Good Guess
An SPH Experience by Snoo-33109.
It was a Sunday afternoon. Rain outside, the gray kind that doesn’t commit to being a storm but refuses to let you call it a drizzle. I was in the kitchen making a sandwich—turkey and Swiss, nothing worth describing—and my girlfriend Nicole was in the living room on the phone with her friend Dana.
Nicole and I had been together for about a year and a half. She was a brunette with shoulder-length hair, five-five, with a quiet, careful way of speaking that made every sentence feel measured. She wasn’t prudish, but she was private. She didn’t discuss our relationship with her friends—or at least, she told me she didn’t, and I had no reason not to believe her. She was the kind of person who closed the bathroom door even when she was alone. Privacy wasn’t a preference for Nicole; it was a principle.
Dana was the opposite. Dana was loud and open, with no concept of a filter. She was the friend who said at parties what other people thought in therapy. She talked about her sex life the way other people talked about traffic—casually, in detail, without embarrassment. She’d been Nicole’s best friend since college, and Nicole loved her and was embarrassed by her in roughly equal measure.
I knew Dana was on the phone because I could hear Nicole’s half of the conversation from the kitchen. It started normally—catching up, weekend plans, the usual. I was slicing tomato and not paying attention until I heard Nicole say something that made my knife stop mid-cut.
“Wait—like, how small?”
My hand stayed on the knife. My ears turned on fully.
Dana had started seeing a guy named Ryan a few weeks earlier. I’d met him once—average-looking, friendly, unremarkable in every visible way. Apparently, what was visible was not the full picture.
Nicole was quiet for a while, listening. I could hear the faint buzz of Dana’s voice from the phone, not the words, just the cadence—fast, animated, punctuated by laughs. Dana was telling a story, and from the tone, it was the kind of story she told with relish.
“It’s not a problem as long as it’s not extremely small,” Nicole said. Her voice had that careful, diplomatic quality she used when she was trying to be supportive without endorsing the conversation. “I think average is enough.”
I put the knife down. I wasn’t making a sandwich anymore. I was eavesdropping, and I’d made peace with that.
“How small is it, exactly?” Nicole asked, and there was something in her voice—a note of genuine curiosity that I recognized because I’d heard it before, in other contexts, in moments that were closer and quieter and involved fewer clothes.
Dana’s voice buzzed again—longer this time. I could almost hear individual words—tiny, maybe. Like a thumb. Something that made Nicole inhale sharply through her nose.
“Extremely small,” Nicole repeated. “So you don’t really feel much?”
Buzz from the phone. Then Nicole made a sound—a small, sympathetic “mm”—that I couldn’t quite read. Pity? Confirmation? I wanted to read her face, but she was in the other room, and walking in there would end the eavesdropping and also make me the kind of boyfriend who hovers during phone calls.
“So what are you going to do?” Nicole asked.
More buzzing. I caught a fragment—Dana saying something about trying and positions, and then something that made Nicole laugh —a short, surprised laugh she immediately suppressed, like she’d been caught enjoying something she shouldn’t.
The conversation moved on after that—other topics, other gossip, the normal terrain of two friends catching up. I went back to my sandwich. My hands were slightly unsteady, and not because of the knife.
—
Nicole hung up and came into the kitchen about ten minutes later. I was eating my sandwich at the counter, scrolling through my phone, projecting an aura of someone who had been doing exactly that for the past half hour and had not, in fact, been standing motionless with a knife in his hand, straining to hear every syllable of a conversation about penis size.
She was pink. That was the first thing I noticed. Not dramatically flushed, but pink—her cheeks, her neck, the tips of her ears. She gets that way when she’s embarrassed, and Nicole gets embarrassed easily. She’s the kind of person who blushes when someone says “sex” on television.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
She opened the fridge, took out a water bottle, and stood there drinking it with the door open, which she never did because she’s a close-the-fridge person. She was stalling. I knew this. She knew I probably knew this. We were both pretending.
“So,” she said, finally closing the fridge. “You probably heard some of that.”
“I heard some of it,” I said. Casual. Unbothered. I took a bite of my sandwich.
She sat down on the stool across from me and looked at her water bottle instead of at me. “Dana was talking about Ryan.”
“Ryan,” I said, as if I were placing the name. “New guy.”
“New guy.” She paused. “She was telling me about—”
“I gathered,” I said. “The walls here aren’t that thick.”
Another blush. Deeper this time. She looked at me, looked away, looked back. “She’s just—she talks about everything. You know how she is.”
“I do.”
“It’s not like I asked. She just started telling me.”
“I know.”
Silence. I ate my sandwich. She drank her water. The rain hit the window.
Then she said it. The question I’d been waiting for without knowing I was waiting for it.
“So, how many inches is yours?”
She said it fast, the way you say something you’ve been building up to and just want to get out before you lose your nerve. Her face was fully red now. She was looking at me directly, which she did when she was embarrassed—like looking away would be an admission that the question mattered, and she was determined to pretend it didn’t.
I didn’t hesitate. “You already know.”
“I know what it looks like,” she said. “I don’t know the exact measurement.”
She paused, then added: “It looks like about five and a half hard. Or so.”
Here’s the thing about that sentence. It landed on me like a spotlight.
Five and a half. She said it as if it were a reasonable guess. Like she’d been looking at me—all of me, in various states, in various positions, in various moments of intimacy over the past eighteen months—and her best estimate was five and a half inches, which meant that five and a half was what looked plausible to her. Which meant that five and a half was, in her mind, what I appeared to be.
I am not five and a half inches. I am four and three-quarter inches. Four point seven-five. I’ve measured it—multiple times, with a ruler, with a tape measure, with the desperate precision of someone who needs an exact number because approximate numbers leave too much room for hope. Four and three-quarter inches erect. Below average. Not dramatically, not catastrophically, but enough. Enough to know. Enough to care. Enough to have spent years caring.
Flaccid, I’m extremely small. That’s the part that eats at me more. When I’m soft—especially when I’m cold, when I’m nervous, when I’ve been swimming—I barely register. An inch, maybe less. A nub. A suggestion. The kind of flaccid size that makes locker rooms feel like threat zones and doctor’s visits feel like auditions. My erect size is below average but survivable. My flaccid size is what makes my stomach drop.
And Nicole had just told me, without knowing it, that she thought I was five and a half. That she looked at me and saw average.
“Good guess,” I said. “That’s exactly it.”
The words came out smooth. Confident. Matter-of-fact. I said five and a half like it was a fact I’d confirmed a hundred times, like I had nothing to hide, like the number was the number and the number was fine. I said it the way you say your height or your shoe size—as information, not a confession.
Nicole exhaled. Not dramatically—a small release, a quiet unclenching. Something in her shoulders relaxed. “Okay,” she said. “I just—I didn’t know the exact number.”
“You never asked.”
“I know. It’s private.” She said this as if she were reminding herself of a principle she held dear. “I wouldn’t have asked, except—Dana got me thinking about it.”
“Dana gets everyone thinking about things they wouldn’t otherwise think about.”
She smiled—a small, grateful smile. The conversation was over. The topic was closed. She’d asked, I’d answered, and the answer was fine. Five and a half. Average. Enough.
I finished my sandwich, washed the plate, and didn’t think about it for the rest of the afternoon.
That’s a lie. I thought about it for the rest of the afternoon, the evening, that night, the next day, and most of the days after that.
—
Nicole asked me one more question during that conversation—something I didn’t fully appreciate until later.
“What’s the average, anyway?” she asked. She was still pink, still not quite meeting my eyes, but the worst was over. She was in the cleanup phase—gathering data, contextualizing, filing the information away.
“Five and a half,” I said. “Hard. That’s the commonly cited number.”
“Okay,” she said. “So you’re—”
“Average,” I said.
“Right. Average.” She nodded. She looked satisfied. Relieved, even. Like I’d passed a test she hadn’t wanted to administer.
Here’s what I didn’t tell her: the five-and-a-half number is the commonly cited average, but it’s not the only number. Some studies say five and a quarter. Some say five and a third. Some say closer to five and a half. The number varies depending on the study, the methodology, the population, and whether the measurements were self-reported (which inflates the number) or clinically measured (which lowers it). The real average, depending on who you ask and how they measured, is somewhere between five and five and a half.
I told her five and a half because it was the number that made me average. If I’d said five, she’d have done the math—four and three-quarters is a quarter-inch below five, which is below average, which is not what she wanted to hear and not what I wanted to say. Five and a half gave me cover. Five and a half made me equal to the number I was claiming to be.
It was a small lie. A quarter-inch lie. The kind of lie that feels victimless because the truth is so close that the lie feels like rounding. But it wasn’t rounding. It was inflation. I was four and three-quarter inches, and I told her five and a half, and the gap between those numbers—three-quarters of an inch—was the gap between average and below, between fine and not fine, between what she wanted to hear and what was actually true.
And she believed me. She believed me because she wanted to believe me, because I said it with the confidence of someone telling the truth, and because she had no reason not to. She’d seen me. She’d felt me. She’d been with me enough times to have a sense of what she was working with; her sense said five and a half, I confirmed it, and that was that.
Except it wasn’t. Because now there was a number in her head—five and a half—and that number was wrong, and the wrong number was protecting me, and the protection felt like standing on ice that might not hold.
—
I need to talk about Dana, because Dana is the variable that makes this story something other than a private moment between me and Nicole.
Dana talks. That’s what Dana does. She talks about everything to everyone, with no regard for what’s appropriate, private, or off-limits. She’s the kind of person who tells you about her bowel movements at brunch and her orgasms at dinner and doesn’t understand why you’re looking at her like she’s just said something unusual.
And Dana has a new topic. Ryan. Ryan’s small penis. Ryan’s extremely small penis that she can’t really feel. She told Nicole about it on a Sunday afternoon phone call, and I have no reason to believe that call was the first time she’d told someone, or the last. Dana doesn’t have one conversation about something. Dana has many conversations about something, with many people, until the something has been thoroughly discussed from every angle and she’s moved on to the next something.
Which means: Dana is talking about Ryan’s small penis with her friends. With Nicole. With other friends. With anyone who’ll listen. And when she talks about Ryan’s small penis, the conversation naturally turns to the question that Dana asks and Nicole won’t: What about your boyfriend’s?
I know this because I know Dana. Not well—I’ve met her a dozen times, at parties and dinners and the kind of group outings where she holds court and everyone else listens. But I know her well enough to know that she doesn’t let things go. She doesn’t accept “it’s private” as an answer. She pushes, she teases, she cajoles, she makes it weird if you don’t play along. She’s the friend who asks “so how big is it?” at brunch and doesn’t understand why you’re choking on your eggs.
And Nicole—private, careful, principled Nicole—would be sitting across from her, fielding the question, navigating the conversation, trying to maintain her principles while Dana bulldozed through them.
Here’s what I think happens when Dana asks about me:
I think Nicole says, “It’s private.” I think Dana says, “Come on.” I think Nicole says, “I don’t talk about that.” I think Dana says, “But is it normal, at least? Because Ryan’s is tiny and I need to know if I’m the only one dealing with this.” I think Nicole—cornered, pressured, wanting to help her friend without betraying her principles—says something. Maybe not a number. Maybe not a description. Maybe just a nod. Maybe just a “he’s fine” that Dana reads as “he’s average” and files away for future reference.
Or maybe Nicole says nothing. Maybe she holds the line. Maybe she’s stronger than I think, and Dana’s questions bounce off her like water off a duck, and my secret stays secret.
But I don’t think so. Because I know what I heard in Nicole’s voice when she asked me about my size—the curiosity, the need to know, the quiet anxiety that maybe she was with someone less than she deserved —she asked because Dana planted the question. And if Dana planted the question in Nicole, then Dana is asking the same question about Nicole’s boyfriend, and Nicole is either answering or resisting. The resistance has a shelf life because Dana is relentless.
—
Here’s where the fantasy and the reality blur, because I’ve spent more time than I should thinking about what Nicole might say to Dana if she did answer. If she let something slip. If Dana pushed hard enough and Nicole’s principles buckled just enough for a fragment of truth to escape.
If Nicole answered based on what she thinks she knows—the five and a half I told her, the average I claimed—then Dana hears: He’s average. Five and a half. Normal. And Dana, who is dealing with Ryan’s extremely small penis, hears this and feels worse about Ryan and maybe a little jealous of Nicole, and the conversation moves on, and I’m safe.
But if Nicole answered based on what she feels—on the physical reality of being with me, on what she experiences when we have sex—then the answer is different. Then the answer is something like, “He’s okay.” He’s not big. I mean, he says he’s five and a half, but honestly, I don’t know if I’d call it that. It’s… fine. It works. But it’s not like I’m being filled up. It’s not like I’m feeling it deep. It’s enough, but enough isn’t the same as a lot.
Or maybe she’d say something about the flaccid size because the flaccid size is the thing that’s actually small. The flaccid size is the thing that, if Dana ever saw it—through some accident, some circumstance, some scenario that exists only in the part of my mind I don’t let into polite company—would make Dana laugh. Would make Dana say Oh my God with that bright, carrying voice of hers. Would make Dana compare it to Ryan’s and say, No, Ryan’s is small, but at least it’s there. Yours is like—it’s like it’s hiding. Like it’s afraid of something.
I think about Nicole telling Dana about my flaccid size. Not because she would—she wouldn’t, she’s too private—but because the possibility exists. The possibility that it could come up, that it could slip out, that Dana could ask the right question at the right moment and Nicole could say, Well, when it’s soft, it’s really small. Like, really small. Like, you can barely see it. And Dana would react. Dana would react loudly, with commentary and the kind of gleeful horror she brings to everything, and I would be known. I would be the guy with the tiny flaccid penis that his girlfriend told her best friend about, and the best friend told everyone, and now it’s a fact that exists in the world.
This is the part I don’t fully understand about myself: the thought of that terrifies me and turns me on in roughly equal measure. The terror is real—genuine, stomach-dropping, cold-sweat terror. The arousal is also real—genuine, physical, undeniable arousal. They coexist. They feed each other. The terror makes the arousal sharper. The arousal makes the terror more vivid. This’s a feedback loop I didn’t request and can’t turn off.
—
There’s a scenario I think about more than I should.
Nicole decides she wants to measure me. Not because she suspects anything—she has no reason to suspect anything; I told her five and a half, and she believed me—but because she’s curious. Because Dana’s questions have gotten to her. Because she wants to know the exact number, the way you want to know the exact number on a scale or the exact time on a clock—precision for precision’s sake, knowledge for the comfort of knowing.
She brings it up casually, maybe in bed. Maybe she says, Can I measure you? Just for fun. And I’d have to say yes, because saying no would be suspicious, and being suspicious would be worse than being measured. So I’d say yes, and she’d get a ruler, and I’d be hard—or trying to be hard, which is its own challenge when you know what’s about to happen—and she’d place the ruler against me, press it to the base, and read the number.
Four and three-quarter inches.
Not five and a half. Not average. Not what I told her. Four and three-quarter inches, which is below average, which is what I actually am, which is the truth that I hid behind a lie that felt small but wasn’t.
She’d look at the ruler. She’d look at me. She’d do the math—the quick, involuntary math that everyone does when they see a number that’s lower than they expected. Five and a half minus four and three-quarter is three-quarters of an inch. Three-quarters of an inch of inflation. Three-quarters of an inch of lie.
She wouldn’t say anything. Not immediately. She’s not Dana—she doesn’t react loudly, doesn’t fill silence with commentary. She’d be quiet, and the quiet would be worse than any sound, because the quiet would mean she was thinking, and what she was thinking would be: He lied. He’s not average. He’s below average. He knew, and he lied, and the lie was about this.
And then, maybe, she’d think about what else the lie meant. She’d think about the times we’d had sex, and she’d felt me inside her and wondered, in some quiet back room of her mind, if what she was feeling was enough. She’d think about the times she’d been close to orgasm and hadn’t quite gotten there, and she’d wonder if size had anything to do with it. She’d think about Dana’s description of Ryan—you don’t really feel much—and she’d apply it to me, and she’d wonder if that was her experience too, if she’d just been too kind or too private or too principled to say so.
She’d have the number. The real number. And the real number would change things—not dramatically, not catastrophically, but in the quiet, permanent way that real numbers always change things. Five and a half was a story. Four and three-quarter was a fact. And facts, once known, can’t be unknown.
This scenario hasn’t happened. Nicole hasn’t asked to measure me. She might never ask. She’s private, she’s trusting, and she has no reason to doubt what I told her. The five and a half stands, unchallenged, in the space between us—a small, sturdy lie that holds up everything.
But I think about it. I think about the ruler, the number, and the look on her face. I think about it the way you think about a car crash you haven’t been in yet—the specific, vivid, terrible imagining of something that might never happen but that you can’t stop rehearsing.
—
Here’s what I know: Dana is still talking about Ryan. Dana is still asking about me. Nicole is still saying it’s private, and Dana is still pushing, and somewhere in the space between them, the truth about my size exists in a quantum state—both known and unknown, both told and untold, until someone observes it and collapses the wave.
And here’s what I also know: I like it.
I like the uncertainty. I like the risk. I like the fact that my girlfriend’s loud, crude, carefree friend might know that I’m small—or might not —and that the not-knowing is its own kind of thrill. I like the image of Dana asking Nicole about Nicole squirming and me, trying to hold the line, maybe failing, maybe letting a detail slip that can’t be un-slipped. I like the image of Dana reacting to that detail—the gasp, the laugh, the oh my God, really? that I can hear so clearly in my head it might as well be a memory.
I like the lie I told, the protection it gives me, and the fragility of that protection. I like that I’m one ruler, one honest conversation, one moment of Nicole’s curiosity away from being exposed. I like that exposure is both my greatest fear and my greatest fantasy, and that the line between them is so thin it might not exist.
These are games we play. Not Nicole—Nicole doesn’t know she’s playing. These are games I play with myself, in my head, in the space between what’s true and what’s said, in the gap between four and three-quarter and five and a half, in the three-quarters of an inch that separate who I am from who I told her I am.
Dana will keep talking. Nicole will keep deflecting. I’ll keep saying five and a half with the confidence of someone who has nothing to hide. And somewhere, in the back of my mind, in the part that I don’t let into polite company, I’ll keep hoping that Dana pushes hard enough to make Nicole say something—something real, something honest, something that starts with well, when it’s soft, it’s really tiny—and that the truth, once loose, does what truth does: spreads, settles, stays.
I don’t want her to know. I want her to know. I don’t want Nicole to measure me. I want Nicole to measure me. I want the lie to hold. I want the lie to break.
These are the games we play. The stakes are three-quarters of an inch, and the whole rest of my life.
The End.
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