PART 6: Spouses
Chapter 37: Easing the ’Rents
For some strange reason the phone companies have failed to solve the robot phone-spam problem, even though it’s been going on for decades. It is of course a complete coincidence that this same problem racks up billions of extra voice minutes on call recipients’ plans and extra backhaul fees charged directly to the phone spammers. Pure happenstance.
I no longer had the freedom to drop such calls straight to voicemail, so based on the unknown number, I answered, “Magic Hands Massage, this is Davie. How may I help you?”
“My name’s Ashley Taylor…Joss’ mom.”
It took me a beat to realize that she meant Allison’s Joss. “Ah, hello Mrs. Taylor! I was not expecting to meet you until the wedding.”
“Yes, well, about that: Luke & I are getting rather apprehensive about the whole thing, you know? I mean, all the…” and here she paused and lowered her voice to a near whisper, “nudity…and all!”
I first wondered if she was at work or something, but then asked why she would be calling me of all people. In one of those rare instances of interpersonal insight, I made a guess. “Allison suggested that you call us and set up a massage appointment.”
“Well, yes, she did. How did you know?”
I laughed quietly and replied, “I know Ali. I think we’d better get this sorted out soonest, Mrs. Taylor. You should both come, you and your husband. I can leave now if you can.” I offered this knowing it would mean my wife would almost certainly be handing over another free massage coupon, but this was a family matter, even if it was in-laws two steps removed.
“Sorry, Mr… What did you say your last name was?”
“Bhat, but everyone just calls me Davie.”
“Very well then, Davie. The thing is, I was hoping to set up an appointment for after business hours. I’m at work, and it would be difficult for me to get away, near-impossible for Luke; that’s my husband. Would it be too much trouble to do this early in the evening; after dinner, perhaps?”
“Perfectly fine, Mrs. Taylor. How about seven?”
We settled the details and said good-bye, then I texted the distilled version to Kaitlyn.
Several hours later in our back yard, Kaitlyn stated, “Skimpy magewear,” with a decisive nod of her head as she turned off the shower. She mooned the sky in a stoop, pulling open a small patio-rated cabinet we’d bought to hold our most essential massage things, retrieving a clean uniform therefrom.
Kaitlyn looked at the two skimpy pieces critically, sent a gentle whoosh of air through them to knock off some of the accumulated desert dust, then turned and did the same for the cabinet as a whole. “Wicker wasn’t such a smart choice for this cabinet, was it, Davie?” she said through suppressed coughs.
I replied as I slipped past her to take my turn under the sun-warmed water, “It looks great, matches the rest of the décor, and its primary downside is readily dealt with, as you’ve just shown.”
I made a thorough job of my shower, since I’d had to stay late working on a client emergency, so I was still sweaty from the bike sprint home. One of these days I expect to be pulled over for going 35 in a 25, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Kaitlyn was dressed and putting the finishing touches on the massage arrangements when we heard gravel crunching in the parking area. We’d been distracted, not keeping a mage-eye on the surrounding area again!
“You get dressed, and I’ll go greet them!” she said as she sprung from the sand to her bare feet, landing about a meter from her prior kneeling position, clearly intending to stall our clients in the parking lot long enough for me to get dried off and dressed.
I managed, smoothing the waistband of my just-cinched shorts when a middle-aged couple came around the corner of the house, dressed as conservatively as you please: dark jacket, white dress shirt, tie, dark slacks, and polished shoes for the man, and for the woman a modest floral-patterned dress, tasteful understated jewelry, hose, and low-heeled pumps matching the dress.
“Hello, I’m Davie. We spoke on the phone,” I said, holding my hand out to the woman. “You must be Mrs. Taylor.” We shook in the dainty manner that some women prefer.
I exchanged a heartier handshake with the man, saying, “Mr. Taylor,” as he attempted to crush my hand, utterly failing at it. I grinned at him as his smile settled into a look of resolved acceptance. This guy looked like he was used to winning dominance games. My advice to this account’s readers: don’t try that with a scantily-clad mage, bare feet planted on Gaia; mage wins, every time.
While we settled this interpersonal matter and I delivered the standard spiel about our massage practice, Kaitlyn put the finishing touches on the massage area.
“Normally, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, we would ask you to come from your shower undressed to your level of comfort, but in this case I think it’s essential that you come out nude. Leave the towels behind, too.”
“That hardly seems fair,” groused Mr. Taylor in a low voice, clearly still smarting from his loss of face.
“Never mind that, you two,” Kaitlyn said, joining me before Allison’s planned parents-in-law. “Davie, we might as well give them the full experience.”
Kaitlyn had her cropped cami over her head before my surprise came into full bloom, but I slipped my shorts off in unison with her, deciding it was better to follow her lead than question her in front of the Taylors.
Now bare before them, she said, “We’ll be waiting,” then gave them a few flicks of her fingers below her waistline in a gentle shooing gesture. This predictably drew the couple’s eyes back to her pelvic area, but their social conditioning bounced their gazes back to her eyes, the woman’s settling there, the man’s getting hooked on my wife’s breasts on the path back up from her sculpted bush, bouncing down and then back up again a few times like some kind of spastic yo-yo.
It was quite amusing, and I let it show on my face.
“Luke!” said Mrs. Taylor sternly, now looking at him and towing him behind the dressing screen by his elbow. Low hushed voices began to emerge from beyond it in a clear argument, but we didn’t pry into its content.
The shower started shortly after this, cooling their heated discussion.
The silence was complete but for a gentle evening desert breeze after the shower stopped. Two dampened towels appeared over the top of the dressing screen, folded into sloppy halves.
And then Mr. Taylor appeared from behind the dressing screen, clearly pushed there by his wife. I actually saw her hand disappear back behind the screen!
“Come, Mr. Taylor,” my wife bade him; “let’s get started.”
He went to her nervously, glancing aside at me as he passed, and I listened to my wife’s opening patter, easing Mr. Taylor into his massage as I waited.
And waited.
“Mrs. Taylor?” I called. “May I help you with something?”
“Um, ah… No! I’ll be out in a second.”
It was more like a dozen seconds, but out she came, pink as a peony from breast-tops to eyebrows.
Ashley Taylor was reasonably well-formed for her age. She maintained a healthy BMI, with no cellulite to speak of. Her matronly breasts sagged a bit from their past duties, drawing my eye over a small pot belly and down to a bush that hadn’t seen clippers in a very long time, if ever.
“Come, Mrs. Taylor,” I said in a soothing tone. “We are ready to begin.”
Her eyes darted first to my crotch, where my flaccid member hung, then to my nude wife straddling her husband’s equally nude body.
“This is…!” she began but stopped herself. I raised an eyebrow, and she saw it, but she shook her head quickly rather than finish expressing her thought aloud.
I chose to step forward and guide her to the sand, since she’d remained planted beside the dressing screen, not venturing any further out.
I felt the last of Mrs. Taylor’s tension finally dissipate about halfway through my work on her back-side, so I asked, “How are you feeling about this now?”
“It’s nice,” she said without delay into the crook of her elbow, the sand puffing out away from her lips, almost touching the warm sand.
Then she stiffened again, and I guessed why: the rational part of her social conditioning was attempting to reassert control over what her body felt. In my best guru voice, I replied, “Yes, it is nice. It is also safe, healthy, and moral.”
To that last, she replied, “This is naughty!”
“In what way?” my wife asked. “We’re doing a nice thing for you, and you are enjoying it. Tell me who is harmed, and I will put a stop to it right now.”
“Mmmmpf!” the woman puffed in her frustration, her deep socialization telling her one thing, her body another, and her forebrain attempting to mediate the conflict.
We let them think on that until we flipped them over. For a wonder, Mr. Taylor was flaccid, but that lasted less than a minute.
Mrs. Taylor began, “He’s looking…! She’s touching…!” ending on a frustrated “Nngmmmpf!”
“What your husband is looking at is a beautiful young woman. Mrs. Taylor, look at her. I do, every chance I get.” Mrs. Taylor did, and after giving her a chance to take in her beauty, I continued, “Why would you expect him not to look? Do you demand that he look at only the flowers planted in your home garden? How is her beauty different?” When she didn’t answer, I told her, “Let him look. My Kaitlyn enjoys being appreciated, and he is clearly enjoying the sight.”
“Yes, that’s very clear!” she replied haughtily, referring to the same stiff display I was.
“And you know what’s going to happen about that this evening, Mrs. Taylor? Exactly the same thing as would happen if my wife and I were wearing modest scrubs, massaging the two of you through your clothes, indoors, on massage tables. Not a thing at all.”
«Right,» acknowledged my wife through the bond, «because he is quite healthy. I have no ethically defensible reason at all to bonk him slack-jawed. So sad.»
«Hush, you,» I replied with a note of amusement.
Then aloud, I told my client, “Just as my wife isn’t going to have sex with your husband this evening, I am not going to have sex with you, Mrs. Taylor.”
I was about to continue, but she interrupted, “Well it’s obvious why not, when you’ve got that waiting in your bed,” she said with a thrust of her chin at my wife.
I could feel myself on a conversational precipice, so I just waited for my wife to rescue me, as she so often does in such cases.
“Mrs. Taylor, my Davie has excellent bodily control, but I can tell that he is in fact attracted to you. The reason he’s neither showing it nor doing anything about it is because he has no good reason to do either, so he controls himself.”
She looked up at me, and I nodded down at her. “You are the picture of womanhood, Mrs. Taylor. Your husband is lucky to have you.”
His eyes were on us by this point, and he reached a hand out across the sand, palm up, and said, “I am, you know, Ashley.” After she put her hand in his and he squeezed it, he added, “Don’t be mad at me. This girl is beautiful, but you are mine. Surely you see the difference in depth between those two conditions?”
He squeezed his wife’s hand again, and tears began at the corner of her eyes, though they did not fall.
“Soon,” my wife continued in a quiet tone, narrating the moment rather than intruding upon it, “your Joss and our Allison will be similarly joined, in the same fashion, nude in nature before us. We began the tradition, Davie and I, but it was Allison’s choice to follow it. I was there when she told Joss that they were going to have a nude wedding, and he didn’t argue at all, just accepted his fiancée’s decision. He did that knowing full well what she was asking of him, because he was at the first one, ours.”
Both sets of eyes turned to her. “What, he didn’t tell you that he was a guest at our wedding? That both of them peeled down for the after-party and joined us in a lovely evening of food, family, and fun?”
Mrs. Taylor attempted to answer “Did they… Did those two… Did you…?”
Kaitlyn said, “If you’re trying to ask if there was any sex before bedtime or if there was any kind of swinging that night, then the answer is no, there wasn’t. And what went on in Joss and Allison’s tent that night, I couldn’t really say, though I do have my inferences. Every time I’ve tried to poke my nose in on that, she’s batted me away.”
“Me, too,” Mrs. Taylor said. “Joss, I mean. Every time I get close to that topic, he just goes ‘Mo-om!’ and gets huffy. I wouldn’t even dream of talking to Allison about…that.”
We chatted more in this vein, answering their questions about the ceremony, telling them about our wedding, and telling them about what we thought of the upcoming wedding.
As finishing time was approaching, Mr. Taylor said, “We need to do this again, Ashley.” They’d hardly unclasped hands, and they held tight again now.
“Assuming you two participate fully in the wedding and do no harm to the young couple’s joyous day, we will absolutely give you another one of these out there.”
“Incentive indeed!” laughed the man, his ease with the situation approaching normalcy.
“How about it, Mrs. Taylor?” Kaitlyn asked. “Are you going to be a good girl? Only good girls get gifts.”
“Oh, very well,” she huffed comically.
“Good,” my wife replied, “because this massage was on the house. But, time’s up. G’wan you two, hit the shower. Davie and I haven’t had our supper, and quite frankly, we’re starving.”
Mrs. Taylor replied, “We haven’t eaten yet, either.” I was going to interject, recalling that she’d scheduled this for after dinner, but she continued, “I was too nervous, so I just sort of flitted around the house until we had to leave while he tried to calm me,” waving an arm at her husband.
“Let’s eat in town!” proposed my wife. “A double date, the four of us! Davie, it’s been ages since we went out, and besides, we still have plenty to talk about. We can get to know each other better before the wedding. How about it, y’all?”
We settled the details, then got dressed inside as the Taylors showered and re-dressed outside.
My verdict at the end of the night? Mission accomplished. Allison owed us big.