Chapter 47: Fight, Freeze, or Fly
Spooning in bed that night, waiting for sleep to come, Kaitlyn said, “She’s infected with something. I saw it in the shower.”
I didn’t need any more clues to know who my wife meant. Then I realized something. “I’m sorry, Kaitlyn.”
“Why? It’s her you should be concerned about.”
“I should have noticed it myself. I was too busy trying not to stare, holding too tightly to my meditative calm that I didn’t even think to give her a magical checkup. It should be something I just do, every time, but…”
“You’re forgiven,” she said, then ground her butt into me. “I was looking, too. I know you caught me. Should I apologize, too?”
“Absolutely not,” I replied firmly. “Chanel is, simply put, stunning.”
“She is that,” my wife replied wistfully, remembering. “I thought I had temptation back in college to go down that path, but Chanel… She must have been fighting boys off with sticks and knives since about five minutes past puberty! Add some financial pressure, and I fully understand her decision now. Why not get paid doing what so many people want from her anyway?”
“Sex work chose her, not the other way around,” I summarized.
“She still had agency, Davie, but yeah, I get what you mean.”
“Invite her over for a free massage, Kaitlyn. Soon. I don’t remember the pre-employment hospital health screening we took covering STIs, and there’s no especially good reason that they should do so, but it still feels wrong to leave her in that state, indirectly in contact with patients.”
“Shower floors,” she said, shuddering slightly.
“Changing room benches, who knows what else,” I agreed. “Besides, this is what we do now, heal people.”
“She’s gonna think we just want to see her naked again.”
“By Minsky’s mukluks, she’ll be right.”
My wife just said, “Mmmmm,” started caressing me, then took my mind completely off of Chanel while I tried my best to do the same for her.
Kaitlyn called Chanel the next morning to set a massage appointment up for her late the following evening, since we already had two massages scheduled ahead of hers starting just after we got home from our day jobs.
Chanel insisted on bringing a salad over, so Kaitlyn decided to make a barbecue of it.
That morning, I got up early and set a frozen brisket roasting in the ceramic cooker in mama Mary’s special BBQ sauce before leaving for work, knowing it would be tender, smoky, and soaked through with the sauce by the time Chanel arrived.
“Wow, this place is amazing!” exclaimed Chanel as she emerged from our little maze of juniper trees and sagebrush into our backyard retreat.
“Thanks, Chanel,” I replied, taking the covered salad bowl she held out to me.
She was spinning slowly in place, looking at the yard, the just-painted house, our new solar power system, the expanse of open land. “Y’all must be rich!”
Kaitlyn laughed. “No, cher, we each have full time jobs plus two part time jobs on top of that, no kids and no debt other than the mortgage on this place.”
“Looks like a distinction without a difference to me,” our young friend opined, somewhat wide-eyed.
I replied, “The distinction is that being rich is a passive condition, whereas busting your ass to afford nice things is very much an active one. If we stopped working, the bank would repo this house, and we’d have nothing. One of my motivating goals at this point in my life is getting out from under that mortgage. Then — maybe! — you could call us rich.”
She looked thoughtful at this, and Kaitlyn got us off the topic by saying, “Let’s get dinner ready.”
Chanel’s salad was a meal in itself, and we treated it as such, using the brisket almost as a garnish, a dessert to her main entree.
“How did you learn to cook like this?” Kaitlyn asked her.
“Had to. My mom died when I was in middle school, and my dad was always bouncing between crappy jobs and unemployment, so we couldn’t afford the heat-and-eat stuff at the supermarket. It was cook from scratch or go hungry.”
Kaitlyn replied, “My mom’s a great cook, but I never could get the knack of it. She tried to teach me, but as soon as I got out on my own and financially stable, it all went out the window. Heat-and-eat, as you say.”
I added, “Same for me, more or less. This brisket is about the limit of my cooking ability.”
“It’s awesome!” Chanel said. “I could cut it with a plastic spoon, it’s so tender! I hardly feel I’m paying you back properly for all you’ve done for me, my salad against your brisket.”
“We didn’t do that for personal gain,” I told her.
“You sure about that?” she asked, tickling a finger up along my forearm seductively, a knowing grin on her face.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want you, Chanel, but it was Kaitlyn’s actions that started all of this, remember, and you know we didn’t discuss it before the action was well under way. Your hypothesis doesn’t hold water.”
Chanel ran a finger up my wife’s forearm in delayed mirror image of her prior move, saying, “I think she wants me, too.”
Seeing my wife struggling for an answer to that, I interjected, “Let’s have that massage!”
“Right!” my wife said, standing. “We’ll just go get back into our therapy uniforms Chanel, and you can have a shower.”
“The hell you will! No, I’ve talked to Miki about you two; I know you’re nudists! Don’t be telling me you’ll be doing massage in your own backyard in those stuffy old scrubs.”
“Our home massage uniforms are a bit sexier than the hospital scrubs,” my wife began defensively.
“Doesn’t matter. I’m going over to that shower, and I’m stripping naked, and I’m having this massage bare-ass naked. Now fair’s fair: you want to give me a massage, you’ll be naked, too!”
I just laughed, deep and gleeful.
“What?” she demanded petulantly.
Through my settling mirth, I said, “Now who wants who? You’re being awfully demanding for someone playing like she’s being pursued!”
Chanel blushed! An ex-prostitute with years in the game, and I managed to make her blush. I knew I’d scored with that one.
She folded her arms, scowled, and looked down at the ground.
We waited her out.
“All right, fine! I want you both, all right‽ Ever since the changing room.” When we only smiled back, she spoke defensively, “Dammit, I’ve been abstinent for weeks now! Normal guys avoid me on campus because of my reputation — not that there’s a lot to pick from here on summer break — and I’m not getting any professionally now on top of it. I haven’t been this dry since… Well since a long time, all right? If I don’t get some action soon, I’m going to have to break out Old Faithful.”
She kinda lost me there at the end, but my wife’s grin widened. “Vibrator?” she asked.
Chanel’s eyes fell, and she nodded slightly. “Had it since high school. The batteries hardly ever run out; thus the name.” Then in a quieter, annoyed tone added, “Probably dead now, though, dammit.”
Doubtless thinking about all the bugs running around in her system, my wife said, “Well, dear, let’s go have that massage, and we’ll see what happens next, all right?”
Chanel made a point of folding up the privacy screen we’d set up between the outdoor shower and the massage area. She loved the idea of washing with sand, making a point of trying to be sexy with the application and rinsing, insisting that we watch.
Then she made us strip for her, slowing us down when we went about it in too businesslike a fashion for her wishes.
As Chanel happily watched us showering, Kaitlyn sent, «Give her a show!»
I caught Chanel biting her lip as we swayed and caressed each other, the hands on her hips quivering a few times, clearly wanting to stray but held in restraint.
Chanel actually popped out in a flush, but perhaps that was the waning evening heat. We were approaching high summer, after all.
We began her massage as we normally did, her face down on the warm sand, forearms pillowed under her head, warm oil dribbled over her bare backside. Her wonderfully callipygous backside, her breasts just big enough to squish out in side-boobs underneath her weight.
I felt my wife begin a magical working within Chanel, and I joined in, amplifying the action of her immune system, sending it after each infection we could find.
This was outside our area of expertise, so I couldn’t list the diseases we cured, not having encountered them ourselves before, but I can tell you that there were several. I assume all were curable with a simple prescription treatment, but…
That made me ask, “Did you ever go to the doctor, Chanel? While you were working, I mean. To get checked out, you know?”
“No,” she replied, sounding half-asleep, “I couldn’t afford that. I always made the guys wear condoms, though, so I never felt the need.”
Either she hadn’t kept that discipline up as well as she was telling us now, or one or more of those condoms had broken, or there was another vector for this spread other than seminal fluid, because this was one unhealthy young woman.
Kaitlyn shook her head at me sadly, Chanel’s head being turned to me at the moment. She sent, «How could she not know about this stuff?»
«Could be she’s just gotten used to it, going on so long,» I guessed.
Kaitlyn angrily stomped another infection flat at that thought. She threw so much magic at it that I felt the backsplash!
One by one, we knocked these infections back, eradicating them from Chanel’s body. We couldn’t tell what each one was, but we could tell when each distinct bug went down.
Between Kaitlyn and I working constantly on this, pulling directly on Gaia’s power, not even our magewear in the way this time, we got almost every STI out of her system before it came time to turn her over.
Chanel loved the soft brushes we used to clean the sand off her front, making us go slow, pulling more sand up over her front when we ran out to prolong the sensations.
Now on her back, Chanel’s eyes closed against the still-bright evening sky, and we mages went after that last stubborn bug, covering the work under further massage.
We pounded that bug again and again, drawing continuous streams of magic up from Gaia, pouring it into our patient, but it was dug in too deep.
«What is this thing, Davie? HIV?»
«No way. That damages the immune system, but we saw that we could rally it to go after the other stuff.»
«Whatever it is, this stuff is frakkin’ persistent!»
«Herpes, maybe?» I guessed, then took a close look at her genitalia, which I’d been avoiding both visually and tactilely for assorted obvious reasons.
And now I saw the lesions. «Yeah, gotcha!» I sent.
«The poor girl!»
«We will help her, Kaitlyn.»
«How, Davie? That stuff is lifelong!»
«What stuff?» came a new voice.
That’s not really the right term, voice, but it is what we have, mage science being in its infancy. Whatever you call it, we’d learned earlier with Kristen and Carlo that we can distinguish speakers in the mage bond. There is no direct analog between audible tone of voice and what we “hear” through the bond, but when Kaitlyn speaks to me that way, I know it is her.
And this was most definitely not Kaitlyn!
«What stuff‽» the new voice insisted.
My eyes refocused on our nude young friend, my vision having become abstracted as we discussed her problem, and I realized that I could also now feel her, not just see her. Her presence had joined ours in the magical rapport!
«Chanel?» I asked through the bond.
«Yeah, now for the last time, what is this stuff you keep babbling about?»
«In a minute, Chanel. Are you aware that you’re in a trance?»
«What, like astral projection or some shit?»
«No, I mean a mental state that is easy to measure in the lab, utterly scientific, not BS woo-woo. You’re in our back yard, and we managed to put you into a trance with the massage. Most people cannot get into this state easily, but you did.»
«I think I know why,» she sent back to us. «As a kid, I learned to sort of disconnect from the world for a while. Get away, you know? Life sometimes sucked, and it helped.»
«Impressive. Well, hold onto your astral ass cheeks, Chanel, because we have another shock for you: you can do magic.»
«Yeah, I’ve had guys tell me that in bed!»
«We’re serious, Chanel. You can literally do things others cannot.»
«Like what?»
«Like talking to other mages without speaking aloud, for a start. Open your eyes. Look at my face.»
She did.
«Chanel, you are a mage.»
Her eyes widened at ‘hearing’ my words without seeing my lips move. Her trance must have popped at that, because we lost our sense of her presence in rapport with us.
“What is this horse shit?” she demanded, getting up onto her elbows, scooting a bit back on the sand, away from us.
“You’re a mage. You can do magic, like us,” I told her.
“Bullshit!”
I went invisible, then stated from out of clear air, “I shit you not, Chanel.”
Her eyes went even wider, turned to Kaitlyn, who smiled and disappeared as well.
Chanel tucked instantly into a squat, looking ready to bolt, so my wife reappeared, as did I. “Sit back down, Chanel, please?” She patted the ground then sat back in seiza pose, hands on her thighs, knees apart, clearly no threat to anyone. I followed her lead.
Rather than take our same poses, Chanel sat back in a near fetal upright pose, thighs and shins before her, legs together, arms wrapped around them. Yet it was not a withdrawing pose, it was a ready pose: her weight was forward, on her feet, poised to jump and run.
And so, in that tense atmosphere, we began to explain a few things to the fifth known mage in the modern era.