Chapter 25: Final Report
The next morning, the Friday before the first-ever World Naked Bike Ride in Salt Lake, we awoke at dawn to the distant sound of highway traffic increasing from its nighttime levels. We had to get moving early today, so we reluctantly got up and started making breakfast.
While Kaitlyn worked on that and I packed our things up, Kaitlyn told me, “You’d better redo your beard, Davie. Mom won’t believe you grew that in just… What is it, four days?”
“Oh, right. Do you want me to lose it entirely, or just grow it back shorter?” I replied.
“Mmmmm… I kind of like it. Let’s keep it.”
“As you wish,” I replied with a bow, and I set off to do my morning mage-grooming: sand shower, magical depilation, facial hair rebuild, and mouth cleanse. About 20 seconds. By Turing’s left testicle, I love being a mage.
Kaitlyn came up to me and stroked my freshly-grown beard and freshly mage-shaved neck, saying “Mmmmm…nice!” Then her hand went further down my front and into my chest hair, and she got a look on her face. “Davie, you’re going to be naked before the world tomorrow. You should mage-shave your whole body.”
Nervously, I said, “I think I’d look kind of goofy.”
Kaitlyn shrugged her shoulders and said, “What’s the problem? Let’s just try it and see what it looks like. Have you ever shaved all over before?”
“No, I can’t say I have. All right.” I hadn’t gotten dressed yet, so I just slipped back into a trance and told my body to let go of all hair below my neck. I ended up with a low pile of short hairs around my feet, like what you get at a barber’s shop after they’re done with you.
Kaitlyn immediately started laughing. “You! Y-you!” Then she broke into peals of laughter so hearty she couldn’t even get the rest of her sentence out.
I put my hands on my hips — my utterly bare hips! — and waited her out.
“You do look goofy!” she eventually said, still chuckling.
I sighed, and then she took pity on me.
“Oh, I’m sorry, but that’s the truth of it. Here, let me make it up to you,” she said, sounding truly contrite, though also still amused. She got down on her knees, grabbed my baby-smooth buns, and took my limp penis into her mouth and soon had it standing up proudly. In one break, she said, “Bare is a plus for this, I’ve got to admit!” Then she went back to playing my clarinet like a jazz master.
As I began to moan, she let me go and began licking my balls, taking them one at a time into her mouth. Between tastings, she said, “I couldn’t do this at all with you all hairy. I think I might get to like this look!”
She continued licking, sucking, and stroking me.
Then she started trying to deep-throat me. When she gagged, my heart sank. “Please, don’t choke yourself. It does nothing at all for me.” Then I mimed a deflating erection with my fingers. “You’re a nature mage,” I reminded her, “you should be able to easily suppress the gag reflex or even move things around in your throat a bit to avoid the problem entirely.”
“You are a clever boy, I’ve always said that about you,” Kaitlyn claimed with a wry smirk. Then she sucked me all the way down without any difficulty. Soon I was sliding easily in and out, her mouth and throat just as tight as she wanted it to be.
Within minutes, I was gasping and moaning. “Oh, Kaitlyn! I’m close!” With one hand she grabbed a buttock to hold me against her face, and with the other she grabbed my balls and squeezed them gently. She might as well have said, “Go for it!” so I did.
“Haaahhh!!! Ahh! Aaaaaaaah! Aaaaarrraarrrrghh!” and I pumped several shots of semen straight down her throat. She held me against her face for a good minute, letting me enjoy the sensation, then she let me slip out, her lips wrapped tightly around my shaft to clean everything off as it passed.
I knelt down with her, embraced her, and kissed her deeply. I couldn’t very well ask her to swallow it and then just give her a peck on the lips, now could I?
“So, how do you like the hairless Davie look now?”
Kaitlyn replied, grinning, “I think we’ll save it for special occasions. It has practical value, but I prefer the natural esthetic. Well, maybe with a few small modifications.” Then she guided the regrowth of my hair. I ended up hairless on the back and buns, well-trimmed in the pubic area, but with a hairless scrotum. She wanted a stripe of hair up from the pubes to my belly, and then nothing on my chest. She walked around me several times as we set this up, and then she directed me to put some hair on my legs and forearms.
“That’s got it, my Indian Adonis!” she finally exclaimed. “Now we can return to civilization.”
“No, it’s your turn now,” I disagreed.
“I’ve already given myself a mage-trim,” she objected.
“Yes,” I nodded, “but we’ve spent most of this trip either in bike clothes, which gives you tan lines, or invisible so the UV goes straight through and thus can’t tan your skin at all. You’ll look better tomorrow with an all-over tan.”
“It’s a bit late to be saying that, Davie,” she replied reproachfully. “If you wanted that, I could have just lain out nude and tanned a few times along the trip.”
“Ah, but you are a mage. Observe,” I bade her, as I sank my awareness into her skin and began stimulating the production of melanin where it was previously lacking compared to the rest of her skin, bringing the lightest parts up to match the areas most deeply tanned.
I felt her magical presence join mine shortly. She’d gotten to the point that she could almost instantly slip into a magical trance with me. It’d taken me years to get to this level!
We began evening out her tan together, the toughest bits being the transition zones along her old tan lines. Still, within minutes you would swear that Kaitlyn was a tanning bed aficionado.
“Perfect,” I said, whispering into her ear from my position working on her neckline, where her tee shirt collars had created one of several tan lines.
“Thanks,” she replied, turning into my embrace, thinking I was talking about her job of smoothing things out.
“No, I mean you. You’re perfect. You’re my dream girl.”
She colored a bit at that, so I kissed her deeply to punctuate the sentiment.
“I can’t honestly say you’re my dream man, Davie,” she said. Then she went on quickly, perhaps worried that I’d be offended. “I would never have dreamed you up in a million years.”
I smiled back at that. I was happy being Kaitlyn’s weirdo, just so long as I was hers. I kissed her again, longer this time, breaking it off reluctantly, knowing we had to meet Mary.
We dressed, finished packing up, and got out of there.
We arrived at the rest stop before Mary did, but not much before. “Ooooh, a beard and mustache now!” she exclaimed to me on getting out of the car.
“You like? We’re thinking of keeping it.”
“It is a bit thin,” she said musingly, “but you’ve only been out about a week. Let me reserve judgement until you thicken it up. It’s neatly kept at least. How’d you keep it trimmed out here?”
“Mystical Indian trick,” I said with a cryptic grin.
“Do your people call this trick ‘beard scissors’?” Mary returned teasingly.
“You couldn’t pronounce what my people call it,” I replied cheekily.
“Well, then,” she said in an exaggerated huff, then turned her attention to her daughter. “You’re looking very tan, my dear. I assume it’s an all-over tan?” she asked with a smirk.
“Wanna see?” Kaitlyn asked, hooking her thumbs into her cycling shorts, threatening to drop trou right there in the middle of the rest area parking lot.
“Ah, maybe let’s do it in private at our destination?” Mary temporized.
“Oh no way,” Kaitlyn said. “We’re changing clothes in the car again. That was fun!”
And that’s just how we did it. Kaitlyn rode in the front with her mother and showed off her light all-over tan, having stripped naked shortly after getting back onto the highway, reluctantly dressing once the inspection was complete.
“I think you’ll want it a bit darker before tomorrow,” Mary put in decisively. “If you’re going to be naked before the media tomorrow, I want you to look your best!”
“We didn’t have a lot of time for tanning on this trip, Mom. We spent a lot of it riding. It was all I could do not to develop tan lines.”
“It’s too bad you couldn’t have done both at once,” Mary said.
Kaitlyn bit her lip, then said, “You mean ride naked? On the highway?”
“You know, that’s a common fantasy,” I pointed out. “A woman riding a bike naked, or at least commando in a skirt, I mean. It’s always in a park along a walking path, or on a quiet paved town road or something. Even in the WNBR, we’ll be doing it over smooth paved downtown streets. To do that out where we were, on the dirt and gravel forest roads and on the poorly maintained highway shoulder areas between those forest roads…madness! Nudity is nice in its place, but padded cycling shorts are also very nice in their place.”
“What sports can we do naked?” Kaitlyn asked wonderingly. Listing the answers to that filled a good ten minutes of the ride back, but being from out of town, we couldn’t think of any place near Salt Lake where we’d be able to practice any of them.
That sparked a thought. I asked, “Mary, where are we staying? Did you get a different hotel, one closer to the starting point of the ride tomorrow?”
“No,” Mary answered. “One of the friends I visited while you were away agreed to host us. They live pretty close to the starting point. It’s not in city center, where the ride will start, but it’s at least on the same side of town, out more into the suburbs.”
“I wonder… Does your friend have an enclosed back yard?” I asked.
“Already ahead of you, me boyo. It’s not only enclosed, they’ve got a pool, a privacy fence, and I’ve already cleared nude sunbathing with both masters of the house, our hosts.”
Kaitlyn gave a squee at this. Mary and I smiled at each other.
Then I asked Mary, “So, um, have you been…partaking of this freedom?”
“Do you think I could raise the topic, get permission, and then just let the opportunity lie?” she asked rhetorically.
“Ahhhh,” I said appreciatively. “And your friends… Did they join you?” I pressed.
“Other way ’round: I asked if we could sunbathe naked there, and they just shucked themselves bare right there in the living room, ran into the back yard, and took flying leaps into the pool! That was their answer!”
Kaitlyn jumped in, “So how many seconds were you behind them?”
“Maybe a dozen?” Mary returned with a smile.
“So long?” Kaitlyn teased back.
“I was fully dressed at the time,” Mary defended.
I just imagined the mess of clothing scattered behind them and laughed joyfully.
About ten minutes further down the road, with the city coming into view, I said, “We can’t go straight to your friends’ house. We have to collect our lab results first.”
“Lab results?” Mary asked.
Kaitlyn filled her in, handing me back Mary’s phone to reprogram the GPS, adding the two lab addresses to our route. Fortunately, we were far enough out that we hadn’t yet missed the first exit the new route would require.
We swung by the university lab first. I brought our last sample into the lab in its baggie, telling our collaborator there that this one could be analyzed at her leisure. I knew she couldn’t get to it today during the workday, and I didn’t want her staying late on a Friday just to give us that last bit of data. Besides, I had other plans for this particular set of lab results.
We thanked our collaborator profusely, making note of her name and office number for later cookie deliveries. Then we did the same at the BLM-affiliated testing lab.
It’s too bad we wouldn’t be able to include newspaper clippings in the gift boxes: properly done, this story would never hit the papers. That’d be a desperation move, a sign we’d failed to apply our new leverage properly.
When we got to Mary’s friends’ house, we found the front door open, music spilling out from it:
Come on in, baby take your coat off,
Come on in, baby take a load off,
Come on in, baby shake the blues off,
I’m gonna love that frown away!
Inside, we found two adults in their 50s dancing and mouthing along to the lyrics, singing outright when the chorus came up.
By the end of the song, we were all smiling.
“You like?” asked the male half of the couple when the song finished, perhaps assuming it was the first time I’d heard it, being foreign-born, but it’s difficult to live three years in the American southwest without becoming well-acquainted with country and western music. I considered studying it every bit as important as studying language and law in my process of acculturation in my new home.
“Yeah,” I answered, “it’s just that when I heard it the first time, years ago, I misheard the first line of that chorus as, ‘Baby take your clothes off.’ ESL, you know,” I explained.
The man laughed expansively. “I’m Robbie Wellington,” he said, extending a big welcoming hand towards me.
“Sounds like British royalty,” I commented as I took his hand in a firm grip.
“Well, then you’ll really like the full-strength form: Robert Samuel Wellington Ⅲ,” he replied in a mock pompous tone, chuckling self-deprecatingly.
“Pleased to meet you, your grandiosity,” I said, bowing over our handshake before releasing it.
He returned my smile, saying, “The farthest I’ve traced my roots is to pioneer settlers down south, not back to England. There’s a town named after them; you must’ve driven through it on your way up here from Moab.”
“Yeah, we stopped there for gas.”
“No connection now, that I know of. My people have been up here around Salt Lake for generations. Anyway, you are all welcome to dress as you please around here. I trust Mary has told you about our clothing-optional policy here in the house and in the back yard?”
“Have you been naughty, mother?” Kaitlyn accused with a smile on her face.
Mary mimed zipping her lips shut but smiled back impishly.
I decided this was going to be fun.
The Wellingtons were empty-nesters, so there was no problem finding enough room for the three of us. Kaitlyn and I could have had our own rooms, if we’d wanted them, but I guessed Mary had made it clear earlier to them that we’d want to be sharing a room, because the topic never even came up.
At one point after we’d put our things away in our room and were back out in the living room socializing, Mary announced, “Next order of business, Kate-love: strip! Get yourself into the back yard and deepen that tan!”
“Yes, mother,” Kaitlyn answered obediently, though with a smile.
Everyone watched her peel down, Sandra and Robbie most interested of all, but Kaitlyn didn’t blush too badly.
“Just leave them there. Don’t worry about the mess,” Sandra said soothingly.
“Thank you, Sandra,” she replied, then turned and headed into the back yard to find a chaise longue.
We all watched Kaitlyn’s gorgeous retreat. Robbie turned to smile at me appreciatively when Kaitlyn turned out of sight. Sandra and Mary smiled at each other for a different reason.
“You next?” Mary asked me.
“Sorry, no, I’ve got to get to typing.” I then explained to our hosts a small part of what our mission here was, then begged to return to the bedroom we were using, where I’d seen a desk that one of their children must have used to do homework.
I spent the next several hours collating our results and typing up a damning report on the info we’d found, adding in copies of the lab reports, GPS readings collected from online mapping sites taken from satellite photos, and more. In the end, we had a package that even an underpaid low-level functionary could follow to find sufficient evidence to create a credible threat of jail time.
I ran off two copies of the report on a printer I found on their WiFi network, located the printer by its whisk-whir noises in the family room next to a disused old tower computer, and then carried them upstairs to hand them out, one to Mary, one to Sandra & Robbie.
Kaitlyn came back in from the back yard, still naked, and sat down with her mother to share Mary’s copy of the report. While they started in on it, I went and found a coffee cup full of pens in the kitchen and passed several of them out to my drafted editors, bidding them to mark their copies up as they felt needful. Then I sat down in a recliner, kicked the footrest up, and lay back with my eyes closed, relaxing from the hours of typing.
“Cadmium!?” I heard Robbie exclaim while I lay there recovering. “That’s mondo-poisonous, right?”
“Yeah, we took a sample from one of the mines’ tailing piles, which was positioned just up-hill from a small stream. That first one, Kaitlyn, you remember.” She nodded, so I went on, “Anyway, it doesn’t look like they’re picking it up downstream yet, or the EPA’d be all over it by now, but we caught ’em! I suspect the downstream population’s been lucky we’re in a bit of a drought year now.”
“First time I’ve heard drought praised,” Sandra said wryly.
“A silver lining on every cloud.” Is cadmium silvery, I wondered? Aloud, I observed, “Anyway, it could’ve gone worse for those downstream from the mine.”
Some minutes later, Sandra asked, “What’s MCHM?”
“I looked it up on the Internet, and it’s a short name for a chemical they use to wash coal. It’s not super-toxic, but it’s bad enough that you have to clean it up when you do spill it.” Then I explained what I’d learned about coal washing.
“Strange,” she opined.
“I don’t see mention of the hazmat dumping, Davie,” Kaitlyn put in, clearly concerned.
“Yeah, I’ve thought about it since last night, and I decided not to put it into the report for a couple of reasons.
“First, we discovered it only yesterday, so we didn’t have time to have the stuff properly analyzed. What would we actually claim in the report? Vague claims won’t have much impact on JRE, I suspect. If we had hard data at hand, it’d be different, but we don’t.
“Second, though, bad as that practice is, I think it can wait, which means it’s good future leverage if they ever renege on the deal we hope to strike with them. We don’t want to tell them about it and have them fix it, taking away our bargaining power. In fact, I want to be able to drop this one on them like an anvil if they start playing hard-ball.”
“Yeah,” she said, agreeing sadly. “Maybe once all of this is really over we can come back up here, dig those buckets up, and clean the area properly.”
“I’m willing in principle, but as long as we feel we need the leverage, I’d rather leave them in place. It might be decades before we feel secure enough about this that we can take that playing piece off the board.”
In the end, they all congratulated me on my work so far. I thanked them and began collecting comments. When they’d all finished discussing it with me, I stood and turned to go back to my writing cave, but Kaitlyn stopped me. “No, Davie, let that sit for a while. Come out with me. Relax.”
“Actually, lunch is almost ready,” Sandra said.
“Let’s eat on the patio,” offered Robbie.
Then we all looked at Kaitlyn, and she just shrugged her shoulders in an accepting gesture, so Mary said, “Let’s all join Kaitlyn naked. It’s the social thing to do.”
“Oh!” Sandra exclaimed, “I’m sorry, we’re being rude, aren’t we?”
“More unpracticed, I think,” Mary allowed graciously.
“I agree,” Sandra said. “We need to get naked together more often so we know how to behave properly,” and the two friends started giggling together like they must have done back in university. Then the two friends began peeling off to join Kaitlyn in her nude state, Robbie and I not far behind. I helped Sandra and Robbie carry the food out onto the patio, and Kaitlyn snagged several hand towels for us to use on the patio chairs in lieu of trousers or shorts.
It was a lovely meal, and as the elders were digesting, I walked over with Kaitlyn to a patch of grass, had her lay down on her stomach, and I began rubbing some strong sunscreen into her skin. Whispering, I said, “Let’s generate a bit more melanin, now that you’ve been out here a while. They’ll probably think I’m applying tanning oil, but it’s actually your SPF 50 sunscreen. Our onlookers will be focused on your beautiful skin, not on what I’m doing to it.”
I eventually let her take over entirely, concentrating on my arduous task, stroking my lovely fiancée all over with creamy slickness, massaging it into her perfect young skin. My life is so hard sometimes…
I got up to leave, but Kaitlyn said, still lying on her back on the grass, her golden body sun-drenched, “I should take a turn at the report writing.”
“No,” I responded, squatting back down, “we’ve got to sell this tan to our hosts. You just come back in later, and they’ll all be impressed without being surprised. They’ll accept it as a normal result of a day spent tanning.”
“Well, at least bring me my e-reader, then,” she bade me.
“Yeth, marthter,” I replied in my Igor voice, smiling.
I went back inside, collected the marked-up reports, took Kaitlyn’s e-reader outside to her, and went back into my cave to polish the report up, this time carrying only my towel with me, leaving my clothing behind in the small solarium off the patio.
A few hours later, I’d printed up a fresh set of reports, handed them out to the same group, collected a much sparser set of critiques, and folded them into the final version. I printed several copies of it.
One copy I handed to our hosts along with instructions on how and when to use it, should the need arise.
Another I mailed off to my friend Jess, including a handwritten note basically repeating my instructions to our hosts along with my thanks for her help in getting a lot of the info that went into this report. I’d gone back through our document trove and put a lot of detail into the report from them, too.
The last copy we were going to be hand-delivering.
And it was now 4:15pm on a Friday.
“Ritchie blast it all to dev null,” I groused.
“What?” Mary asked, who happened to be seated nearby.
“We’re too late to get down into city-center, to deliver this finished report to JRE,” I sighed.
“Don’t worry about it. You can do it tomorrow after the big ride. It might be best if you didn’t do it face-to-face anyway,” Mary soothed.
“Yeah,” I agreed, reluctantly.
“Now get your pretty buns into that pool before I throw it in there,” she mock threatened.
“Yes, ma’am!” I replied with a sloppy salute.
Shortly, the whole group of us were splashing in the pool, skinny-dipping the way swimming was meant to be done.