Grim Reality

I think this is an original story line. Having not read every single story on this site I may be wrong. If I am wrong, I apologise in advance.

I know this, my first submission, is a bit long, so in the interests of saving time I'll give a small summary. You can then decide whether or not to go to the effort of reading it.

It is a psychological thriller, based on fact. There is a bit of cheating, a lot of tension, a lot of realism, a lot of pragmatism, very little sex, and a devastating but non-violent BTB scene at the end. Unlike some writers here it seems, I have read it several times and corrected grammar and syntax errors. If your spell checker picks up any errors, change the dictionary to English (UK) rather than English (US). Enjoy.

Thank you SW_MO_Hermit for the inspiration for this story. His "A Smart Set of Cheaters" is in my top three list. If you haven't read it yet do yourselves a favour.

*****

I sat in our study at home and realised I had a problem. Where was that damned bit of paper? I had been sitting right here last Tuesday night finishing the list that had taken me several months. So where the fuck was it now? A second clearing of the desk, looking in the drawers, looking behind and under the desk revealed nothing. Ah, revelation, check the bin................ empty. I thought back to Tuesday. I'm sure it wasn't empty then. Friday was my wife's housework day. Sorry Dave old son but you're going to have to scrounge through the recycle trash bin.

My Story

Hi, my name is Dave and at the time of this story I am 41 years old. I grew up in a small mining town and for all you readers that had a similar childhood, you may recognise my symptoms. You see in my town it was not socially acceptable to be intelligent and I was. Smart kids were bullied and generally put through a living hell. So I learned to hide it. The secret was to not use big words and talk just like everyone else.

I think it came as a surprise to a few people when I finished high school class valedictorian in my class of about 100. Too late though suckers. I left town to go to college and was never going back. I was lucky that my parents broke the mould of their blue collar background and actually encouraged and supported my ambitions. Seven years later I graduated with honours in Mining Engineering and started my career.

I didn't realise at the time but ten years of primary school had conditioned me to still hide my intelligence. After a while I discovered it was a professional advantage. Thinking I was average intelligence lured people into a false sense of superiority until a conflict came, at which time I went for bust and won nine times out of ten. They simply underestimated me.

You're probably thinking this makes me sound arrogant and manipulative but you're wrong. At the time of this story I am a successful mine manager pulling down a healthy six figure salary with very generous bonuses. The reason for the latter was that I had taken over a struggling, break-even mine and turned it around so that it was a money factory. I had done this my way. With my blue collar background I had moulded the entire workforce into a friendly team who shared in the mine's financial success. Everyone was happy and getting richer.

Eight years into my career I had met Tracey, swept her off her feet and married her. At the time of this story Tracey had given me two wonderful sons who are six and eight years old. They are the centre of my universe and my reason for life.

I know I am different to other guys. Where they are attracted to the physical things about women, big boobs, nice butts etc, my first attraction is to their minds. If they aren't intelligent, I'm not interested. How do you judge intelligence? Easy. It's all in the eyes. One glance in the eyes tells the whole story. Tracey was very intelligent. The perfectly shaped boobs and nice tight ass on a petite 5' 6" frame, topped by a pretty face were a pure bonus.

Tracey's Story

My dear wife and soul mate had a similar background to me. Her tradesman father and overbearing stay at home mother had provided for her well with only one character flaw. Her mother has pretty much destroyed her confidence. Her mother was a bully plain and simple. Her father was pretty much a silent partner. What words he could get in were shot down. Tracey was thus very shy, unconfident and had a woeful self body image. This was unjustified and I liked her body just fine. I had spent our courtship and married life to now trying to improve both her confidence and body image by congratulating her on her successes and worshipping her body. It was like trying to paddle a canoe against a very strong current. All married guys know this. Husbandly compliments just don't carry much weight.

Her father died just after we started going out, of liver cancer. Her mother followed just two years ago with cancer of the everything.

Unlike my parents, Tracey's hadn't encouraged her intelligence and after high school she did a secretarial course. I met her when she was the receptionist/secretary of the mine I was working at as the Undermanager. Within two weeks we were an item. God I loved and respected that girl.

Our Story

Four years and two different mines later we were married and had our first son. Making all decisions jointly we decided to move somewhere more civilised for raising our family. Don't get me wrong, I love the mining industry. It is rewarding and exciting but why do they put the mines in the middle of the biggest desert around. I'd lived in some real shit holes. We managed to find one twenty five minutes' drive from a regional centre of 100,000 people. It was scenic and a thoroughly nice place to live. We both loved it. The people were friendly and welcoming and Tracey soon had a good support group of other mothers that met either together or in small groups almost daily.

Now I know I'm going to piss a few people off with my next statement but hey, one of the things people like about me is my directness.

The job description of 'mother', is the highest rank in society as far as I am concerned. Higher than president, general, secretary general of the United Nations and every other title on earth. We are here to raise physically and mentally healthy kids. While I recognise the need for both parents to work to put food on the table in some situations, those other situations where both parents of babies work to further their careers or to be able to afford a lifestyle they don't need, I just hold in contempt. One of you should stay at home and be a parent. It's what the kid needs.

Luckily Tracey agrees and until our youngest son, who was born shortly after our last move, started school, she was happy to be a stay at home mum.

The problem for an intelligent person being a full time parent is that it isn't the most intellectually stimulating job in the world. Recognising this, I did whatever I could to keep this stimulation up. Our talks at night after the lads were in bed were precious to us. I gave her as much time away from the boys, when I wasn't working as she wanted. Girl's nights out were a fortnightly occurrence at least. I looked after the lads while she did adult education courses at night or on weekends and we got baby sitters and went out together about monthly.

Life was good and I was happy with my soul mate and with every other aspect of my life.

The first major seed of discord started very innocently. After the lads were in bed one night we were watching TV when they announced that they were doing an IQ test. Over the next hour and a half they were going to ask the questions and at the end invite people to email or text in their results. It was sort of a national IQ census. They made people aware that as these tests are time related, all writing of answers should stop at the end of the quiz. The last half hour of the show was the answers and how to work out the score. Tracey and I both agreed it would be fun and sat down together to do the test.

At the end, I had a score of 136 and Tracey was 124. Both made sense to me but Tracey wouldn't accept the results and said the test was faulty. She got quite heated about it and refused to text the results off. I was bemused to say the least.

The next night, at the same time, she announced that she had found another IQ test on line and had done it that day and had got a score of 132. She wanted me to do it. I sat on the couch next to her with my laptop and scored 141. Tracey was visibly agitated. Over the next month she found and we did about six others. The results were generally the same, me about 5-15 points ahead of her. She wouldn't tell me why this was significant to her or why it upset her.

I was going through a busy patch at work and didn't have the time or energy to give it much thought. One weekend though I forced myself to take the time to think about it. I instinctively knew it was important. I couldn't immediately think of any reason for her rancour and it was bothering me. I have always been a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle and through his character Sherlock Holmes I learned his method of battling problems with no clear solution. "Discount the impossible. Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". One improbable solution, the only one I could think of, was that Tracey thought she was smarter than me and when the tests showed otherwise, she resented it. Was she harbouring resentment that she, the smarter one, had been a secretary while I was the successful professional?

Once I figured out the problem, the solution was clear. On our next snuggle night I related the story of my childhood 'intelligence hiding' behaviour.

I came completely clean with her and apologised that it appeared that my behaviour had become so ingrained that I seemed to have even fooled her. She seemed to take it very well and positively even to the point of saying she could understand it. It gelled with her school life experience as well. In a way, an intelligent girl was even more socially unacceptable in small towns than a smart boy. A very sad indictment on the ethics and morals of our formative years.

I thought that heart to heart had solved that problem. I was wrong. I didn't realise till much later that from that day on she subtly put more effort into winning our arguments than before.

With our youngest, Mick, was off to school, Tracey had six hours a day to fill. Like a good partnership we discussed her options. She wanted to go back to work but I suggested something else. With such a good brain, she could go back to school. In the end we agreed on both. She enrolled in a distance education Naturopathy course and looked around for a part time secretarial job. I would look after the kids at nights so she could study at home. I would even help out with shopping, housework and cooking.

She quickly got a part time job as secretary to an attorney. It was five days a week and she started every day after dropping the kids at school. Her boss was an old dude, near the end of his career who was on the wind down. He only worked short hours and took a limited number of cases. There were only the three of them in the office, the third being a 40 something married paralegal lady with whom Tracey quickly became firm friends. The office was an old house about twenty minutes' drive from home. With a small number of cases, the work was very cyclical. With no big case on Tracey might only work three hours a day. With a big case on the go she would work up to the time she had to leave to pick up the kids from school. One or two days a month she was asked if she could stay longer to help. She was happy to oblige and if a phone call to me didn't result in me coming home early then one to Mary, the widower next door who doubled as our baby sitter fixed that. On the rare occasion she wasn't available then Tracey reluctantly turned the overtime down.

Everyone was happy. Tracey was stimulated and busy, the girl's nights continued and our monthly date nights remained unchanged. Apart from our date nights, I didn't have much social interaction. I was either working or spending my time with Tracy and the kids. No outside hobbies, poker nights, bowling. Nothing. That suited me, I had all I needed and wanted.

It is six months after Tracey started work again. In the next hour my life is going to detour down a bizarre path. I just didn't know it yet.

She was working late. I had picked up the lads taken them home and started dinner. I was happy to be home early. All day I had the feeling like I'd left the notebook on the study desk last night. The notebook contained a loose page with the results of my project and was for my eyes only. Once home, I'd found the notebook but the list was gone.

I went out to the garage, swallowed my pride and emptied the recycle bin out on the floor. I put everything non-papery back in the bin then started sorting through the paper. No joy in the loose paper, what about the balled up discarded stuff. I know for a fact that I hadn't scrunched my list up but was it possible Tracey had found it? Woops! If she had, it would take some explaining. I had hidden the list in the back of one of the five spare note pads in the desk drawer and not the one on the top of the pile either.

I started un-scrunching the balls of paper still on the garage floor. There were only six. The second one started my slide to a new, much less idyllic life. I was almost ready to dismiss it, as it was in Tracey's handwriting, when I noticed the underlined heading. 'Literot'.

I smoothed the page and read what was obviously a list. In her neat writing was.

Photo.

Voice recorder in car.

Home early, caught in act.

Phone call overheard.

Text message on cell phone.

Sleep talking.

Bluffed into giving something away, either admission or body language.

Seen in public.

Ratted on by friend.

Car seen at motel.

Eye contact with other person in public.

Hidden letters/presents.

Laundry.

By this stage I knew what the list was. It was a list from the Literotica stories. A website of basically erotic stories, of how spouses had been caught cheating. Tracey doesn't trust me I thought. It was a bit of a blow but not huge. I had my own trust issues, why shouldn't Tracey.

I had got her into Literotica. When she started studying at the start of the year, I would use some of my time after the kids were in bed to read some of the stories on my laptop. I made no secret of it and often told Tracey if I found a particularly stimulating story. I was secretly looking for ideas on how to improve our sex life. I told her the juicy bits to try to fire her up. She started reading some as well. It must have looked real funny to see us both lying in bed, side by side each reading porn. It worked and I'd had fewer knock backs in the last two months.

Another thing I did was note what stories she spent a lot of time reading then read them myself, looking for clues on what excited her. Again I was looking for clues on how to improve our love life. She would read a story and if she liked it, look at other stories by the same author. I noticed she spent quite a bit of time on the stories of SW_MO_HERMIT and read one called 'A Smart Set of Cheaters' through twice. I read it two days later but couldn't see anything in it that could possibly be of use. I read Hermits other stuff then moved on.

One night she came to bed after studying and snuggled up to me, reading the screen of my laptop.

"The White Van, what's that all about," she asked.

I told her it was a story about a guy who caught his wife cheating and made her pay dearly.

"Why are you reading stuff like that," she asked.

I replied by ask if she had ever been cheated on and she said no. I said I had been and described how devastated I had been. I explained that by reading other peoples revenge stories it eased my lingering memories.

I had never told her about being cheated on and she asked me if I minded telling her the details. I did mind, it still hurt after all these years, but we shared everything.

I had met Cindy while in my last year of university in another state. She lived in the residential college next door doing her second year of an art degree. We immediately clicked and became inseparable. We started having sex very shortly after that but had to keep it very secret. Despite having a European name, Cindy was a second generation removed, but full blooded Chinese with very strict parents. Any word getting back to her parents and she would have been removed from the residency. I didn't mention to Tracey that we had fucked like rabbits all year and it was the best sex I ever had. The next year I moved back to my home state to work, Cindy stayed behind and finished her final year and we kept up a successful long distance relationship. I flew up about once a month to see her.

After our second year she came and stayed with me for the summer and I proposed. My brand new fiancé then moved three hours down the road to the state capital to do a one year Diploma of Education to become a teacher. With a BA, opportunities for employment in a small mining town were nil. They were however, screaming out for teachers.

She stayed at my brother's house in the state capital but he was away most of the year on a dig. Every weekend I would drive down or she would drive up. Being Chinese, with a strong work ethic, she also worked as a waitress in the local casino. We had also got to know a divorcee called Joe who lived up the road from my brothers. One week while on the phone talking about the next weekend she said she had to work on Saturday and that Joe had asked her to escort him to his company's annual dinner on Friday. Being a trustful guy I agreed and said I would come down Saturday morning rather than Friday night. I'm still slightly embarrassed at what a naïve fool I was at that age.

That is what happened. We spent Saturday together until she went to work. She usually worked 5PM to 9PM but if they were busy she might be asked to work till midnight. At 10PM she wasn't home and I was battling to stay awake. I decided to walk to Joe's place just for the exercise. It was about two minutes to the end of the street then up a 60m dirt driveway to Joe's place. When I approached his house I was shocked. There in front of his house was the Alpha I had bought Cindy. There seemed to be a bit of a party going on in the house. I couldn't approach too close as there were continually people standing on the porch smoking.

I was still confused as hell half an hour later when Cindy and Joe came out and walked to the car. I was hiding behind a wall very close to her car, I couldn't see them but could hear clearly.

I heard her say "why do you keep trying to kiss me?"

He mumbled something about how pretty she was. There was silence for a while. I peered over the wall. They were having a full on tongue tango. I was stunned. I immediately went into Crisis Mode. This was a mode I was very familiar with. Some people, in a crisis, panic. I went into 'the mode'. Cold, clinical, decisive and calculating. I could even turn my emotions almost off with effort. It was a characteristic that had served my career well. People who are familiar with the mining industry know just how quickly harmless situations can degenerate into bedlam. Military personnel on active service and airline pilots should be familiar with it.

After a minute they broke and he asked when he could see her again. Crunch time. Before she could answer, he invited her over after dinner the next night. All three participants in this private charade knew full well I would be gone back to my town the following evening but my name wasn't mentioned. Her behaviour to this point was forgivable but I would give her all the rope she needed to hang herself.