Being Kendra (12 page)

On the set of
DWTS
. Hmmm . . . wonder why I’m smiling?

Hank and I had sex once in the trailer in the back of the studio lot during
Dancing
with
the
Stars
. We weren’t ashamed; we were horny! We were just like, “Why not have sex in our trailer right now? You only live once!” We hadn’t spent a lot of time together and were crazy busy, but I was all worked up from grinding with Louis and Hank came by, so why not! It’s fun, it’s something to spice things up a little bit. Sex in the middle of the day at the workplace, it doesn’t get much better than that! We were in my trailer and the door was shut, so no one was watching. How many people can say they had a little afternoon delight in a
Dancing
with
the
Stars
trailer? I can! It’s not our bed, it’s not our home, it’s not even a hotel—it’s our trailer! Any time you can, you should take advantage of where you are. I’m not saying the whole world needs to start having sex in the Gap changing room or the Applebee’s bathroom, but if you are feeling it and horny, take advantage of the time that you have and just go for it.

Of course I’m always aware of our surroundings. The trailers at
Dancing
with
the
Stars
were connected to one another, so when we were doing it, I was looking around the trailer like, “OMG, everyone’s probably feeling this movement right now.” The whole damn thing was rocking—Hank’s a big guy! Lucky for us, Hines Ward was in the trailer next to me, so while I was a little bit worried that someone would notice what we were up to, I’m sure that Hines would be the coolest about it. And I swear because it’s so easy, some other people do it too, because as I’ve said
DWTS
is a really sexually driven show; there’s no way I was the only one getting worked up that day. After all, you’ve got your own private trailer to go back to. When we were doing it, I stopped for a second and realized how much the trailer was really moving. But once we got going there was no turning back! It was a brilliant performance; I’m sure the judges would have given us three 10s!

All right, so not everyone has their own private star trailer. But everyone has access to mirrors. If you want to spice up your sex life, a simple mirror will do it. It’s fun to see you and your partner from a million different vantage points. I don’t think it’s necessary to go to the extreme with whips and chains, or crazy porn, or even strip clubs. You can spice your sex life up with each other; you don’t need anyone else or any crazy tools in particular. Why watch someone else on TV or bring a stranger or strange object into your sex life? With a mirror, you can see all of your body and places you don’t normally get to see—there’s nothing hotter than watching yourself have sex. We women are used to not getting to see everything because of the “usual” sexual positions. And when you’re proud of your body, that’s when the sex is going to skyrocket. Regardless of your body shape, if you are confident and feel sexy, it’s hot. Hank and I use mirrors all the time. I think any time we have a reflection it spices up our sex life times ten. You can never have enough mirrors.

I have friends who are so shy about sex, so I’m there for them; I’m like everyone’s sex therapist. I try to encourage them to enjoy themselves and let loose, but they laugh about it all because they’re shy. You can’t be shy about sex. A body is a body. Sex is your number one natural opportunity to feel good, so take advantage. One of the few times that I wasn’t having sex was when I felt depressed and fat and ugly. I realized I needed to get back to being aggressive. No matter who you are, be a woman, and go and get what you want!

Of course, I have a great partner to get creative with. And everything about Hank turns me on, but especially his back. I love Hank’s back at nighttime and in the morning, because it’s covered during the day. So I’m the only one who gets to see it. He’s got this big sexy tattoo on it. For me his tattoo represents the full dynamic of who Hank really is. On the one hand he’s a really polite guy, a gentleman. But when he takes off his shirt it’s like he is this total badass. His back is muscular, with this big tattoo with the Roman numeral III for Hank the third (baby Hank is Hank the fourth). He is such a good man; he respects everyone, he opens doors for people, he brings me roses, he takes care of the baby. But ohhhh, that tattoo. And it’s only me who gets to see his back with the tattoo on it. That tattoo represents the bad boy in him, and that’s what turns me on the most. When we are having sex it’s like I feel safe knowing it’s with Hank, this man I love and trust, and yet it’s totally hot because of his bad boy side. In general I’m not a huge fan of tattoos—too many sort of signals sex sex sex and it can just be too much. I don’t have any tattoos and I don’t love them on women, but on men it says self-confidence, it says they’re good in bed or they want to be good in bed, and I like that. I read “sex” when I see a guy with a tattoo.

Louis, my dance partner, understands sex and, being a dancer, I would think he has sex on his brain all the time. And as a dancer, he really understands a woman’s body. He is always talking about the inside of a woman’s thigh. He knows all of the sexy turn-on spots. If you watch
Dancing
with
the
Stars,
it’s a very sexy show and a lot of the dancing is designed to be sexual. Louis is always talking about posture and standing up straight and having confidence. He says that when a woman is pigeon-toed, you don’t get to see the inside of her thigh, so it’s kind of a turnoff and she doesn’t give off any vibes of sex. But when her leg is slightly out—not too much, but when your inner thigh is showing just slightly—a man will read “sex” all over that. Because he’s seeing the inside of her thigh, an area he’s not used to normally getting a peek at, a guy will be instantly turned on. I thought I knew so much about sex, but I didn’t really know anything. After talking to someone like Louis who understands seduction and chemistry, I’m taking what I learn from dance and bringing it home, and it’s made my sex life even better. I feel so much more confident and better in bed now. I thought I was good before, but now I’m a champ!

One thing I’ve always known with regard to sex is what my man wants. There’s nothing sexier than confidence and knowing exactly what your partner wants. Hank loves it when I wear little booty exercise shorts. Of course, he doesn’t mind seeing me in lingerie, but he prefers when I’m being myself. Even in bed he loves me wearing a sports bra with little booty shorts on and my socks pulled up high. That’s his fantasy, so I give it to him. When Hank first met me I was the “sporty” one of all of Hef’s girls. And to this day he still loves that look on me. So when I want to give him what he wants, I wear a sports bra! It’s very easy to fall into the habit of just getting naked for sex. But I like to I mix it up and throw on the fantasy costume that gets Hank all worked up. It’s better than asking for it.

You probably think Hank and I are pretty kinky, but other than sometimes having sex in places other than our home and adding in the occasional mirror and outfit, we’re pretty much just like any other couple. There’s a certain freedom in being in a loving, committed marriage. We love having sex, and while we are willing to try a lot of different things, we do have our limits. One thing we don’t do is videotape our sex . . . yet. But we will. I’m not going to stop doing that because some asshole a few years back taped me and then sold the tape to the world once I became famous. The sex tape represented a really tough time in my life, but it didn’t finish me. That motherfucker was probably thinking, “I ruined her life,” and felt powerful for a minute. But I’m not allowing that to ruin my life or my relationship. Right after the sex tape came out, my first reaction was to act and look more conservative as a way to offset it or show I was different now. I thought I’d have to be a prude, but life goes on. You cannot stop your life because someone is trying to sabotage your success.

I’m not going to allow some asshole to ruin my sex life with my husband. If I want to press “record,” I’m going to press “record.” Hank and I talk about that all the time actually. Of course, we haven’t done that yet because it was traumatizing, but when we are ready, we’ll do it. I think we have to be in our own element and we never did it before because we were in an apartment or a hotel or traveling and it wasn’t creatively anything to showcase, so it would be such a waste of time. But now that we’re in our house, we have big plans: We’re going to get a tripod, maybe some lights, and really do it up! Maybe I’ll make my own private little studio; I’m not ashamed anymore. I will make another sex tape. But this time, only my husband and I will see it.

That guy who released the sex tape tried to make me feel guilty. But why should I feel guilty about having sex? Sex is a great thing; I love sex and we are made to have sex. Some people love to shop, some people love to eat, I love to have sex. Sex is a way to feel alive, and when you have it, you know you are living and you are feeling good. Think about the first moments after sex with someone you love—doesn’t it feel great? I like having that feeling. Materialistic stuff makes you feel good when you put it on and you look good, but you need to also find something that makes you physically feel good, something that will make you feel good on the inside, and what feels good on the inside will show on the outside.

M
arriage is all about give and take. Hank and I are a team, and one person needs to step up when one of us is down. Such was the case for baby Hank’s first birthday party. It was a true test of our marriage and parenting skills. We were in Minnesota at the time, but I had to go back to L.A. for business a few days before, so I left the actual planning in Hank’s hands. I’d be back just in time for the party.

Hank did a great job. He booked a private party room at the Mall of America, ordered a special cake, and put together all of these Dora the Explorer and Diego decorations. He went all out. But, of course, the day of the birthday we looked out the window and it’s another big blizzard, like one of the biggest they’d seen in decades. The snow was coming down hard and the roads were completely covered. Hank had put his heart and soul into planning this party and said, “Let’s go! Let’s do this!” I had different thoughts in my head, but I knew how hard Hank had worked on the party, so I went along for the ride. It wasn’t my place to throw in the towel just yet. I was being a good wife, even if as a mom I wanted to call it a day.

My mom was there, as were my brother and Hank’s parents and brother. We were all ready to celebrate baby Hank’s first birthday. We all left our apartment at the same time, piled in our car, and drove off. That’s when I said to Hank, “We can’t see as far as we can piss!” I kept saying that and the whole family was cracking up. But Hank was really mad; it was a very touchy situation, because deep down he knew the odds weren’t good we were going to actually get to the party. Everywhere we looked, cars were stuck in ditches or turning around and heading home. I knew in my heart we should have stayed home. It was risky and super dangerous, but Hank was so passionate about getting there. He kept saying, “We gotta try!” Hank’s pride was taking over, and I knew I couldn’t say anything else negative. But after ten minutes in the car I felt a skid. I opened my mouth and said, “Nope.” We slid again and I opened up my mouth and said, “Babe, let’s not go. This isn’t right.” Then what I thought would happen happened. Hank yelled out, “No! We are going.” But I said no again. It was an argument, and I needed to let him see that harming us and getting us stuck in a ditch would be much worse than a canceled birthday party. I insisted we needed to turn around. I wasn’t being a girl who was scared, I was being a parent. I begged him and said, “Please don’t let your pride take over. Your pride will get us killed. Think about the consequences. We could get stuck in a ditch and end up being stuck in this car for hours.” So Hank was really sad, and I swear I saw a little tear drop down his face, but he finally turned around.

We ended up in the little vacant party room in our apartment complex. It was kind of sad: just one single window, a pool table, and a fireplace that we lit. We put presents all around and tried to create a birthday party atmosphere for the baby. It was kind of quiet for a birthday party, but our family was all together and that’s what mattered most.

Hank felt like a failure because I had been trapped inside all winter and had no real home to live in, and all I had done for the last year was travel from city to city. He wanted to throw a good first birthday for Hank Jr. as a way to make it all up to me. He was devastated, and even though I was depressed and struggling, I had to brush my issues aside and take care of him and his emotional needs and talk to him about it all. I wanted him to know that in my heart I knew what an amazing job he had done. That was my job as a wife and a mom. Hank had done good. So my brother and Hank’s brother ran out to the grocery store to get a birthday cake (in this weather it took them almost two hours to drive there), and we took pictures and smashed Hank Jr.’s hands in icing. We made it work.

A week went by and the Mall of America told us they’d hold the room for us and the decorations and let us celebrate when the weather cleared up. So we gathered Hank’s teammates and their kids and we celebrated for real, a week later. Hank Jr. (and daddy Hank) got their big birthday celebration after all.

Hank Jr.’s first birthday party—a week late, but still just as fabulous as Hank had planned.

But even when things are going good, there are feelings and emotions that you’ve been bottling up that tend to rise to a boiling point, and if you aren’t careful in a relationship, they can blow up right in your face. Sometimes you can get too comfortable in your marriage and you don’t pay attention to what your partner is feeling or saying. While I know we all have the best intentions (like during baby Hank’s first birthday), I know there have been times certainly where Hank was clueless about what I was feeling.

That’s why we try to sit down and talk as much as we can. On date nights we remind each other how much we are in love. During phone calls we flirt. When we are away we Skype. We don’t ever take our relationship for granted. But I’m the first to admit, it’s not always gumdrops and cotton candy.

As long as I’ve known Hank, we’ve gotten in only two bad fights in our entire relationship. The first was our brutal argument after I had my meltdown in Minnesota. That ended with Hank passing out unconscious on the floor. But we never got physical with each other. We know how to debate and argue, but we rarely fight anymore because we have learned our lesson. One nasty fight in a relationship might happen. But you should learn from it. Having it happen twice is unacceptable. If you had walked in immediately after that verbal sparring in Minnesota, you would have thought I had knocked out my husband. I hadn’t, of course. But during our second bad fight, the shit really hit the fan and I did knock him out.

We were in New Mexico for our annual charity event for the Oasis Children’s Advocacy Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Hank’s home state), in 2010. We help raise money to benefit abused children with a golf tournament called the Tee’d Off About Child Abuse Golf Scramble. Hank and I raised a lot of money during the event, so we ended up celebrating with friends and family and both got very drunk pounding shots of tequila at the hotel bar. That was right around the time when the sex tape came out, so I was very self-conscious and my world had been turned upside down; just another dramatic day in the life of Kendra Wilkinson. I assumed that if an ex-boyfriend was out there hawking a sex tape from stuff he had filmed us doing several years back, then I guess the whole world was out to get me. I was feeling down because I felt like I had been publicly humiliated. Well, not even “felt.” I
had
been publicly humiliated.

So Hank and I were both belligerently drunk. We don’t drink all the time, but we both have wild sides and when we do drink it can get a little crazy. Plus Hank is an athlete, so guys are always buying him drinks and shots and he thinks because he’s six foot four he can just guzzle and guzzle. He can’t. We split up at the bar; he was hanging out with his boys while I was hanging out with my friends. I looked over at the bar and there were two girls who looked very suspicious hanging around where Hank was. I went up to him and said, “Hey, watch out, these girls look really suspicious.” He took it the wrong way. He was like, “You’re just jealous. Why would you think I would do that to you?” I was like, “No, Hank, I’m not saying you’re cheating on me, but there are writers and journalists here, so just be careful. You know there’s a lot of heat on us right now.”

The last few months had been horrible for us: Magazines were saying we were splitting up, blogs were revealing the sex tape, and reporters were following us everywhere. Literally I would buy a soda at a store and a few days later I’d read about the conversation I had with the store clerk in one of the tabloids. Hank and I had flown separately to our charity event because of our schedules, and one of the magazines actually bought the plane seat next to Hank for the flight down. A reporter sat right there next to him trying to get a big interview about the sex tape, me, and our relationship. Hank spent two hours next to this girl and had to repeatedly say, “No comment.” So yeah, I was a little paranoid. If a reporter is going to chase us onto a plane, why wouldn’t they try to get Hank while he’s drunk in a bar?

Hank was pretty drunk and wasn’t listening to what I was saying. He still kept saying things like, “You think I would do something like that to you?” Ultimately, he wouldn’t stop drinking or leave the bar area, and the girls were still near him, watching him. I got so frustrated that he wasn’t listening, and I went up to our hotel room. He quickly followed me and we started arguing and screaming at each other. We weren’t even making sense, just fighting and lobbing insults back and forth for the sake of fighting, so I told him to leave. I was done with the fight and over being drunk. He went back to the bar to drink some more with his friends, and I tried to calm down and stayed in the room.

But then I looked at my phone a little bit later and there was a text message that read: “Come by. I would love to see you right now.”

I flipped out. I had just gotten done fighting with him, so who the hell was he texting that to? He had said he wasn’t paying attention to the girls in the bar, but . . . This was one of those moments where I saw my life flashing in front of my eyes. I had put all of my eggs into this basket—Hank’s basket—trust, family, money, love, my whole life built here with Hank Baskett, and he’s downstairs sending “sext” messages to other girls? I had the heart-stopping, gut-wrenching feeling that he was cheating on me.

I knew I needed to find out the truth immediately, so I called him and screamed, “How dare you? You cheated on me!”

It was a messy fight. He came storming back to the room, trying to show me he wasn’t cheating. “I’m not cheating on you, what are you talking about?” I said, “You just sent a text to me that read you ‘would love to see’ me. That wasn’t for me! Who are you talking to? You just saw me so you certainly weren’t talking to me! And those certainly aren’t the type of messages you send to your wife. You were sexting! Who were you sexting? One of the girls from the bar?” Hank truly had nothing to hide, but when you’re drunk you tend to get a little bit loopy. He was like, “Here, look through my phone.” He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I looked through his phone and I looked through his text messages and didn’t see anything, so I just assumed he had erased the message. Of course, I was checking his text messages, too drunk to realize he had actually sent me a BlackBerry message.

I forgot to check his BBM. I just assumed he was lying to me anyway, so I smashed his phone and my phone together repeatedly, trying to break them. He just kept repeating, “Look at my BBM!” But it was too late; I was full of rage (and alcohol) and unfortunately, I just swung at him, not really trying to hit him but just for the action of swinging, and—oops—I clocked him bad. He had gotten too close to me and my fist went straight into his head. Crunch. He looked like he was going to cry, not because of the pain (though it was a pretty rough hit), but because I had actually hit him.

You can’t really imagine what the situation is like until you’ve been in it, but a husband and a wife hitting each other, that’s a betrayal. Couples fight, and while celebrities make it seem like everyone’s happy and there’s a ton of money and no one’s ever stressed, that couldn’t be further from the truth. But what happened with us, it should never have come to that.

Hank was devastated not only that I hit him but that I had accused him of cheating. The hit really sobered us up and brought us to a calmer, more repenting level. Nursing his eye, Hank calmed me down enough to show me that he had accidentally copied and pasted a message to a friend on his BBM. He proved me wrong on a very broken and now cracked phone. It was a very accidental fight and he was able to prove his innocence to me. He was like, “How could you punch me?” He was so upset and showed me the message over and over again that he had sent a while ago to his guy friend in New Mexico and accidentally copied and pasted to me. Then he took me downstairs to the bar, where the friend he texted was waiting.

Ooops.

Morning came and I was still angry. I don’t know why but I was angry at the both of us, mostly at him for getting so drunk and just not explaining himself to me right from the beginning. I said, “Why didn’t you just show me the damn message?” I didn’t know what I had done and he didn’t know what he had done. It was like, “How do we apologize for something like this?” He had an imprint of my wedding ring right under his eye, but mentally he was hurt even more. Hank rarely holds a grudge, especially against me of all people. He wasn’t mad at me, but he was upset it got to that point. He just looked at me and said, “Kendra, you had a nice shot. You should be a boxer.” We started laughing about me punching him. We were so drunk we didn’t even know what happened. Till this day we still make it the biggest joke. Accidents happen; I was trying to push him, but I did it a little too much.

Just because you are married doesn’t mean you are immune to feelings of embarrassment with your partner. We felt awkward for a few days, but from that day on we said we’d never go that far with drinking ever again. That morning we had a three-hour talk on life. We said, “We have a son now, so we will never do this again. This will never happen again.” It never did happen again and it never will happen again. So we created a drinking limit; only one of us can get drunk if we’re together, not both of us. That’s our rule that we set from that day. It’s kind of like a four-to-one rule. If I have four drinks, he can have only one. If he has four, I can have only one. We will never get to that level again ever. Thank God the baby wasn’t around and we were just with each other. That was a great thing we got through, and while it’s not something to brag about, it happened and I think we are better off because of it. It was bad and we’re ashamed of it, but we know how to laugh about it. Nobody else knew about this and Hank had to wear sunglasses for a couple of days to hide his shiner. We kept it between us until now.