A Bad Influence
A Fictional Story by GretaLarkin.
He said it pleasantly. He always said everything pleasantly. Four hours from the airport, and he waited until the engine was off and the trunk was open before he said it, so that if I reacted, I would be the one making a scene in a parking lot.
“She’s my best friend, Glenn.”
“I know that. I’m only saying it was supposed to be the two of us.”
And Tess, who was standing on the other side of that car with her bag already on her shoulder, said, “Glenn, honey, I have been in a middle seat since six this morning, and I would love to hear the rest of this later.”
Then she picked up my bag too and walked off toward the boardwalk, and I watched him watch her go, and I thought: not much longer now.
* * *
I want to tell you what Glenn did, because otherwise you are going to spend this whole thing thinking that Tess and I were cruel to a man on a beach for no reason, and I need you to know that there was a reason and that it was a good one.
He read my phone. That is not the bad part. Every woman reading this has been with a man who read her phone.
For about two years, he had been deleting Tess’s messages off it.
Not all of them. That is the part that took me so long to see. If he had deleted all of them, I would have noticed within a week. He took some. He took enough. He took the ones where she was reaching out and left the ones where she was passing along a link, so that what was left looked like a friendship going quietly cold, which is a thing that happens to women in their thirties all the time and which nobody investigates.
I thought she had gotten tired of me. She thought I had gotten tired of her.
We ran into each other at a wedding in March, and she was polite to me. Tess. Polite. And in the middle of being polite, she said, “I never heard back from you about my dad.”
Her father had been sick since the previous spring. He died in November. She had written to me four times about it, and I had never seen one of them.
I stood in a hotel ballroom in a dress I had bought for a man and worked out what had happened to me inside of about nine seconds, and then I went out to the parking lot and sat on a curb, and Tess came out and sat down on the curb next to me and neither one of us said anything for a long time.
So that is what Glenn did.
And the reason I did not leave him that night, which is the thing I have had to make my peace with, is that I wanted to do it somewhere he could not talk his way out of.
* * *
Tess had known about Sandpiper Key for years. She was the one who told me about it originally, back before, back when I still knew things about her life.
She called me the week after that wedding and said, “I have got an idea, and you are going to say no.”
“I’m not going to say no.”
“You are going to say no at first.”
“Tess.”
“There is a beach,” she said.
* * *
The rule at Sandpiper Key is posted on a sign at the top of the boardwalk, with two lines on it.
MEN: FULLY NUDE BEYOND THIS POINT. NO EXCEPTIONS.
WOMEN: AS YOU LIKE.
I told Glenn I had found the place on a travel blog. I told him it looked cute. I said the word “cute” to that man in a kitchen in April, and Tess had to leave the room.
* * *
He read the sign twice.
He did the thing where he laughed and looked at me to see if it was a joke, and I said “huh” and kept walking, and Tess said “oh, that is wild” in a voice of complete innocence that I am going to hear on my deathbed.
And then he stood there.
I want to be fair to him about this because it is the only place I am going to be in this entire story. He had a choice. The car was three hundred feet behind him; the keys were in his pocket; he was a grown man; and he stood at the top of that boardwalk for a full minute, working out whether being looked at was worse than being left behind.
Nobody made him do one thing. He took off his shorts and set them on top of his cooler.
Tess looked at me over the top of her sunglasses.
I did not look back at her. If I had looked back at her right then, the two of us would have died laughing at the top of that boardwalk and the whole week would have been over before it started.
* * *
Now let me tell you how the three of us looked walking down that sand, because it matters.
Tess is forty and built like she has been swimming since she was nine, which she has. She went bottoms-only about four steps past the sign and made no announcement.
I went bottoms only too, and I have got what I have got. Neither of us had a white patch anywhere because we had both been lying out since April like a pair of women with something to prove, and it turned out we did.
And Glenn walked between us. Naked. Pale as a bathroom fixture.
And hard.
He got hard about ten steps past that sign, and he stayed that way for two hours, and it did not do him one bit of good.
* * *
Now, Tess had never seen him.
Three years I was with that man, and she had never once seen him with his clothes off, because, of course, she had not, and because for two of those years he had made sure she was barely in the house.
So I watched her find out.
She did it properly. I will give her that until the day I die. She looked once, quickly, the way you check a stove, then looked out at the water and did not say a single word, and we walked another forty feet in complete silence.
Then she said, “Simone.”
“Do not.”
“I did not say anything.”
“Tess.”
“I have not said one word.”
“You are going to say a word.”
“I am going to say it later,” said Tess, “and you are going to be ready for it,” and she put her sunglasses back down and kept walking.
She waited two hours. Two hours, until we were in the water up to our chests with him back on the sand under the umbrella, and then she turned to me with her hair slicked back and the sun going and said:
“Honey. He is tiny.”
And that was it. That was the whole thing. Two years of a man quietly cutting a hole in my life, and it all came apart out there in four feet of water because my best friend said two words about his cock.
I laughed so hard I went under.
And that is what two women who have been kept apart for two years and have just gotten back together are like.
We were awful.
I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not going to apologize for it either. We were awful for four days, out loud, in the sun, and it was the best week of my adult life.
It started small.
“That’s a nice one,” Tess said, about a man walking past us toward the water.
“That is a nice one.”
“Simone, look at the way it just hangs.”
“I am looking, Tess.”
“It doesn’t do anything. He’s not even thinking about it. It just hangs there like a coat on a hook.”
Glenn said, “Are we doing this all week?”
And Tess said, “Doing what, honey?” without turning her head.
* * *
By the second day we had a system, and I am aware of how that sounds.
Tess would spot. I would rate. We did it quietly at first, and then we quit doing it quietly because it turned out nobody on that beach cared, and because every time we did it, we could see the back of Glenn’s neck go red from three feet away.
“Blue chair.”
“Where?”
“Blue chair, past the stand. He is asleep, and he does not know what he is doing to me.”
“Oh, that is a lot of cock for a man who is asleep.”
“That is what I am saying.”
“That is a nap with a cock on it.”
We laughed so hard that a woman two umbrellas down laughed with us without knowing what she was laughing at.
By the afternoon we had stopped bothering with code.
“I would choke on that.”
“Tess.”
“I am telling you where I am at, Simone. I would go in with a plan, and that plan would last four seconds, and then I would just be a woman with a cock in her mouth on a public beach.”
“He is sixty.”
“He is sixty, and he is hung, and if he came over here right now and did not say one word, I would put my mouth on it in front of everybody on this sand.”
Glenn said, “Jesus Christ.”
“Something the matter, honey?” said Tess.
And I want to be clear about how she said it. There was nothing in her voice. It was the voice you use on a coworker. That is the thing that makes Tess dangerous and always has.
* * *
The other game we played, which was worse, was that we did not talk about him at all.
Four days. We talked about every man on that beach out loud and in detail, and we never once mentioned the one sitting between us with his cock standing straight up off him like a thumbtack.
He brought it up himself on the third day, which was the whole point.
“You two have been at this since Sunday.”
“At what?”
“You know at what.”
“Glenn,” I said, “I genuinely do not know what you are talking about.”
“You have rated every man on this beach.”
“Have we?”
“Yes.”
“Every one?”
He did not answer that, because he had worked out about half a second too late where it was going, and Tess turned a page of her book and said, without looking up:
“Not everyone.”
And Glenn sat in his chair with a towel over his lap, which you are not allowed to do at Sandpiper Key, and got told about it by a nineteen-year-old kid with a clipboard, and had to take it off in front of us.
Tess did not say anything about that. She just looked at it and then looked back at her book.
That was worse than anything either of us said all week.
* * *
I met Peg on the third morning at the waterline.
She is somewhere in her sixties, gray hair cut short, brown as a saddle, with a body that has been on that beach for forty years and is not asking anybody’s opinion about it. She was standing in the surf up to her shins, her hands on her hips, looking out at the water as she owned it, which, as far as I can tell, she nearly does.
“You two are having a time,” she said when I came up beside her.
“We are.”
“He is your husband?”
“Boyfriend. Until Friday.”
Peg made a sound.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“You are going to.”
“Are we being terrible?”
* * *
She thought about it. That is the thing I want you to know about Peg. I have asked a great many people that question in my life, and every one of them answered it in under a second because they were answering to be nice. She stood in that water for a good while.
“Tell me what he did,” she said.
So I told her.
I told her standing in eight inches of water on a Wednesday morning, the whole of it, the phone and the two years and the wedding in March and the four messages about a dying man that I never got to read.
Peg did not say anything for a bit.
Then she said, “No. You are not being terrible.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I have watched this beach for a long time, honey, and there are two kinds of women who come down here and do what you are doing, and they look identical from a folding chair.” She turned and looked at me for the first time. “One kind wants him to feel small. The other kind wants him to feel exactly as big as he is. And she has quit doing the work of making him feel bigger.”
I did not say anything.
“You spent two years telling that man he was fine,” said Peg. “You did that. You lied to him kindly, every day, for years, the way we are all taught to. And now you have stopped, and he has walked out onto a beach where nobody is going to do it for you, and he is finding out what he actually looks like without a woman standing in front of him holding a hand over it.”
“That is not the same as being nice to him.”
“No,” she said. “It is not. But it is not cruelty either, and if he wanted to stop finding out, he could put his shorts on and sit in the car.”
* * *
I asked her how long she had been coming down here.
“Since seventy-nine.”
“Did you know her? The woman who made the rules?”
Peg smiled at the water.
“I knew her about as well as anybody did,” she said. “She was already old when I got here, and she was mean as a snake, and she is the reason I am the way I am. She used to say the sign was not about men at all.”
“What was it about?”
“She said any woman can be brave for an afternoon if the rules are on her side for once in her life,” said Peg. “She said the sign was fifteen words and it did more for the women who read it than anything the rest of us ever managed with a lifetime of talking.”
Then she walked out into the water, swam off, and left me standing there.
On the way back up the boardwalk I stopped and counted the words on the sign, because I am a woman who counts things. I got twelve. I thought about walking back down to tell her, then about who I would be telling, and I let it alone.
* * *
I told Tess all of it under the umbrella, and Tess was quiet for about a minute, which, for Tess, is a geologic age.
Then she said, “Okay. So we are fine.”
“We are fine.”
“Then I want to tell you about the far end.”
Here is what happens at the far end of Sandpiper Key, past the last lifeguard stand, in the evening, once polite society has packed up its chairs and gone in to dinner.
It is not organized. Nobody runs it. There is no sign for it, and nobody at the hotel will tell you about it. If you ask about it directly, you will be told there is nothing down there but sea oats.
But if you are on that beach at seven in the evening and you walk south far enough, there will be people. There will be a general understanding of what is going on, and nobody will bother you, stop you, or say one word to you about anything.
Tess had known about the far end for years, just as she had known about the beach itself. She reads.
“How?”
“Because I read, Simone. I read constantly. I have been reading about this beach since I was thirty-one.”
“And you never came?”
“I was going to come with you,” said Tess. “That was the whole plan, and then you fell off the face of the earth for two years.”
And that was the only time either of us cried all week. It lasted about nine seconds, and then she said, “So anyway, do you want to go down there or not?” and I said yes.
* * *
We told Glenn we were going for a walk.
He said he would come.
Neither of us said anything for a second, and then Tess said, “Sure,” in a voice I did not recognize, and she looked at me, and I understood exactly what was about to happen and I did not stop it.
I want that in. I did not stop it. I could have.
* * *
We walked for forty minutes south with the sun going down behind the dunes, and by the time we got there, it was that hour when everybody looks better than they are.
There were maybe fifteen people. Most of them were men. Everybody naked, obviously, because it is that beach.
And Tess took my hand, which she has done since we were nineteen, and walked us straight into the middle of it like a woman walking into her own kitchen.
* * *
I am going to tell you the rest of it plainly, because I have decided I am done being anything else and because Tess has read this and told me not to soften one word.
There was a man about my age standing near the water who had been watching us come for the last two hundred yards. Big through the chest, going gray, and hanging heavy and thick down the front of himself, half hard already from watching two women walk toward him for four minutes.
Tess went right up to him and said, “Hi. I am going to suck your cock.”
He said, “Okay.”
And she got down on her knees in the sand.
* * *
I stood there for about two seconds.
That is all it was. Two seconds, which is what a lifetime of being careful comes to when somebody finally takes the lid off it.
And then I got down in the sand next to my best friend, and I have not regretted it since.
She got him in her mouth first. I watched her do it from eight inches away, up close, closer than I have ever watched anybody do anything. She took him most of the way down on the second try and made a noise about it, and then she came off him wet and turned his hips toward me with both hands and said, “Your turn,” the way you pass somebody a plate.
He was so thick I could not close my lips right, and I did not care. I got about half of him and worked the rest with my fist, and Tess put her hand flat on my back and said, into my ear, “Look at you.”
* * *
They came over. That is what happens down there. I am not going to pretend it was anything other than exactly what it was.
There were four of them around us inside of a minute, and then there were six, standing in a loose ring in the sand with the light going orange, and the two of us knelt in the middle of it and did not hurry about any of it.
I want to be accurate about what it was like, because I have had a great deal of sex in my life and none of it was ever this.
It was not about any one of them. Not one. I could not pick two of those men out of a lineup today, and it would not matter to me if I could.
It was that Tess would say something filthy into my ear and then get her mouth back on somebody. It was that I would laugh with my mouth full. It was that every so often the two of us would come off at the same time and look at each other with our chins shining and be nineteen again, which is how old we were when we met, and the last age either of us was before men started having opinions about us.
“Simone.”
“Mm.”
“I have got a cock over here that is going to be a problem.”
“Which?”
“Behind you. Do not turn around fast.”
I turned around fast.
He was maybe thirty-five, and he had a cock on him like a forearm, and Tess had both hands around it and could not make her fingers meet.
“Okay,” I said.
“I told you.”
“Okay, yes.”
“Do you want to try, or do you want to hold it while I try?”
“Hold it while you try,” I said, and she laughed so hard she had to put her forehead against his hip for a second.
“Simone, I am not going to get this in my mouth.”
“Try anyway.”
“I am going to try; I am telling you I am going to fail.”
She failed. She failed for about six minutes, loudly, with her fist working the bottom of him and her mouth doing what it could with the top, and the whole time she kept saying things like “no” and “I cannot” and “God, look at it,” and not one of those was a complaint.
* * *
We worked him together, which neither of us had ever done with the other.
She took the top, and I took the base with both hands, and we got into a rhythm inside of about thirty seconds, and every time she came up for air I went down, and every time I came up she went down, and neither one of us said a word about it because there was nothing to say.
He put a hand on the back of each of our heads. Not pushing and just resting there, one on each of us, like a man holding on to something.
Tess said, “he is not going to last.”
“No.”
“Do you want it?”
“I want it on my face,” I said, and heard myself say it, and did not take it back.
* * *
He gave us about four seconds of warning, and Tess got her fist around the base of him, aimed him, and I put my chin up.
The first rope of it went across my cheek and my open mouth and up into my hair. The second one caught me on the throat. Tess turned him about two inches and took the rest across her own face without once letting go of him, and there was a great deal of it, and when he was finally done she looked over at me with his cum running down the side of her nose and started laughing.
I have thought about that a hundred times since. Not the rest of it. That. My best friend on her knees in the sand, wearing another man’s cum, laughing at me with her whole face.
* * *
After that it was not a thing with an order to it.
They took turns. Nobody managed it, and nobody had to. Somebody would step up, and one of us would take him and the other one would get underneath and go after his balls, and we swapped back and forth without discussing it once.
I got a man off with Tess’s hand around the base and mine underneath, both of us working him together, and he came all over the two of us, and Tess said, “Oh, that is rude,” with such total delight that two of them laughed out loud.
Another one lasted about ninety seconds and apologized for it. Tess told him not to be sorry, that a man who goes fast in front of two women on a beach is being honest with everybody, and he came on her tits and thanked her, and I am not making that up.
I sucked five men that evening. Tess says six. We have argued about it since and neither of us is going to win.
And the whole time we got messier and louder and less careful about any of it. The light went from orange to nothing. There was cum drying on my collarbone and in my hair and down the inside of one thigh where a man had missed me entirely, and my jaw ached, and my knees were raw from the sand.
I have never once in my life felt cleaner.
* * *
Glenn stood outside the ring the entire time.
He had followed us down. He stood twenty feet off while it started and then ten feet and then he was at the edge of it, and I knew he was there the whole time and so did Tess, and neither of us said one word about it, because he had walked down there of his own free will the way he had taken his own shorts off at the top of the boardwalk.
He was hard. He had been hard since Sunday, and it was Thursday.
And at some point, and I do not know how far in we were, he said my name.
* * *
Everything stopped.
That is the thing about a group of men on a beach. They are not a mob, and they do not act like one. Somebody says a name in a voice that is not right, and the whole thing just quits, and six naked men took a step back and looked at the sand and waited to see what I was going to say.
Glenn was standing at the edge of the circle with his hands at his sides.
“Can I,” he said.
And he did not finish it. He did not have to.
* * *
I got up off my knees.
I want to say that I thought about it, and I did. I stood up in that sand with cum on my face and my throat and in my hair, in front of six men and my best friend and the man I had given three years to, and I thought about it for a good four seconds, and some part of me nearly said yes out of nothing but habit.
Then I said, “No.”
“Simone.”
“No, Glenn.”
“Why not?”
And there it was. He asked. In front of everybody. He stood in a ring of men on a beach and asked me to explain, which is what that man has done in every kitchen, every car, and every parking lot for three years, because Glenn has never once let a no be a no. He makes you say the reason. Then he argues with the reason.
So I gave him the reason.
* * *
“Because you are too small, honey.”
Nobody moved.
“That is it. That is the whole answer, and there is nothing underneath it. You are the smallest man on this beach, and you have been all week, and every one of these men knows it, because they have been looking at you for four days the same way you have been looking at them.
“And I spent two years telling you that it did not matter—two years of being kind about it. I have never once been thanked for that, and I am never going to do it again for anybody as long as I live.
“And you took my phone.”
Tess stood up beside me.
“Say the rest of it,” she said.
“He deleted your messages.”
“Say the part about my dad, Simone.”
“He deleted the ones about your father,” I said, “for a year, while he was dying, and then he watched me not go to the funeral and he never said one word.”
* * *
I have thought a great deal about what happened next, and I still do not entirely know how to describe it.
Nobody threatened him. Nobody said anything to him at all. Not one of those six men opened his mouth.
They just closed the circle.
They shifted, the way people shift, and the gap where Glenn had been standing was gone. The whole thing took about two seconds, and none of them looked at him while they did it.
And then Tess put her hand on the back of my neck and said, “Come here.”
* * *
So we finished it with him standing out there in the dark behind six men’s backs.
I am not going to apologize for that part either.
There were four of them who had not gone yet, and they had been standing in that ring for a long time watching two women work, and it did not take any of them very long once we started again.
Tess got up on her knees and put her hands behind her back, which nobody asked her to do, and said, “All of you, and do not be polite about it,” and I got up next to her and did the same thing.
And they stood over the two of us in a half circle in the dark and worked themselves and finished on us, one after another and twice two at once, and it went on a great deal longer than I would have believed if somebody had described it to me.
It came on my mouth, my cheekbone, and my eyelid, which stings, and nobody tells you that. It came across both my tits and ran down between them and off me into the sand. Somebody got the side of my neck, and my ear, and I felt it go down inside my collarbone. One of them was still going when he ran out of anywhere to aim at and finished the last of it into my open hand, and I have no idea why he did that, or why I let him.
Tess took one straight across the bridge of her nose, did not blink, and did not turn her head one inch.
By the end of it, I could feel the weight on my face. That is the thing I did not know. There is enough of it, when it is that many men, that you can feel it sitting on you.
I kept my hands behind my back the entire time.
That is the part I did not expect, and it is the part I have thought about since. Nobody was holding my arms. I could have moved at any second. I knelt in the sand at the far end of a beach with my hands behind my own back because I wanted to, and I let six men finish on my face because I wanted that too, and there was not one person on that sand who had made me do anything.
And Glenn watched all of it from the other side of a wall of shoulders.
* * *
At the end of it, Tess turned her head and looked at me.
We were both a mess. I don’t have a polite way to put this so that I won’t try. It was in her hair and on her chest and running off her chin, and it was all over me, and neither one of us had moved to wipe any of it off.
“Well,” said Tess.
“Well.”
“Do you want to go swim?”
So we got up, walked down into the water hand in hand, went under, and came up. The whole beach was dark by then, and we floated out there for a long time on our backs, with the stars doing what they do.
I did not watch him go. I want to be honest about that too. I could have turned around and watched that man walk back up the beach, and I chose not to, because I was busy, and because he had already had three years of me and was not getting any more.
He was gone from the room when we got back. He had gotten a car to the airport.
He paid my half of the rental, which I want to note on the page. It’s the only decent thing he did in three years, and I am not going to pretend he didn’t do it.
Tess and I sat out on that balcony until two in the morning with a bottle of wine and the sliding door open, and I have never talked so much in my life.
* * *
I saw Peg one more time, on our last morning, out at the waterline where she always is.
“Well,” she said.
“Well.”
“I heard.”
“Peg, it is a beach. Who told you?”
“Honey, I have been coming down here since seventy-nine, and there is not one thing that happens on that sand that I do not hear about by breakfast.” She looked out at the water. “Was it all right?”
“It was the best night of my life.”
“Good.”
“Peg.”
“Mm.”
“He asked me why,” I said. “In front of everybody. He stood there and asked me to explain it to him.”
And Peg laughed. She laughs at a screen door.
“They always do,” she said. “That is the whole thing, right there. A man like that has never once been told no and had it stick, and so when it finally comes he does not hear a no, he hears the opening of a negotiation.” She shook her head. “You did not negotiate.”
“No.”
“Then you are going to be fine.” She stepped into the water, then stopped and turned around. “And bring your friend back next year.”
“I will.”
“I mean it,” said Peg. “That one is the good one. Not the boyfriend, not the beach, and not the six men in the sand.
“The good one is standing under your umbrella wearing your sunglasses.”
* * *
Tess was, in fact, wearing my sunglasses.
She had been wearing my sunglasses since Tuesday, took them home with her, and now has them. I am not going to ask for them back.
The End.
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