The day I turned thirty-four my husband was away at a wine brokers' conference in Prague. I knew he'd really wanted to go and at the time it came up, some three months prior to my birthday, I'd pretended it didn't matter and said all the right things about making up for lost time later and so on. Inside, though, I was seething. It didn't seem to me to be a very important conference. He'd given the same sort of material himself at several presentations here in England over the preceding year and I couldn't see anything in the programme that looked particularly new or innovative, but he seemed keen to go and he was very sweet about buying me a special present and making up for missing the day itself the week after he got back so I cooled down inside and as the day approached I simply busied myself elsewhere while he packed his case. I even dropped him off at Heathrow on the afternoon of his flight, and watched him while he disappeared through security and into the departures lounge. Ten minutes later he was texting me to say he was already through and browsing the duty free shop and did I want anything etc., and I drove home none the wiser.
It was four months later - exactly one month after my birthday, that I found out the real reason why he had been so keen to go to Prague. And believe me it had nothing to do with European regulation of the wines and spirits market. He had left his laptop open while he took the dog for a walk. We'd just put an old unwanted dresser up for sale on an auction site and I wanted to check to see if we'd had any bids. I opened the lid of the laptop, and that's when my world turned upside down. There was a funny kind of e-mail message on the screen. It was mostly cartoon-like graphics and was written in a language I didn't recognise but there was a "Click here" icon that was easy enough to understand, and the open tab behind the message showed a video in progress that hadn't finished downloading yet but did so as I stared at the screen. The video that loaded I will never be able to push from my mind. It showed my husband and at least thirty other men, stark naked and taking it in turns to fuck two women who were almost - but not quite, completely stripped. What clothes they were still wearing were business attire and they seemed to be enjoying the experience of having cocks galore emptying their cum over their bare flesh, into their faces and at regular intervals into their pussies.
I'm not a prude. I've seen porn before, and in my student days I was party to the odd threesome, but this was on another level. I was stunned. Simply stunned. My husband was unmistakably one of the men in the video - he has a distinctive tattoo on his ass, and anyway, he was one of about half of the men in the video who weren't wearing a mask. I watched as he stuck his cock into one of the women, and then pulled out in time to cum into her face. It was sickening, yet I couldn't look away. The date on the video in the corner was April 10th. My birthday. He'd fucked another woman - maybe two, in a gang bang on his wife's birthday.
The door opened downstairs and I closed the lid on the laptop and went quietly out of the study. I went to the bathroom and retched into the toilet. Nothing came up, but I felt physically sick. How could he betray our marriage like this? How could he fuck some woman at a conference? What the fuck was that scene all about anyway?
I don't know how I got through that evening but I faked a migraine and slept in the spare room. Steve didn't even come in to see how I was. I heard him in the study, and I heard him type something and the whoosh sound of an e-mail being sent. He was quiet for the rest of the night but at 2 AM I was awoken by the sound of the study door being opened. The sound of that door is distinctive. It's just down the corridor from the spare room and it catches on the door jam so its sound always tends to wake me up when Steve's working late. On this occasion, though, I didn't think he'd been working.
The next few days were torture for me. I didn't know what to do but I knew enough not to confront him. Steve's got a nasty streak to him and I didn't fancy being on the wrong end of a confrontation that might turn physical. Instead, I called up Carla and said I needed to have a girls chat with her. Carla is my best friend and has been since we were at school together in the nineties. She's the sassiest person I know and I'd trust her with my life.
"Oh my god what a fucking prick," were the first things she said.
"Can you believe it?" I asked her wiping a tear away.
"Oh, Sara, yes I can believe it. He's a fuckwit. He thinks with his dick and he doesn't deserve you." She replied.
She went on to tell me how he'd tried to seduce her and at least three of our mutual friends in the three years we'd been married. He even tried to feel up one of my bridesmaids at our wedding. This was news to me, but it made sense that Clarissa had dropped our friendship pretty much immediately after that. Carla assured me that Steve hadn't been successful with any of these attempted conquests, but I certainly wouldn't have put it past Mila. That story's for another time.
"The important thing," said Carla, "is not to get mad but to get even."
That made me smile but I had no intention of just going out to sleep with someone just to get even with a husband I now despised. "Well, here's something that might change your mind" said Carla pulling out her phone. "When you called me I guessed it might be something like this so I did a little searching for you. Have a look at this site"
She handed me her phone and I saw a website on it from the Czech Republic. It was described in four languages and one of them was English. The website's clients appeared to be professional women who had a secret desire to be sluts. The website promised them a night of being fucked by multiple men and to film the whole experience to fuel their fantasies in the future. Call me naive but I had no idea there were websites like this - or even the women to keep them in business. Clearly I was blind to the real world.
"Don't feel too bad, honey," said Carla. "Most people don't get this. These are women who just need a rare thrill. Usually their husbands actually know what's going on. Sometimes the husbands are part of the gang bang. Sometimes they get their kicks from watching their wives get fucked by strange men. It's a weird world out there. Just as long as Steve doesn't give you a nasty infection!"
I shuddered at that, but Steve and I hadn't had sex since the night he got back. It seemed I was OK - so far.
"What are you going to do?" asked Carla. I had no idea. But she did.
Carla is a teacher at a sixth form college. We used to tease her about how she just had to be the fantasy older woman figure for her eighteen-year-old boys. She's stunning, brilliant and she dresses like a rock star. She laughs this off but I know she knows most of her boys would give their eye teeth for a chance in the sack with her. It's completely unprofessional and she'd never do anything like that, but that doesn't mean her mind doesn't wander in that direction sometimes, and she routinely gives marks out of ten for looks and sex appeal when she'd describing her day to me and the rest of our crowd on our girls nights out.
So it wasn't a complete surprise when I got a call about a week later inviting me over to Carla's flat. She told me to dress sexy and said she was going to introduce me to a friend of hers who could help me with my problem. I wasn't even sure what she thought my "problem" was, but it was sweet of her to have been thinking how to help me and I decided to go. Moping in my house was getting to be unbearable, and Steve spent most of his evenings in the study with his computer "working on a big project" according to him, although precious little money seemed to be coming in.
I didn't know what this was going to be about but I felt my heart pounding as I walked out of the bathroom, freshly bathed and with a dab of perfume behind each ear. I got dressed. First I pulled out the sort of clothes I would wear for a girls night out. Then I stopped. I went back to the closet. Let's start again, I thought. Red stockings, black short skirt, white silk blouse with red epaulettes and button holes. Black jacket and heels. I kept my wedding ring on and put my hair up. I have long strawberry blonde hair but I like my neck, so I often wear my hair up to show off my best feature. I was wearing my Coco de Mer underwear. Black and red lace. Standing in front of the mirror I took a look and undid the third button down on my blouse. You could now just see the lace of my bra if I leaned even the slightest bit forward. I looked a million dollars. I was glowing. I walked to the car. Steve, if he noticed me going at all, didn't say a thing.
