Howard's story
I slept fitfully that Saturday night, thinking about what I had discovered about Shelley.
One thing that disturbed me profoundly as I read further into her logbooks was the fact that at some points I was becoming sexually aroused at the thought of what she was doing.
In fact, the next night, Sunday, I woke up in the middle of the night with a throbbing hard-on after having a dream about something that I'd read in her logs about something she had done.
And that left me terribly confused. I was still hurt by the fact that she had deceived me for so long, and that she had sought out sex, lots of it, outside the marriage vows.
But I couldn't get out of my mind the fact that I loved this woman, that she had been my partner for 31 years, that she was and always has been the sexiest thing I'd ever seen.
I don't know, maybe I have always had an inferiority complex where Shelley was concerned. All I know is that I've always considered myself lucky to have her, and I was having a hard time dealing with the possibility of losing her.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I didn't necessarily blame the people she was seeing. I mean, let's face it, my wife is a knockout, and I can't see anyone turning down a chance to fuck her.
So how did I feel about Shelley, now that I knew about her secret life?
I put my logical thought processes to it, considering how she had remained loving and affectionate through all of this. She had never denied me when I wanted sex, never let on that I wasn't adequate for her needs, never tried to assault my manhood.
That counted for something. She may have been deceiving me when she traveled, but I didn't think she such a good actress that she could fake the kind of affection she'd continued to show me. Even sleeping, she has always been one to cuddle and bond herself to me.
I believed I needed to take that into consideration when it came time to decide the fate of our marriage.
Then there was the matter of the logs themselves.
Why had she felt compelled to chart her adultery? Did she subconsciously want to get caught? Was it guilt?
It was obvious by the way they were hidden away that she didn't want me to find them, but it was also obvious that she felt a need to write down her exploits, maybe as a way of unburdening herself.
I still wasn't sure about what I was going to do, but I knew one thing for certain. We needed some serious help with communication.
I had never realized that my wife had this sexual beast that was lurking inside of her. Oh, I knew she could get pretty hot-blooded sexually, but I had no concept of what kind of a sexual creature she really was inside, and how it had begun to consume her.
And, for some reason, she never felt like she could tell me that I wasn't giving her what she wanted, what she needed. She had just let me rock along thinking I was doing fine, when obviously I wasn't doing fine at all.
As I said at the start, I'm quiet and fairly mild-mannered, so it's not in my nature to ask what's going on in Shelley's head. And for all of her assertiveness and business acumen, Shelley is pretty guarded about the inner workings of her mind, and she doesn't readily volunteer information, not even to me. If we had any hope of salvaging our marriage, and at that point I wasn't sure if that was possible, that had to change.
And while we were restoring our lines of communication, I realized that we also needed to be more open in sharing our fantasies. It's clear to me that Shelley has some rather lurid fantasies, and it appears that she's been living out as many of them as possible.
She apparently fantasized about sex with a black man, she's developed a taste for anal sex and she has shown a bent toward exhibitionism.
I, too, have some pretty raunchy fantasies, and most of them involve many of the things Shelley has been up to over these past seven years, which was why I found myself aroused at some of the passages I encountered in her logs, in spite of the hurt they caused.
As I made my way through her logs, moving through 1999, 2000, 2001 and beyond, I saw several names appear and disappear, but Louis Bertelli and Darrell Poston remained pretty constant.
There were also few others that began to appear with numbing regularity, and one of them was an Alicia Sanchez, a client of Shelley's in Miami.
It followed the same pattern as the others, meetings and dinner dates, right up to an entry from early 2000 that made my cock stand up and salute, because it described one of my most cherished fantasies...
Shelley's story
I guess it's a fair question to ask why I kept such detailed logs of my trysts with other lovers. Really, though, that's like asking me why I breathe.
Mostly, it was just force of habit. I'm not kidding when I say that I started in my company at the bottom and worked my way up the ladder. My first job there was as a stenographer, and one of the first things I learned was to keep concise, yet detailed notes of everything that went on in my job.
Until I got my promotion seven years ago, I kept my work logs in spiral notebooks. But one of the congratulatory gifts I got from a co-worker was a hardbound logbook, a datebook that I could order refills of each year as I needed.
So I began to use those, because they were easier and more precisely dated. And I kept them, I think, because something else was at work in my mind, a subconscious sense of guilt.
I've known from the very first that I've deceived Howard grievously. I've said repeatedly that he is a sweet, loving man that I probably don't deserve, and he certainly doesn't deserve to be treated the way I've treated him. I'll live with that shame for the rest of my life, no matter what happens.
Maybe logging my trysts was a subconscious way of purging my guilt, a feeling that if I wrote it down in concise, clinical detail that it could somehow become less real.
So it just never occurred to me to not log everything I did on my business travels, and that included my sexual affairs. I don't know, maybe I considered those affairs part of the job. It certainly didn't hurt to make the clients happy, but that's not why I had these affairs.
Not every client I saw got to fuck me, and some who did only got to do it once. I've never gotten a sense that it affected my relations with the companies I deal with, pro or con.