The Secret Life of My Loving Wife

And then the redhead leaned in and gave Angela a kiss. And not just one of those sisterly pecks on the lips. It was a KISS.

I leaned closer to the screen. Angela was not pulling away. They were kissing.

They were kissing!

I moved the laptop off of my lap and stood up. I paced around the room a bit, then came back and played the video again. Then again. And again.

What the hell was going on?

I shook it off. It couldn't be what it looked like. My wife was as vanilla as they come. She was virtuous and proper and even above all that, she was hetero. I knew all of these things for a fact. We had been married for twenty years. She was virtuous and she was proper and she was hetero.

I looked out the window at the Baltimore night, but my eyes were elsewhere. I had to be misinterpreting something. This has to be a long-lost cousin or an old sorority sister or something. Maybe that was it. She and her sorority sisters were sometimes weirdly affectionate with each other at the reunions, a fact that never ceased to intrigue me.

I played the video again. The redhead was twenty years too young to be a sorority sister. Maybe she was a pledge or something, but it's not like Angela was active in the alumni network these days.

I leaned in, inches from the screen. They were pressed together. They were talking. They were kissing. Angela was facing away from me, toward the door, and the redhead was facing the camera. What was she saying? I couldn't tell.

Who was this woman? And why was she kissing my wife?

****

I didn't sleep well that night. I tossed and turned and had weird dreams, and when I woke up it was the weirdest dream of all. The laptop was still open, and the camera website was still logged in. Warily, I approached it at the desk and looked. Eight more files, all relatively small. One at a time I opened them. Dogs coming in from the garage, dogs walking around, dogs barking at the mailman. One file was Angela heading out to work. Nothing to report.

I marched through my meetings with a client and a potential supplier, had a quiet lunch, and interviewed a job candidate in the afternoon. In between, I watched a lot of dog videos, which were already becoming rather tiresome. Being two hours ahead of time on the East Coast, I eventually went to dinner and forced myself to wait until midnight before I logged back on again, watching a couple of old movies on the movie channel to kill time.

It had to be a massage situation, I decided. Women felt differently about affection than men. Maybe for some reason you would kiss a massage therapist in your home.

Even I didn't believe that. But it was the only theory I had that didn't explode my brain out the top of my skull.

At 12:30 a.m., I logged back on. There was a big group of new files waiting for me. Unsure what to expect, I began clicking through them, deleting the dog files as I went. I kept the file of Angela coming home from work, clad this time in a form-fitting business dress. It must have been sunny today, because she wasn't wearing a coat.

The good news was that, based on the camera's records, the redhead did not return on this night.

The bad news is that it was a brunette instead.

She was slightly shorter than Angela, and had a boyishly short haircut that contrasted sexily with a very feminine figure. She was almost as curvy as Angela, and was wearing a somewhat bohemian pair of slacks with a white shirt and suspenders that were all the fashion rage right now. The two women greeted each other with a cursory hug and stood for a couple of minutes speaking. I wished I could hear what they were saying. Then Angela gestured toward stage right. Either they were going to a bedroom or they were taking a circuitous route to the kitchen. I had a bad hunch it wasn't the kitchen.

They were gone, and the video ended. The dogs must have been put away because the next video was the brunette exiting. Angela was in her robe and the bohemian brunette was dressed the same as she had entered. They stopped at the entry, had a short conversation, and then --

Bam.

Angela had the brunette up against the wall. They weren't just kissing, they were making out, and Angela was the aggressor. There was no doubt about it. The brunette's right hand went down, and while I couldn't tell exactly where it was, I saw Angela's hips jerk spasmodically. The woman's left hand grabbed Angela's ass and pulled her close. And then ...

I did not sleep well the second night either.

****

Cassie knocked on the door frame of my office entry. I didn't even know she was there.

"You okay, boss?" she asked.

I looked at her, unable to form a proper answer. It didn't help that she was wearing a white t-shirt and suspenders today. I scanned her up and down, but the Bohemian Brunette was clearly a different person. Damn fashion trends.

Cassie cocked her head quizzically, then shut the door behind her and came over to my desk. "Something's wrong," she deduced, sitting in the chair opposite me. "You've not been yourself at all today."

I smiled wryly. "I am myself," I responded. "I'm just not sure who everybody else is."

We sat silent for a moment, she waiting expectantly and me with a thousand competing thoughts running through my head. Finally she spoke. "Are you going to tell me or am I going to have to wrestle you down and beat it out of you?"

The thought made me smile, partly because it came from this waifish young woman who could likely not outwrestle a 12 year-old boy, and partly because such a thing sounded fun. She was always saying things like that, just flirty enough to plant a fantasy but not enough to be over the line.

I needed someone to talk to. I needed someone to tell me I wasn't crazy. I looked at my watch, and it was 4:45. "Want to go get a drink somewhere?" I asked. "This is going to take a while."

Her big brown eyes got even bigger, illuminating the white around them. She looked at her watch too, then nodded, a look of curiosity and concern on her face. "Let me go shut down for the day," she said. "Meet me at my car."

Fifteen minutes later, I walked out to the employee parking lot. Cassie's car was a perfect match for her, small and cute and modern. She was waiting behind the wheel, checking her makeup in the rear view mirror. I crossed in front of her and climbed into the passenger seat.

"Where to, boss?"

"How about your place? This is very confidential."

"My condo?" She turned and looked at me, then started up the car. "Well, aren't you quite mysterious today?" Sensing my seriousness, though, she changed tones. "Something seems wrong. I hope you're okay."

It took me a minute to answer as she edged out of her spot and began driving. "I'm not."

****

Cassie made good money at the firm. We designed and manufactured high-end jewelry, and we did quite well. Her early presence in the firm and her brilliance had earned her a great living, and her condo reflected that. It was on the 22nd floor of a downtown high-rise, decorated in a manner that could best be described as "1960s mod meets rococo." I had only been there a couple of times over the years, once at her housewarming party and once for an employee's funeral, but the style matched Cassie's nature, bold and individualistic. She poured us each a glass of wine and we sat on her couch.

I opened my laptop. "I need you to look at something," I said. "I need you to tell me how you interpret it."

"Oookay." She was looking at me like I was half crazy, and dutifully adjusted her glasses.

"Obviously, it's going to be highly personal and confidential. I just want to be sure that I'm not jumping to any conclusions." I told her about buying the camera and my tests with the dog videos and that I hadn't intended to be spying, but the video showed something I wasn't expecting.

A flash of realization came across her face. "Oh, no," she said, and she looked as upset as I felt. "Angela?"

I answered hesitantly. "That's part of it."

We moved together so she could see my screen, our hips nearly touching each other as the laptop balanced on my knees. I pulled up the first video, the one with the redhead arriving. "This was at 8:15 on my first night in Baltimore."

Cassie leaned forward, intently watching it. The redhead arrived, she and Angela hugged, and the video ended. Cassie shrugged. "Am I missing something? Who's the woman?"

"Now let's go to the next video. This is a couple of hours later." I started up the departure video, and Cassie leaned in.

I leaned back to give her room, and studied her as she watched the video. Maybe it's just because my marriage was going down the drain, but she looked particularly attractive today. Her medium brown hair was shoulder length and flipped inward at the bottom, smooth and shiny. The suspenders, flaring out and up over her narrow shoulders, accentuated her tiny waist and subtle breast swells. Maybe if I ended up single ...

"Oh, my god!" Reaching into my lap, Cassie hit the key to back up the video. She watched again, peering intently, then swung her head around to me. "Are they kissing?" The look on her face was nearly identical to the look that I had seen in my hotel mirror. She turned around and played the video again, leaning so far in that I could only see her sleek mane of hair in my lap.

"I'm going to ask a really stupid guy question," I said, "but do women ever casually kiss each other like that? Could that be a friendship kiss of some sort?"

Cassie stood up and began pacing, her small ass swaying. She kicked off her shoes and suddenly got notably shorter, and I realized that I'd never seen her barefoot before. She was smaller than I realized. She stopped, gave me a look like she was a private eye and pointed at the laptop. "That's a woman," she said, as if I didn't understand the obvious. "That's another woman!"

I nodded. As traumatic as my night had been, it was entertaining to watch Cassie in this state. I'd never seen her so perplexed and indignant. She was pacing rapidly, as if trying to diffuse energy before it caused an explosion.

She continued, her hands moving up to clutch her head as she paced. "I mean, that's Angela! That's your wife! I've known her for years! There must be an explanation. There has to be an explanation for this." She was talking a mile a minute, her mind working through scenarios just as mine had done.

I waited for an opening. "Want to see the next night's video now?"

Cassie's face went pale and she stopped in her tracks. "There's another one?"

"Oh, it gets better. Or worse."

She sat down beside me again, and I started up the Bohemian Brunette video. "I won't show you this woman arriving because nothing happens there, but here she is leaving a couple of hours later. This is on the second night that I was gone. It goes on for about seven minutes."

Like I had done, Cassie watched the video a half dozen times, or at least the most damning parts of it. At some point she plucked the laptop off my lap and crawled up onto the couch, lying against the far arm facing me, then curling up and balancing it on her knees. She braced her bare feet against my thighs and disappeared into the screen.

When it was over, she looked at me with bewilderment, her mouth agape.

"Do you have any theories?" I asked.

Cassie set the laptop on the floor and sat facing me, her feet still against my thigh. I could see a faraway look in her eyes as her sharp mind clicked through scenarios. She gestured toward the laptop. "That last video makes it pretty clear," she said.

"So what does it mean?"

Cassie shook her head in shock. "Honestly, it's blowing my mind. I don't know which is more shocking, the fact that she would be cheating on you or the fact that she'd be doing it with a woman."

"Welcome to the club."

Cassie ran her slender fingers through her hair, her big brown eyes unfocused in thought. She peered at me. "Is Angela bisexual or lesbian?" she asked pointedly.

"Not that I knew of."

"She's never said anything about it?"

I shook my head. "I would definitely remember that," I quipped.

Her smile was shaky. "Because they were clearly ... I mean, that other woman, she was ... she was masturbating Angela. Right there at your front door." Cassie blushed even saying the words.

"And Angela was the one who made the first move," I observed.

"Has she ever given you any sense that she liked women? Any sense at all?"

Most people's sex lives are private, and Angela and I were no exception. In fact, we were very private. But these were unusual times. I looked at Cassie, looked at the laptop, and started baring my soul. "Okay, here's the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I've never gotten any indication that she liked women. None at all. I've joked over the years about doing a threesome with her, and she always laughed it off. We have sex, but it's really vanilla, and she won't even tell me her fantasies. Won't talk about them at all. But I know she must have them. Everyone has fantasies, right?"

"Have you ever watched lesbian porn together?" Cassie blushed again as she said it, but I think we both knew that this was going to be a no-holds-barred conversation.

"Well, sure, we've watched some porn over the years, and I really like the girl-girl stuff. She watched it with me, but she never asked for it or anything. She tends to be pretty conservative about sex."

Cassie looked at me, and then her mouth blossomed into a grin. She began laughing, and I realized what I had said. I had to laugh as well.

"I'm so sorry," she said, wiping away a tear of laughter. "I guess we know THAT's not true now."

In a world where everything was suddenly upside down, Cassie made me laugh. She was the rock that I needed right now.

"So what's next? Is this divorce material?" she asked.

I laughed again, sheepishly this time. "This conversation is never going to leave the room, right?"

"Oh, absolutely not. Just you and me."

"First off, it looks like she's cheating on me. Maybe that's divorce material. It seems like it should be, but I'm still in too much shock to think clearly. But ..." I swallowed hard. This was rapidly becoming a week of unprecedented firsts. "But ... I have to say ... it also really turns me on. If she had just asked, I would have been thrilled to let her do it."

Cassie threw her head back, laughing again, baring her slender throat to me.

What the hell. I kept going. All bets were off now. "I would kill to see her having sex with another woman. It's probably my favorite fantasy. If they're still frigging each other at the front door, I'm dying to know what happened back in the bedroom. If she wanted this, why didn't she just tell me? I would have gladly let her do it."

Cassie's toes curled against my thigh. She was giggling uncontrollably. "So you're into the lesbian thing, huh? Would you actually do a threesome with her?"

"Hell, yeah! A thousand times yeah!"

I was oddly euphoric. Everything was happening at once. My world was crumbling, my wife was apparently a lesbian, and I was sitting in Cassie's living room feeling her bare feet on my thigh, telling her that I enjoyed threesomes and lesbian sex. I had a feeling that the next few months were going to be a wild ride, most likely with a horrific crash at the end, but I didn't care. It was that moment on the roller coaster where you just crested the top and you throw your arms up triumphantly right before the bottom drops out.

Cassie pulled her feet away from me, reaching down to grab the laptop. "Let's watch it again. I want to see something."

She hit the replay button and I moved in close to her, our hips and shoulders touching. It was all there again. The Bohemian Brunette went to the door. They had a short conversation. And then Angela pushed the Bohemian against the wall, trapping her in a passionate kiss. The Bohemian's hand went down and into Angela's robe, and my wife's hips jerked in response. The Bohemian then reached around, grabbing Angela's ass and pulling her close.

For the next several minutes, Angela kissed and pawed the Bohemian, and the Bohemian jilled off my wife. My wife of twenty years. The robe never came off and there was no visible nudity, but it was obvious what was happening. At the end, Angela's hips began moving and her back began arching.

"Right there, she's having an orgasm," I said. I knew that arch.

Cassie was rather flushed at this point, and I saw something I'd never seen before. Under her fashionable suspenders, her t-shirt was light and thin and her nipples were quite erect. Erect and large, much larger than I would have thought possible on her petite B-cups.

She rotated back against the arm of the sofa to face me, looked down, and noticed them. She quickly drew her legs up and casually wrapped her arms around them. "Do you know what I see?" she queried.

I knew what I was seeing, but I think she was talking about the video. "What do you see?"

"I see lust, not love. Think about it. Two different women on two different nights. She's not having an affair. She's just fucking around."

I'd never heard Cassie use a vulgarity before. Chalk up another first. "What's the significance of that?"

"It's your call. Divorce, intervention, whatever. But I don't think she's cheating on you emotionally. I think she's just getting her rocks off. And it sounds like you kind of like that."

I turned it over in my mind. I had been thinking about the situation from my own perspective, and feeling rejected and cheated on. I hadn't looked at it from Angela's perspective yet. A new kernel of thought entered my mind, one that was much less morose. I looked at Carrie and she looked at me, and we exchanged raised eyebrows.

I spoke slowly and carefully. "I think ... that I need to investigate this more before I do anything. I need video of what's happening in the bedroom."

"Absolutely."

"And I need to figure out who those other women are."

"Absolutely."

"And I need to understand better why she's doing this."

"Absolutely."

"I think I'm going to buy a spycam with sound."

She nodded. "Give me the one you've got," she said, "because I still need to catch a thief. Oh, and I'll work up an excuse to send you on another business trip as soon as the new camera arrives."

We walked together to the front door. I stopped, and spontaneously we gave each other a big hug. She was so small in my arms, but she held me with great strength. At long last, arching her back so she could look into my face, she said, "Oh, and one other thing."

"What's that?"

She blushed, but her teeth shone in a big grin. "I'm going to need to view those videos with you. I kinda like lesbian porn."

I laughed the whole way home.

****

The new camera looked like a small clock. Angela wondered why I had bought such a thing, but we tended to be independent about such things, so she just shrugged and let me go on my way. Sitting on my nightstand, it pointed inward at the bed and offered a perfect vantage point. I was very proud of my stealth.

I kept mum about the videos, which wasn't too hard if I worked late every night. I then told Angela that I had to go to Los Angeles, and she didn't question it. I traveled regularly, usually once a month, so having a second trip so soon wasn't unheard of. But I didn't go to Los Angeles. I went to Carrie's condo, where she had her guest bedroom ready for me.

"Thanks so much," I said as I entered.

"No sense in spending the money for travel," she said, "and otherwise we'd just be on the phone all night anyway."

She padded to the kitchen to get some waters for us. We had a casual workplace, so I usually saw her in jeans and a t-shirt. I seldom saw her in shorts, much less the short shorts she was wearing tonight, and it was a real treat. She was only a shade over 5 feet tall, and she had a small, pert ass that defied gravity. Given some bouncing on her way back, I also decided that she wasn't wearing a bra under her thin and aged concert t-shirt.