1: The Princess and the Poppers

The bachelor party was in Vegas. My fiancee Samantha had never met these guys. They were my east coast friends from college, and she knew we’d been a wild crew when we were younger.

“You can come to Vegas,” I told her reluctantly. “But I’m going to be off radar for a few days.”

“That’s ok,” she said. “I have an old friend there I’ve been meaning to visit for years.”

“In Vegas?”

“Yup.”

“You’re not coming along just to keep an eye on me?”

“Of course not. I trust you, Simon.”

My friend James was the groom-to-be. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years but we’d been tight through college. He was the guy you hear stories about. He was quiet, he was handsome, he was a little intimidating. The women couldn’t stay away from him. Me and the guys had planned a hell of a send-off for his single life. Samantha knew some of the details. She knew there would be some recreational drugs. I hadn’t denied that there would be a stripper or two.

“If there are going to be girls there, hands off, ok?”

“Of course, Sam. Hands off.”

“Good.”

“What about other parts?” I joked.

“No touching,” she said. “I mean it, Simon.”

I kissed her, slapped her butt, grabbed my bag, and headed for the hotel lobby.

There were eight of us. We met at James’s hotel. I was the first to arrive. James and I hugged each other and slapped each others’ backs. He was looking good. He wore a tailored shirt, his skin was tan, his dark hair was expensively cut. We opened a bottle of bourbon and chatted. He was on his way to making partner and about to marry a woman who could have been a supermodel if her career in biotech patent law didn’t pan out. Anson showed up next. We all hugged. Anson’s a software engineer. We used to call him Urkel but in a circle of otherwise white friends, he was the black guy in glasses, so that was kind of obvious and kind of shitty. We were kids. He’d actually always been more stylish than any of us.

Joey and Brad arrived together. They’d traveled from Long Island, where Joey worked as a plumber and Brad sold real estate, when he wasn’t surfing. They still liked to party hard and they were always posting pictures on Facebook from dance clubs and expensive boats. There was another round of back slapping, another round of shots.

The next guy to arrive was someone the rest of us didn’t know. He worked at James’s firm. He was a big black guy, shaved head, muscular, dashing. He had a winning smile and could make everyone feel like they’d known him for years.

Gary called and said his plane from Chicago had been delayed and he wouldn’t get in until the next morning.

And finally there was Rob. He was the last to show up, as usual. He showed up in typical Rob fashion, sandy hair disheveled and with lipstick on his cheek.

“Couldn’t wait, huh?” said James.

Rob smiled. “I had to stop to get a little gift, my good friends.” He put a vial on the glass table. He laid his AmEx next to it.

When everyone had done a couple of lines we went out for steaks. We ate slabs of steak, drank expensive scotch, caught up. We traded stories about our girlfriends or wives and the kind of trouble we were planning and whether or not they’d ever find out and what they’d do if they did.

“Tit for tat, man,” said Ty. “Tit. For. Tat. If Cathy ever finds out I fucked a ho she just goes out and does the same right back. No hard feelings or nothing. Just boom, like that.”

“That actually happened?” said Anson.

“Yeah, few times.”

“Shit bro,” said Rob. “My girl Angie, she’d be so pissed, she’d rip my dick off. I have to share everything with her. Unconditional.”

“Well let’s keep this theoretical,” I said. “Hand over your phones.”

“What?”

“Y’all are going to get pretty lit up tonight, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You know it.”

“Oh yeah.”

James just gave me a quizzical look.

“So by the powers vested in me by Sir James, I need to collect your phones before anything regrettable can happen.”

“Shit.”

“Fuck.”

“Oh this is gonna be good.”

“This is gonna be bad.”

Our first stop was a strip club called The Velvet. Classy, dim. Five star girls. Lots of silicone on display. We bought James a lap dance. A brunette with a hard body did deep knee bends in front of him, then straddled him, pushed her big tits in his face, held the back of his head. She left a wet spot on the crotch of his slacks. Gary said that was just a showgirl trick. Ty said it was just sweat. James touched his finger to it, smelled it, and assured us it was the real thing.

“You boys are bad,” the girl chided us.

“I’ll show you bad,” said Rob.

“All you showed me so far is a bad tip.”

He passed her a fifty. She smiled and flounced away.

Our next stop, after another round of drinks, was a place called The Kitty Korral. It was considerably less classy than The Velvet. Rob got a lap dance from a cute young black girl with a tight, tight body. He whispered something in her ear, and a few minutes later both of them had disappeared.

There was another bar, a few more lines of coke, and yet another bar. Things get a little blurry at this point. What I remember is that the sight of all those gyrating women got me into a state where I needed some relief, and since the suite had everyone in such proximity that a bed wasn’t guaranteed, I decided I would head back to the hotel room that Samantha and I had rented. I was fully determined to fuck her brains out. I apparently made it back to the room, and I have a vague memory of making my play. I woke up the next day, decidedly un-fucked, on the couch. Samantha had shaken me awake and was handing me a cup of coffee and a couple of Advils.

“How was I?” I asked after downing the pills.

“You were too drunk,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s ok,” she teased. “Do you have any idea how easy it is for a woman to get laid in this town?”

I changed the subject. “So how’s your friend? I forget her name.”

“Kim. Good. Happily divorced, two kids.”

I sipped my coffee.

“So aren’t you going to ask me how my night was?”

“On principle, no,” she said. “But last night you told me everything anyway.”

I almost choked.

“Everything?”

She nodded.

I squinted at her. “How do you know it’s everything?”

“Well, you told me about the strippers and the lap dances.”

“Ok.”

“And you told me about the coke.”

I swallowed. Had I told her what was planned for tonight? I didn’t want to ask, but I desperately wanted to know.

“What else?” I said.

She smirked at me. “I love watching you squirm. Now why don’t you get up and bring the guys their phones back.”

The plan for that night, which I was hoping to hell I hadn’t spilled to Samantha, involved a woman I had hired to show up at our suite, give us a solo performance, and then, if James was game, help him out with any premarital tensions he may be having. It was going to be a surprise to James and in fact to most of the guys. Rob and I had made the arrangements.

We reconvened for the day over brunch. Much-needed bloody Marys were sucked down, as well as a few tequila shots. Gary met us there having flown in that morning and dropped his bags at the hotel. He’s an industrial supplies salesman from Chicago, a family man, definitely the most reserved of the bunch. Despite having just gotten off a plan, he looked well put together in a polo and crisp trousers while the rest of us were rumpled and tired. He just drank coffee. We were ordering our second round of the morning.

“So where’d you end up last night, Simon?” Brad asked me.

I hadn’t told them my fiancee was in town with me. They’d think I was whipped.

“A little private entertainment back at your hotel?” said Rob.

“I was thinking about it,” I said. “But I was too drunk and I just passed out.”

While we were waiting for our food to come, I got up to use the bathroom. On my way back to the table, I nearly tripped over myself in surprise. Two tables over from the guys, Samantha was having brunch with a man and a woman, and the woman was the very same woman I had hired for the evening’s festivities. I recognized her from her pictures. She was a curvy blonde with big blue eyes, a broad charming smile, generous breasts. Her name, professionally at least, was Nicki. She and Samantha were chatting in a familiar way that gave me the initial impression that she was the old friend. But there was no way this could be a coincidence. Maybe she wasn’t the old friend. Maybe Samantha had intercepted my email exchange with Nicki and contacted her. Maybe there was no old friend at all. Had I drunkenly spilled the beans last night? And who the hell was the guy? I realized that I’d been standing and staring and I forced myself to return to my table. Samantha was seated facing toward us. I managed to catch her eye. She smiled at me. I couldn’t read it. Had she caught me at something? How did she even know where we’d be having brunch?

I texted her: Did u know we’d b here?

She read it and responded with a shrug and a head shake.

Then the guy at her table said something and she laughed and put her hand on his arm. She picked up her phone again. A moment later I got a text. It was a picture of Samantha on her knees with her arms pinned back, t-shirt hoisted up, tits jutting out, and the guy at the table holding her by the throat as he fucked her from behind.

This is the real reason I didn’t let you fuck me last night.

At this point, I should make a confession. Over dinner that first night when Ty talked about he and his girlfriend trading affairs, and Rob talked about he and his wife sharing their flings, I held my tongue. Samantha and I have had, for a number of years, a similar but somewhat different arrangement. She’s allowed to sleep around, as long as I get pictures or video. So far it had only ever been a one-way arrangement. Don’t judge. It started when I was deployed in Iraq and she was home alone. It’s a more common story than you might think. We started out those two years intending to stay faithful to one another. I could hack it. She couldn’t. One day over a Skype video chat she asked for permission to be with other guys. She was crying, but she was firm about what she needed. I respected that. I said I would think on it and a week later, feeling terribly conflicted but fearing I would lose her, I gave her my permission.

There were rules, of course. First, it must never mean anything. To avoid emotional attachment, she agreed never to fuck the same guy more than twice. It’s like the old superstition about how you should never light three cigarettes on a single match. Second, she must always tell me about it afterward. Full disclosure. After all, I wasn’t getting any, so I might as well at least live vicariously through her hookups. Photos and video weren’t a requirement at first, but eventually I insisted on getting them, after which I started to look forward to her date nights with a kind of queasy, horny anxiety. Porn is fine and all, but it’s emotionless. But when it stars the woman you love and it’s made custom for you, that’s a whole other thing. When her video messages arrived on my phone, I could barely wait to find a secluded corner with a bottle of lotion and hit play. A couple of guys in my platoon caught me at it once, but that’s a story for another day.

After I returned home, we kept on with her dates. It was just a part of our life now. She enjoyed it too much for me to ask her to stop, and we felt strong in our relationship. Was I jealous? Sure, but at the same time, it remained a huge turn-on for me. Every time she showed me a picture or told me the details of a hookup, my heart hammered and my cock got terrifically hard. When I was deployed, I had always taken this rush of feelings out on myself. Nowadays, I direct that lust at her, with a hard, jealous fucking to claim her again as my own. We love these sessions. I call her filthy names. She goads me with details of how the other guy was bigger, thicker, used her mercilessly, made her do depraved shit that I’d never asked of her. While she tells me this, I fuck her so hard she can’t walk straight the next day. We hold each other afterward for a long and tender while and we fall asleep together.

So the picture Samantha had sent me was on my mind all day, distracting me from the question of how she knew the woman I’d hired for the bachelor party. Instead, I was wondering how she knew the guy, and when, not whether, she was going to fuck him again. (The second time is always the best. She tells them, “My boyfriend only lets me be with a guy twice. This is your last chance so you better make it count.” From the videos I’ve seen, they make it count.) I became so distracted by the idea that I had to find a moment’s privacy in the bathroom, pull out the phone, and jerk off while imagining all the details.

Hangovers put to rest, we started the day’s activities with a visit to the casino. James is an accomplished poker player and he managed to win a couple grand at the table. We went back to The Velvet and tipped big. Lap dances all around. It was late afternoon when we emerged into the scorching sunlight, thirsty from day drinking. We were surprised somehow that the sun was still up. We went for a late brunch at a little out-of-the-way Cajun place that made great po-boys and even better hurricanes. Maybe you could call it high tea, since most of us also took long trips to the bathroom to do a few more lines of Rob’s seemingly bottomless supply of cocaine.

“Oh my god, dude,” said Joey. “That chick with the fuckin’ pierced nipples. She was a fuckin’ freak!”

“Right?” said Ty.

“I would bang her in a hot minute.”

“You mean that’s how long you’d last?” said Brad.

Ty laughed. Joey flipped Brad the bird.

We went out for another round of drinks at a fancy hotel rooftop bar. Ty was getting chatted up by a couple of cute blond girls who were obviously impressed by his muscular good looks, black skin, and sharp attire. Joey went over and tried to edge his way in but they ignored him. Joey is originally from the Jersey shore and let’s just say Ty was more these girls’ style.

While watching this scene and waiting for a drink at the bar, I got a text from a number I didn’t recognize. I looked at my phone and there was a picture of Samantha, some dude’s dick dangling above her open mouth, and a puddle of semen on her tongue. The message said, “Talented fiancee you got, bro. Make sure to kiss her goodnight for me.”

“Get some bad news?” said James. He must have seen the look on my face. I quickly put my phone away.

“Just checking work email,” I said. “Never a good idea.”

I couldn’t get the image out of my head. Typically when Samantha had one of her little adventures, she was the one who sent the pictures, not the guy. This one seemed a little vicious and personal in a way I wasn’t expecting. It was humiliating. So why the fuck did it give me an immediate hard-on? I kept my hand in my pocket to disguise it as I walked back to the poolside.

It had just gotten dark. Rob checked the time and said, “We should get back to the hotel after this round. We don’t want to be late for Nicki.”

“Nicki?” said James.

“Yeah.” He smiled. “You’ll see.”

I had told Samantha I would be hands off with any women during this trip but with that image burning in my mind, I was starting to wonder if I shouldn’t exercise a little good-for-the-gander. I took out my phone and responded to the stranger who’d fucked my fiancee, “That all you got?”

He texted me back immediately. “Nope.” Then a moment later another picture arrived. Samantha and Nicki sharing a big sloppy open-mouth kiss.

What the actual fuck.

We’d arranged with Nicki for her to arrive at the suite at 9. I was wondering how I could take her aside and ask her a few pointed questions. When the knock came at the door, right on time, Rob answered it. First I saw her pink platform heels and her long legs and her pink ruffly skirt. Then I saw her curly black hair. As Rob grinningly presented her to the room, I thought to myself, “That’s not Nicki.” It took me a moment to realize that the woman was my Samantha.

“Guys,” said Rob. “I want you to meet our very special guest tonight, Nicki.”

Samantha met my gaze and gave me a wink. My heart started to pound.

“I thought you said Nicki was a blond,” Rob whispered to me. I’d been the one to make the arrangements online. Only I had actually seen Nicki’s picture.

I forced myself to shrug. “I guess she changed her hair?” It was only after a moment that I found myself wondering why I’d lied. I suppose I could have said, “That’s not Nicki.” I could I have said, “That’s my fiancee, Samantha.” But what then? I think I was more worried about disappointing the guys. I was definitely worried about embarrassing myself. I couldn’t see how to get from that moment to, “Guys, meet my fiancee.” In any case, things were moving faster than I could keep up. I’d been drinking all day and I’d done a few lines. I wasn’t in control of this situation.

Samantha stepped into the circle of white plush couches in the lounge area of the suite where the guys were all relaxing, vaping cannabis, sipping scotch. She curtsied, holding the hem of her skirt, and then did a slow turn so that we could all get a good look at her. She wore a sparkly tiara. The silk blouse was nearly transparent, with a lacy push-up bra visible under it. Samantha has a great pair of breasts that she used to be shy about because they attract so much attention but every now and then she takes them out to play. Tonight she was showing them off. Her flat belly was bared too. The skirt she wore was very short with her pink garters visible just below the hem. She flipped it up in the back to give everyone a peek at her nice round ass, thonged and framed by pink stocking suspenders. Her shoes were sparkly lucite platform heels, improbably high. Her big blue eyes were framed with long false eyelashes and her eyelids and cheeks were dusted with sparkles and her lips were painted with a wet sparkly pink gloss. Where on earth had she gotten this outfit? She looked like a princess turning tricks. But if James took her up on the offer we’d paid her to make him, then she wasn’t going to look like a princess by the time she left.

Brad whistled appreciatively. Anson said, “Mmm hmm hmmm.” Through my anxiousness I felt a rush of pride. That was my fiancee and my friends were definitely enjoying the sight of her. She was hotter than any of the club girls of the past two nights, and she was mine.

“James, hope you like unwrapping this gift, bro,” said Rob. “Nicki, want to show us what you brought us tonight?”

“Of course,” she said.

She sat down on the glass-topped coffee table in the middle of the circle of couches. The coffee table was built on a pivot. She opened her legs and showed off her long white-stockinged thighs, first for James, then she slowly rotated clockwise so everyone got a peek up her little skirt. The guys’ eyebrows rose enthusiastically. What were they seeing under there? When she rotated in my direction though, she crossed her legs and swung past. She gave me a mischievous little smile. When she faced toward Rob, she opened her legs wide. He took out his phone and took a picture and my heart sank.

I said, “Guys, I thought we agreed no phones.”

“Nicki doesn’t mind,” Brad said. “Does she?”

Samantha shook her head.

“Probably good for her business,” said Gary. “Advertising. Most of these girls have web sites.”

“Take all the photos you like, boys,” said Samantha. Then she unbuttoned her blouse, took it off, and tossed it into Gary’s lap.

“Look at those fuckin’ tits,” said Joey. In response, she bounced slightly, making them bobble in her lacy pink bra.

“Men are always looking at them,” she said. “They can’t seem to keep their eyes off.” She shook them side to side. “Or their hands.” She put her hands under them and plumped her cleavage upward. “Or other things.”

“Where did you find this girl?” said Brad.

Rob looked at me and said, “Simon found her.”

Little did he know. I remembered with a pang how Samantha and I had met in college. But he was talking about Nicki, the stripper I’d found online. None of the guys knew Samantha. Would their fun be over if I told them who she really was? Would hers?

“Good choice, Simon,” said James. “I like your taste.”

Rob walked over to the coffee table and knelt in front of Samantha. He made a gesture with his hands for her to open her legs. After a moment of coy hesitation, she complied. He tapped some coke out onto the glass between her thighs and cut it up with his AmEx card. Then he leaned down and snorted a line. He looked up at her, smiled, and said “Take off those fuckin’ panties, princess.”

She gave him a look of mock surprise, her mouth a glistening pink O. “Isn’t it traditional to start with these?” She wiggled her breasts again.

Rob shook his head. “It’s traditional for princesses to do what they’re told.”

She feigned shock. But then she said, “As you wish,” and she raised her feet up off the floor, hiked her skirt, and hooked her thumbs into her thong.

My heart rose into my throat. She was really going to go through with this. I wanted to stop her, call the whole thing off, nice joke Samantha, ha ha. But I also felt proud because she was so sexy and self-possessed. There was no question that she knew what she was doing. She’d somehow taken the place of the real Nicki, if the real Nicki had even been real. She’d have known going in that she would be the center of attention at a bachelor party, with me looking on as well. She’d have known the guys would be expecting a strip tease and probably she’d have known what more we’d asked Nicki to do for James if he was into it. Had she fucked that other guy in order to get herself worked up for this performance? Or in order to get me worked up for it? I couldn’t connect the dots. The thought kept spinning through my head in any case that the woman I was going to marry was shameless. I had always loved that about her. But a slutty woman is a both a gift and a burden. When I kissed her, I would always be wondering who else had kissed her that day. But wasn’t that just part of the thrill?