Maybe she wanted to wait and see how it all played out in real life, he mused.
He knew he had to confront her about all this. She needed a serious wake-up call to reality. He absolutely had to stop her before this escalated, and she did something that he truly couldn’t forgive, destroying everything they had built together. Not to mention the danger she was putting herself and her family in. She was ignorant of how easily personal information could be found and manipulated. Although James knew she wasn’t likely to see it this way in her near future, she was damn lucky that the guy online had only revealed her secrets to him. His little idiot wife had told the guy she was an elementary teacher. Then, in a later conversation, he easily got her to slip and reveal the suburb they lived in, and after she sent the pictures, he knew what she looked like! How easy was it for him to go to the elementary school websites for their suburb and click on teacher webpages until he found her? From there, with a full name to work with, he surely hadn’t had a hard time finding James’ email.
As he considered all this, James had been practically shaking with rage. He just couldn’t believe how fucking careless she had been!!
He had been so tempted to go to her right then and there and throw all of this in her face, but he restrained himself. If he had learned nothing else in his dom days, it was patience. A clear head, free from an emotional response, was the only way to devise and carry out a punishment that would leave a lasting impression. And oh, was he EVER going to make an impression on his conniving little wife.
“Well, Jules, I sure hope the reality lives up to the fantasy,” James muttered aloud to himself. And with that quiet resolve, James had spent the last 2 weeks plotting and planning the perfect way to teach his wife a lesson she would never forget.
******
Julia was lying in bed, thankful for the summer months that gave her time away from work and real-life so that she could “explore herself” as she liked to call it. Caleb was away at camp and James had been busy working, so this had given her plenty of alone time to do whatever she wanted, which over the last few months amounted to reading erotic fiction and “researching” her new obsession with BDSM. As she lay on her bed, re-reading one of her favorite stories, she heard her husband call her from his home office downstairs. “Julia, could you come here for a minute?”
In retrospect, she really should’ve taken more note that he had called her by her full first name. He always called her Jules. He only used Julia on the few occasions that he had been upset with her, which honestly wasn’t very often. They had a great marriage. She adored her husband. What wasn’t there to love?
He was sexy, treated her with nothing but respect, took care of her, and made her feel loved. The only thing lacking, if you wanted to even call it that, was a little more domination action in the bedroom. But he really couldn’t even be faulted for that, considering she had never shared those desires with him. The thought of actually verbalizing her fantasies to her husband was mortifying to Julia.
Though she was pretty certain he wouldn’t judge her, she just couldn’t bring herself to have the conversation on the remote possibility that he might. Not surprisingly, over the years, her stifled needs had finally surfaced as an online obsession. She reasoned it wasn’t ACTUALLY cheating and that she was probably even saving her husband the burden of feeling unnecessary pressure to meet her needs in the bedroom. Yes, she had concluded, she was definitely doing him a favor-and if nobody knew, nobody would get hurt.
She sighed and threw the phone down on the bed as she made her way downstairs to his office to see what he wanted. She opened the door and peeked her head in.
He was sitting at his desk, looking at something on the screen. She took a quick moment to appreciate how sexy he looked sitting behind his desk. She loved it when he wore that white shirt, and even after nearly 10 years of marriage, he could still bring flutters to her stomach when he gave her that certain look.
“Hey hun, do you need something?” Julia asked.
He finally turned his eyes away from the screen and looked at his wife. God, she looked so incredibly innocent. Even though it had been two weeks since he first found out about her
“Self-exploration,” he still could not reconcile what he knew about his wife with the woman who was standing before him now. She simply had no idea her entire world was about to be turned completely inside out.
For a split second, he almost felt sorry for her.
Almost.
“Come in here, please. I wanted to discuss something with you,” James stated with a quiet authority. Julia sensed an unusual seriousness to his tone, and a tiny seed of worry began to take root within her. She stepped inside his office and walked forward, cautiously stopping a few feet from his desk.
“What’s up?” she asked, trying her best to strike a casual tone.
For a moment, he just sat there and stared up at her, considering her carefully.
Julia was becoming a little unnerved under his scrutiny, and just as she was about to repeat her question, he caught her completely off guard by his next question.
“I was just wondering,” he began slowly. “How you were enjoying the new phone we bought you a couple of months ago?”
Had he seriously just called her into his office to talk about how she liked her phone, Julia wondered, and that seed of worry began to grow. When it became clear he was indeed waiting for her answer, she replied that the phone was great and it met all her needs.
James almost had to laugh at the irony of her statement, even though he was certain she hadn’t meant it that way. “Hmm… well, you seem to be on it a lot these days,” he continued. Julia wasn’t sure how she was supposed to respond to that and wondered if she had just imagined the slight accusation in his tone.
But she did know for certain something was off here. Before she had time to contemplate it further, he asked his next question.
“So. What exactly are you doing on your phone that’s keeping you… So very busy?” he threw out the last 3 words of his question with a hint of stressed sarcasm, which was not lost on Julia.
She sincerely hoped he had just found one of the naughty stories she had been reading and planned to just tease her about it a bit, which at one time in the not-so-distant past, would’ve seemed like the worst, most humiliating thing that could ever happen to her.
Oh, but how far she had fallen since then, she thought, allowing for a moment of regret.
She quickly decided she needed to keep any answers as close to the truth as possible, so she blurted out
“I’ve been reading an awful lot. There were so many books I had saved up to read this summer, and now I finally have the time.”
There. That was close enough to the truth. Sort of.
James observed how she dropped her eyes down as she told her first direct lie to him.
“Is that right?” he asked, in a rather rhetorical tone. Then, casually placing his hands behind his head, he leaned back in his chair and considered her again. While everything in his posture showed a casual, perhaps even slightly amused demeanor, the predatory look in his eyes was anything but. She should’ve prepared for the obvious next question, but this whole conversation was throwing her off.