The Lies You Tell the Others
(and the lies you tell yourself)
1. Six Hours Out of Port
"No, sweetheart. I wasn't asleep."
Having drifted off, figuratively, in the comfort of her deck chair, caressed by the late afternoon sun and the humid sea breeze, Michelle resisted the momentary urge to respond negatively to the interruption of her bliss by her husband.
Husband? In truth, he was her fiancé, although they hadn't yet set a date and he hadn't yet bought her a proper ring. But she thought of herself as already his wife, just not quite according to the letter of the law.
"You were snoring."
"I don't snore."
"Sit up, Chelle. Got someone I want you to meet."
Alben stood in front of her, dressed in his elegant summer attire, and to her right was a stranger, clad in a lightweight tank-top shirt that did not flatter his developing pot belly, and Bermuda shorts that highlighted a pair of deeply-tanned but skinny legs. She sat up straighter on the recliner and pulled her prescription sunglasses down an inch for a moment. "Hm?" she responded neutrally.
"How're ya doin'?" the balding man inquired. He was a few inches shorter than Alben, which meant that he was still a good half foot taller than herself.
"Already?" she asked Alben, catching herself too late. She had been fantasizing about dinner at the buffet, not about sex.
"This is Richard," her distinguished-looking husband explained, briefly peering over his shoulder instead of looking at her. "Say hello."
"Hello, Richard," she said to him without enthusiasm.
"Helloooooo, Michelle," the man said, applying an oily sheen of suntan lotion to the words.
"Stand over here, Richie," Alben directed, pointing further to his left. The other man did so, and then Alben moved a few inches too, in effect mostly shielding her from the view of three men standing by the railing. Alben then placed his finger under the spaghetti strap of Michelle's bikini bra and pulled it aside, revealing to the man her small right tit and its pebbly little brown nipple.
Michelle drew in a breath but just stared at the ocean to her left, impassive.
"Noice," Richard said.
Alben kept hold of the strap for a couple of seconds longer, then let go. The bra cup snapped back gently, mainly into place, and Michelle used her thumb to finish neatening up her appearance. "Aren't you going to thank him?" her husband asked. "The gentleman just paid you a compliment, didn't he?"
"Thank you," she said matter-of-factly to the gentleman, looking down at her freshly pedicured little toes rather than up at him, then added, "he only does this because he thinks it will embarrass me."
"And does it?" Alben inquired solicitously.
She made eye contact with the stranger again. "What do you think," she said evasively, involuntarily arching her back ever so slightly.
"A lot?" her husband persisted.
She sat up straighter still and lifted her knees a little so as to rest her soles on the chair surface. "It depends." She looked down at the other man's expensive sandals and his tired, damaged-looking feet. On the way down, her eyes detected the definite signs of an erection in the man's shorts. Ugh. Perhaps, she thought, he had chosen to go commando this afternoon. Double ugh.
"Open your legs. Let's see whether you're also aroused."
She complied for him, parting her knees just enough to give both men a look. "Not really," she said. "But I knew you would ask." The blue fabric of the new swimsuit Alben had gotten her was the type that darkened if even slightly wet, and she couldn't be one hundred percent confident they were seeing no such evidence at the moment.
"Oh well. We can try to fix that," he said, expecting and receiving no additional response.
Richard cleared his throat, then asked, "how do you like the cruise so far?"
"We're only six hours out of port," she said, closing her legs again. "It's barely started."
"Exactly. Party's only starting."
His attempt at small talk was inconsistent and weak, and she didn't bother to reply again.
He didn't impress her.
She wasn't easily impressed.
Alben did impress her, even after two years together. Before that, she had endured nearly twenty years of marital misery and half a decade of emotional solitude while sharing custody of her youngest child. Tentatively reentering the dating scene, she encountered mostly unmarriageable single men and too many married liars. And then a friend of a friend hosted a Y2K party, which she almost didn't go to, and Alben had been there. Almost ten years her senior, he was grounded and confident and well-mannered and financially secure and semi-retired and, most importantly, widowed - qualities she found charming, like his namesake Vice President and his young grandson named after him. Slender but almost flat-chested, and with a face that could be charitably called "plain," she was hardly a knockout, but he had apparently seen something in her eyes, even behind the large round glasses she depended on to see anything past her nose. So, much to her own surprise, she went home with him to ring in the new year 2000. By the second date he had checked all of the boxes for her, and on the third date she made sure to check the rest of his. Her background in accounting didn't hurt either, as it turned out; he hired her to be his personal assistant, for his part-time real estate brokerage, and brought her to live in his tony lakeside home in a small, prosperous suburb.
This guy Richard, by contrast, checked no particular boxes at all for 45-year-old Michelle. She guessed he might be closer to her own age than to Alben's, but that didn't mean a lot to her. Her husband was disciplined and would never let himself go to seed the way this guy obviously had.
Alben didn't let the silence endure to the point it became awkward. "Wanna show him your muff, Chelle?"
"I can't refuse," she said opaquely. She shivered almost imperceptibly.
"Don't lie," he chided her. "You always have the option to say no." He allowed honesty from her. Encouraged it, even. Honesty was her safeword, he would tell her at times, even though he would discount her stated preferences when it suited him, which was increasingly often. Her actual safeword was Red.
"I'm not going to." She recognized his use of coarse language about her pubic hair meant nothing good would happen if she were to decline.
"Good." He reached below her navel to put an index finger inside the waistband of her swimsuit. Her knees were still up, and lacking any further verbal direction she held them tightly together, not wishing to make it easier for him. But he was able to pull the front panel downward a couple of inches, revealing several weeks' growth of hair that was a shade or two darker than the natural color of the hair on her head, which in turn was a few shades darker than the expensively bleached and streaked dye-job she sported now. It was more than stubble but calling it a muff or a bush was a bit of an exaggeration. But she detested even more for him to use the term pubes, so she hadn't protested the choice of word. He added, "see what I mean? She loves it," for the other man's benefit.
"Noice," the other man said again.
Alben let go. "So, Richie. Are you curious what the suites on this ship look like? I decided to upgrade, just before boarding, and I'm already thinking I'll never do a standard stateroom again. My little pet would love to show you around. A guided tour, so to speak, of our little home away from home. Wouldn't you, Chelle?"
She understood his choice of the word 'pet' of course. She understood the purpose behind the liberties he had taken in exposing her tits and pussy in a public setting, no matter how carefully or how briefly. She understood also what a rhetorical question was. "Yes," she said this time, adjusting her swimsuit bottom for full coverage.
Richard looked at his watch. "Katherine's spa session goes another 35 minutes," he said incongruously.
"Perfect. My pet won't need more time than that. You don't mind that he's married, do you, Chelle? Come, sweetheart, get up."
She sat the rest of the way up and pivoted her petite body to set her bare feet on the deck, then slipped into her sandals. She looked up at their new companion and said, "don't get the wrong idea. He only does this to embarrass me. Every time we are on a cruise, at some point. It's always something."
