Need.

I needed the pain.

I don’t know when it started, when the little seed of an idea was set in the fertile soil of my mind and it sprouted and began to grow. I don’t understand why it started, because I’d always had a life and a history of relationships that were healthy and fulfilling by any metric.

I’d never been cheated on. I’d never cheated on anyone. I’d been dating regularly, had long term relationships and short little fun one night stands.

The list of women I’ve been with isn’t long, but it’s long enough. In the double digits without being disconcerting and each one of them was special and unique and holds a place in my heart.

I was friendly with my exes, if not outright friends. Sociable and successful enough in my professional life, better off than some and not jealous of those who were above me.

If you met me you’d think I was ordinary and well adjusted. I could be your neighbor. I could be your coworker. I could even be your friend and you wouldn’t know or understand that this compulsion, this darkness, was inside of me. I could play the part of a well-adjusted man because I was for such a long time.

Until the day I woke up and the single idea was present in my mind and I realized that it had been growing for years and now the roots were long and tangled in my brain. Nothing could get them out.

I want to watch my wife cheat. I need to watch my wife cheat. I crave it. I hunger for it. I can’t get it out of my mind.

For a long time, I did try to fight it. The compulsion predated any enjoyment of porn surrounding cuckolds or cheating. I didn’t seek it out, it found me and it stuck in my brain so firmly that each night when I went to bed next to my wife it was all that I could dream of.

When I closed my eyes I would see her naked body entwined with a man I couldn’t put a face to but I knew. I knew that he knew me and I knew that we were close and that made the fact that he was pleasuring my wife all the more difficult to take.

Bodiless I would be there with them. Swooping around and coming in close, viewing it from all angles and listening to their quietly whispered confessions.

That they loved one another and not me. That they did all this to hurt me. That he could fill a place in her that I never could because he loved her enough not to lose her as I did. Because I loved my wife, but as the days turned into weeks and turned into months I realized that love alone might not be enough.

Compulsion looms large, slamming down with power and force and flattening all opposition.

The need took me to dark places. My resistance to watching porn featuring this little fetish eventually broke and I tried to use it as a balm to soothe my need, but it only made it stronger. Instead of sating it I was feeding it, giving it strength and energy and making it be present and I knew that it would eat me alive. I knew that I would lose myself.

I’d already started to. Sex with Ellie was getting boring and I was having a hard time not only satisfying her but eventually even getting it up. Only when my eyes were screwed shut and I conjured the memories of those dreams, using her moans in the real world as a soundtrack for my fantasies, could I ever get hard enough to satisfy her.

I hated myself for it, but I knew that it was going to happen.

I was going to set my wife up to cheat and fulfill the fantasy that had consumed me. The only question that remained was how.