Persuasion

The kitchen was bright with sunshine that Sunday morning as I checked the laptop screen one last time before taking a deep breath and anxiously clicking on the 'submit' button. There was a pause, the cursor span in little circles and then the 'thank you' message appeared.

I breathed a sigh of relief. It was done; the fruit of two weeks' work would, I hoped, soon be published and after that my new online friends would increase in number helping me further along the journey I had so recently undertaken.

If I had known then how far that journey would take me and my husband Pete, or how quickly we might get there I might not have been so free with my writing and sharing my emotions.

But at that moment I had no idea – and the first few steps had certainly been fun.

***

After my fuddled mind had adjusted to the extraordinary realisation that my attractive husband of twenty years was actually serious about watching me having sex with other men, my next thought was that I had to learn a lot more about what I could only consider a very strange and unnatural fetish.

Shared fantasies were one thing; actually having sex with another man; actually cheating on my husband for the first time since our marriage was another thing altogether. At the time I had no real thought of doing what he had asked but I loved my husband very much and wanted to understand what strange thing was happening to him to make him want this.

After all, men do have midlife crises, don't they?

I had expected the idea to revolt as well as shock me - after all, it's not the sort of proposal you expect from someone you have been married to for so long – but to my surprise I found myself more curious than repelled and thought about it at first in an oddly detached, almost scientific rather than a passionate or lustful way.

I had always been dimly aware of the 'swinging' scene and over the years had seen many TV programmes in which wife-swapping had featured, though more in comedy than in drama. Indeed at least one village not far from us had a reputation for this sort of thing dating back to the 1960's but in my naiveté I hadn't really imagined that it was still going on.

I had had even less idea that it involved the affluent, professional classes to which my husband Peter and I belonged at least as much, if not more than 'those kind of ' families living on the 'problem' estates.

I had so much to learn.

I suppose Pete and I had lived fairly sheltered lives. From School we had both gone on to University in the Midlands where he had studied Medicine, I had studied Biological Sciences and we had met through mutual friends in the hospital.

Pete was and still is slim, handsome and athletic. Neither tall nor short and these days somewhat thin on top of his head, nonetheless he is still fit, confident and attractive, not least to me.

I'm as tall as my husband to the inch – taller when I'm in heels - with dark eyes and dark brown hair (most of the time). I'm still slim and fit though I have to work hard to stay that way, and have always had very small boobs, even when feeding our two kids.

Our eldest, now in his mid-twenties, lives and works in London and our two younger children were away at University at that time so Pete and I had been living the life of a couple again for nearly a year before these events took place. It had, I must confess, been a lot of fun being a couple again with evenings out, evenings in, weekends away and, of course, a great deal more sex thanks to vastly improved privacy.

Pete's vasectomy some years ago had helped too, removing the need to worry about my long term use of the pill. Neither of us liked condoms and my menopause was only beginning so some form of protection was still needed.

We have both prospered in our careers too. Pete is a Consultant at a major hospital in the city near where we live. I work in a senior role in a medical-related field in a city nearby but I'd better keep the details of that to myself or it would be far too easy for a persistent reader to work out who we are!

But back to Pete's astonishing proposition.

As a trained researcher, my first instinct was to find out much more about what I had originally considered an exciting fetish, but definitely one for the fantasy zone alone. The idea of turning that fantasy into reality was both frightening and exciting at the same time but not something I was taking seriously. If I'm honest, the idea of my own husband not just accepting me being unfaithful but actually trying to persuade me to have sex with other men though unthinkable in practice was highly arousing in principle.

But there was no doubt Pete was sincere about it. This was something I found deeply unsettling and at first my number one concern was for my husband's mental health.

My first port of call for research was of course the anonymous internet so, with feelings of misgivings, I trawled the net for some time, looking for anything remotely scientific about a man's desire to allow or even watch his wife having sex with another man – the desire to become a Cuckold.

There was plenty of porn of course, much of it badly written and entirely unbelievable, but there were a few genuine studies out there too which I analysed assiduously. I even joined a forum or two under false male names and tentatively joined in a few threads, but soon discovered most participants were either frauds or fantasists or both.

Overall I learned a number of things that both worried and reassured me:

That cuckoldry was a surprisingly common fetish in the western world, affecting perhaps a fifth of men in the USA in some form. One report suggested up to half of all American men had at least fantasised about their partner being with another man. British men couldn't be all that different, I reasoned, rather shocked.

That it is a form of masochism – I hadn't imagined that - in which the pain of a wife's infidelity was offset against powerful feelings of arousal and, in widely varying degrees, a desire to be humiliated.

My athletic, attractive husband, a masochist? Who would have thought it?

Even stranger, I learned that deliberate cuckoldry is most common among educated, affluent middle class couples. This would certainly describe Peter and me. Wow!

I also learned to my surprise that it is not the same as a desire to 'swing' – there was not necessarily any need for the cuckold husband to have a reciprocal right to have sex with other women. Again this fitted in well with all Pete had said to me.

Maybe it wasn't so strange a fetish...? Maybe he didn't need therapy after all.

There were plenty of videos too, most of them obviously fake, but after a while I stumbled on a good few that appeared to be genuine. These I watched with fascination when I was alone in the house or early in the morning while Pete slept upstairs.

Despite their universally low quality, in many cases I could feel the real, genuine enjoyment being experienced by all the participants. To my considerable surprise, the identity of the 'bull' in these encounters seemed almost irrelevant; he was often just 'a cock', usually a black cock but not necessarily a huge one. He didn't even need to be handsome and was often quite overweight!

What was more surprising was that the 'bull' appeared to get less pleasure from having sex with another man's wife than either the unfaithful wife or even her cuckolded husband got out of the event.

I had not been expecting this at all and have to confess that on more than one occasion I was aroused enough watching the video clips to wake my sleeping husband up for a passionate pre-breakfast copulation straight away.

So it went on for weeks, the new knowledge significantly heightening my arousal and dramatically improving our sex life to a degree I hadn't expected at all. Our fantasies grew more detailed and more intense so that I now only had to fake some of my orgasms rather than almost all of them.

Pete kept asking me if I had thought any more about his idea of turning our increasingly vivid fantasies into reality. I kept telling him that I was still thinking about it but wasn't ready to give him a definitive reply yet. When he tried to press me harder, I shamelessly put him off by suggesting too much pressure would make me not want to do it at all!

Meanwhile I continued my researches on line but it soon wasn't enough for my anxious, inquisitive mind.

Guided by some of the techniques I would use to investigate a hypothesis at work, I felt I had to find a way to test out all I had learned in real life, as I would with a medical theory. I needed to keep myself safe and anonymous but at the same time needed to find out more about my own, mixed-up emotions. The online forums I had joined helped to some extent but many of them were so obviously inhabited by imposters as to be useless.

I resolved to find at least one genuine, real life cuckold to explain the increasingly appealing desire to me on a one-to-one basis. More would be better, but one real example was essential.

So I started to write again.

***

I had originally discovered the pleasures of online erotica nearly ten years earlier when Peter and I were going through a 'dry period' in our marriage. It had also been around the time of my first 'near-miss' with Tony, as I now thought of it.

Coincidental? Maybe!

At that time I had investigated erotic stories on the internet as a way of addressing some of the sexual frustrations that the problems in our marriage were causing. Back then there were no 'Fifty Shades' books easily available to a married woman approaching middle age. I quickly found that, although there were plenty of erotic stories on the many websites out there, the bulk of them were disappointingly crude, unrealistic, often misogynistic and almost exclusively male-oriented.

After a frustrating week reading wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am stories in which ten inch cocks seemed to be the norm and were all that women obsessed about, I decided to see if I could do better myself.

Almost immediately I found writing to be both arousing and cathartic; allowing my deepest fantasises free rein as I wrote was extraordinarily arousing. I gradually grew bolder and eventually found the courage to submit my first work under a pseudonym.

Within a week it was live on screen; I could hardly believe my eyes! To be honest, seeing my own words actually 'in print' in public was both terrifying and amazingly satisfying at the same time.

Of course it wasn't all plane sailing. Although I knew to expect some unpleasant comments, I was shocked and hurt by some of the extraordinarily offensive comments posted and messages sent by the horrible trolls who inhabit the internet and who also seem to lie in wait, preparing to attack unsuspecting authors.

The attacks I suffered then and still suffer now could and still can reduce me to tears with their viciousness but when the praise began to arrive a day or so later, I felt a new pride in myself, a pride strong enough to over-ride the hate mail – although there is no way to prevent it hurting.

At first I wrote as a woman but received so many unwanted and unpleasant messages that I quickly switched to a male pseudonym which I stuck with for several years. But eventually as the kids grew older and I had less and less time to myself, the writing slowed to a standstill until I found to my surprise that I had published nothing for over three years.

Now however, the timing of Peter's extraordinary suggestion had been fortuitous. With all my children either at University or working in London, I had much more time on my hands, especially early in the mornings when I habitually rose an hour before my husband and had the house to myself – time to work, think, stretch and, importantly to write again.

And this time through my writing, I needed to deliberately explore the unfamiliar world of infidelity that my husband apparently wanted the two of us to enter.

A few weeks later a new series of erotic stories began to appear on various websites written by a woman describing herself as 'middle aged and middle class'. The stories followed several themes but one in particular stood out in terms of the number of stories and their popularity – the emotive and controversial idea of wife sharing . Mostly were written in the first-person and, unusually for a female writer, were almost all written from the Cuckold Male point of view.

My previous years of writing as a man were beginning to pay off.

My first attempt was enjoyable, if slightly off target. At the time I hadn't quite grasped the important difference between 'swinging' and 'cuckolding' so had written a story based on an incident that had actually happened to a close friend and her husband and which I had learned during a drunken hen party. To my surprise, I really enjoyed the writing and the closeness it had brought both me and my friend as we collaborated rather drunkenly on the details.

The story was well received but the feedback taught me of the existence of the 'one-way' swinging or 'wife sharing' world which I suppose I had suspected existed but had never explored. My next story went into this much more deliberately and deeply. Feedback for this second story was much more revealing and brought me into contact with a handful of trolls, a good few outright liars but also several real life cuckolds with whom I began to correspond regularly.

Richard was the most influential – I have his good counsel to thank for much of what took place the following year - and through their open and honest conversations I gradually began to understand the attraction of 'planned infidelity' to the cuckold as well as to his wife or girlfriend.

And with that understanding, my husband's fantasies began to feel less and less perverted and, to my surprise, I found myself unexpectedly becoming more and more interested.

***

I turned and looked at the kitchen clock. Just after eight. Plenty of time, I thought as I filled the kettle and switched it on. I smiled inwardly, guessing that my husband of over twenty-five years would be in bed for at least another hour - possibly much longer, given the amount of red wine he had drunk at the dinner party last night.

I had been the nominated driver as usual so had remained nearly sober all evening; a good thing as it turned out, given the way Tony's hands had wandered when I had dropped him off at his apartment on our way home.

Tony had been my husband's partner in crime over dinner, at least as far as red wine consumption was concerned. Although not nearly as drunk as Pete, he had certainly been tipsy enough to push his usual 'goodbye hug' quite a bit further tonight. Once again I had been forced good humouredly to move his fondling hands away from my buttocks and up to my back as we kissed our goodbyes on his doorstep.

Tony and his wife Jane had been two of our closest friends ever since our children were born. Indeed Jane and I had first met at a nursery school Christmas party. Their two children were much the same ages as our three and we had spent many enjoyable evenings, weekends and even a few holidays away with them over the years.

The only fly in the ointment – if it was a fly – was that Tony had become a little took forward when hugging me goodbye after a day out or especially after a wine-fuelled dinner party. He had always been very tactile with the wives of his friends but as far as I knew had never actually either been slapped in the face or taken to bed by any of us. The general view was that it was 'just his way' and that he didn't really mean anything by it but it was noticeable that the way he touched me was considerably bolder than other women and was getting more so.

I had tried to hide this mild groping from my husband – after all, we're British and don't like 'scenes' – but as I learned more about the 'cuckold mindset' it started to cross my mind that perhaps my husband was not as ignorant as I had imagined; perhaps he had known this was happening all along but had chosen not to intervene. Perhaps he even got a thrill out of seeing another man's hands on his wife's body.

I was never entirely sure how to react to Tony's attempted groping. On the one hand it was an outrageous invasion of my personal space which as a confidant, professional woman with a decidedly married status I absolutely should not tolerate.

On the other hand, Tony was a very close friend of us both who I was increasingly finding extremely attractive and with whom I had come very close to 'inappropriate contact' on at least two memorable occasions in the past.

Extremely close and very inappropriate on one memorable occasion a few years ago; the closest I had ever come to cheating on my husband. This was an important reason I usually chose to drive and not drink if I knew Tony would be present.

Besides, he had been a bit drunk too, and who could blame him? After all, his wife of over twenty years had only months before started having an affair. I still couldn't quite believe it; Jane had been my closest friend for nearly twenty years. We had first met at the kids' nursery and our two families had been on holiday together nearly a dozen times since then.

She was nearly the same age as me but just after the previous Christmas, had been foolish enough to embark on a very public affair with her Personal Trainer, a man almost young enough to be her son. It was obvious to all her friends, including me that this relationship could never last long but she appeared oblivious to the fact and seemed to be revelling in her new notoriety.

So far this mid-life crisis had resulted in Jane and her husband separating and Tony living for the past six months in a new three-bedroom apartment near the city centre.

If I am totally honest, I was also rather envious that a fifty-one year old mother of two could attract and so far keep so young and beautiful a boy. Pete had rather leeringly suggested that she must be very good in bed and from what she occasionally told me about her new relationship I suspected this was probably true. She was certainly still extremely pretty, I had to admit and over the years had spent long hours in the gym keeping in shape but it had still been quite a surprise when the two of them had gone public with their affair.

Tony had moved out of their home shortly afterwards.

Since then, on several occasions and especially after a few drinks, Jane had made suggestive comments about what it was like to be in bed with her young lover compared with her husband and by implication, what it must be like for me in bed with mine. Her eyes were bright and animated and her face looked a good ten years younger as she described how incredible he made her feel. Sometimes when tipsy she would even hint at some of the things they got up to which, she once confessed after a very drunken girls' night in, now included frequent anal sex.

The image of this china-doll-pretty mother of two on her knees with a young man's cock in her rectum was almost more than my imagination could handle but the profound and exciting effect on my friend was undeniable and impossible to dismiss.

What spoiled the image was her rather bitter attitude to her husband Tony, who even then would seldom comment publically on her behaviour. Jane on the other hand would often make subtle and occasionally extremely unsubtle hints at his performance in bed, suggesting that his erection simply wasn't long enough or that, unsurprisingly, he didn't have the energy of a gym instructor more than twenty years his junior.

But whatever the reasons for her infidelity, Jane was paying a high price for the sexual gratification she was now receiving. Apart from me, many of her older friends now tended to shy away from her as if the illness might be contagious. Certainly she and her boyfriend were very seldom invited out as a couple. Worse still, her children refused to stay at the family house she still occupied when they came home from University. If her boyfriend was there, they preferred to squeeze into their father's apartment rather than give any suggestion they accepted their mother's young lover.