Chapter 9: A Trade of Professional Services
“So, what’s our first task, maestro?” my wife asked Carlo as we were finishing lunch.
“I’d like to start with the core of your business, the actual massage work, then work out from there toward the collateral elements.”
With a small smile she replied, “Good, you’re already dressed for a private massage. As are we, for that matter.”
We filed out and showed him the new patio and solar shower.
“Oh, I’ve got to get pics of this. Kaitlyn, would you be our model? Artsy back, bun and sideboob shots only, suitable for business use,” he reassured her.
“Sure, you want to go get your camera, so we can get to work?”
It turned out that “camera” was only the smallest part of what we had to haul from Carlo’s car into the back yard. He’d brought two huge hard cases filled with gear, one dominating his car’s back seat, another its trunk. Packed in all around these were more equipment bags, only one of which held the actual camera body and core lens set.
Among this photo geekery was a four by three meter scrim “…to knock the contrast down in mid-day outdoor shots, making them a lot better looking than you’d get without it,” according to Carlo. Then there were lights, stands, bounce cards, softboxes… It was a Production, capital P.
The artist set me to work practicing with a gold bounce card while he put the finishing touches on the direct lighting, taking about an hour before we were ready for Kaitlyn to begin modeling the shower for us.
“All right, let’s keep the hair dry to start,” he said after she’d turned the water on, continuing the patter as he shot frame after frame, adjusting the light and composition several times, directing me to bounce golden reflected sunlight over my wife’s flank while he worked. I could already tell that these were going to come out beautifully!
As Carlo finished that sequence, I told him, “How about you get under there next? You’ll want to be clean for your massage anyway.”
“All right,” he agreed equably.
As he got himself thoroughly wet, I walked casually over to the patio table where Carlo’d set the remote shutter release down and pressed its button, figuring the camera’s last framing was just as good for a five-three graphic artist as for my five-two wife.
“Hey, what’s this now?” he demanded, half-scandalized.
“We need a male model, too,” Kaitlyn said with a grin, in rapport with me and knowing my motives.
“So get Mr. Beefcake over here instead!” he complained with feigned irritation.
Rather than object to that exaggeration, the two of us replied in unison, “Oh, you’re a fine model!”
I realized my fingertip on the low-tech remote shutter release button wasn’t interfering with my magic enough to prevent Kaitlyn from maintaining our rapport link. And then after further consideration I wondered if this was all her idea, me merely acting as her proxy to the camera’s remote. Was Kaitlyn the photographer, or was I?
«Caught me,» she admitted, her coy smile deepening.
Carlo tried another tack: “My modeling rates are higher than as a photographer, you know.”
Kaitlyn just clicked the shutter by proxy again.
“Extra nice massage?” I offered, mediating.
“Extra extra nice,” he bargained.
“Deal!” replied my wife.
I stood, leaving the remote shutter release on the patio table, but Kaitlyn wasn’t done. She walked over to the camera on its tripod, then rather than click away some more with Carlo’s static framing, she grabbed the ball-head’s knob in one hand, the lens’ zoom ring in the other and started making framing adjustments and calling poses!
While they worked together, swapping places a few times, I got a fun lash-up out of our patio cabinet: a desktop microphone stand with a cheap Sherlock Holmes costume prop magnifying glass in its grip, duct tape padding the handle out to the diameter of the vocal mic the stand was designed to pair with. The adjustments let me focus sunlight on our metal massage oil bowl, augmenting the hot sand’s thermal contribution through the bowl’s flat bottom.
In a few minutes, the oil was ready, so I announced, “Massage time!”
“No towel?” Carlo asked when we’d guided him over.
“You’ll like it better without; trust us,” my wife said.
“I do trust you,” he replied with evident sincerity.
We laid him out face down on the warm sand, and he began groaning in delight before we’d even laid oiled hands upon his body.
I began delving him magically soon after we started work, partly to guide the massage more precisely than we could from external cues alone, but also because we’d gotten into this massage game as a covert way to do magical healing without giving our powers away to the wider world. Kaitlyn’s presence soon joined me, and we divided the responsibilities.
Our first thought when learning to do magico-medical checkups was to divide a body along its axis of symmetry, as we do for a four-handed massage, but we quickly shot several holes in this idea.
First, that splits symmetric organs such as the nose down the middle. What’s the point of me checking one nostril, Kaitlyn the other? And how were we supposed to divide his dong anyway? The very thought made me shudder.
Second, it also splits mirrored-pair organs: not only is there no point in having Kaitlyn check one eyeball, me the other, it’s actually better if just one mage does it, since the examiner can compare structures. It also permits specialization, the result being that I ended up learning more about upper body organs such as ears and lungs while Kaitlyn excelled at gonads and patellas.
Third, the clincher: the human body’s bilateral symmetry is inexact, most especially inside the torso. How could we possibly divide work on asymmetric organs like the heart, stomach, and liver, of which there is only one, offset within the body? How about the intestines?
We solved the problem by rotating it 90°, drawing the line thus: me taking the thoracic organs upward, Kaitlyn the abdominal organs downward. Skin, muscles, tendons, circulatory vessels and such we split by their proximity to these organs. It wasn’t a perfect arrangement, since there’s enough going on in the head alone to make my job more involved than Kaitlyn’s, but I’m a more experienced healer, so it worked out well enough.
I’d only checked Carlo’s lungs — doing just fine thanks — when Kaitlyn called my attention to his kidneys. They were…lumpy! Not cancer, something else, but clearly abnormal.
«I have no idea what that is, Kaitlyn. Massage over them to see how he reacts.»
She took that advice, eliciting a wince from our client. “Sorry, Carlo. What’s this?”
“Aggh…” was all he said, clearly reticent.
“We’re healthcare professionals of a sort, Davie and I. You can tell us in confidence,” she reassured him.
“Well, all right. It’s a genetic thing: ADPKD, which I’m not going to expand for you because we’ll be here all day and then you’ll have to massage my sprained jaw as well, all right?” he replied jokingly, clearly trying to deflect some deeper psychological pain.
“What’re the consequences? I’m asking as a professional here, Carlo. I need to know how to treat it.”
I was certain he didn’t know that this was a double entendre, that Kaitlyn intended to actively treat it somehow, not simply avoid hurting him further as he was likely assuming.
“For now,” he replied reluctantly, “there’s nothing more than a bit of pain when it’s pushed on, as you just did, but eventually they’re saying I’ll have to go on regular dialysis as my kidneys continue to lose function. I’ve got the robustness of youth on my side, but that won’t last.”
I guessed he was about 25 now, which sparked a thought: I checked his ring finger and found it empty. Hmmm!
“That’s a bummer,” my wife said sympathetically. “We’ll try to avoid irritating them.”
Covertly through the bond while continuing his massage, she sent, «I want to go after it, Davie.»
Hesitantly, I replied, «He called it a genetic disease, love. You can’t just accelerate his natural healing process, because his broken DNA codes for his kidneys to do that.»
Agreeably, she sent, «And since we do not yet know how to fix DNA magically, that leaves only one option: sex magic. Legit case?»
«Yes, you are entirely right to go after it with whatever means you see fit. Where and when do you want to do this?»
«Mage Arch, on Earth Day.»
«What, like a threesome, him and us?»
«No, I was never very happy with our experiments with the Alexanders. Someone always ended up kicked out every time one pair got too hot-and-heavy; not always the same person, but always one, so we kept returning to either two couples side-by-side or two spectators watching one couple. You must’ve noticed?»
«Yeah,» I agreed through the bond, «but I thought that was just inexperience or incompatibility or something.»
«Maybe,» she demurred, «but we tried all pairings except you and Norman, and they all worked. Also, we’ve had threesomes with Kristen that I thoroughly enjoyed from start to end, but I believe that’s because she’s a mage, thus able to coordinate the extra body parts with us through the rapport bond. I think that’s the real reason, Davie: with non-mages like the Alexanders, we won’t be able to go beyond couples without a lot of practice, something we won’t have time for here with Carlo. No, I have a different plan for him. Let me work it, okay?»
«Yes, O Denuded Doctor,» I intoned within her head, managing somehow to contrive a resonant effect there even though we were communicating without sound.
She stifled a laugh at this, smiling as she continued working on Carlo.
We exchanged no more words through the bond for a time, only murmured thanks when he commented on our work, the sense of it being that he thought this massage was much better than his first back on Halloween, not only for being four-handed this time but also for being outdoors and from two much more skilled therapists.
Half an hour after we started work on his backside, we helped him flop his flaccid body over and showed him the second half of our overt massage plan, using soft wide brushes to clean the sand off his front, bought for the purpose. In our private work within the family, we used magical wind for this instead, refining the technique to make it feel like the finest brush ever made, but we wouldn’t be able to do that with outsiders like Carlo, alas.
“Oh, that’s so very nice!” he said, smiling, eyes closed against the bright sky.
That sparked an idea, which Kaitlyn caught through the bond, standing with me to fetch Carlo’s scrim, repositioning it to cast shade over his face, our movements as smoothly coordinated as if choreographed.
Kneeling beside his appreciatively smiling face, I said, “We should have something like this ourselves, though maybe more in a bamboo-and-reed motif?”
“Yeah!” enthused my wife as she resumed work on Carlo, adding, “Just enough to give the client some shade when working around mid-day,”
“That’d be good,” agreed Carlo.
We said no more as we spent the next half hour turning Carlo into a puddle ’pon the sand.
As he lay half-asleep, I caught Kaitlyn’s wish to stand and move the scrim again, fully shading Carlo’s supine form, bringing a smile to his lips. I suppose he had the same thought I did, that we were just kindly giving him some relief from the mid-day sun, because he kept his eyes closed.
…until his eyelids were flooded by flashes from the studio lights we’d silently re-pointed his way, Kaitlyn triggering them with the camera shutter!
“Hey, what?” he yelped, sitting up.
“I thought you agreed to be our model?” accused Kaitlyn with mock petulance.
“Well, it was indeed an extra-extra nice massage, but I’m pretty sure you can’t print these,” he said, motioning over his exposed man-bits. “Besides,” he added, indicating his scarred thigh, “I can’t be a model with this.”
Not wanting to talk about the scarring if he felt badly about it, I deflected, “Turn over and we’ll do some towel-draped shots, then,” I told him.
“Only if we do more of Kaitlyn,” he bargained.
“Of course!”
“And you!” he demanded of me.
Sigh. “If you must,” I said reluctantly.
Kaitlyn pronounced, “We must, Davie: we need a masseur, and I don’t want to dress today, so you’re it. Now go get your massage therapist outfits.”
I obeyed, and we did a sequence showing off the sandy massage area, Kaitlyn professionally draped in most of the shots, though there were several shots of each of us that would go no further than our private photo collections.
We worked at that until dinner time, then made our photo selections around the dinner table, setting work aside only once Kaitlyn served dessert, a kiwi-strawberry tart thingy she’d put together on the fly, her mother having taught her well in this art.
“I’ve made a decision,” Carlo said between bites. “I want to try spending the entire rest of the week nude, if possible. I’m hoping to break a personal-best record for longest time nude here on this trip.”
I did a bit of quick arithmetic then asked, “You’ve previously done better than three days and change? I thought this nudism stuff was new to you.”
“Outdoor nudism, yes, but I’m kind of a home nudist. Curtains closed during the day, maybe a bit of time in my skin on my semi-private deck after dark, that kind of thing. I’ve stayed nude for three and four days several times before, usually over long holiday weekends. I, ah, don’t get a lot of visitors at the house.”
“Relax,” my wife offered, “you’ve fallen into a pack of introverts here. If we look like we’re the outgoing sort to you, it’s just because you’re kind of one of us, so we’re comfortable with you.”
We let that comment sit for a while, then I added, “You know, I should’ve guessed that about you: Kaitlyn told me about your farmer costume: nothing but overalls and boots, right? Did anyone look down the sides and see your bare butt or anything?”
“A few,” he admitted with a small grin. “I told them it was for verisimilitude. Widespread use of underwear’s a fairly recent thing, you know. Low-income farmer types were among the last to adopt the fashion.”
I did know it. Nude beggars weren’t unheard of in my home country.
Apropos of this, I offered, “I took the nude record over Winter Break.”
My wife clarified this for me, “Twelve days straight, Carlo.”
“Wow!”
“Anyway,” I went on, “how about you try to take the record from me, Kaitlyn? You haven’t been dressed since we got back home from your parents’ on the 12th, and you’re not returning to work at the BLM until the 27th, right? That’d be over 14 days total, if you can pull it off, solidly beating me.”
“You wouldn’t be upset to lose the record so soon, holding it only four months?”
“If it means I get to see you naked for two solid weeks, yeah, I’ll happily concede the loss!”
“You’re on!” she said.
I thought we’d have trouble with our Earth Day plan, but I kept that worry to myself. I wanted this, maybe more than she did, so I was hoping a workaround would occur to me before then.
That night we went our separate ways for bed, Carlo downstairs and we upstairs.
Kaitlyn and I usually do some reading on our tablets before turning out the lights. Looking over from my e-book copy of Robert Jordan’s “The Eye of the World,” the first in his epic Wheel of Time series, I raised an eyebrow at my wife’s dubious choice of bedtime entertainment, the Wikipedia article on Carlo’s ADPKD thing: autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease. Yowza! He was right: I wouldn’t be saying that three times fast without serious risk of injury to the jaw.
I rolled onto my side and slid closer, one fist beneath my pillow to raise my head so I could read between her shoulder and cheek, the other hand sneaking up onto her bare belly.
Kaitlyn snuggled back into my embrace, tilting her head back slightly to rest on my forehead. She switched to reading one-handed, her other pinning my forearm in place beneath the sheets, signaling acceptance of and limitation on the cuddle; she didn’t want that hand to go roaming, distracting her from her reading.
I read along with her, eventually opining, “This looks harder to cure than cancer. Like, by a lot.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked, putting down the tablet, its backlight bathing the ceiling blue-white.
“When I eradicated your mother’s pancreatic tumor, I did it by focusing my mind on her existing pancreas without the tumor. In preparation, I magically studied yours and mine for comparison, then I locked those images in my mind at the point of orgasm and basically forced the organ back into that pictured pattern.”
“Yeah,” she said, “you told me that at the time. Why can’t I do that for Carlo?”
“These cysts in his kidneys aren’t separate growths, Kaitlyn, they’re the organ itself growing incorrectly, and it’s doing so under control of a genetic mutation. That last rules out normal healing: all we could do is accelerate the disease down the pathological rails Carlo’s genetics demand. The thing is, that also makes the first problem worse: there isn’t anything to excise in this case: if you cut away all of the bits of his kidney that aren’t growing right, you’re left without any kidney at all!”
“So what do I do, then?”
“I think you have to proceed like I did on your mom’s pancreatic cancer, only at the whole-organ level. Instead of imagining a healthy pancreas without this one unwanted growth in the middle, as I did, you’ll have to imagine an entire healthy kidney for him and then realize it within his body. Basically, you’ll be giving him a magical transplant, converting his unhealthy kidney tissue into a brand new organ!”
Kaitlyn stared at the ceiling for a while at that, then breathed, “Holy shitballs, Batman.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “What I did for your mom was just barely within my power, and as we’ve seen, I didn’t even complete the job. A kidney’s a much bigger organ than a pancreas. I think the only way we’re going to get this done is to work together on it, Kaitlyn.”
She got a resolved look on her face and said, “Best let me get back at it then, Davie. Kidneys are my bailiwick.”
I rolled away reluctantly, and we resumed reading separately, Kaitlyn occasionally setting her tablet aside to concentrate inward on her own body, then on mine for comparison.
After about an hour of this back-and-forth, she muttered, “Yeah, I got this thing. That disease is going down.”
I squeezed her hand, then told her, “My love, you get Carlo, and I’ll finish the work on your mother: if we do nothing more with healing the rest of our lives, this past year of effort will have been worth it.”
We kissed for a while, then made love quietly, not wanting to embarrass or tease Carlo, his own bed only about 6 straight-line meters away, halfway under ours.