'Finished!'
I said to myself as I clicked on the 'Publish Story' icon and leaned back in my chair, feeling pleased as I watched the cursor spin for a few seconds before the confirmation message appeared on the laptop screen.
Moderator permitting, the latest chapter in my story would be on line within a few days. No doubt the first troll attack would follow within minutes of publication but I had become immune to their extreme nastiness by then.
Well, almost immune.
I looked up at the kitchen clock. My husband Pete wouldn't be downstairs for at least half an hour. I poured myself another mug of tea then returned to my laptop, opened my secret author's email account and began to read the half dozen messages that were waiting in my Inbox.
***
It was Sunday morning, four weeks after Pete had returned from his conference in Geneva when the two of us had come as close to splitting up as I ever wanted to get. It had been the end of a two-week period apart during which we were to make the most important decisions in our twenty-year-plus marriage.
During our brief separation, I was to decide whether I wanted to remain with my husband or leave him and live with Tony, the close family friend who had seduced me the previous November and with whom I had been carrying on a passionate affair ever since.
In my defence, my husband had been pressuring me to take a lover for over year. Wife sharing had featured strongly in our bedtime fantasies for a long time and he had said he was keen to turn it into a reality.
When that reality had arrived and I had confessed my adultery to Pete, far from divorcing me, to my surprise and relief he had agreed that the affair could continue as long as it didn't pose a threat to our marriage and I promised to be honest and truthful about it the whole time.
To my shame, I had been neither of these, falling badly in love with Tony, arranging meetings and romantic overnight stays with my lover behind my husband's back to the point where he and I had actually planned for me to leave my husband and move in together, possibly even getting married once our respective divorces had come through.
The deceit had been so serious that, once it had been discovered, my cuckolded husband hadn't been sure he could live with me any longer. Pete had insisted on us having a trial separation to make the decisions we had to make freely and unencumbered by our marriage.
I was supposed to spend the time living as Tony's wife, deciding with which man my future lay. As I was doing this, my husband Pete would be living in Consultants' Accommodation at the hospital at which he worked and would be deciding whether he wanted his lying, cheating wife back at all.
Then natural justice had intervened. During our supposedly brief separation, things had not gone to plan. Far from welcoming me into his bed and his life, my lover Tony had immediately and callously dumped me, leaving me frustrated and alone in our family house throughout the entire first week of my freedom.
It should have taught me a serious lesson, but fate has a cruel sense of humour. Far from pining for each other, before the week was out both my husband and I had tasted forbidden fruit.
Pete's bite of Eve's apple had come in the pretty, petite, deceptively innocent-looking form of my lover's estranged wife. Julie, a woman my age and my closest female friend had spent a night of passionate, highly adventurous fornication with my husband during which he had apparently fully satisfied her infamously demanding libido.
In the process she had also introduced him to many new pleasures including anal sex; something he and I had tried but never successfully managed. For some reason I found the idea of my husband enjoying something in bed with another woman that he and I hadn't been able to share particularly hard to bear.
While this was all happening, my own voyage deeper into infidelity had come at the hands of Julie's erstwhile lover Darren, a twenty-nine year old personal trainer at the sports club. Darren had seduced me very easily, bedded me equally efficiently then subjected me to what was without doubt the most exciting, most energetic and exhausting night of sex in my entire life in his squalid untidy bedroom in a shared house.
The walk of shame I had taken the following morning had unfortunately been observed by his housemate Will who couldn't have failed to understand what my presence in his house at that hour meant and might even have heard my orgasmic exclamations throughout the night.
But some good had come of all this; during their pillow talk, Julie had told Pete about her husband's long and inglorious history of seducing married women and abandoning them as soon as their marriages were broken. Apparently I was only the latest in a long line of dumped conquests but was the closest of their friends who had fallen under his spell.
After Julie had visited me to tell me the same thing, I had flown to Geneva and begged Pete to take me back, something he had eventually agreed but not without both suspicions and conditions.
His suspicion was that I was only coming back to him on the rebound from my failed affair; that it wasn't love for him but a need not to be alone that was driving my return to his life. No matter how often and how earnestly I assured him this wasn't the case, I knew my husband retained a level of mistrust. Given my history, this was easy to understand.
Pete had finally agreed to have me back but on strict conditions, one of which was that if we were to have an ongoing marriage, it would have to be the Hotwife relationship he and I had originally agreed before my affair with Tony got out of hand. Going back to a normal monogamous relationship was simply not possible after all that had happened and most certainly was not what Pete wanted.
As he told me many times, I had got what I wanted out of my affair; his fantasies had barely been addressed at all. If we each paid attention to the other's needs, we could perhaps make it work for both of us this time in an even-handed way that had been completely absent from my self-centred affair.
So our new marriage contract had begun.
The Geneva Convention as we jokingly referred to it, involved Pete and me spending a few months as a conventional couple, trying to re-establish some of the trust my affair had destroyed. This was not going to be easy but we both understood it was essential before the two of us could embark once again on the Hotwife -- Cuckold lifestyle we had tried and failed to establish first time round.
This renewed romantic relationship was now a month old and, it had to be said, was working very well so far. Keen to succeed and now with the same ultimate sexual destiny in mind, both my husband and I had been trying hard to bring the romance back into our marriage. We had been out to dinner many times, the house was full of flowers and the smell of cooking; we had enjoyed a romantic weekend away as if we were a normal, affluent couple.
Emotionally though, the beginning had been predictably shaky. From the outset is was obvious that, whatever he said aloud, inside my husband no longer had the trust in me that had characterised the previous twenty-plus years of our marriage.
Although he never said as much, this mistrust manifested itself in many little ways. For example, Pete would ask me about my day and my plans in much more detail than before; he would look at my diary more often 'to make sure his was up to date'. I even caught him quietly looking at my phone as if checking who I had been talking to or exchanging messages with.
All these were little things; given their cause there was nothing important enough to object to but together they created an atmosphere that left me in no doubt that it was down to me to demonstrate remorse and make my reformation obvious. So I left my diary easily available for him to find. I took the password off my phone so he could see everything. I told him every detail of my activities that he asked and after a week or so Pete seemed to be a little less nervous.
All the same I could tell things would never be quite as they were before.
It has been said many times by many people but until it happens to you, one never truly understands how a trust that has taken decades to build can be shattered so quickly.
And that was exactly what I had done.
Perversely, our sex life blossomed immediately; Pete and I made love passionately every day for the first week -- often more than once - before settling down to a more manageable two or three times each week. My vaginal orgasms remained few and far between but with the promise of more partners to follow I could live with this disappointment easily.
Besides, there were always my husband's world-class oral skills to fall back on if a climax became essential.
Although I had to accept with sadness that the depth of trust we used to have might never be restored, there was no doubt that our relationship was improving considerably. Our social life had resumed largely unaffected too; we had been out for dinner with our circle of friends several times and there was no sign of anyone knowing about the difficult patch Pete and I had just gone through -- indeed were still going through.
An unspoken agreement seemed to have emerged too whereby the painful subject of my affair with Tony was never discussed. In return, I didn't raise the rather less controversial subject of Pete's night with Julie. I was concerned that this lack of discussion meant that we were still not properly addressing the main issue between us but at this stage it seemed more important to heal the wounds than to open them further.
My Hotwife bracelet with its blue charms representing each of my official dates with Tony had been consigned to a closet drawer but interestingly, I did notice that Pete's collection of my semen-soiled knickers was still in its shoebox at the bottom of his closet.
There was however, no barrier to the open and detailed discussion of my night of passion with Darren; something with which my husband seemed completely obsessed as an example of what our future Hotwife lifestyle might look like.
