Chapter 1

It might have been a mistake, but it wasn’t all my fault. I’ve had plenty of time to think it through, and I’m sure it really wasn’t my fault, though it did me a real favour – eventually. Some mistakes are like that.

It was Gary. That’s whose mistake it was, and yes, it was his fault.

“Rod, old son,” he said to me that dark cold March evening in the pub, “It’s a chance you’ve always dreamed about. Now you can have it.”

“It?“ I’m afraid I raised my voice, and other patrons glanced my way. So more quietly: “It is a She!“

“Ssh!” he said. “People are looking.”

“Rachel is your wife.“ I said more quietly and with exaggerated patience. “I always thought marriage was in some sense about faithfulness – you know – not going off shagging other people?”

“Look Rod,” he said with a show of almost as much patience as I had demonstrated, “Modern marriage is more varied, more flexible. Couples decide for themselves what they do. After four years of marriage and six years together, Rache and I want to have new experiences.”

“But you are saying you want to get her to sleep with another man! You want it. Does she?“

“She isn’t totally convinced,” he said, “but I’ve done a lot of research on this. Lots of men get a real buzz out of knowing their wives are fucking someone else – some other bloke is pushing his cock into his wife, and once the women get the taste for it, they love it. Variety, Rod, variety. She just needs to try it and she’ll be won over.”

“And what’s in it for you?” I asked him. “Do you get the chance to shag other women?”

“Well, yeah, but only if she wants me to, which she probably will.”

“So?” I was lost for words (except that one).

“As a cuckold husband I get to experience all sorts of things – jealousy, uncertainty, powerlessness, and a big erotic charge. There’s also the thing that while you get to shag her, she always comes home to me. I’m the one she wants to be with for ever. Just talking about it with you is getting me hard!”

I shook my head. “I don’t get it,” I said.

“If you go along with me you will get it!” he laughed.

“Her.“

“Yes – her.”

“I need to think about this,” I said. “Ring me tomorrow.”

I should have been more explicit, more definite. I should have said “No Way!”

Gary and I had been at school together. Gary and I were mates. Rachel was in our class, and she was gorgeous! Dark lustrous hair, green eyes, captivating face, long neck and perfect figure, and slim shapely legs. Gary was one of the lucky sods who got to date her. There were only a few who did date her, and none of them for long. She was clearly very choosy and could afford to be.

As far as pairing off is concerned, Rachel and I were non-starters – she didn’t look twice at me, and I never talked with her. I’m one of the average guys; her time, and probably she herself, was more than filled by one or two of the handsome, athletic jocks who clustered round her, trying to conceal their erections and their tongues

Gary was always winningly handsome in a roguish sort of way; still is. He did date her in sixth form, and they were together for a while, but it finished as teenage romances do; they both moved on to other partners.

Gary and I went off to different universities, and it transpired that Rachel went to a third. Then Rachel and Gary both returned to our hometown immediately after graduating, while I got a job in computing ninety miles away. They took up again, lived together for a couple of years and then got married.

Gary had a managerial job in a light engineering firm and was making good money, with prospects of rising to the top of that particular tree. Rachel was an assistant manager in a department store, and from what Gary told me was in line for a store manager’s job and more, further up the promotion ladder. He told me all about their brand new cottage-style home. It looked very small and cramped to me. In Britain ‘cottage’ means ‘cramped’! (It does mean other things as well, but not in this story).

After I’d been five years with the firm, it opened a division back home and I was offered a directorship in charge of customer support and bespoke innovation – very important in software sales – and a move back home. It included adapting existing programmes to perform different or extended tasks according to a customer’s needs, but was mainly dealing with helping customers with more complex problems than those resolved by ‘turn it off and on again’, or ‘try plugging it in’. I’m not joking!

I was very young for such promotion, but that was life in computing, everyone seems to get promoted young, and though I say it myself, I was very good at what I did, both solving problems and organising a team for more complex tasks.

The increase in salary and the share options were mind-blowing for me at that age, and I was able to buy myself a very roomy third floor flat with great views over a golf course to the hills beyond: spacious hallway, three good sized bedrooms, living/dining room, kitchen, roomy bathroom with wet shower area as well as a bath, etc. Each of the rooms, I reckoned with a good dose of exaggeration, was bigger than the total floor area of Gary’s and Rachel’s ‘cottage’. The flat was expensive, but now I could easily afford the mortgage. Life was good.

Gary was ecstatic I was back, and we took up again, though we only met in the pub or in my flat; I was seldom invited to their house, and when I was so invited, Rachel seemed to make herself scarce. Sometimes she would make polite conversation, you know: asking me how the job was going, that sort of thing, but she seemed distant and the exchanges were brief. They didn’t seem to invite people for meals. I laughed to myself that there wasn’t room to get everyone round a table in their dining room! I never invited them either.

Strangely it never occurred to me to wonder why that was. It was a ‘guy’ thing, I suppose: we were drinking companions. I had a busy life at work and socially. Gary and I had no real interests in common: he talked football and cars and I listened and commented. We also commented on the attributes of my various girlfriends, and he crowed about his sexpot wife, so there was plenty to talk and joke about while out on the booze.

So now, after a settled couple of years of regular drinking with him, I was faced with this new situation. I didn’t think very clearly if I remember.

First of all, I’d always fancied Rachel, but it was clear that she did not fancy me at all, and as I said, I never made any attempt to date her at school. I wasn’t sure she even liked me; our meetings were never what you would call warm or friendly.

In any case, Gary got to her first and mates don’t poach their mates’ women, do they? I must have told him he was a lucky bastard, though now it seemed he took that to mean I fancied her rotten, which I did, though very morally, hopelessly, and at a great distance.

So getting to shag the woman was very enticing at a visceral level: she was far better looking than any of the women I’d ever had. Come to think of it, she was far better looking than any women I’d ever seen. Realistically she would never go for it, and even if she did, morally I found the whole thing unsettling and frankly wrong.

Though she had a lively dating life in the last years of high school, and it was common knowledge that while she must have had sex, she was not ‘easy’ like some of the girls – the girls I went with. She had to date a boy for some weeks before they became intimate, and she was known never to cheat on the lad she was seeing. As a result only a very few, which included Gary, actually got to date her. I assumed she still had those morals and would not want to betray her marriage.

Finally, I was not short of female companionship of my own, and I didn’t need the complication of a married woman, even one as pretty as Rachel. While at university I did the one night stand routines, some of which extended into two weeks or a month.

However in third year, I had given up the casual liaisons and had two serious relationships. The first girl, Abigail, was hot. She and I had a stupendous and hyper-energetic sexual relationship, but that was all we had. We lived together in each other’s rooms in hall, but had few interests in common. Mind you, with all the sex we didn’t have time for much else.

It took us two months to realise that we were going nowhere, and finals were on the distant horizon. We parted without resentment before Christmas.

A month later I fell for the other end of the alphabet, Zoë. With her it was the reverse of Abi. We had everything In common, we had the same interests, the same likes and dislikes.

Though constrained by the need to prepare for finals, we supported each other through those last months at university. We studied better in each other’s company, and seemed to know when we needed a break. Sex was simple and loving; it had meaning for us beyond physical performance. We were perfect for each other.