Chapter 2

Sundays turned into more than one-day-a-week: Steph was staying at my apartment more than one day a week. Then, over Spring Break, she just moved in. My carefully plotted schedule went to hell. First I had to give up scrabble club. I mean, who had time for shifting tiles around a playing board when I could use the time to study. And once I studied in that time, I could free up a couple of extra hours to do you-know-what with you-know-who.

Then the debate team had to exist without me. Consider: all the time I needed to devote to researching 'whether the Catholic Church, over the 2000 years of its history, was a force for good or evil' and compare that with fucking the beautiful Stephanie in the afternoons.

Then Steph had to give up being on the chess team. With all the extra time she was spending with me, she needed the time to study. I stayed on the chess team. I only had another year of eligibility and I was the best player there. We were gonna be going to the U.S. Collegiate Team Championship in May.

She refused to be a regular at AD&D, however. In fact, she began missing more than every other week. Steph said that she used the time to catch up on her social life. She'd go to parties or hang out with 'the girls' or even have a regular date with some guy she'd met. I mean ... what could I say? We never went out anywhere. Sure we'd go out to restaurants – everybody has to eat. But we didn't dance, or go to a movie, or go to a party. She was adamant that she'd never 'do anything' with some guy she went with, or any guy she met at a party. We'd just stay at home: fuck, eat, sleep – that's what our time was spent on. With the emphasis on fucking.

She was driving me nuts. Believe me when I say I wanted her. In every way. I wanted to go dancing with her, as bad a dancer as I was. I wanted to go on dates. But she went out with other guys. I'd read the stories online about cheating girl friends and wives. So I bugged her purse. Just a tiny digital voice activated recorder. All I picked up was the sounds of her at a party, her with the girls – explaining why she was with such a nerd. She said, by the way, it was because there was a really great guy just lurking behind the nerdiness. Her at a club – that was mostly music, because she was dancing with guys she met there. No real evidence of any cheating. Only evidence that she was doing exactly what she said she was doing.

And what she was doing was, if hard evidence could be believed, was fucking me blind four and five and six nights per week, and that's all. I had to call for a break when it came time for exams, 'cause I didn't want to go into them exhausted.

Spring became summer and one year flowed seamlessly into the next. Steph graduated, and I had only one year to go. I'd already been targeted by a Silicone Valley chip developer: Ajax. Their business model was to design a new -whatever- chip then sell the rights to one of the big boys and live off the royalties. They offered me a hunk of stock options.

I surprised Steph one Sunday by taking her to a very fancy restaurant, dropping to one knee and thrusting a paper at her. It said: 'I hope you can find the ring. It is within ten feet. Please marry me.'

She tore the table apart. I stayed on one knee and the others in the restaurant must have wondered what was going on. The restaurant staff were in on it, of course. Salt and pepper cellars were emptied. The centerpiece arrangement of flowers was shredded. She looked under the table cloth and spent quite a few minutes looking at the underside of the table. She probed the padded chairs. Then she looked overhead at the crystal chandelier. She kicked off her four inch heels – the ones with the green soles that matched her eyes – and took her mini-skirted self up on the table and finally found it. It was hanging on a nylon filament.

Steph got down and showed me the ring. She was out of breath and said, "Are you satisfied?"

I said, "Yes. 'Cause you'll be my wife. My goal is satiated, it is assuaged, the fire of indecision is quenched, it is..."

She put her fingers on my lips indicating that I should be quiet. "A kiss is a lovely trick, designed by nature, to stop speech when words become superfluous," she said. "Do you know who said that?"

"Other than you? No."

"Ingrid Bergman ... Shut up and kiss me," she said.

So I did, to the general applause of the other patrons. Eventually, we did have dinner there, finished off with a nice cheesecake. Then we went home for a dessert that lasted until noon the next day. We took turns fucking each other blind.

I was in heaven. How could life be better than this? We still played our little puzzle challenge game. Sometimes the challenges took the form of a scavenger hunt. Figure out a clue, then go to some location, there'd be a lockbox chained to some thing or another. Read the contents, figure out that clue and repeat until you got to the last box. In which there was always something sexual – or a card promising some sexual favor.

It was a wonderful life.

She took a job as a junior programmer at some firm in the valley. They developed an accounting package, and it needed modification for every new customer. So she had to travel. Mostly it was day trips with a Senior Programmer (Note the capitals on SP. He was very Title Conscious. I told Steph that she should say she was a 5^th level Elven Cleric [in AD&D] with big boobs, named Melony, but she demurred.) He was named Al Evans. It didn't bother me. She said he was a nitwit. Even the overnighters to Reno or Los Angeles or Portland were okay.

She was still gorgeous. She was still fucking me blind. She was still saying she loved me. And the little recorder that I had hidden in her purse was still telling me that she was exactly where she said she was, doing exactly what she said she was doing. I wasn't dumb. I read the stories online, and while I knew that they were fiction, they had a gram of truth to them.

In January of my sixth year, I submitted my doctorate dissertation, and the only thing I had to do was defend it. So, on February 1, I started with Ajax Chips, and started earning my stock options.

One summer day, my friend, Walt, at Ajax gave me a little gizmo he was flirting with: it was a pen-light sized detector that would buzz or flash a light if there were any electronic devices transmitting within its range. It was a private project he built in his garage – some garage he must have had. It looked professionally made. I searched online for similar devices and found cigarette pack sized units. Nothing as small and compact.

He wanted me to try it out.

Naturally it went nuts at Ajax. There were all kinds of sending units there: cameras, laptops, cell phones with GPS, you name it. I stuck the little detector in my shirt pocket. At the end of the day, I turned off my laptop and went out to my car. The thing had been vibrating every time it got close to a sending unit – about five feet.

When I was walking toward my car, the detector went off – then stopped. I clicked off my cell phone, but it went off again. That was strange, and I thought maybe it malfunctioned. There wasn't anything nearby. I shrugged it off – it was a prototype after all, and maybe it burped when it should have farted.

On my way home, it vibrated again, and again I ascribed it to a malfunction. But then it vibrated when my car-mounted GPS went off. Then it stopped. And started again. I turned off my GPS and that didn't matter. Then it stopped again. I'd mention it to Walt tomorrow.

Steph was on a day trip to Sacramento, so I was expecting her to be late. When I got home, the little detector started to vibrate and stayed on. I went into the bedroom to change and buzzzz, within five seconds it was vibrating again.

I changed out of my work clothes and stuck the detector back in my pocket. I was looking around the house, now, however. Didn't see much. I walked into the bathroom to do my thing there, and the device was silent.

I stepped into the hallway. Silent.

My office space – a.k.a. the spare bedroom. Silent.

The bedroom again. The thing started to vibrate.

Hmmm. I went out to the car again to see what happened. It vibrated again for a short time, then stopped. I investigated. I looked in the wheel wells, under the car, under the seats in the car. I found a mini-recorder, similar to the one that I had hidden in Steph's purse, but a different brand. Mine was Wal-Mart brand; this one was from Radio Shack.

I put the recorder back in place and continued to look around. Under the back seat, I found a GPS transmitter. I put it back and went back to the apartment.

There's only one person I could think of who'd be tracking me: Stephanie. But why? And listening in the car? What was that about?

I know exactly why I hid a recorder in her purse. She was gorgeous and I was just a tall gerd. And she wanted to go out and party with strange guys. And she travelled.

What did she think I was doing?

Then I knew. This was a setup for a game. I didn't know what, yet. Maybe she wanted to semi-cheat (in the game – get your mind out of the gutter!) and see what I was doing when it started. I picked up my cell and started to call Walt.

Then I looked at the cell. Could she be listening to my calls? It was technologically possible. I walked down to the laundry room of the apartment complex, punched up Walt's number and dialed him on the pay phone there. While the call was ringing, I took out the battery on my phone.

I explained what I'd found to him and solicited his advice on overcoming the surveillance. He suggested I put a camera in the smoke detectors, and to foil the kind of electronic transmission detector I now had, it would only transmit when I triggered it to, from my laptop.

My laptop! Stephanie had the skills to put some piece of software into it. Probably a key logger. Well, I have the skills to take it out. Walt stopped me.

"Why not put in a hardware switch on a USB device that could turn off and turn on the key logger," he said. "You know she's up to something, right?"

"Of course, and I'm going to find out what sort of game she's playing." This was getting to be fun. Like the old Mad Magazine comic: Spy vs Spy. "You have one of those things that could turn off key logging?"

"Well, not exactly," he replied. "I don't really know how to do that, but I know they're out there. I have a traveling keyboard that you plug in to USB and it will bypass the normal keyboard routines – goes straight to the BIOS, I think. Personally, I don't have much use for it."

"So, I could use it for a while?"

"Yeah. I'll get it for you. It's here at my apartment -- somewhere. You know how it is. I don't use it, so I put it away. I'm sure I can find it."

"Uhm ... how can I put in the counter-spy cams without being seen on her spy cams?"

"Oh, that's simple. Let me get my stuff and come over."

"No, no. Better not. She'll be home any time, tonight. Better do it tomorrow while she's at work. Can you get the day off?" We went back and forth and eventually arranged to meet the day after tomorrow, outside my apartment, at 9:30.

When she got back from her trip, later that same night, Steph practically attacked me in the bedroom. You may think I'm boasting, but that was fairly normal for us. Five nights a week she'd suck and fuck until I was worn out – or until she was worn out – whichever.

But I did notice something a little strange. You know that little head flip that you see women in porn movies do? The one that gets their hair out of the way so the camera can get the blowjob scene without their hair dangling down? Steph had a lot of hair and she made sure it was always away from the side of her that was facing the shelf of knick-knacks and stuffed animals she had on her mirrored dressing table.

And once, when she was riding me in reverse cowboy position, she spread her legs and leaned back – again like they do in porn movies, but I don't think any normal person would do – to show my big dick pounding into her open vagina from underneath; show it to the dressing table with all the knick-knacks and stuffed animals.

I didn't think it was because she wanted to show her sex to the stuffed unicorn or the teddy bear she'd had since she was ten. She was making porn movies. I hoped they were for her private viewing.

I pondered the whole thing that night, while I wasn't sleeping. It could still be a game. Probably was. It was a private game of her own, but ... why the GPS and recorder in my car?

Two days later, I had installed fisheye cameras, with sound pickups, in every smoke detector of the apartment. Walt had used a signal scrambler so that, while Steph's camera would record and send everything that went on, the receiver, wherever it was, wouldn't get the recordings. It would either get nothing, or static – Walt wasn't sure but he thought it wouldn't get anything at all. My cameras would cover the whole room, but it would kinda be a distorted picture that would be transmitted to me only when I activated it.

Whatever game she was playing, I would soon find out.

Meanwhile, we continued with the crossword puzzles, sudoku puzzles, and word games. The score had evened up a bit; we reset it every New Year's. It was 33:29 in my favor as of now.

The weekend was the first time I had a chance to download my cameras, when Steph went out to do some shopping. I downloaded into my laptop, using the extra keyboard that I kept in my briefcase, and then looked at the video files.

Seeing and hearing yourself fucking your wife should have been exciting at some level. But seeing a distorted view of yourself – it was a fisheye lens, after all – wasn't.