You stare at your fiancé kneeling between your legs. She looks up at you, your crank in her hand, her lips wet, her lipstick not quite rubbed away.

You’d asked her a question you meant for a compliment. The kind of nonsense question you might blurt out when a woman has you so close to a climax that unruly words fly out of your mouth.

Now you wish you hadn’t. You were not prepared for her answer that would make you an accessory-after-the-fact to murder.

You were tense. She asked if it was pre-wedding jitters. You let her think that was it. So, she led you to the bathroom, sat you on her mom’s vanity stool, and went to work making magic with her mouth.

It didn’t take long to melt the tension, because she is spectacular. Her head bobbing, coming down left, lifting, coming down right, taking you all the way in. Her nose brushes against the skin of your belly. It’s somehow more intimate and immediate than her tongue on your balls. She had you breathing harder, making that long, elastic moan that let her know how fine a time you were having, and what a great job she was doing.

Loosened up like that, the question popped out of you.

“How did you get to be so good at this?”

It was unintended, but it was not a totally random question. You did mean it to be a compliment. For as long as you two have been together, you often wondered how she acquired such a delightful skill.

But last night you had all the more reason to wonder how she achieved such oral artistry.

Some guys from her graduating class got together and hauled you off to a bar out on Division Road for a pre-wedding boozer. It didn’t take many drinks before they got around to celebrating your fiancé’s magnificent mouth. They all had opinions on what you could expect if you lived long enough to reach your honeymoon, but they denied any personal experience to back it up.

You played the good sport, went along with the joking, figuring she’s allowed to have a past. As long as it stays in the past.

But one thing you did notice was the way they denied any first-hand knowledge of her talent. It seemed less about saving your feelings and more about convincing each other.

The question remained at the forefront of your mind this morning. It kept you keyed up, which you tried passing off as those pre-wedding jitters. Which led your fiancé to prevent you getting cold feet by hauling you aside and sucking you off. The question, percolating in your head, popped free when your brain was otherwise engaged.

You didn’t really want an answer. You figured she would hum an appreciative “mm-hmm” that would buzz you through her lips.

But she didn’t. She sat back on her heels, still holding your pecker, rubbing her thumb over the tip.

“Do you really want to know?” she asked, and you said, “what?” because your brain wasn’t taking messages, occupied as you were, savoring how your entire nervous system melted into a hot, liquid state.

“Do you really want to know?” she repeated, and now you floated up through the fog of fellatio to focus on what she was saying.

“How I got to be so good,” she said. “At this,” she added, waggling your pecker like a sock.

“Sure,” you said. Because you did. Even before the guys last night, you would let yourself drift into fantasies about how she mastered the mechanics of oral sex. You would imagine her studying the geography of the penis in a Biology class full of girls. Or practicing on toys and vegetables with her girlfriends at slumber parties. Or fumbling with the real thing on one or more of those guys from last night.

“Did somebody say something?”

“When?”

“Last night?”

“Last night? No. Nothing special.”

“What did they say?”

“They talked about a lot of things.” You told her you couldn’t recall all that much, there was so much to drink, but you were deflating in her grip, an inverse Pinocchio, shrinking the more you lied.

She leaned forward, mouthing you a little bit more, as you tried to conjure some great distractor to put her back on track.

“All I meant,” you said, “was how good you are. Like you studied.” You don’t know when to shut up when you’re nervous, or embarrassed, or lying. With your dick between the teeth of a woman you know can get really angry. Whose years of orthodontia would ensure a clean bite-through if she decides to take your balls off.