Chapter 49: Accommodations
The three of us were bare naked on the front porch swing, crowding it from one armrest to the other, watching the sunset over the bluffs, the Colorado River winding along at their base, an occasional off-road vehicle whooshing past our property on the Kane Creek Boulevard, just out of sight below the rise our house sat atop.
Hip-to-hip, we spoke through the rapport link, answering Chanel’s questions, beginning to teach her what we knew of the art.
I sent, «We have reason to believe that mages have affinities, Chanel. It’s a bit early to say, but I suspect yours is sex magic. Probably comes from your prior profession, though I could have cause and effect backwards. Maybe you were naturally good at it because you had this magical affinity, best expressed while nude, working as it were, and you just didn’t know how to use it consciously yet.»
«In retrospect,» she replied, «I think you may be right. When the sex was uncommonly good with a client, I learned I could sculpt his arousal — or, rarely, hers — to bring it along at the perfect rate, to give the client the best ride possible. That wasn’t experience talking, I tell you I felt it myself, not unlike what we just did together, though far less intense.»
«In time,» Kaitlyn offered, «you might end up teaching us about sex magic. Maybe not too much time at all, in fact.»
«Awesome!» Chanel sent, then stretched her legs out straight in front of her, using her core to bounce them to put a bit of amplitude back into the swing’s motion. «What are your affinities?»
«Invisibility,» I told her.
«Communing with animals,» my wife added simultaneously, though in rapport like that, our answers were distinct, not intermixing like sound does, so Chanel didn’t have to expend mental effort to pull them apart.
I wondered what a hundred mages jabbering in rapport would be like. A thousand! Would it be like walking through a crowd where all conversations were clear and sensible? Wow!
«I’m cured,» Chanel observed. «I can feel it inside. Hell, I can see it!» she exulted, running a hand over her smooth-shaven vulva, not a lesion in sight.
«That makes me wonder,» I began tentatively, «how soon you can begin paying down your debts.»
I felt her tense up beside me, and she sent, «You want sex from me? Like, as a payment for teaching me magic or something?»
«No no,» I returned quickly, «I mean the social costs you’ve created out in the world by spreading your diseases. There have to be people who caught one or more of them from you. I think you have a debt of honor requiring you to go find and cure all of them.»
«How can she do that?» my wife shot heatedly into the link. «That takes months of training and practice just to get started!»
She was referring to the schooling we’d gone through over the past year ourselves, but I sent, «I told you that you cannot safely heal others with regular magic, but this is sex magic. With regular magic, she’d have to know what she’s doing to get started, just as much as any mundane healer does, but with sex magic, you let the power of Gaia do the work. In the same way that we didn’t have to know anything about forest ecology to heal that pine beetle infestation or anything about microbiology to cure Chanel’s infections, she can use sex magic to heal those whose lives she damaged by not getting tested while working as a prostitute.»
Kaitlyn managed to send a nod of accession through the bond, since I couldn’t see her on the other side of Chanel, who was taller, so I went on, «We can’t do it for her anyway. I’m the wrong sex for the majority of her clients, and you, my love, well how would that work? You just go up to a random college kid and say, hey, wanna bone down? Drag him off to bed and go after him?»
«I could!» she sent defensively.
«But would you want to?»
Chanel interrupted our brewing argument. «It’s my debt. You have to let me do this. Besides, I know who the guys are. The regulars, anyway. I’ll just say I’m giving them all one last free bang by way of thanks before I leave the business. Most won’t turn me down.»
«All right,» my wife replied, emitting a curiously resigned feeling through the bond.
Was she wanting to role-play a prostitute now? Not in the bedroom, but out in town? Kinky.
I set that thought aside and sent, «If you somehow get re-infected, Chanel, we can cure you with mage-sex again. I wish we’d thought of it earlier, actually: it’s a lot safer than doing it with regular sex.»
Kaitlyn sent, «We can only do it with those who know about magic, though.»
«You’ll spill the secret to them PDQ otherwise, Chanel,» I agreed, «but Kaitlyn, the two of us did know she was a mage before we started. I should have thought of it, but I was letting my dick do the thinking, and he’s pretty stupid.»
«My bread and butter,» Chanel sent with a wry grin. Then it faded, and she added wistfully, «Once upon a time, anyway.»
We let the silence stretch, then Kaitlyn sent, «Are you going to miss the life?»
Chanel replied, «Some of it, I suppose, but the whole thing? No, I’m glad I’m out now.» She sighed, and added, «Well, to the extent that I am out. I can’t help but think you two just became my mage-pimps.»
I felt Kaitlyn’s hurt through the bond, and I was hurt, too, but I sent calmly, «This is entirely voluntary, Chanel. You say who you bang and who you don’t. We may point you at likely candidates, but we won’t make you do anything you don’t want to. Besides which, it’s not like there is even a cut for us to take a piece of. One thing we will insist on is that you never charge for your magical sex services ever again.»
«Or else?» Chanel replied.
Kaitlyn sent, «We’d have to put some distance between you and ourselves. We’re taking on a fair bit of risk with what we already do. To have our business associated with an active prostitute… That could end us in this town.»
I added, «There’s another risk: you need to avoid curing anyone who knows they’ve got something mainstream medicine considers incurable. You’ll have to leave them to their mundane palliative care. It’ll raise red flags if someone on a prescription for a drug meant to treat a lifelong disease suddenly turns up at their next test uninfected.»
Chanel asked, «How do I do that?»
I sent, «You’ll probably have to become familiar with all of the standard and nonstandard medications for these things, then go rummaging through the guy’s medicine cabinet before taking him to bed. If you don’t find anything, either he’s not infected, he is but doesn’t know it yet, or he’s got a recent test that your cure will overturn, causing it to be interpreted as a false positive. That last happens all the time. But if you do find one of the relevant medicines, you confront him and refuse to sleep with him. If he blames you for giving it to him, you can honestly say you aren’t infected.»
Chanel looked sad at that, sending, «The lie aside, that seems like ducking out on part of my social debt. I don’t like the idea of leaving someone forever infected.»
«Pay it forward,» my wife advised.
«Huh?»
«Instead of trying to pay your debts back to those you wronged in the past, do more good in the world than the pain you caused. Davie and I don’t have burdens as big as yours, but that’s the life philosophy we practice, every day. You’ll have to work harder to create a net positive in the world than we do, but we’ll help you.»
The first stars were beginning to peek out when I sent, «You don’t seem put off by sex, Chanel, despite your bad experiences.»
«Maybe it’s my affinity,» she replied, «so I’m not just drawn to it, I need it. Not in a nymphomaniacal sort of way, but in the same sort of way you need to play with computers, Davie, or you need to be doing something ecological, Kaitlyn. Sex is my innate skill, so I need to be doing it to maintain my sense of psychological well-being. I feel my best when I’m doing it.»
Kaitlyn proposed, «Chanel, what if you begin paying your debt forward by offering free sex services to those truly in need?»
Chanel laughed aloud, then sent, «What, like a soup line, except with my twat?»
I felt the need to rescue my wife. «Ah, we…ah, didn’t exactly have a serial gang-bang in mind, my shishya. More like one at a time, days or weeks between each gift. Lookit, lemme tell you about a guy named Ron,» I began, then proceeded to tell her about the wheelchair-bound amputee, his accident, and his retiring personality, which together meant he had almost no chance of landing a woman.
«Chanel, there are people who are celibate by conscious choice, whether it’s explicitly voluntary as with a Catholic priest or implicit as with a guy who actively maintains a terrible personality, who stays indoors when not forced out, and who doesn’t bathe properly before he does go out. Given infinite resources, we could go after as many of those sorts as want our help, but so far, there’s only the three of us, so we have to use our powers where it’s needed most, for people like our buddy Ron. How about it? Will you join us?»
«Formalized charity fucks,» Chanel summarized incisively.
My wife winced at the crudity, but I just agreed, «In the best possible sense, yes.»
She thought for a while, then said, «Why not? I like the work, and it’s socially useful. You’re on!»
As the constellations started becoming visible, Chanel said aloud, “I think I need to be getting on home. It’s been an amazing night, but I’ve got a job to be at in the morning. Thanks to you,” she added belatedly.
“Kaitlyn? What would you say to housing a student? Not just a mundane college kid, but our very own shishya to raise up right, together?”
She sent me a loving caress through the bond, then aloud observed, “Chanel, one of the ways I got through college debt-free was living with my parents. Not to pry, but that isn’t an option for you, is it?”
“No,” she replied simply, not elaborating.
“Can you still cancel your dorm for the next semester?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a few weeks to the deadline.”
“Living here would save you a bunch of money,” my wife observed.
Chanel replied, “You’re offering me, what, a free room?”
“Not free, I think,” I told her. “It’s important to have skin in the game, psychologically. How about half your current dorm fee, and you make up the rest with your amazing cooking? Help with the other household chores, that kind of thing?”
“Deal!” she said, and we shook simultaneously on it, her arms across her chest, one hand in mine, one in Kaitlyn’s, grinning like a loon.
“Well, here it is,” I said from beside the spare bedroom’s doorway, motioning Chanel inside, flipping the light on around the corner.
“Nice!” She drew the word out, sounding genuine. “It’s bigger than my dorm room, actually. My half of it, I mean. Bed’s bigger, too. I guess I’ll be paying more in gas for the commute, though.”
“Kaitlyn and I bike to work most days. We’ll be happy to help you find a suitable bike of your own. It’ll pay off on a purely financial basis in a year or two on gas savings alone, and it has a bunch of side benefits besides.”
“Yeah, maybe,” she said, unconvinced. Still looking around the room, she asked, “What’m I gonna do about pajamas tonight? I really don’t want to go back to the dorm and pack this late.”
I offered, “You could use one of my tee shirts as a shorty nightgown.”
My wife shook her head and advised, “No, sleep in your skin; it’s nice. Davie and I do.”
“I, ah, haven’t done that much,” Chanel admitted, blushing again.
«See? I can do it, too!» my wife sent through the bond.
Chanel didn’t react, so I assumed my wife had managed to keep the sending private, perhaps because we were on carpet now, our bond maintained by skin contact.
That made me wonder if we could keep secrets from Chanel even sitting bare on the sand, but I brushed my musings aside and said, “I would have assumed that with your profession…”
Chanel looked at me like I was five and had asked about her pee-pee. “You know, when they say, ‘to sleep with,’ they don’t actually mean dropping into slumber, right?”
There was in fact a point when learning English that I hadn’t grasped that distinction, but I didn’t see a good reason to slag her native language, so I stayed quiet.
Chanel continued, “No, the guy was always out the door five minutes after dropping a tied-off condom into my bedside trash can. Well, unless he paid extra for cuddling after, that is.”
“You charged extra for that‽” my wife asked incredulously.
“I charged extra for everything!” Chanel replied. “It’s like the custom plate at a Mexican restaurant: you want a chile relleno with your enchilada, it’s this many dollars more. Want beans and rice? Ditto. Anyway, pajamas: I had to let my roommate back in eventually, and this being Southern Utah, sleeping nude with another girl in the next bed over wasn’t really an option. And back at home… Well, ‘not an option’ is putting it mildly, and I’ll leave it at that.”
My wife clearly made a few of the inferences I did, because she told our new shishya, “You’re safe here, Chanel. Outside of lessons, we will not touch you without your consent.”
Chanel looked thoughtful, then said, “You know, I can’t figure out if we’ve had sex yet or not. What we did together out there…”
My wife got a kind of helpless look on her face, so I offered, “I think we did. What’s the key part that matters when it comes to intimacy? Is it seeing another person naked? You can do that anonymously on a porn site, one-to-many at a strip club, or socially with perfect strangers at a clothing-optional resort. No, nudity isn’t the key attribute of sexual intimacy. Is it sharing biological fluids? No, Chanel, your own experiences tell you the answer to that. I think we had sex together tonight because we shared something very intimate and special, but being naked for the event was incidental because of the way magic works, not the key determinant of whether it was sex.”
Chanel looked confused. “If conventional and mage sex are both done naked, then doesn’t that puncture your hypothesis?”
I took a bit to get my Socrates on, then replied, “Would it have been less intimate if we’d been blindfolded, Chanel?”
She got a thoughtful look, then shook her head and replied, “More intimate, if anything.”
Kaitlyn snuggled up to me through this exchange, and I embraced her. Sensing a gap, she added, “Which means we can’t do it again, if we’re to be your teachers. Educational lessons, maybe, but free-wheeling stuff like we did tonight? Not again until you’re at liberty to make your own choices without worrying about our power dynamic here. We’re not only your teachers now, Chanel, we’re also renting you a room. We’re not going to abuse the powers we necessarily must have for those positions to get sexual favors.”
I nodded in agreement. I thought on the topic of further lessons, then said, “I’m not sure if we even need to teach you all that much about sex magic, Chanel. I suspect you already know most of it, one way or another. Everything else, you can probably just learn from watching us.”
“Oh goody,” she laughed, “my own personal live sex show! Do I get to give you commands?”
“No!” we barked in unison, then laughed.