This is a draft of a short story I plan to publish in a collection titled "The Secret Society. The final version will appear in that collection.
Plausible deniability is a woman’s best friend.
What am I talking about?
Take, for instance, this situation I found myself in recently. I was out at a chain restaurant with my girlfriend, Anaïs, and a group of her friends. The running joke among them had been that I didn’t like them, which was why I always turned down their invitations to join them at gatherings like this.
“He used to come all the time,” they would tell Anaïs.
What she didn’t tell them was that anytime I joined them, I was always paired up with the “partners” they dragged along, as though we were little boys on a playdate, and that I hated being around them because of the way they framed almost everything they said around that whole “happy wife, happy life” deferential bullshit.
I can’t relate to that anymore, especially when, as I’ve grown older, experience has proven the opposite is true: if I’m happy, my happiness trickles down to everyone in my life, and they become happy. And I’m at a point in my life where I have better things to do than waste time among men who would set themselves on fire if it meant keeping their girlfriends and wives warm. The instinct to try to save them would be there, but the reality is these men wouldn’t want to be saved. That’s when I realized I was the only man at the table. They all had left their “partners” at home, which I’m glad that they did: No one hates those kind of men more than other men.
Anyway, Anaïs had been insistent that I come this time, and Jasmine was strangely happy to see me there. She cross-talked with Anaïs, joking, “Wow, I feel honored.”
Other’s at the table said the same thing, jokingly. That they too felt honored to have pulled me away from my “hard” work: I’m a boudoir photographer. Then came the question: “Doesn’t Anaïs get jealous that you take pictures of naked women?”
Anaïs replied before I could, “These girls have nothing on me.”
“Why would any woman want these types of pictures taken by a man?”
I replied, “Because something in them wants to feel like a ‘bad girl’ but is afraid of being judged by other women.”
Many at the table said the answers I gave were interesting, something they’d never considered; that the cruel judgments women pass on each other are just as bad as anything men could say or do, all leading to them feeling the same thing: shame.
The final question came: “Why do you want to take those kinds of pictures?”
I understood what this gathering had now become: the interrogation. Something I realized Anaïs’s friends had been putting her through, and that she’d grown tired of the barrage of questions of why she would allow her man to be around other beautiful, naked women. As if they thought she could control me and what I do. And it seemed to me that it was inconceivable to them that it was Anaïs who had put me up to it to begin with—to make money off women who could never find the perfect angle to take a picture of themselves with their iPhone.
Never justify yourself, especially when it would open Anaïs to their judgment—I answered the final question, “Because I want to. And because there are women out there who, for reasons personal to them, want—who need—the male gaze while having the ‘plausible deniability’ that it was all for a boudoir photo shoot. That it’s for their ‘empowerment,’ and there’s a market for that, and that market is made up of women who don’t want to be shamed by other women. I’m just meeting that demand.”
I got called “toxic” for that answer, as if that word, and their attempt to shame me with it, would have an effect like it would with their “partners”, and that’s when I realized Jasmine’s foot was slightly on top of mine.
I moved my foot away from Jasmine’s. She shimmied her foot back over, placing it slightly on top of mine again.
I looked over at Anaïs, who was looking at me with smiling eyes.
As far as I could tell, the rest of the table was oblivious to what was going on beneath it.
All sorts of thoughts flashed through my mind. The one that stood out was the memory of the day my grandmother’s friends came over to tell her they’d seen my grandfather out with another woman.
My grandfather, who was a player, a seducer—the man’s man who made good things happen for my grandmother—was everything the men in her friends’ lives weren’t. And it was these friends who had come to my grandmother with the plausible deniability that their intent was to help another woman.
I remember my grandmother replying, “Why are you trying to break up my marriage? Do you want him for yourselves? I see how you putas look at him.”
After they acted like they didn’t know what she was talking about, and after they called my grandmother dumb, she gave up the game.
“You don’t think I know? A good-looking man like that is gonna be a man. But I’d rather have someone like him—a man with swagger—than a faithful pendejo (Spanish for partner) who’s always up my ass, kissing it. So long as he doesn’t spend my money or get other women pregnant, it’s fine. I’m more mad that he didn’t do a better job of hiding it. Now I’ve gotta talk to him.”
When I first met Anaïs, I told her that story, and since then, she’s called my grandmother a smart woman—especially considering that my grandfather has been dead for decades, while my grandmother is still alive and has never worked a day in her life because of his hustling.
It was in Anaïs’s smiling eyes that I understood that because I consistently make things happen for her, her motto had become, When he’s happy, I’m happy.
Her smiling eyes were giving me permission to be happy, and it made me happy to place my hand on Jasmine’s thigh.
It made me happy to inch my fingers closer to her pussy while I massaged.
It made me happy to stop short close enough that, in the fold of her groin, I could feel her pussy pulse.
It made me happy to feel her slightly writhe next to me.
A friend sitting across from Jasmine asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, why?” she replied.
“Because your face is red.”
Anaïs cut in, “I’m sure it’s just an allergic reaction to the dip.” She looked at Jasmine. “Remember when you mentioned you hoped it didn’t have any gluten or peanuts?”
“Yeah,” Jasmine said. “I guess this does.”
Jasmine shifted her focus to another friend sitting across from us and began talking. I could feel her legs spreading wider, pushing mine as if she was telling me to stop lingering at the edges and grab her pussy.
Where would the fun be in that?
For the rest of the night, I teased Jasmine while Anaïs grabbed my thigh and did the same to me, inching her hand up. But instead of lingering, Anaïs grabbed my cock and began massaging it through my pants. She kept massaging it until it was time to leave, and we all had to awkwardly stand and move around so no one else at the table would notice how aroused Jasmine, Anaïs, and I were—my bulge obvious in my pants, and spots of their wetness seeping to the surface of their jeans.
Jasmine walked us out to our car. She gave me a long hug and whispered, “I hope you come to our next outing. I know I’ll be coming.” She lingered in my arms as my hands slid down her back to her ass. Anais came over and hugged me from behind. There we remained until our hands dropped away, and Jasmine went to her car, and we climbed into ours.
On the drive home, Anaïs talked about some of the women at the table and how miserable they were in their relationships.
Her friends had complained that their boyfriends—husbands—had no edge. They had nothing going on and had stopped working on staying attractive, choosing instead to let themselves go. They no longer had any swagger and were now boring.
What made Anaïs and me shake our heads was when she shared that her friends, especially Jasmine, couldn’t trust their “partners”—so called men who watched tons of porn but said awful things about the women in those videos—not to say the same things about them if they revealed their real sides, the bad girl in them. Her friends would always have to worry that anything they did for their men in bed could be thrown back in their faces.
“I don’t have to worry about that with you,” Anaïs said, smiling. “You know how to play the game. You know to never say the quiet parts aloud.”
It was in that game that, when we got home, Anaïs and I had the most intense, passionate sex. It was like I was meeting her real self.
And in this meeting, where she was at her most vulnerable, she reclaimed the freedom to be authentic. To take what she wanted to take, and for me to handle her as rough as she wanted me to handle her.
And Anaïs came hard when I whispered in her ear, “You’re my bad girl.”
And in return, when she hunched her body over mine to whisper in my ear, “Next week, this bad girl wants you to fuck Jasmine,” I came hard, deep inside her.
My latest novel The Desert Road of Night, which explores many of the themes in my short stories, poems, and personal essays like this one, is available now on Amazon.
