Chapter 55: Brass
Around the kitchen table a few days later, Kaitlyn commented on the meal, “Amazing, Chanel!”
“Thanks!”
“You hear back from Amanda?”
“No, nothing. Should we call her?”
“Best do,” my wife answered, reaching for her phone on the nearby kitchen counter, causing her breasts to dangle interestingly.
Chanel and I looked on avidly; Kaitlyn smirked back.
She began poking through the Contacts app on her phone as a gentle evening breeze pushed some of the heat of the day out the house’s front door, entraining cooler air in through the patio door screen. I sighed hugely, and my wife said, knowing my mind well, “Better than A/C!” as she poked Amanda’s number, then the speakerphone button.
I didn’t get a chance to reply, because the young woman answered the call immediately. She must’ve been playing with her phone at the time.
“Yes? Who is this?”
“Hi, Amanda, it’s Kate Gutierrez. Chanel gave me your number.”
“Oh! I’ll have to save it, then.”
“Do; we want to help, so if you need to call me directly instead of through Chanel, that’s fine. It’s why I’m calling, in fact. Um, you’re on speakerphone with Chanel and Davie, by the way.”
“’S fine,” Amanda replied unconcernedly.
“Anyway, we were sitting around eating dinner, speaking of your case, wondering if Ed was still bothering you?”
“Haven’t heard from him. I suppose I should have called, but… Well, how do you know how long a silence will last?”
“Perfectly understandable. You give us a call if he bugs you again, hear? We had pointed words with him a few nights back, but he can be as persistent as toe fungus. I know from personal experience, Amanda.”
The women were chatting, winding down the conversation when my own phone rang. It was back in the living room, so I leapt up and walked rapidly into the front room, getting to it on its third pass through the ring tone. I was turning with it to my ear, asking “Hello?” into it when I saw Chanel and Kaitlyn miming applause at me for the show I’d just given them. On reflection, I realized I must have been rather floppy in my haste. Besides, both of them were suckers for muscular clenching buns, I knew.
“Is this Magic Hands Massage?” a contralto female voice asked through the mobile phone speaker.
I responded, “It is, ma’am. My name is Davie. How may I help you?” as I walked down the bedroom hallway, wishing to let the girls continue their speakerphone conversation without competing chatter in the background.
“I was hoping to get a massage, only, um, can you come to me? I don’t want to go clear out of town for this.”
Moab isn’t such a large place that “clear out of town” was a huge deal, but I solicitously replied, “Of course. We prefer to work outdoors in the warm months. Do you have a private space we can use? A fenced back yard, for instance?”
“Ooo! I hadn’t even considered that. Well, sure, I suppose we can do this on the lawn. Sounds nice.”
I replied mildly, “We have yet to get any serious complaints about our work, ma’am. Now, my wife and I are in this business together, so did you want her, me or both?”
“Both?” my caller asked, sounding a bit startled.
“Yes, ma’am; we call it the four-handed massage. Many clients who try it sign back up for another, even rearranging their schedules so we’re both available.”
“Well, I suppose I won’t have a preference until I try it. Four-handed it is!”
“Excellent, ma’am. Now how would you like us to dress?”
“I get a choice?”
“Yes, ma’am. In the warm months, we prefer rather scanty outfits, particularly when working outdoors, but we always dress to the client’s level of comfort, up to full-coverage scrubs if need be.”
“Well, that’s novel!” she replied brightly.
“We think it’s only fair, ma’am. We do our best work on clients when they have no clothing in the way, but most therapists insist on being fully covered up themselves. Magic Hands Massage gives you the choice, ma’am.”
“Pin that, Mr…um…?”
“Davie,” I replied. “Just Davie if you please, ma’am.”
“Yes, right. Anyway, you’ll be asking me to undress? Fully?”
“We ask you to undress to your level of comfort. As I said, the less in the way, the better the work we can do, but we can work with a fully dressed client, if need be. Part of your consideration must be how private your back yard is, of course.”
“Oh, it’s well-screened, and all our neighbors work during the day. Can I get this done mid-day, by the way?”
“Of course.”
We nailed down the details, and I returned to the kitchen dining area, the other phone conversation having ended by now.
“Client?” asked my wife.
“Yup. Tomorrow at 2, four-handed. She was quite eager, so I hope you can get off.”
“It’ll mean surrendering another free massage coupon to Sherry, but yeah, I should be able to.”
“It’ll be out on the East side of town, a couple of blocks past that baseball park by the library.” I gave her the address.
“No table?”
“I talked her into trying it on the lawn.”
“Good, I can bike over, then.”
The next day, I was bumping up onto the driveway to the client’s house when I saw Kaitlyn pushing down the street from the other direction, so I stopped astride my bike to watch her ride. It isn’t often that I got this angle, her sweat-sheened cleavage deeply displayed by her loose magewear top, her pumping thighs flexing the exercise shorts, offering unfulfilled promises of a lady-lip flash.
That was one of the most challenging aspects of the outfits’ design: make them loose enough to avoid splitting at the seams while biking or working with a client yet avoid offering peeks at things the law required that we keep hidden. Homespun cloth isn’t nearly so stretchy as synthetics or even machine-woven cotton. The necessity of hand-tailoring these outfits made it possible, but it’d been a lot of work to get all the details down just so.
Mesmerized by this sight, I didn’t hear a woman walk up behind me. It wasn’t until her hand intruded on my peripheral vision followed by a question that I startled back into awareness of my surroundings.
“You’re the masseur?” she asked rhetorically, her hand extended for a friendly shake.
I grasped it and used my other hand to gesture at my arriving wife, “And the masseuse, yes ma’am.” She was in a business outfit, so I added judiciously, “If you’ll show us into your back yard, we can get set up while you have a quick shower, joining us undressed to your level of comfort.”
“Will I need a towel?”
My wife pulled up alongside me and answered our client in a steady voice, not breathing hard at all, “If the grass back there is as lush as up here in the front, we encourage you to do without it. It’s a nice sensation, massage above, tickling grass below.”
The middle-aged woman blushed a bit at the thought, then said, “I like it! Come; there’s a gate into the back yard over here.”
We dismounted our bikes and rolled them in through the gate she held for us, into a middle-America green back yard, completely unnatural in this clime, yet somehow fitting the neighborhood anyway.
“Let’s do it over by that fence there,” she pointed. “It’s shady, and there’s a house on the rise that can see down into the rest of the yard. Do you need me to bring you anything? Drinks? Massage oil?”
“No, ma’am, we’ve got everything. We should be ready in about five minutes.”
“I’ll go get that shower, then.”
We’d done well enough at this massage therapy game that we’d quickly built up to a second set of massage tools for each of us, then used our sewing skills to customize a pair of removable bike cargo bag sets for them, so we could swap out our normal biking bags for house calls like this one.
I’d set the massage oil bottle out in the sun behind the shop this morning. I poured its still-warm contents into a brass bowl we’d found at an antique shop, placing it out in a sun-dappled patch at the tree shade periphery.
By the time we got our magnifying glass oil warming rigs set up, the woman returned through the sliding glass door, now down to her white conservatively cut underwear, looking around nervously, her updo the color of weathered brass, sunlight making it sparkle with her head’s angle, looking up at the house’s second-floor windows.
I followed her eye-line, but I saw nothing, only darkened bedroom windows.
“Come now, no need to be nervous,” called my wife.
The woman tip-toed rapidly out onto the lawn in a crouch that did not flatter the small belly she was carrying, almost diving to the ground in her haste to find some sort of concealment. “I’ve never, ah, been out here…like this.”
“That’s our marching orders, then, Davie. We simply must earn a second commission so she can do this again!”
The woman blushed and laughed nervously, and we got to work around the modest lace trim of her cotton-poly blend underthings.
We’d almost put the woman to sleep by the time Kaitlyn said, “Time to turn over, ma’am, if you would.”
“Hmmm? Er, okay.”
Her blush returned in full force by the time she was on her back, looking up at us past her bra-clad breasts, but we resumed our work professionally.
We tried to close her eyes for her, though they kept flicking up and down our scantily clad bodies. Kaitlyn was well-muscled by years as a gym rat, toned by the last year of bike commuting and camping, incised by our informal competitions in the PT department’s gym area, polished to a sheen by the heat of the day, despite the shade we worked under. My path was different, but I knew from the woman’s hungry eyes that she liked the result.
“Can I see more?” she asked plaintively, her eyes flicking between my own eyes and my outfit.
“I can remove my shirt if you like, ma’am.”
“Please?”
I did and resumed working for another few minutes before she asked, “More?” now looking at my shorts.
“It’s as far as I can legally go, ma’am,” I told her regretfully.
Her eyes closed, and a strange look came over her face, but she said nothing for a time. “What if I show more?” she finally asked. “I could, um, take off my bra for you. Would you like that? Would that get your shorts off, Davie?”
We were sufficiently unclothed that we were in rapport, so my wife sent, «Your call, but if you want my opinion, tell her no.»
Aloud, I said to the woman as I pushed a stroke up along her flank in a precise mirror of my wife’s work, “Can’t do it, ma’am. The law won’t allow it. Sorry.”
She actually winced at that, then tremulously said, “My panties, then. I’ll go completely naked if you will.”
“It would only be fair,” I agreed, “but the rules are pretty clear on this, ma’am. I am sorry,” I apologized once again, adding a deep kneeling bow toward her this time, eyes closed regretfully.
The woman got a stern set to her mouth, clearly psyching herself up, then looked around and saw no windows in her eye-line other than the ones overlooking their back yard, then reached under herself, unclasped her full-coverage underwire bra, and shrugged out of it, flinging it across the lawn, far out of reach. Then with a deep resolved sigh, she pushed her panties down her thighs as far as she could get them while on her back like that and said, “Take them off me, please.”
I looked at Kaitlyn, one eyebrow raised, but before my wife could offer an opinion, our client said, “Now, please, no arguments.”
I slid the synthetic undergarment down her legs, a bit thicker than the healthy ideal, then off her feet. I was folding them gingerly when she said nervously, “Toss them over by the bra. Do it.” Then she bit her lip, undermining the force of her quiet command, but I complied.
She just kept looking at me, watching my face as I continued my work blithely, as though I hadn’t just stripped an embarrassed woman to her skin in her own back yard.
What was this woman playing at?
Was this some kind of fantasy for her?
My wife interrupted our silent contest, asking, “Would you like me to massage your breasts then, ma’am? Just the outer parts, you know, to relieve stress on them.” The woman turned to look at my wife, who looked down into her eyes, adding, “Kind of like a foot massage after getting your socks and shoes off at the end of the day, you know?”
“That sounds lovely,” the woman answered. “Him, too?”
“It’s up to you, ma’am. We often work symmetrically in a four-handed massage, but if you only want me to touch your breasts, we can do it that way,” my wife assured her.
She was biting her lip again and said, “All right, the both of you, then.”
We began working her breasts, staying away from the areolas and nipples as we’d been trained, finally closing her eyes again.
But they snapped open a minute later, and she said, “Nipples, too? You can do that, I hope?”
“If the client asks specifically, yes,” my wife confirmed.
“Then yes, please.”
“Mmmmmmnnnffff!” the woman exhaled as we professionally rubbed over her stiff nipples, then up her breasts to her shoulders, resuming our prior work on her body.
Her eyes re-opened, and she asked, “That’s it?”
“You seemed relaxed, so we moved on,” my wife pointed out.
“Yes, but… Well, I was just expecting something more.” We waited for her to make a request, but she exclaimed heatedly, “Dammit, I’m horny, all right? I need you to get me off, and do it right now. I’ll double your fee!”
To my wife I sent, «She’s healthy now. I fixed every little problem I could see, short of little stuff like moles. We have no cause to use sex magic here.»
Kaitlyn sent back, «Yeah, and she paid us already besides.»
Still facing the woman, my wife added quietly, her tone striving for tact, “Ma’am, we simply cannot. It isn’t legal here.”
The woman tried turning to me, raising her offer with pleading eyes, “Triple!” Then she added, “I’ve got it in cash in my purse, right now. I can go get it if you want to see the green first.”
I shook my head, putting on as deep a face of regret as I could manage.
“Damn it all to hell!” the woman hissed, hopping up and running inside in a low crouch, her heavy middle-aged breasts flopping about as she ran.
«Should we go?» I sent to my wife, wondering if we were about to get into a fight of some kind.
Kaitlyn was about to answer when the woman returned, brandishing something black. I tensed for a moment, but saw it was just a woman’s overstuffed wallet-style purse. She now stood straight over us, apparently no longer caring whether her neighbors could see her bare nakedness, even though she hadn’t taken the most covert path back to us. In fact, she’d taken a kind of J-hook path back, so that she was now facing us across the long dimension of the lawn.
She unzipped the purse, shot a forefinger and thumb inside, and pulled out what looked to be about five times our agreed-upon fee in cash, spreading it between her fingers saying, “Here. This is yours if you do me right here, right now.”
“Let’s go,” I said aloud to my wife.
“C’mon, I need this!” she exclaimed, shaking the bills at me.
Without a further look or even a word through the bond, we began gathering our massage gear, packing our bags as quickly as we could.
“Dammit, you’ve at least got to know someone in the business, a professional who could take care of my needs? I’ll even let you have the money up front to go out and bring someone in. Please‽”
When we continued packing, the woman huffed then danced back toward the corner of the yard a few paces and pulled a wee little pocket pistol out of the purse, its small polymer frame almost swallowed by her delicate hand, the now-disregarded cash scattering over the lawn in the afternoon breeze.
She didn’t point the weapon at us, didn’t even wave it threateningly, just said, “You aren’t leaving before we have a bit of a talk first. Go get my underwear, girl; do it now.”
Kaitlyn did as the crazy armed woman demanded, laying the things down on the lawn about a meter in front of her, as indicated by the pistol’s muzzle, then retreated under her glare.
Our erstwhile client got back into her underwear as quickly as she could consistent with keeping the pistol ready, yet without sweeping us with its muzzle.
This caught my curiosity, and I began to relax, because it meant this woman knew how to handle a gun properly. That led me to believe she wouldn’t point it at us as long as we were clearly no physical threat to her, so I sank down into a deep kneeling pose, butt on the ground between two wide-spread shins. I told my wife to do the same, and we raised our hands to the sky.
In an even, calm tone, I asked, “What did you want to talk about, ma’am?”
“This massage business of yours. I need sexual release. Are you going to give it to me or not?”
Ignoring her question, I said, “Ma’am, you’re on the verge of threatening my life with a deadly weapon. If I believe you’re about to point it at me, I will be forced to defend myself.” The woman looked me up and down there in my submissive posture, getting an incredulous look on her face. I just shrugged my shoulders as well as I could, hands in the air like that.
She continued her evaluating stare, then huffed loudly. “Dammit!” she swore with naked frustration, then stuffed the little automatic back into her purse, returning with something else hand-sized and black, flipping it open to reveal a shiny police shield surmounting a photo ID. “Lieutenant Phoebe Carlisle, Moab P.D.,” she announced. “Now let’s have that talk. And put your hands down, you look silly like that.”
I thought the Lieutenant In Lingerie should talk, but the two of us decided in wordless rapport to do as she demanded. A woman with a badge and a gun has sufficient authority to see that her demands are met; adding clothes would just gild the lily.