Chapter 4

"I can't believe this! I really can't believe this!"

"Please Kevin, lower your voice. You'll wake Mineena."

"Waking our daughter is the last of my worries at this moment!"

It was five weeks later and the October issue of Ladies Man had just hit the newsstands.

"I... I had no idea!" she gasped as she leafed through the centerfold feature again.

"What do you mean you had no idea? You were there weren't you?"

"Yes, yes of course, but I had some wine to calm me down. I don't remember much after that."

"Oh, come on, Denise. That's about the weakest excuse i've ever heard. Some wine would have made you a bit tipsy but too much would simply have put your lights out. I've seen you drink." He grabbed the magazine and turned to the photo of Denise, at the moment of orgasm, fingers in her nest, dildo in her rear. "Jesus, you're cumming, Denise! You're fucking yourself! You've got your fingers in your pussy and a dildo half way up your ass!"

"Kevin, I... I don't know what to say. Josh, the photographer seemed so nice. I... slept on the couch for over an hour. He told me the shoot went okay."

"Okay? Yeah, I'll just bet it went okay! Did you fuck him too, Denise? Did you decide to fill your pussy with some real cock too?"

"No! NO! I swear nothing like that happened!"

"How would you even know, if you can't remember posing like this?"

"I... I just would! Kevin, I swear to you, I honestly thought I was just posing for some tasteful nudes."

"Oh, you're nude all right, but there's nothing tasteful about this crap!" he exclaimed, holding up the magazine in emphasis.

"Kevin, please!"

"Don't Kevin me! You've just shown the world you're nothing but a damned street whore!"

"Kevin, don't..."

"How do we explain this to Mineena? A few nude shots might not have been so bad, but pornography like this..."

"Kevin, I had no idea..."

"Don't try to blame it on the wine, Denise. The wine may have loosened you up a bit, given you the courage to take off your clothes, but no amount of wine will cause you to do something like this!"

"I don't know what to say."

"What can you say?"

"That I'm so sorry. That I really and truly had no idea what was going on."

He shook his head in disbelief.

"You should be! I just can't believe you'd pose like this -- for only fifteen thousand."

Her head snapped up in anger.

"So now we get to the it! You don't really care that your wife totally humiliated herself, that your wife revealed the most intimate recesses of her body for others to gawk at, that she debased herself so men would lust after her and regard her as nothing more than a slut! No! Your concern is that I didn't charge enough!"

"Not true!" he countered, "but if you were going to do what you did you should have made it worth it."

"Oh? And just what is the going rate for degrading oneself! Should I have charged by the body part -- five thousand per breast! Another five to see my pussy! Seven more for my ass! And let's don't forget the dildo! Maybe I should have gotten a thousand for each penetration... and how about two more for an orgasm?"

"Yeah, well just maybe you should have! If you're gonna strip and fuck yourself like a slut, you should get paid a lot of money."

"And fifteen thousand isn't a lot of money?"

"Hey, we need every penny we can lay our hands on right now. But what you did -- you should have gotten a lot more."

"I'll keep that in mind when Hustler calls and wants me to..."

"Yeah, maybe you should!" he shot back.

In tears, she ran from the room. Kevin spent the night on the couch and Denise cried herself to sleep.

Relations were more than a bit strained for the next few days, an icy air of silence separating the two. They both kept up appearances for Mineena, but other than that neither had much to say to the other. The talk radio stations and entertainment industry TV shows had a field day. Denise declined several offers to be interviewed about the centerfold. She was the talk of the airwaves for several days until a movie star was caught on tape cheating on his wife and thankfully for Denise, she quickly became old news.

Two days after that Max called and asked to speak with her about another shoot. Still smarting, Denise told him to come over, but that Kevin would now be negotiating her contracts.

"First," said the agent, after they had settled into easy chairs in the living room and Denise had served some coffee, "I want to apologize for what happened."

"It wasn't your fault, Max. I got myself into that."

"Well, we all knew it would involve nudity. I just had no idea that they would ask you to..."