Stephen, a rotund man with an acute case of rosacea and a few beads of sweat trickling down his face, carefully navigated his boxers over his deflating erection, visibly working hard to avoid tipping over onto the bed. He ran his fingers up the side of his wife’s still naked body, trigger her back to pucker up into pert goosebumps.

“That was great Janice, we need to do this more often,” Stephen softly whispered, trying not to disturb her post-coital glow. She refocused her eyes on him lovingly, her smile psychically channeling her internal ecstasy into Stephen’s understanding.

“Mmmmmm, honey, this … this was so good!” Janice purred, sensuously wriggling under the covers in a way that made Stephen want to crawl right back into bed for another round of mattress wrestling. However, his subconscious gave a pinch like a lactose intolerant rectum on a first date at an Indian restaurant. Stephen knew that he couldn’t keep up with his mid-life crisis. She was still a supple 23 with smooth skin and curvaceous volume in just the right places. He was a flabby, hairy 45 year old with a big house and a bigger checkbook. He knew he wasn’t enough to satisfy her; that’s what today was about.

“You know, we still have enough time to catch a movie. I heard that First Man movie is good.” Stephen emerged from the requisite catatonia after an orgasmic emission. “I’ve always been fascinated by movies about the Apollo program, Apollo 13 was great!”

“It’s all fake, you know,” a voice jarringly interjected from the chaise in the reading nook. “The moon landings were a hoax.” The voice was disturbingly earnest, with just a hint of condescension. Just the tone one would expect from the half-naked twenty-something Adonis of a man tapping away on his iPhone in the corner of the bedroom.

“What the hell are you talking about, Brad?” Stephen shot back, launching all-out thermonuclear body language war with the man whore in his reading spot. Stephen made a mental note to bleach the hell out of that chaise before sitting there again. If only that furniture could speak…

He snapped out of his train of thought with a realization that he couldn’t afford therapists for all of the furniture that was violated during today’s extended game of hide the pickle. Not while paying for that bitch of an ex-wife’s therapist, too. God, what a wrinkled old cunt!

Brad had leisurely removed his thong-ridden sweaty ass cheeks from Stephen’s sacred retreat, and was slowly getting dressed while he put together a parting shot that would extricate him from the room with his payment and without fucking up next week’s scheduled romp time with Stephen and Janice. He really wanted that damned 84″ QLED TV, whether or not it meant doing the devil’s threesome with some rich geezer and his glorified whore.

“The moon landing was a hoax. An American bluff to the Soviet space race dominance.” Brad muttered without addressing anybody in the room. He hoped beyond hope that this was the end of the conversation and he could go home and take a shower. He could feel that whore’s randy juices congealing in his beard, and he internally cringed at the thought of how much beard wax it would take to return his chin mane to its former glory.

“Brad, you aren’t even old enough to have seen the moon landing, how would you even know?” Janice sat up in bed, any remaining aura of afterglow having been replaced with a mix of mild annoyance and reluctant curiosity. Brad noticed her perky bosoms settle into an oddly attractive asymmetry, like a cute girl with a crazy eye. Janice, following Brad’s gaze, covered her mammaries in reflexive embarrassment.

“It’s all out there… you know, on the Internet. The videos were clearly produced in Hollywood. The artifacts are more of science fiction than science fact. I mean, you can even see the flags waving in the breeze! Who do they think that they’re fooling?” Brad felt his hackles rising, and he resigned himself to getting into this debate yet again. These ignorant fools don’t even know that the moon landing is fake… they probably think that Al Quaeda did 9/11 and Sandy Hook was done by a disturbed autist.

“Your-” Stephen started.

“Let me ask you a question, before you get started,” Brad interrupted, pausing for dramatic effect before continuing. “What evidence do you have that the moon landing actually happened?”

“Well, uhh,” Stephen was caught off guard and gathered himself under the disguise of thoughtful contemplation. “There are people who claim to have gone to the moon. There is a large amount of equipment still around that was used to send people to the moon. There is video of men on the moon. Hell, I’ve even seen a moonrock.”

“What do you find most convincing from that evidence?” Brad questioned, pretending not to notice that Stephen’s Trump-like penis was slowly retreating through the slit in his boxers into it’s fungal habitat like a snail tentacle after encountering a patch of salt.

“Well, I guess the video is most convincing,” Stephen tried to hide his defensiveness by leaning onto the edge of the bed, unintentionally flaunting his scrunched up coin purse through the widened hole in the front of his only clothing.

“The video?” Brad scoffed, barely reining in a condescending “harumph” that would’ve been the last nail in the coffin of his plans to continue to rock the world of that naked vixen whose cheek still showed the remnants of his primal rut. “The video could just as easily have been fabricated. In fact, it has many issues that indicate possible fabrication. If you strip away your trusting bias, you-”

“Trusting bias? I’m the one with a bias?” Stephen shoved away from the bed, causing Janice to flinch in a way that tore her out of whatever trance was allowing her to tolerate this idiotic debate. She slid out of the sheets, and walked, intentionally seductively, to the closet to grab some clothes. Movie or no, she was going to get dolled up, if only to make Brad feel jealous and to distract Stephen from this inanity. She knew how Stephen was, he’d talk all night if somebody didn’t distract him.

“Yes, you’re too trusting of the media and the government. Humor me for a moment and approach the moon landing from a skeptic’s point of view,” Brad was clearly enjoying this a bit too much. He could feel the blood coursing back into his flaccid meat tube.

“Ok, I’ll play along. As a skeptic, I see a bunch of video seeming to show people in suits on a rocky surface with low gravity. I see a rock that doesn’t look like a normal rock I could find in my backyard. I’ve seen a full sized model of a rocket that could plausibly send these men into space. I’ve heard more than one person talk as though they have been to the moon.” Stephen was also enjoying this a bit too much, although not with the sexual repercussions that were stretching Brad’s thong under his sweatpants. “I guess that if I didn’t trust what I was told about these things, they could represent anything from a legitimate trip to the moon to a conspiratorial hoax. I don’t have any direct evidence that anybody has actually been on the moon.”

Brad nodded in approval, cutting in before Stephen could assert dominance. Brad chuckled internally as he recognized the same power play he used while directing the three person play that was the violation of Janice. “But why wouldn’t you believe them? They have no reason to lie, right?”

Brad paused, locking eyes with Stephen and not faltering when Janice sauntered back into the room, stuffed into a mini-skirt and halter top that looked like it was about to burst. “Wrong! They were losing the space race! The Soviets beat them to every major milestone, and the Americans were desperate for the upper hand. It was a pivotal time in the Cold War, and the Americans couldn’t afford to lose this one.”

“I mean, I guess that’s plausible, but Occam’s Razor seems to suggest that it’s more likely that they actually did it rather than some massive conspiracy including thousands of people to fake a moon landing.” Stephen, unlike Brad, made no attempt to hide his notice of Janice’s provocative dress.

“What is there to believe if we can’t trust the history books, the contemporary records, and the testimony of others?” Janice contributed, to the shock of both Brad and Stephen.

“That’s just it!” Stephen supported “If we don’t trust the government and historians about the moon landing, what can we trust them about? What is truth when you don’t trust anything outside of your own first-hand experience?”

“Now you’re talking! Question everything!” Brad said, betraying his love for the X-files and for pot. “How do you even know that there is a place called New Zealand? There are pictures and videos, and people pretend that they have been there, but without actually going there, I have no idea that such a place exists.”

Stephen, obviously annoyed at this turn of conversation, pulled Janice close, pressing her soft body against his. “You’re a moron, but your point is well taken. I can’t know that something is the truth unless I’ve directly observed it. Everything else is built on some sort of social trust. It’s an assumption that people won’t collectively and casually lie to you about history and science and other things that you can’t and won’t verify.”

“So, are we going to watch First Man?” Janice asked, sliding her hand down Stephen’s pantleg in an obvious sign of impatience.

“See you next week, Brad,” Stephen asserted with a finality that caused Brad to turn and walk out the door.