He moved closer to it. He was tempted, very tempted indeed but he was also nervous about what he might find. Did she have a lover? Was she having an affair? There had been no outward signs. There had been no signs of a change in her love for him. No arguments or disagreements between them. No changes in her routine. Everything seemed normal. There was just nothing to suggest that she was seeing someone else apart from her strange behaviour when he had walked in on her while she was using the laptop.
Jeff rested a hand on the table. Elle had just left to do the weekly shopping; she would be away for at least another hour. He had his chance now to check and see. But then there was the invasion of her privacy; he had always respected that. He had never touched her mobile phone, never entered her handbag; he had never even delved into her knicker drawer. Elle was entitled to her privacy.
However, he was entitled to peace of mind. Something was just not right and he needed to know. Jeff pulled back the chair and sat down. He waited a few moments for the screen to light up. He waited for the background picture of Niagara Falls, the place where they had visited on their honeymoon five years ago, to appear. It didn’t. Jeff got quite a shock when he saw the Windows screen appear requesting a password.
‘Password?’ Jeff muttered to himself, ‘Never needed a password before!’
Jeff pressed the Enter key.
The words ‘Invalid Password’ came up.
He pressed again. The same message appeared. He was getting angry now. Suddenly he heard footsteps and turned round. It was Elle.
“What are you doing?” she asked him.
“Why is there a password on the laptop?”
“Why do you need to use it anyway, you have your own?”
“I want to know what you are up to, Elle.”
Elle opened her mouth to speak and then closed it. A resigned look appeared on her face. Jeff knew that Elle rarely lied. He had known her since she was sixteen and apart from the odd white lie there had never been any serious deceit.
“It’s ‘Nigeria’”
“Nigeria?”
Elle nodded.
Jeff touched the keyboard and started typing then stopped and turned to her, “I would sooner that you tell me what has been going on rather than me trying to invade your privacy.”
Elle put her handbag down on the table, went to the cupboard and took out two wine glasses, then opened the fridge door and took out a half full bottle of Pinot Grigio.
“That bad is it?” Jeff said as he sat down.
Elle sat down and poured two glasses of wine. “I haven’t done anything,” she said, “not been unfaithful or anything.”
She took a large sip of her wine. “I’ve been chatting to a Nigerian guy. I got bored one night and went onto a website and he was online as well,” she started to explain. “We got chatting and became friends.”
“Boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“No,” Elle replied. “Just mates.”
“Look, I know that I haven’t been around like a lot of other guys my age but I am not stupid either. Guys don’t chat to married women just to be mates. They want into your knickers!”
Elle smiled at his turn of phrase.
“Okay,” she said, “he wants more than just chat.”
“And you?”
Elle took another sip from her glass, “I suppose I have been flattered by his attention.”
“Are you saying that I don’t give you enough attention?”
Elle shook her head, “No, of course not,” she replied. “You’re a great husband.”
“But?”
“There’s no ‘but’.”
“Does he know that you are married?”
Elle nodded.
“So what’s he doing chasing after a married woman then?”
Elle smiled. “He likes to cuckold.”
“Cuckold! What the fuck is that?” Jeff shouted.
“It’s a husband whose wife has cheated on him,” Elle told him. “But… he likes the husband to know that he has been cuckolded.”
“Is he a masochist or something?” Jeff responded. “A guy like that is likely to get his face rearranged.”
Elle smiled as she shook her head.
“Well they may act like that in his country but it’s different in this part of the world.”
Elle smiled once again, “He does most of his cuckolding here.”
“I thought he lives in Nigeria.”
“He does. He’s a businessman and he travels to the UK quite a lot.”
Jeff looked at her. “So what gives him the impression that he can cuckold me?”
Elle raised her glass to her lips and drank the last drop. “I went on to an interracial sex site,” she told him quietly. “Lots of married couples go on there looking for sex with black guys.”
Jeff was dumbstruck.
“What… what made you want to go on there?”
Elle gazed down at the glass in her hand. “Curiosity, I guess.”
“Curiosity?”
Elle got up and took a bottle of wine from the rack. Jeff looked on pensively as she refilled her glass and then topped up his own glass.
“You’re the only guy that I have ever had sex with,” she started to say, “I’ve always been curious about what it would be like with someone else. Not that I would ever do it. But I like to think about it at times. I like to watch videos of other couples, especially black guys and white girls.”
Jeff sat back, taken aback with her confession. Elle reached across the table and put her hand over his.
“I do love you, you know, and would never cheat on you.” Elle told him. “I just like to fantasise about it sometimes.”
Jeff squeezed her hand. “You need to be careful on the internet, you know,” he said. “You don’t know who you are talking to. There are some right nutters out there.”
Elle gave a smile of relief. “I know. I am careful. He knows nothing really personal about me. He is quite genuine though.”
Jeff looked up at her.
“I saw him on web cam one night. He couldn’t see me but I saw him.”
“What was the point of that?”
“He… he wanted to show me his thingy.”
“Thingy?”
“His penis.”
“Fucking hell!”
Elle squeezed his hand. “Sorry.”
Jeff was almost speechless.
“I won’t chat to him again. I promise.”
“He hasn’t seen anything of you has he?”
“Of course not.”
“Thank God for that.”
Elle smiled. “I will have to go online sometime to him though,” she told him. “He’s coming over to the UK in a couple of weeks and he was hoping to see me.”
“What?”
“He’s been trying to get me to persuade you to let him sleep with me,” she confessed. “I can tell him now that I did discuss it with you and you hit the roof.”
Jeff looked at her. He was beginning to discover that there was a side to his wife that he didn’t know even existed.
Elle squeezed his hand. “All this is a bit of relief actually,” she told him. “He’s been pressuring me to tell you all about him and try to get you to let him cuckold you. I can end it all now.”
Jeff looked her in the eye. “Is that what you really want to do?”
Elle could not hold his stare.
“Do you want to end it?”
“I’m married and I respect the wedding vows I made to you,” she said before taking a large gulp of wine.
Jeff looked at her again. “That hasn’t answered my question.”
Elle looked away as she spoke, “I love you and would never do anything to hurt you,” she told him. “But if you want the truth, yes, if you were to let me sleep with him I would.”
A telephone call from Elle’s mum suddenly ended their conversation, and a short while later her mum came round and they went off shopping together.
Jeff was left alone with the laptop but he didn’t switch it on. He was too afraid to investigate any further and he was also too afraid of his own emotions. Before she had left she had put on the washing machine. Jeff had watched her as she stooped to put the washing inside. Her short pleated skirt rose up giving him a good eyeful of her thighs. It aroused him.
Elle was very attractive, slim and curvaceous. He knew that a lot of his friends fancied her and she had been asked out on dates by work colleagues a number of times. In those few fleeting moments as she bent down he saw her from another man’s point of view. He had seen her naked so many times that he had lost count. He knew every inch of her body, and he suddenly realised that it was no longer fresh for him. He would be there as she undressed at night and climbed naked into bed beside him, and yet he took it all for granted now. It was no longer new and fresh to him. For those fleeting moments, he had seen her from another male’s eye. It was an instant arousal and an instant desire to fuck her.
For a few moments he started to think the unthinkable; he started to think about her with another man.
