ZOOMED OUT OF A MARRIAGE

by Vandemonium1

Like many of my stories, this one was inspired while I was reading someone else’s work and saw a different path. I’d like to acknowledge SaddleTramp1956’s fine tale, ‘Prime Suspect’ as the inspiration for this one. If you liked the lightheartedness of my ‘The Death of a Modern Man’ and the fast pace of my second story, ‘Onslaught’, then you should like this one. In fact, part of its genesis was in one of the last lines in that story.

For those ignorant of politics in a Westminster style government, in a two-party system those elected become, ‘Members of Parliament’, or ‘MPs’. The party with the most MPs forms government, the losing party becomes the ‘opposition’. From the winning party are appointed, ‘ministers’, who run the departments, when they come together they become the ‘cabinet’.

The opposition appoint their own representatives for each department (the ‘shadow cabinet’), and these powerless individuals become ‘shadow ministers’. MPs that aren’t appointed to either the cabinet or shadow cabinet become, ‘backbenchers’.

Each party will have a ‘Chief Whip’, a senior party member. Their job is to ensure discipline within their party. Make sure they vote the right way and if a member develops a conscience, book them into surgery to get the filthy thing removed.

This story has been independently rated as 3.5/5 pickaxe handles on the rating system that you can find via my and CreativityTakesCourage’s joint profile, SemperAmare.

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Could life get any better than this? I thought to myself, as I stretched out luxuriously on the king-size bed and glanced at the clock on the bedside table of the five-star hotel I was staying in. I yawned.

It had been a long day thus far. Limo to airport for a 7:00 a.m. flight to the state capital. Another limo to Parliament House. Meeting of the Shadow Cabinet, with hangers on, whisked back to the hotel for a quick meal. Fuck lover, shower again, fuck lover again, nap, wake just in time to check in with husband and kids at home, a nightly routine I never missed while away on these trips every month.

It was time for my loving wife act. Time to put my nightclothes on and phone Dave at home and talk to him and perhaps the kids. When I started these trips two years prior, the novelty of my being away meant the kids normally joined in the Zoom call with my husband, but with them now being of ages when they liked their independence as well as the passage of time having bred contempt, I was unlikely to see them tonight.

Shit, I’m being rude and haven’t introduced myself, have I?

My name is Camille Brown. Wife of David Brown. Mother of Dennis, seventeen going on seventy, and Jenny, an aloof sixteen-year-old. I married young and was a stay-at-home mum until Jenny started high school. Dave supported me doing a Certificate IV in Public Relations and soon after graduating I jagged a job in the PR department of the local hospital.

That’s where I met Mike. Rising star in local politics and a national Australian Rules Footballer in his heyday, a commentator of the game on national TV after his playing days were over, and owner of a used car business. Twelve years ago, he’d stood for and won a seat in state parliament and when his party also got the majority, he was made, no surprise, Minister of Sport. From there, he’d steadily progressed toward the top of the tree and was now Deputy Leader of his party and Chief Whip.

He made the news, and came to my attention, after being shot coming out of a bar one night. No one was ever arrested for it and the police remained clueless on who the perpetrator was. With Mike being a politician, having a bit of a reputation as a philander, and a used car salesman, the joke at the time was that if the police had asked everyone with a grudge against him to step forward, the city would have been gridlocked for two days by the queue. He was in my hospital for four weeks and I got to talk to the press on his status.

To cut a long story short, he hired me into his campaign team, got me a senior staff position after that, then bankrolled me into standing for a seat in the local parliament. I won the seat, but my party didn’t win government, so I became a backbencher. That’s where I was at now career-wise. Camille Brown MP, Special Assistant to the Deputy Opposition Leader and Chief Whip, aka, Mike. That qualified me to attend Shadow Cabinet meetings but to have to sit at the back during them.

That reminded me. Sitting tomorrow would be a little uncomfortable. As soon as we’d entered the room after dinner, Mike had bent me over a chair, lifted my skirt, whipped my knickers down, pulled a tube of lube from his pocket, unzipped, slathered lube on his less than impressive cock and unceremoniously shoved it up my ass. Oh, the things I do for ambition and his patronage.  

The clock ticked over to 9:00 p.m. and it was time for my act. Adjusting my pyjamas to reveal a little cleavage, I hustled Mike off the bed and pointed to a chair near the desk and told him to be quiet. He knew the drill; we’d done it often enough. If we’d had adjoining rooms he would have gone back to his, but on this particular trip we didn’t and we both thought it wise to minimise trips in the corridor between his room and mine. Before dawn, when there was unlikely to be anyone around, he’d sneak back along the corridor to his room. Laugh if you like, but it was by covering every base that we’d successfully hidden our affair for four years.

Opening my laptop, I hit the necessary keys to connect to home via Zoom. Dave appeared on the other end, sitting on the leather lounge in our rumpus room, part of the eight-bedroom McMansion befitting an MP married to a successful businessman. By the angle I knew his laptop rested on his, well, lap.

Dave and I began chatting comfortably while Mike sat bored and naked, waiting for me to finish and round three to begin. So bored, in fact, that he began one of his puerile games. This one was called, ‘Let’s try to distract Camille and make her laugh while she’s on the phone to her loving husband, aka, the unknowing cuckold.’

Trying to hide either a smile or a look of annoyance, I longed to be able to bark at him to stop it. In my peripheral vision, I saw Mike standing there with his erection in his hand while he mimed pushing me to the floor at his feet and holding the back of my head while he throat-fucked me. Fuck! Not that again. He bruised my mouth the last time he did that and I spent half the night cleaning puke off the carpet.

I must have drifted off for a second because the next thing I knew Dave was saying rather insistently, “Camille, Camille, can you please ask Mike to stop that. It’s demeaning and downright embarrassing… to him.”

Talk about surreal. Mike froze in mid-pump and my mind went numb. Dave stayed quiet.

“Wha.. what are you talking about, Dave?”

Then I remembered with relief my husband had a mischievous sense of humour. He was always saying things like, ‘Put that man down and come out to lunch with me’, when he rang me at the office. Today must have just been a lucky strike on his part. I decided to play along with it.

“No, dear, I’ve sent Mike and all the other men back to their rooms, the orgy is over for the night.”

Dave didn’t smile or laugh as I expected. Something was wrong. I decided to brazen my way through this and at the same time throw a little smokescreen. When I’d first started travelling with Mike, Dave had quaintly warned me that he had a reputation as a pussy hound.

“Dave, really? I think I could do a little better than Mike, don’t you think? I know I’m not out of your league, but surely if I was going play around, I’d choose someone a little better than that old coot, wouldn’t I?”

Mike pretended to look hurt and began miming slapping my face with his now only half-erect cock.

Dave still wasn’t smiling. He took a deep breath, appearing to come to a decision. I saw his arms extend to grab the laptop and swing it around until it was facing the huge TV screen on one wall of the rumpus room. What was on the screen staggered me. The screen was split into two views. One showed me lying on the bed, the other showed Mike in all his glory standing near the dressing table. I heard myself gasp and couldn’t stop my eyes darting to the smoke detector in the middle of the ceiling, obviously where the cameras were that were my undoing.

What the hell do you say in a situation like that? I stared at the screen and watched the onscreen Mike walk over to the bed. Staying out of the laptop camera’s view, he leaned over to look at the screen from the side, gasped, and stood bolt upright again. He was as speechless as me. Dave wasn’t, though.

“Hi, Mike. I say, where is the other half of your cock?”

Mike blushed deeply. Whether from being busted or through the insult to his manhood I neither knew nor cared. I could just imagine the view Dave had of our two mouths opening and closing like Guppy fish at feeding time. His next words were fairly incongruous, though.

“Now do you believe me?”

The screen on my laptop went through another vertigo inducing traverse of the room at home. When it stopped, I had a view of only half of Dave sitting on the couch, but a full view of the two people sitting next to him. Two words slipped through my befuddled brain to my lips.

“Mum. Dad.”

My father, with a look of thunder on his face, was shaking his head from side to side as if in denial. My mother, always the expressive one, said in a voice I barely recognised it was so croaky, “Oh, Camille. I thought we raised you better than that.”

She then burst into tears and leapt out of the field of view. Dad followed with a hissed, “Slut.” With the slam of a door I deduced they’d left the room.

It was well known family lore that my parent’s marriage was the second for both of them. They’d found each other after divorcing their exes for cheating. If my heart gave out, and it certainly felt like it might, it was racing so fast, I would be lucky if they even deigned to pee on my grave.

Looking away from the screen in sheer embarrassment, I glanced at Mike. He was still naked, bizarrely, and, knowing him as well as I did, I could see the thoughts crossing his face like an LED scrolling sign. Dave must have known before today to arrange cameras in the room. Camera footage could be recorded. Recordings such as those could damage a career… end a marriage… lose a guy his job.

As I watched, a look of determination suffused Mike’s face. He grabbed a pillow, used it to hide his shame and came to sit on the bed beside me so he was finally visible on my laptop camera.

He hissed, “Now listen, cucky boy, I’m sure you’re way too smart to go tell anyone about this. One sniff of the Party, the media, or my wife getting a hold of this, then your dinky little business is finished. You’ll find all your current contracts drying up and good luck getting new ones. I’ll—”

His voice abruptly stopped. A figure stepped into view behind the couch Dave was seated on. At first all that could be seen was a torso. Who it was, was revealed when Dave’s arms again reached for his laptop screen to tilt it backwards a little. There stood Mary, Mike’s wife.

You would have expected her to look livid but instead she sported a soft smile. Strangely, she didn’t say a word, just tilted her head and looked around the room, obviously checking for witnesses. Presumably, spotting none, she leaned over Dave, her left hand grabbing his chest, while her right moved further down. It was off screen but I think she was caressing his package, Dave’s eyes bugging out confirmed as much. By the look of him, Mary’s move was unscripted and almost unwelcome. Almost.

“Camille, old friend, I really wonder why you gave this up for the pathetic excuse for a pee-pee hidden behind that pillow. Shit, a facewasher could do that job well enough.”

Then her expression became serious as she straightened up, her hands resting casually on Dave’s shoulders.

“Don’t bother coming home anytime soon, dear, your key no longer works for MY house. If you need reminding what was in our prenup, well, you know who my lawyer is, just ask him.”

She was probably going to say more but just then I heard a door and Jenny, my sweet innocent Jenny, say off camera.

“Dad, it’s on next. The laptop screen view swung sickeningly again, to show Jenny coming to a halt in front of the huge TV. With her was my son, Dennis, pointing the remote at it. He was flicking through the TV channels. A news anchor appeared on the screen.

“Just to repeat tonight’s top story, in a joint news conference this evening, the wife of the Labour Party Chief Whip, Mike Harding, and the husband of fellow MP, Camille Brown, have jointly sued for divorce from their spouses on the grounds of adultery. They have been allegedly conducting an affair when attending monthly Shadow Cabinet meetings here in the capital. Stewart Burns, the leader of the Opposition, says their party memberships will be cancelled immediately. ‘It’s exactly the disgusting behaviour our party is trying to stamp out’, he released in a statement…’.

The screen went blank as Dennis hit the remote before turning to the camera on Dave’s laptop.

“You did want to be famous, Mum. In case you’re wondering, Dad asked us before telling the media. We said you deserved all you got.”

With that, he put his arm around his sobbing sister and walked her off camera. The screen turned back toward Dave and Mary again. He had a tear trickling down one cheek as well.

“If for no other reason than the tears in our children’s eyes, I will never forgive you for this, Camille. Don’t expect me to be generous in the divorce, I’ve had plenty of time to hide everything from you and your lawyer. As for you, Shithead. You and I will have a date one night in a dark alley. Until then, kiss your balls goodnight every time you go to bed. They have an appointment with a rusty knife and a dumpster.”

For the final time, my husband’s muscular arm reached out and the screen went blank. I was stunned. Mike recovered quicker than me, and man of action that he is, he threw on his pants and shirt, but didn’t button it up. He strode to the door and reefed it open. He again froze as a barrage of flash bulbs lit off and a dozen questions were hurled at him simultaneously. Stepping forward carried him through the door which he slammed behind him. I looked down at my nightie and visions of the next day’s front pages flashed before my eyes.

I could not think of a single pillar that was supporting my life ten short minutes ago that was still standing. I remembered thinking later that I finally knew what rock bottom felt like. I was wrong, of course.

My screen came to life again with an incoming Zoom call. The image was of a man sitting in a darkened room, at a desk with only a lamp for illumination. I recognised him immediately. I’d been elected on the Catholic vote and our local bishop was good friends with Australia’s Cardinal, who had a holiday hideaway near our town. When the pressures of office got to him, he came here and attended our church. That same Cardinal sat at the desk, red skull cap and sash in all their splendour.

I remembered that adultery was mentioned in some stone tablets given to a guy called Moses a while back. Dave always joked that, technically, that made Moses the first person ever with a tablet downloading stuff from the cloud. My present circumstances made it impossible to smile at the joke the way I had in the past.

I knew my political career was finished. While the leader of the party couldn’t remove me from my seat, the voters could. What the Catholic vote giveth, the Catholic vote taketh away. I was struck dumb to be addressed by such a celebrity as this. He wasn’t.

“Camille, my child, your husband has been telling me some very disturbing things about you. There will be someone here shortly who wants to talk to you.”

At that point, he looked sideways and shot to his feet with admirable speed for a man of his years. That took him out of camera view, but the microphone was working fine. The last thing I heard before I fell sideways off the bed and on to the floor was…

“This is the woman I was telling you about, Your Eminence.”

Here endeth the lesson.

Now lighten up.

You can thank Moreandmore for this one.

Marriage counselling wasn’t going well so the counsellor said, ‘Mary, turn and face Tom then say something about him that you like.’  Mary turned. “Tom, amongst all of your friends, you have the largest cock!”