walking back down the aisle.

"Doug? What happened to you?" Pam heard the receptionist ask.

"Wow, big guy! You look like someone worked you over but good!" joked one of the other agents, not sounding surprised or sorry at all.

Doug looked around the office and figured he might as well get his 'explanation' out of the way.

"Last night, after I finished bowling with a couple of buddies, I was mugged on my way back to the car. I didn't see anyone because it was dark and I think that someone clobbered me with a baseball bat right at the beginning.

"So I was only about half-conscious. They grabbed my coat, my wallet and my brand new, only used once, bowling ball. How low can you get? That's all I can tell you, 'cause it's all I remember."

He continued walking back to his desk across the aisle from Pam's.

While Doug was describing his encounter from the night before, Pam was rereading the last part of the story on her computer. Her eyes suddenly opened really wide and she had a look of horror on her face as the implications became clear.

Doug looked down at Pam as he walked past.

"Hey sweetie, let me tell you, my day has not gone well so far."

Doug sat down at his desk and almost immediately the receptionist called back to him.

"Doug, your wife is on line two."

Pam looked at her former lover, shaking her head with a look on her face that was somewhere between a grin and a grimace, as Doug picked up the phone line. She'd already re-read the ending of the story.

"And believe me, Doug — beginning in about thirty seconds, it is only going to get worse!"