'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.