The hot July sun was already bearing down by the time John and the boys finished loading the Jeep for three days of fishing and camping in the mountains. The chaos of their departure crescendoed with hugs from Cheryl all around before exhausting the first half of Friday morning.

Suddenly the house was wonderfully quiet, and Cheryl was alone. She opened Messenger to see if Tom was there. He appeared offline but Cheryl shot him an e-mail: “Tom, are you there?” No response.

Cheryl decided an alternative would be to take the pictures that Tom had been bugging her about. She had entered a cyber relationship with Tom three months earlier and it was still gaining intensity. He was smart, funny and a dazzlingly exciting cyber sex partner. CS with him was almost like dancing, subtle signals within context directing it seamlessly from one phase to the next as passion built. The lead would change. She was inventive and astonishingly uninhibited. He was forceful and commanding, occasionally revealing a sadistic side. That suited Cheryl just fine and provided a fillip to her daily life, so she offered only token and teasing resistance.

Cheryl had already sent Tom two sexy photos of herself: one headless picture in a black bikini, and another with her face turned from the camera, wearing a powder-blue camisole. A schoolteacher on summer break, Cheryl didn’t want to be recognizable in any erotic photos floating around the Internet. The second one was self-taken with the timer and selected from about 30 shots that took almost two hours to get. Her breasts, one of her best features, were Victoria’s Secret-perfect in that shot, with just enough nipple visible to evoke a powerful sexuality.

Cheryl hated taking pictures of herself. She was fully aware that, with all of the professionally photographed bodies online, any ordinary housewife faced considerable challenges looking attractive in static timer-taken photos. With the lighting in her bedroom, the challenge was even more formidable.

So when Tom began asking for more pictures, she didn’t actually promise to deliver, merely conceding that when the opportunity arose she might try to take some for him.

He then told her that he wanted one picture of her in a wet t-shirt and another of her reclining naked on a bed, with a gag and a blindfold to mask her identity. He was insistent and sweetly pushy about it over the course of a couple of conversations.

She naively thought she would shut him up by typing, “OK, if I get a chance I will take some during the summer, but you will never see them unless I get a few revealing photos of you.”

“You’re on,” was his response.

A few weeks went by without another mention until one day he asked if she had taken her pictures. He told her he did and he was anxious to send it to her, but not before she had hers.

She ignored his request. Having created a perfect image of him in her mind, she didn’t