My Not So Loving Wife

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

I didn’t see it for what it was at the time, I admit, but my wife’s out of character directions to me as we drove to a shopping precinct that was unfamiliar to us was certainly the catalyst for what triggered my suspicions the Saturday following this first.

And of course, once my suspicions had been triggered a whole host of little things began to gel in my mind.

The first of those things being that after twenty-three years you come to your woman pretty well in both mind and body.

And I had noticed small changes to both.

One of them being that my c**k was no longer the snug fit it had always been for Terry’s p***y. They say a man loses up to an inch of p***s size in both girth and length as he gets older but at fifty-three the process hadn’t seemed to have kicked in with me quite yet and I remained at what I saw as a reasonably average six-incher when erect. So what had happened to that “snug fit”?

Okay, Terry had given birth twice and some expansion was not only expected but necessary. But she had soon retracted to her normal size with a few months and plenty of Kegels under her belt. So why was I suddenly flopping around inside of her on what was becoming an increasingly less frequent bedtime connection?

My late in the day friend hindsight, however, was quick to remind me of other changes and I thought back to how fresh and… energised… Terry seemed on the growing number of occasions she had stayed late on school business during the week.

That and the subtle but unmissable lack of interest she seemed to show for the prospect of s*x with me.

Not that it became more infrequent, you understand?

No, not that.

Just less… enthusiastic.

But still I told myself that we were no longer newlyweds and nothing stayed fresh and vibrant forever.

We were simply growing a little more… sedate.

The fool there’s no fool like, eh?

Stupidity and an inability to accept what was right under one’s nose that led me to see her expanded p***y as no more than a simple consequence of nature.

Time, perhaps.

Gravity.

Any-f*****g-thing but the explanation kicking my teeth out.

Until, that is, her newly kicked-in sense of direction on our shopping-trip and the events the following Saturday saw to it that this particular fool and his paradise was not about to last.

Her behaviour towards me – or should I say reaction – had undergone a slight change too, I need to add here.

Not for one moment did I ever feel she loved me any less than I loved her, and she was forever telling me how happy she was and how I was the only man she could ever imagine living with and sharing her life.

Assurances that were to prove almost true.

But every now and then, and especially when she thought I couldn’t see her, she would give me a look that was both genuinely loving and…

…guilt ridden.

Though as I say, my recognition of the latter only came with hindsight.

“You need to take this left before the lights,” she told me as we approached the turn from the duel-carriageway that led towards Purley and on to Croydon and London itself.

She had read in the local newspaper that a jewellers was having a closing-down sale in Caterham, the third town on from Westerham and not one with which I was familiar, and I had offered to buy her something for our upcoming anniversary – though I knew I’d also need to have a surprise up my sleeve to go with it.

By now, I think we all know who got the surprise, don’t we?

“Since when did you turn into a homing-pigeon?” I teased.

“Since my stubborn husband refused to use the Sat/Nav he was given,” she came back instantly, smiling as she said it.

I smiled too as I remembered asking Deanna, our youngest, if she would mind me swapping the navigational aid she had gifted me on my last birthday for something else. She hadn’t and I swapped it for a hands-free device that, in truth, I wasn’t much fussed by either. But I’d had to get something to show my gratitude and at least a mobile phone in my new Alfa was less intrusive than some metallic voice giving out instructions and ruining the driving of it I enjoyed so much in the process.

When we turned-off and came to the roundabout in Caterham she surprised me again:

“Left again at the roundabout and then the first left after that.”

“Wow! Now I’m impressed. You normally need a map to get from our garden into the house.”

She gave me a look I couldn’t decipher as I took her directions and it was only later that I realised she was chewing herself out for being so careless.

“I came here with Gayle a few months back,” she reminded me. “Remember? You were given those tickets and took Chris to see Crystal Palace play against…”

She threw up her hands and gave it up; unlike her husband not having the slightest interest in football.

“Manchester City,” I told her, remembering the game and taking Chris but not that Terry had gone shopping with his mother – and certainly not to Caterham.

“Like it makes a difference,” she scoffed. “Another left now and we can find a space in the supermarket car-park.”

“Jawohl, Herr Oberst!”

“And for that, smarty-pants,” she smirked, “you can take us for a nice pub-lunch somewhere after you’ve taken your wallet out of mothballs and bought me some jewellery.”

I did indeed find a space, and I also bought her a really nice – expensive too, given it was half-price – necklace, as well as lunch at The Fox in Old Coulsdon.

All was well in my world.

Until the following Saturday at a charity fund-raising barbecue run by her school.

Which was the exact time the wrecking-ball was well and truly lowered.

***

“Is that young guy with Terry on staff, Ron?” I asked Veronica Hall, a History teacher and colleague of my wife who shared the same birth-year with me, a good friend of Terry’s I’d come to like a great deal myself for her clear-sighted opinions and loyal-to-a-fault nature.

Ron looked to her left from the bar where we were sipping at a couple of white wine spritzers towards my wife as she chatted away gaily with an unprepossessing chap I took to be in his mid-thirties. Like me, Terry loved to flirt and we were both agreed it was one of the great harmless pastimes. A way, in fact, of assuring ourselves we were still capable of playing the game, even if we would never make ourselves available for the starting line-up again – though I found it hard to believe that a guy who looked so, well, desperate, could give my wife much in the way of assurance on that score.

“Jake Corbett. Recently qualified English teacher. Twenty-Five. Unmarried. Birthplace: County Durham, Sah!” Ronnie snapped out at me as if relating the record of a Private to the superior officer about to charge him.

“Any previous, Sergeant Hall?”

“No prior misdemeanours, Sah!” she told me drawing herself up erect, well as erect as she could, given she was holding a half-full glass of white-wine and soda-water.

By the way, Ronnie at fifty-three remains a curvy and attractive redheaded widow with full and still proud breasts and a pair of great legs I was sure provided the boys in her classes much in the way of adolescent fantasy.

Or would have had Woldingham School not been for girls only.

I laughed at her less than convincing imitation of a no-nonsense RSM, though my amusement would not survive for too long after her reply to my next piece of sarcasm:

“Current address?”

“Caterham, Sah! Apartment complex at the back of the supermarket car-park, Sah!”

“Very well, Sergeant, at ease.”

My mind not having fully connected the dots at this point, I shared Ron’s amusement as she teased:

“Don’t worry, lover-boy, she only wants him for some s*x on the side when you’re not available. As you can see – and not to stroke your ego too much – he’s not in your class in the looks department.”

The look she threw in Jake Corbett’s direction was not malicious exactly, but it wasn’t friendly either; and her words weren’t particularly flattering either:

“Not much in the personality stakes into the bargain,” she went on. “In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact of his tender-years I’d have to say I don’t like the oily little bastard and wouldn’t trust him as far as a two-year-old could throw…”

She caught herself and gave me a look of amusement mixed with self-rebuke:

“Instant dislike, I’m afraid. Always been my curse and always will be.”

Ron held out her glass for me to take.

“You haven’t finished that one yet!”

“Which is precisely why you’re going to hold it for me while I take myself off to the Ladies’.”

We laughed again as I took her glass and she made for the toilets. I liked Ronnie and I knew Terry thought the world of her and placed great store in her opinion – whenever she asked for it, that is. Smiling to myself, I made a note to suggest to my wife that we have her over soon for a barbecue of her own.

Which is when I took another look at Terry and Jake Corbett and felt the first rumblings of…

…unease.

They weren’t doing anything blatant, you understand, and standing as close to other people as they were I was pretty sure nothing untoward was being said, but…

As I mentioned above, after twenty-one years being married to someone you get to notice small things about them other people wouldn’t.

And especially once you start looking for them.

Well I was looking now.

Ronnie was right, with all ego aside, Jake Corbett, simply wasn’t in my league when it came to looks and, knowing Ronnie as a shrewd judge of character – despite her “instant dislikes” – I was pretty sure he didn’t come close in terms of intellect and personality.

So why was my wife’s body language screaming out to me a need to want his c**k inside her?

Which is when it hit me:

And why had she gone from a woman who couldn’t find her way from bathroom to bedroom without a guide, to suddenly giving me navigational instructions?

Instructions that led to the supermarket car-park at the back of which was the very apartment-complex in which Jake Corbett lived?

And now I knew.

I didn’t need any more proof than the way they were with each other, her improved sense of direction, and the general address supplied to me by Ronnie.

My wife of twenty-one years, the mother of my daughter’s and of whom not thirty seconds passed without me thinking of her, was having an affair.

She was f*****g a fellow teacher almost thirty years younger than her husband.