Just Him
A Fictional Story by cheekchloe.
Cassie and her husband had been together since forever. I’m talking college-era, the kind of relationship that outlasts apartments, jobs, other friends’ entire marriages. He was a fine guy. Quiet. The type who showed up, helped clear the table, loaded the dishwasher without being asked, and then sat in the corner with a beer while the rest of us got louder. Nobody ever talked about their sex life. There was nothing to talk about as far as any of us knew. They seemed fine. Stable. Boring in the way that long couples sometimes are, where you assume the fire went out years ago and neither of them minds.
The second bottle was open by the time the conversation slid into stupid territory. You know how it goes. Someone makes a joke about an ex, someone else tops it, and then we’re all in the gutter together, laughing about things we’d never bring up sober.
Cassie was already a little flushed. She gets pink across her cheeks when she’s been drinking, and her blonde hair was pushed to one side, falling over her shoulder. She was sitting on the floor leaning against the couch, legs crossed, glass in hand. She’d been quieter than usual for most of the night, like she’d been chewing on something.
Then she said it.
“You know I never complain about him being too much, right?”
The room kind of paused. Not dramatically—just a half-beat where everyone’s brain caught up with what she’d said. Nora was the first to bite.
“What do you mean?”
Cassie laughed into her glass. Not a big laugh. More of an exhale with sound. “There’s not a lot there to complain about.”
She said it so easily. Like she’d been carrying it around for years and had just now found a place to set it down. Nobody spoke for a second, and I think she took that as permission, because she kept going.
“He’s small. Not ‘kinda small, whatever.’ Small.” She held her index finger and thumb apart in the air, maybe two and a half inches, and wiggled them slightly. “Soft, it’s barely anything. Hard, it’s still not much.”
I stared at the gap between her fingers. It was smaller than I expected. Not that I had a specific expectation—I’d never thought about her husband’s dick before that moment—but there was something about seeing the actual measurement in someone’s hand that made it concrete. Real. Not a joke. A fact.
She said she used to tell herself he was a grower. That first summer they were together, she’d see it soft and think, okay, it’ll get bigger when it matters. It didn’t. She said she waited for it. Kept waiting. Eventually realized that was just how it was.
“The first time I saw it,” she said, “I actually waited. Like a beat. I thought maybe he was joking, or maybe it was cold, or maybe it wasn’t done yet.” She took a sip. “He just stood there.”
I don’t know why that part stuck with me. The image of him just standing there while she waited for a punchline that wasn’t coming. Both of them in that moment, her looking at him, him looking at her looking at him. The silence of it.
She talked about the early months. Faking it. Not every time, but enough. She said she’d adjust how she moved—press closer, shift her hips, try to find an angle where she could actually feel him at all. She described it as a mechanical problem, as if she were troubleshooting. “You kind of learn to work with what you’ve got,” she said, and then added, “or what you don’t.”
Nora asked if he knew. Cassie shrugged.
“He knows I can’t always feel him. I told him last week, actually. I was on top, and I just said it. ‘I can barely tell you’re in.’ Plain as that.”
The room went quiet again. Becca’s eyes were wide. Sam had his hand over his mouth, half-laughing, half-shocked.
“What did he do?” Nora asked.
“Went red.” Cassie paused. “Then got harder. Which still didn’t change much.”
Everyone broke. The laughter was loud and messy, the kind where someone snorts and it makes everyone else worse. I was laughing too. I was also very aware that my legs had gone still and my hands were tight around my glass. I was pressing my thighs together under the table without thinking about it.
Because here’s the thing nobody in that room knew: I’ve been watching this kind of stuff for years. SPH videos. Clips of wives talking about their husbands. Women holding up their fingers and laughing. The whole genre. I found it in my mid-twenties, and it hit something in me that I still don’t fully understand. I’ve never told anyone. Not Cassie, not anyone. It’s the kind of thing I only access in private, the kind of tab I close before I get up from my desk.
And now Cassie was sitting three feet away from me, describing her actual husband, and it was too close. Too real. I kept my eyes on my glass, laughed when everyone else laughed, and tried to act normal.
She kept going. She talked about the things she says to him now—not speeches, not big conversations. Just little comments that slip out. How it disappears in her hand when she’s holding him. How she doesn’t even think about condoms because they don’t stay on right—there’s not enough to keep one in place. She said that one casually, like she was talking about a sock that won’t stay up.
Then she told us about the lipstick.
“One time he was hard, and I had a lipstick on the nightstand, and I just…” She laughed. “I put it next to him. Same length. Thicker, though.”
She held up her hand as if gripping an imaginary tube, then mimed placing it side by side with something invisible. The gesture was small and precise and devastating.
She laughed. The room laughed. I laughed late. I laughed about a full second after everyone else, because I was still processing the image. Her husband, hard. A lipstick next to him. The comparison. Her doing it in the moment, not as a joke, just as a thing that happened.
My face was warm, and it wasn’t from the wine.
Then she asked if we wanted to see a picture.
“Not his face,” she said, already reaching for her phone. “Just… him after a shower. Towel not really covering anything.”
She said it like she was offering to show us a funny cat photo. The same energy. Casual.
People leaned in. Nora said “oh my god” before the phone even got all the way around. Becca put her hand over her mouth. Sam just started laughing, that helpless kind where you can’t stop.
The phone came to me. I looked.
It was him, standing in their bathroom, towel half-draped. The towel had slipped or been pulled, and there he was. Soft. Small. Tucked against his thigh, barely there. The kind of dick that looks like it’s trying to hide inside itself. The kind of photo I would close instantly if someone walked in behind me—not because it was someone else’s, but because of what it was. Because of what seeing it did to me.
I made a face. The same face everyone else made—eyes wide, mouth slightly open, the universal expression of “oh wow, that’s really small.” I handed the phone to the next person and took a long drink of wine. My hand was steady. Inside, I was something else entirely.
She put the phone away and leaned back against the couch. “I used to feel bad talking about it,” she said. “Like I was betraying him or something. Now I don’t care as much.” She shrugged. “It’s just him.”
It’s just him. She said it like that, and it explained everything. And maybe it did. Maybe after enough years of being with someone, you stop seeing their body as something to judge and start seeing it as just a fact. Like his shoe size. Like his height. Just him.
I changed the subject after that. Asked Nora about her new job, something safe, something that didn’t make my pulse do what it was doing. The conversation moved on. Wine kept flowing. By midnight, everyone was talking about something completely different.
—
The group chat is still going. Cassie’s been texting that she told him we know. Not what we said, just that the topic came up. She thinks I found it funny. I did find it funny. That’s not the only thing I found funny, but she doesn’t need to know that.
She sent a message this morning: “He turned so red when I told him you guys saw the picture.” Followed by a laughing emoji.
I typed back “lol” and put my phone down.
Last night, after everyone left, I went to my room and put on the same kind of videos I always watch—the familiar stuff. Wives talking. Small dicks. Teasing. The genre I know by heart.
I couldn’t finish. Not because it wasn’t working—it was working too well. I kept seeing Cassie’s fingers held apart. Her voice saying I can barely tell you’re in. The lipstick next to him. The photo on the phone, his small dick just existing in the frame while someone’s towel slid wrong.
The strangers on the screen couldn’t compete with the real thing that had just happened in my living room. I turned it off and lay there in the dark, still hard, still thinking about it.
She has no idea. She thinks I’m just a friend who laughed at a funny story about her husband’s small dick. She doesn’t know that I went home and replayed every word she said. She doesn’t know that the photo is still in my head, clearer than anything I’ve ever watched on purpose. She doesn’t know that the thing she told us so casually—it’s just him—is the thing I keep coming back to.
She doesn’t know about any of it.
And I’m going to see her again next weekend, and I’m going to sit in the same room and drink wine and laugh and be normal, and the whole time I’ll be thinking about her husband’s dick and the way she talked about it like it was nothing.
Just him.
—
The week between was worse than I expected.
I kept telling myself it would fade. That’s how it usually works with this stuff. You see something, it hooks into you for a day or two, and then the ordinary weight of life pulls it back under. You go to work. You eat lunch. You forget. The thing shrinks from an obsession to a memory to nothing.
That didn’t happen this time.
Monday I was fine. Busy. Meetings, errands, the usual noise. But by Tuesday night, alone in my apartment with nothing to do, my brain went back to it like a tongue pushing at a sore tooth. Cassie’s voice. The gap between her fingers. The way she said he just stood there.
I opened my laptop. Didn’t even pretend I was going to do anything else. Found a video I’d watched before—a woman sitting on a bed, talking to the camera about her husband, holding her fingers apart, laughing. The same setup I’d seen a hundred times. It usually worked. It was reliable. Familiar.
I watched it for five minutes and turned it off. The woman on screen was performing. She was good at it, but she was performing. Cassie wasn’t performing. Cassie was sitting on my floor with wine on her breath, telling five real people about her real husband’s real dick, and the difference between those two things was enough to make the video feel hollow.
I closed the laptop, lay on the couch, stared at the ceiling, and thought about the photo again. The towel. The bathroom. Him just standing there, soft, small, not even aware he was being documented. Not aware his wife would hold that photo up in a room full of people two years later.
I thought about her putting the lipstick next to him. I thought about that a lot.
—
Wednesday, the group chat lit up.
It was Nora. She’d sent a meme—something about “things you can’t unsee”—and tagged Cassie with a row of crying-laughing emojis. Cassie responded immediately.
Cassie: Oh no 😂
Nora: I’m still thinking about it
Cassie: STOP
Becca: We’re all still thinking about it, Cassie
Cassie: He asked me today if people were “talking about it.” I told him no one cares.
Nora: LIE
Cassie: Obviously lie. What am I going to say? Yes honey, everyone at the wine night has seen your dick, and they’re all texting about it.
Becca: 😂😂😂
Sam: I’ve recovered. Mostly.
Cassie: Sam, you were the loudest
Sam: I know. I’m not proud.
I read all of this in real time. I didn’t respond. I watched the bubbles pop and disappear and pop again, and I held my phone with both hands and felt my pulse in my thumbs.
Then Cassie sent a follow-up —just to me, in a separate thread.
Cassie: You were quiet about it btw
I stared at that message for a long time.
Me: Wasn’t quiet. I laughed.
Cassie: You laughed late. I noticed.
My stomach dropped. Not a fall—more like a slow sink. Like the floor tilted by half a degree.
Me: Processing.
Cassie: Processing what?
Me: The fact that you just had that photo ready to go on your phone
Cassie: 😂 I’ve had that photo for months. I’ve been waiting for the right moment to show someone.
Me: And Saturday was the moment?
Cassie: Second bottle of wine. Seemed right.
Me: You’re insane
Cassie: You’re blushing. I can tell through text.
Me: I’m not blushing
Cassie: You’re blushing.
I put the phone down. Picked it up. Put it down again. She was being normal. She was being Cassie—teasing, direct, the way she always is. She wasn’t suggesting anything. She wasn’t hinting. She was just giving me shit the way she gives everyone shit.
But she’d noticed I laughed late. She’d been watching me while she talked about her husband’s dick, and she’d noticed something.
That thought sat on me like a weight.
Thursday. I made the mistake of going back to the video. The same one. The woman with the fingers. I told myself I just wanted to see if it still didn’t work. It didn’t. I watched for three minutes, felt nothing close to what I’d felt Saturday, and turned it off.
But I didn’t stop thinking.
I kept thinking about what Cassie said about faking it. About adjusting how she moved. Pressing closer, shifting her hips, trying to find an angle where she could feel him at all. I thought about her on top of him, looking down, saying I can barely tell you’re in, and him going red, getting harder, and it still not mattering.
The specificity of it. That’s what got me. It wasn’t a fantasy. It was a description of something that actually happened in a bed I’d never seen, between two people I’d known for years. The details were too specific to have been invented. The angle adjustments. The condom problem. The lipstick.
I thought about my own body. Four inches. Thin. The thing I’ve carried around my whole life like a secret under my clothes. The thing I’ve watched strangers mock in videos I close before anyone could see. And here was Cassie, describing a man with the same problem—or close to it—in the same tone she’d use to describe a bad restaurant.
It’s just him.
I kept hearing that.
—
Friday night. The group chat again. This time Becca started it.
Becca: Okay, real question. Does he know she showed us the picture?
Cassie: He knows I talk about it. He doesn’t know about the photo specifically.
Nora: Cassie.
Cassie: What? He knows it’s small. He’s not under any illusions.
Sam: Does he know you compared it to a lipstick
Cassie: He was there for that.
Sam: WHAT
Cassie: He was right there. I did it in front of him. He just kind of went quiet.
Nora: I don’t know if that’s mean or hot
Cassie: It’s both. That’s marriage.
I read it’s both three times.
Then another message from Cassie, again in our separate thread.
Cassie: You’re being weird about this.
Me: I’m not being weird
Cassie: You’ve barely said anything in the group chat. You always say something.
Me: Just busy
Cassie: You’re thinking about it.
Me: About what
Cassie: About what we talked about Saturday. Don’t play dumb.
I didn’t respond for ten minutes. I could see the typing indicator start and stop on her end. She was choosing her words.
Cassie: It’s fine if you are. I’m just saying. You can say so.
I stared at that message until my screen went dark.
Me: I thought it was funny. That’s all.
Cassie: Okay.
She left it there. One word. She didn’t push. She didn’t let it go either. She just put it down and walked away from it, the same way she’d put down the story about her husband—casually, like it wasn’t heavy, like it was just a thing she’d been carrying and now it was on the ground and she didn’t need to pick it back up.
I didn’t sleep well.
—
Saturday morning. I was in the kitchen making coffee when my phone buzzed.
Cassie: We’re coming tonight. He’s coming too.
Me: Who’s we?
Cassie: Me and him. Becca and Sam are coming. Nora bailed. Are you making food, right?
Me: I wasn’t planning on a full thing
Cassie: You’re making food.
Me: Fine
Cassie: Good. He’s nervous btw. He knows you all know.
Me: That you talked about it?
Cassie: That everyone knows. I told him.
Me: How did he take it?
Cassie: He went quiet. Then he asked if people laughed. I told him yes.
Me: And?
Cassie: And he went to the garage and didn’t come back for an hour. He’s fine. He’ll be fine. He’s just being him about it.
Me: Maybe don’t bring it up tonight
Cassie: I wasn’t going to. But if it comes up, it comes up.
She sent a shrug emoji after that. I put my phone on the counter, stood there with my coffee cooling in my hand, and tried to figure out what the next eight hours would be like.
He was coming. Her husband. The man from the photo. The man with the dick she’d described with her fingers and compared to a lipstick and talked about in my living room like he was a weather report. He was going to be in my apartment, standing where she’d sat, probably helping with dishes the way he always did, and I was going to have to look at him and not think about any of it.
I didn’t believe that was possible.
—
They showed up at seven. Cassie first—jeans, a loose sweater, hair down. She looked the same as always. She hugged me at the door and said something about the wine I’d picked and walked past me into the kitchen.
He came in behind her.
I’d met him a dozen times before. He was average height, with brown hair and a face I’d never really studied because there’d never been a reason to. He was wearing a button-down and jeans, and he carried a bag with extra bottles. He set them on the counter, shook my hand, and said, “Thanks for having us,” in the same quiet voice he always used.
I looked at his hands. Normal. Average. I looked at his waist. The belt. The jeans. The front of his pants where something I’d seen a photo of lived underneath, small and soft and barely there, and I thought: I know what your dick looks like and you don’t know I know.
He asked where he could help. I pointed him to the cutting board. He started chopping peppers without another word. Quiet. Helpful. Exactly as advertised.
I stood next to him, pretended to season the chicken, and tried to make my brain act like a normal person’s.
Becca and Sam arrived twenty minutes later. More wine. More noise. The kitchen filled up and the evening took on the shape it usually took—someone’s playlist on the speaker, someone else stealing food before it was ready, Cassie directing traffic from the counter with a glass in her hand.
He stayed at the cutting board. He moved to the sink when it was time to clean up. He washed dishes while the rest of us talked over each other in the living room. I could hear the water running. I could see him through the doorway, standing at the sink, his back to us, hands in the water.
Cassie was telling a story about something at work. She was animated, laughing, gesturing. Normal. At one point she caught my eye across the room and held it for a second longer than usual. Then she looked away and kept talking.
I didn’t know what that look meant. Maybe nothing. Maybe she was just checking to see if I was acting weird. Maybe she was checking to see if I was thinking what she thought I was thinking.
I was.
—
Later. The second bottle again. Everyone on the couch or the floor. He was in the armchair by the window, beer in hand, quiet. Cassie was next to me on the couch, her knee touching mine. I didn’t know if that was intentional or just how the couch worked.
Becca said something about a dating app. Sam told a story about a coworker. The conversation was normal. Safe. Nothing about anyone’s body.
Then Cassie leaned toward me. Close enough that I could smell her perfume, she didn’t whisper, but she dropped her voice to something only I could hear over the group noise.
“He knows I showed you the picture.”
My chest went cold.
“What?”
“I told him. Last night. He asked which one. I told him the shower one.”
“Why would you tell him that?”
“Because he asked.” She said it simply, as if it were obvious. Like telling her husband that five people had seen a photo of his small dick was just a thing that happened in the course of being honest.
“Is he okay?”
She looked over at him. He was sipping his beer, watching Sam tell his story. His face was neutral. Maybe a little tight around the eyes.
“He’s fine,” she said. “He’s used to it.”
He’s used to it. Another one. Another line that lodged in me like a splinter.
She turned back to the group and laughed at something Becca said, and her knee pressed against mine again, and I sat there with my wine and my pulse and thought about him in the armchair, knowing we’d all seen it, sitting there anyway, quiet, drinking his beer, being used to it.
I excused myself to the bathroom. I locked the door, stood at the sink, looked at myself in the mirror, and tried to slow down. My face was flushed. My hands were unsteady. I turned on the cold water, held my wrists under it, and breathed.
I thought about my own dick. Four inches. Thin. The same category as his, maybe, or close enough. The thing I’d never let anyone see the way Cassie had shown his. The thing I’d only ever exposed in anonymous corners of the internet, in videos I watched alone, in fantasies I fed with other people’s humiliation because I couldn’t face my own.
And here was a man who didn’t have that luxury. His wife knew. His wife’s friends knew. His wife held her fingers apart, showed a photo, and told stories about lipstick comparisons, and he was sitting in the next room with a beer, used to it.
I turned off the water. I looked at myself one more time. I went back out.
—
The night ended the way these nights usually end. Slowly, then all at once. Becca and Sam left together. Cassie stood up, stretched, and said they should go, too. He was already at the sink again, washing the last glasses. She told him to leave it. He said it was fine.
At the door, she hugged me. He shook my hand again. “Good food,” he said. That was it. Two words. He followed her out.
I closed the door and stood in the hallway of my apartment and listened to their footsteps fade down the stairs.
Then Cassie texted me.
Cassie: You were quiet again tonight.
Me: I was normal tonight
Cassie: You were normal at being quiet—same thing.
Me: What do you want me to say, Cassie
Cassie: I don’t know. Something. You’ve been off since Saturday, and I know it’s about what I said. I just don’t know which part of it.
I sat on my couch. The apartment was empty. The dishes were done. The wine was put away. The spot where she’d sat was just a couch cushion.
Me: It was a lot.
Cassie: A lot how?
Me: A lot to hear. That’s all.
Cassie: You’re not the one who should be having a hard time with it.
Me: I know
Cassie: Then what?
I didn’t answer for a long time. The cursor blinked. I started and stopped three different messages. I thought about telling her. I thought about saying the words out loud—I watch videos like that. I’ve watched them for years. I have the same thing he has. I’ve been sitting here all week thinking about your husband’s dick because it’s the same as mine, and you talked about it like it was nothing, and that’s the thing I can’t stop hearing.
I didn’t say any of that.
Me: I’m fine. Really. Just tired.
Cassie: Okay. But I’m going to keep asking.
Me: I know you will
Cassie: Good night
Me: Night
I put the phone on the table. I sat in the dark living room where a week ago she’d held her fingers apart and told us everything.
I didn’t open my laptop. I didn’t put on any videos. I just sat there and thought about him standing at my sink, washing dishes, knowing we’d all seen the photo. Quiet. Helpful. Used to it.
And I thought about Cassie in the hallway, leaning close, her knee against mine, her voice low: He’s used to it.
And I thought about what it would feel like to be used to it myself.
The End.
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