'Are you okay Penny? Please reply. I'm worried.'
The screen of my phone flashed in the corner of the kitchen the following morning for the third time. The message that glowed across the screen before fading told me instantly who had sent it; Tony, the man with whom, less than twenty-four hours ago, I had committed adultery for the first time after over twenty years of monogamous marriage.
I had cheated on my husband. Not in one of our fantasies; not in one of my erotic stories. No, this time another man's erect penis had actually been inside my body and, if that wasn't bad enough, it had even left its load of semen within me.
I was no longer a faithful wife. I was soiled goods. The damage had been done and could never be undone.
"Are you okay Penny?"
My husband's words mirrored those of my only lover exactly but for different reasons. Not knowing how to reply, I had deliberately ignored all the messages Tony had sent me since I had hurriedly shooed him from our house the previous evening only minutes after our first and only copulation had ended. He was unsurprisingly becoming anxious.
"I didn't sleep well, that's all," was the best I could say.
Pete's question deserved a better response but he seemed content, returning to the article in his newspaper.
He had cause to ask; I had risen early as usual that morning looking terrible after a largely sleepless, guilt-ridden night. Riven with remorse after the previous day's incident, I wasn't in the mood to continue writing any of my erotic stories so instead I had flicked impatiently through the newspaper at the breakfast bar until my husband had come downstairs, thinking terrible thoughts about what had happened only hours before.
No matter how many times I told myself that Pete and I had fantasised about this happening many times; that it was something he had told me over again that he wanted; it didn't help reassure me as the events of the previous evening ran over and over in my troubled mind.
How had I let it happen? After so many years - maybe decades of flirting, I had finally let our close, long-time family friend Tony seduce me, strip me and fuck me on our lounge floor. Over twenty years of fidelity had been thrown away for what turned out to be less than ten minutes of frantic, clumsy fornication.
What was far worse was that they had probably been the most fantastic, most exciting ten minutes of my life. As I sat alone in our kitchen that Saturday morning I was trying to deal with an awful but undeniable truth: that I had loved every crude, brutal and abandoned minute of my fall from grace.
It hadn't been like Pete and my bedroom fantasies at all; there had been no lengthy seduction; no gradual disrobing, no long drawn-out foreplay. It had in truth been more of a crude wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am fuck but it had felt simply incredible.
Even as I sat, guilt-laden across from my husband I could still remember vividly how Tony's short but so very thick cock had felt inside me; the sheer physical shock as my inexperienced body had been penetrated by its first unfamiliar cock in over twenty years, stretching me tightly around its impressive, unaccustomed girth.
I could still picture clearly how he had looked, his half-clothed body over mine as he thrust that short, stubby cock into me over and over again.
I could remember vividly the arrival of my first vaginal climax in nearly a year; how it had caught me unawares, shaking me uncontrollably as the shockwave of illicit pleasure had pulsed through my yielding body.
I could remember vividly the look on Tony's handsome face as his own climax turned his familiar smile into a cruel grimace before his pulsing cock began to pump thick sticky semen deep into my vagina.
I had studied myself carefully in the bathroom mirror before coming downstairs, afraid to see tell-tale signs of guilt written brazenly across my face. All saw was a tired, middle aged woman who could have done with a lot more sleep. My vulva was still pink, swollen and surprisingly sore from the battering Tony's cock had given it but beyond that there were no obvious outward signs of the momentous change that had taken place.
But there was no escaping the fact that I the change had happened; that was no longer a faithful wife. I was a cheat; an adulteress; a fallen woman; a harlot as my Grandmother would have said.
I felt guilt like I had never felt before. I felt shame. I felt sick.
My husband Peter had risen a little earlier than usual too and was sitting across the table from me, oblivious to his wife's new status as a 'fallen women' and his own as a Cuckold.
I looked again at the handsome man who sat drinking his coffee and reading the financial pages, blissfully ignorant of the guilt that wracked my every thought. I thumbed distractedly through the colour supplements, knowing and dreading the fact that I would soon have to read and reply to the messages waiting on my phone.
Even the newspaper seemed to taunt me, apparently containing nothing but reports of celebrities having affairs and marriages breaking up but deep down I knew it was really my conscience haunting me. The undisputable fact that my husband had spent the last year positively urging me to take a lover only went so far in assuaging my feelings of guilt. Worse still, however guilty I felt, there was no denying that it had been one of the most intense sexual experiences of my life.
I looked across at my phone again and wondered what my new lover had to say. Did he feel as guilty as I did? Did he regret it all? Had he lost all respect for me now as I had done for myself? Would he be overcome with remorse and feel he had to confess all? If so, who would he confess to? His marriage might be in tatters but I wanted to keep mine!
Finally I could wait no longer. Interrupting Peter's bright, talkative conversation, I excused myself and almost ran to the upstirs lavatory, sweeping my phone off the dresser as I passed and locking the door to be sure there would be no interruptions.
I sat down on the toilet seat and fumbled with the phone's screen until I found Tony's latest message. I read it and all his previous messages before taking a deep breath and dashing off a hurried reply.
'Hi. I'm okay. How are you?' I replied, physically shaking with nerves.
'Thank God Penny! I thought you were ignoring me,' his reply came almost instantly.
'No. Sorry. Couldn't find a private place. Are you okay?'
'Yes of course but I feel very bad about yesterday. I wanted to talk last night but didn't dare call.'
I thanked God that he hadn't. My nerves were frazzled now; the previous night they would have been in pieces.
'Do you regret it?' I asked, not knowing what answer I wanted to hear.
"Do you?"
I paused. The answer should have been an unequivocal 'yes' but even then I couldn't make myself ignore the incredible feelings my single adulterous encounter had produced.
"I'm not sure," I replied truthfully.
"I understand. There's a lot to think about."
It was the understatement of the year.
"Did I force you into it?"
Tony's question wrong-footed me for a moment. In all my night-horrors, I had never once even pretended to myself that I had been a reluctant participant in the wicked deed. While it might have been a sop to my conscience for a moment it would have been too great a lie even for a fallen wife to use.
