Happy Wife, Happy Life
A short story about cultivating passion through plausible deniability.
Plausible deniability is a woman’s best friend.
What am I talking about? Take, for instance, this one situation I found myself in recently. I was out at a chain restaurant with my girlfriend, Anaïs, and her friends. As we were seated at a table, she made sure to sit on one side of me while her best friend, Jasmine, sat on the other.
Jasmine was going on and on about how, despite their many invitations to join them at gatherings where their circle of friends would get together—and sometimes have their boyfriends or husbands tag along—I would always decline.
I have better things to do with my time than spend it among men who, in their desire to please the women in their lives, talk that “happy wife, happy life” bullshit. I can’t relate to that anymore. My experiences have proven to me that the saying is bullshit. It’s more like: if I’m happy, then my happiness trickles down to everyone in my life.
Based on the stories Anaïs would share with me after returning from her gatherings, combined with my experiences from the few times I’ve met these men at parties hosted by her friends, it seems to me that these guys would set themselves on fire if it meant keeping their girlfriends warm—just to be told they were their “good boys.”
Nah.
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.”
Jasmine’s boyfriend wasn’t there. In fact, I was the only guy at the table, and the rest of Anaïs’s friends made the same joke, saying they too felt honored to have pulled me away from my work: I’m a boudoir photographer.
Then came the question: “Doesn’t Anaïs get jealous that you take pictures of naked women?”
She replied before I could, “These girls have nothing on me.”
Or the other question: “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. The cruel judgments women pass on each other are as bad as anything men could say or do, all with the same result: 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. My girlfriend had gone through it too and had grown tired of her friends’ constant barrage of questions. Why did she allow her man to be around other beautiful, naked women? As if they thought she could control me and what I do.
So she brought me along so I could tell them myself, and I gave them the same answer I’d given Anaïs when we started dating:
“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 found among women who don’t want to be shamed by other women. In my way of thinking, I’m meeting that demand.”
That got a laugh from Anaïs’s friends. Some called me toxic, as if that meant anything to me, and that’s when I realized Jasmine’s foot was slightly on top of mine.
I looked over at Anaïs, who was looking at me with smiling eyes.
I moved my foot away from Jasmine’s. She shimmied her foot back over, placing it slightly on top of mine again. It stayed there while Jasmine and Anaïs cross-talked with the rest of the table until the end of the night when we all said goodbye. Jasmine gave me a long hug.
On the drive home, when I mentioned to Anaïs that Jasmine’s foot had been on mine, she said, “Maybe she didn’t know... Sometimes, when we wear those kinds of shoes, we can’t feel where our feet are.”
“When I moved my foot away, she moved it again.”
Anaïs smiled and said, “It’s just your imagination,” then changed the subject.
I knew exactly what was going on—it was the buildup for what came next. Over the weeks, after turning down several more invites to their gatherings—again, I was busy—I finally accepted, but only after Anaïs insisted.
When we got to the restaurant, Anaïs insisted on the same seating arrangements, and again, it was just her friends. The only thing different was the setting. Whereas before it had been a chain restaurant, this time it was a lounge. The atmosphere was dark, with moody music playing in the background while everyone around us snacked and drank wine.
After much cross-talk, instead of her foot, Jasmine inched her leg closer until it was against mine. Then, after a long moment, she lifted her leg and draped it over mine, so now she was spread-legged while talking to Anaïs, who was looking at me again 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, but 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—the player, 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.
My grandmother replied, “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—someone with swagger—than a faithful pendejo 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 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 make things happen for my girlfriend, her motto had become When he’s happy, I’m happy.
And it made me happy to place my hand on Jasmine’s thigh, massaging it as my fingers inched closer to her pussy, stopping just short to feel her pulse through her jeans in the fold of her groin as she slightly writhed.
A friend sitting across from Jasmine asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Because your face is red.”
Anaïs interjected, “I’m sure it’s an allergic reaction to the dip.” She looked over at Jasmine. “Remember when you said you hoped the dip didn’t have any gluten or peanuts?”
“Yeah,” Jasmine said. “I guess this does.”
Jasmine then turned her focus to another friend sitting across from us, all the while spreading her legs wider, signaling for me to stop lingering at the edges and touch her pussy, which I didn’t. 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, she 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, gave me a long hug, and said, “I hope you come to our next outing. I know I’ll be coming.”
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 that their men, who watched tons of porn but said awful things about the women in those videos, wouldn’t say the same things about them if they revealed their real sides—the bad girl in them. They always had 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.”
It was in that game that, when we got home, Anaïs and I had the most intense, passionate sex. It was like we had met again, except this time, I was meeting her real self.
In this meeting, where she was at her most vulnerable, she reclaimed the freedom to be authentic.
Anaïs came hard when I called her my bad girl.
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.
Want more? My Instagram isn’t where I write, but it’s where I share the images, music, and moments that shape the stories I tell. If you’re into the culture, the vibe, and the history behind these worlds, follow me @viktor.e.mares.
Also, my 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 for preorder on Amazon.