Chapter Forty-Nine
They say the road to hell is the smooth, straight one; the deceptively easy path that descends so slowly you hardly know you're on it until you reach your fiery destination.
They also say that the Devil makes work for idle hands.
As far as Penny Barker is concerned, they are right on both counts.
***
After the extraordinary revelations of that week and to everyone's surprise, life returned to what approximated to normal in our household and remained so for a long time. At the time, it felt as if stability was finally returning to my life after far too long an absence. Little did any of us know it was just the lull before the storm.
And what a storm it was going to be!
Izzy went back to University and to her boyfriend Jack, knowing that her both parents had cheated but resigned to keeping that fact to herself. In exchange for that, her sex videos and her short but very passionate affair with her boyfriend's father would remain a secret known only to me and our shared lover, Tony.
No-one else, especially her Dad, was ever to know.
Although I was trying to carry on as before, the disturbance this revelation had made to my peace of mind was profound and continuing. Along with a mother's natural instinct to protect her offspring, came unexpectedly powerful feelings I had not expected but could not shake off.
The idea of being in competition with my own daughter for a man's intimate affections, or worse, of the two of us being compared by him as lovers was deeply unsettling. Vivid images of how it had felt being fucked half senseless by him flooded back into my mind alarmingly often, usually triggered by random thoughts, memories or coincidences at any time of day.
Knowing that my daughter had shared those same experiences and had the same kind of memories made my belly ache with jealousy.
At least our recently outed gay son Tim was happy. His boyfriend Thomas's family had proved more supportive than expected and the two of them were now properly acknowledged as a couple. It did feel very strange preparing a double bed for the pair of them when they visited, and even stranger seeing them cuddling together and casually kissing, but they looked so happy it soon seemed only natural.
I even got to spend a day or two with Samantha, my son Josh's girlfriend and their baby, thereby temporarily relieving both Josh and Pete of their duties. Rather predictably, the boys used their freedom to watch live sport in a local pub.
As I knew well, secrets are not good for a marriage so Pete and my relationship was somewhat strained for quite a while, but once he realised that whatever magic spell I had cast had worked and that Izzy really was going to keep quiet, even he began to forgive me.
Although there was still an element of awkwardness between us, our life as a couple with a small baby returned to something like the barely regulated chaos in which all such families try to survive.
By midsummer, Leanne had started to sleep through the night too, or at least the gap between her late and early feeds had lengthened to around six hours. This was more than enough for me to feel I had enjoyed a fair night's sleep myself, so my energy levels were considerably restored.
Everything in our lives was finally going smoothly, or so I thought.
The truth was that is going too smoothly; so smoothly that I didn't notice the way in which my life was drifting until it was too late.
If I had to name an event, I would say that things began to go wrong when Pete's work started get much busier. Fully occupied with my baby and my writing, I wasn't exactly sure what had changed for him, but over time, he started coming home late more often, or later on, staying at the hospital overnight.
This wasn't unheard of, but for someone in his senior position it was unusual. He even had to work a few extra days at weekends too.
Thanks to his absence and consequent tiredness, Pete's libido reduced considerably and our highly active sex life deteriorated until it had become at best, sporadic.
Not even our recent change to predominantly anal rather than vaginal penetration and the resulting improvement in my husband's pleasure, was enough to maintain the sexual momentum we had developed, and which I had unknowingly come to depend on.
Still, at least it gave my body a break physically.
Since our change of orifices and the high frequency of rear penetration, my consumption of panty liners had dramatically increased. I was beginning to worry that if we kept up this pace, I might become permanently loose back there.
I had heard stories of men and women needing to wear nappies after too much anal sex. The thought disturbed me, but there was no way I was going to interfere with my husband's sexual contentedness.
As a result, the recent one-sided reduction in our sex life, though easy to understand, was difficult to bear. It would have been difficult for any couple, but for a woman with my baby-enhanced libido it was physically painful as well as an emotional strain.
Especially when I knew that Julie, my husband's only former lover was still single, waiting in the wings with her petite body, her tight vagina, her readily available sphincter and gold pierced clitoral hood.
With my increased energy, near-constant arousal and surging libido, I badly missed his presence in the house and in my bed and was forced to resort to masturbation and my toys on many occasions for the daily sexual relief I now desperately needed.
But at least it gave me much more private time in which to write, to correspond with my readers and, increasingly, to look online for what I told myself was research. This led to a positive plethora of new published compositions spilling from my keyboard, which in turn led to a huge increase in my correspondence with readers, which in turn... and so it went on.
From this new correspondence, a whole series of exciting, real-life erotic stories emerged, each as true as I could make it. Most were within my go-to cuckold genre, but there were other themes too, some light and cheerful, others darker and more brooding. Some were even quite disturbing.
Unfortunately, along with these new stories came new and sometimes appallingly vicious troll attacks. Though by now I was mostly hardened to these assaults, some still managed to cut through my defensive armour and hurt me, especially those few which appeared to be from other women.