Chapter 46: Hustle & Jive
Kaitlyn and I got back to our own hustles, a day job and two side gigs apiece. This kept us plenty busy, but we felt good about it rather than overwhelmed. We were building something worthwhile here, and it made our alone time together even more piquant.
We saw a lot of each other at the hospital gym. It changed things between us qualitatively when I was able to work out alongside my wife rather than just act as her helper, unable to use the equipment myself. It really brought out her competitive streak. I had the genetic advantage of growing up mainlining testosterone, but she had a drive I lacked, so we pushed each other forward and thereby pushed some of the onlookers onward as well, becoming exemplars of physical fitness for the sparse PT patient traffic in the times we used the hospital’s exercise equipment.
Our shared workouts after a shift aside, PT work separated us, alas. Turns out, there isn’t a medical insurance filing code for “four-handed massage.” That’s too bad, because we did better work that way.
Our massage hustle got us together quite a lot, though. Virtually all of our massage clients started out with a one-on-one session, but in those instances where one of us would get a gig and the other was around and idle, we’d ask the client to let the other join in for free if it was their first session with us. This move converted a large minority of our regulars to four-handed massages, exclusively; if they could only get one of us on their preferred date, they’d reschedule for a time when they could get both!
Another popular offering was the couples massage. We usually did these around sunset, before or after, with lots of candles lit around the massage area. More than once, Kaitlyn and I had to declare a movie night, leaving the clients to enjoy each other in our backyard. We turned the home theater speakers up loud, turned off all lights in rooms at the back of the house, and kept ourselves planted in the living room at the front of the house until we saw the clients’ vehicle depart.
We learned to leave a tip jar atop the drawer cabinet behind the shower screen, strategically lit by a candle so that clients would notice it as they re-dressed in the clothes they’d stored in its drawers, filled with happy feelings as they always were at that moment. More than half the time, we’d find something in the jar when cleaning up, particularly after one of these late-night couples sessions turned movie nights.
Some clients attempted to get a little sexy action from us, but we kept a tight lid on that, backed by a clear logic cascade: sex was justified only when powerful magic was needed, and then only when the case was acute enough to justify working on the client for free, as with Ron out at Delicate Arch. Most cases we could resolve without sex magic, particularly here in summer, where our back yard was a viable massage location.
We settled into a loose pattern: get off work at our day jobs, ride carefully across town to the hospital in Moab’s “rush quarter-hour” evening traffic glut, pick up an hour or two doing PT massage, work out hard, shower, ride hard home, and shower again. The main variation was when a gap in the PT schedule allowed us to take a massage client at the house after work instead, and the key difference there was that those nights we didn’t get any gym time.
It was on one of the first sort of nights when we heard a voice calling into the PT department’s staff changing room, “Davie? Kaitlyn?”
“Yeah, just us in here, Miki. Come on in,” my wife called back.
Our boss found us in our skin, closing up our lockers, about to take our evening shower. Weeks into this routine now, Miki didn’t even blink, just started undressing across the aisle in front of her assigned locker, using one foot to kick the opposite shoe off, then reversing it, flicking each aside at the base of the lockers with her toes.
“You guys are doing great work,” she said in an upbeat tone from underneath the scrub top as she pulled it over her head. As her arms folded behind her back to unclasp her plain everyday lavender bra, she added, “We’re getting a lot of compliments about your work from patients.” She shrugged the straps off her shoulders, hunched slightly forward to slide them down her arms, causing her mature C-cups to dangle and sway.
Not that I was looking.
Hanging her bra on a hook inside the locker, Miki continued, “You’re developing a following, you two, patients that won’t come in unless they can get one of you.”
“Aww, that’s nice to hear, Miki. Thanks,” I said, being careful to look straight into her eyes, which turned up to meet mine as she bent slightly forward to slip off the scrub bottoms, revealing modest everyday panties. Nice, clean, white cotton panties. ‘Focus, Davie!’ I yelled at myself.
No fashionista, Miki was pushing her mismatched underwear bottoms down her hips when my wife asked, “Hey, who does all the cleaning around here? I don’t mean the generic janitorial stuff like floors and such, I mean the medical sort: wiping off the PT equipment, emptying the biohazard bins, that sort of thing.”
“Also the janitorial staff, actually,” Miki said, her back to us now, setting her shoes and panties into the bottom of the locker, picked up as a group from the changing room floor. I definitely did not take a look at her round well-exercised buns when she did this.
When she turned from the locker, my wife said, “Hey, you shaved!”
Miki wasn’t a lazy person, just a busy one: the short-cropped hair, the randomly-selected underwear, and the full wild-grown pubic bush exemplified this. But there before us, we saw her shaven innie.
Miki blushed and said, “I-yah… Well, it’s your fault, really, Kaitlyn! You shamed me into it, is what you did!” Then she folded her arms under her breasts in a mock accusatory way, lower lip stuck out stubbornly.
My wife laughed, stepped over her dressing bench, and gave Dr. Miki a stroke on the upper arm while leaning in to kiss her cheek. “Well, it looks very nice!”
It certainly did. But I wasn’t looking.
I tell you I wasn’t looking, all right‽
I held my hand out towards the pair of scrub sinks in an “after you” gesture, letting the women continue their conversation while they did the vigorous minute-long hand and forearm washing mandated by the hospital rules. I did my best not to watch the wobbling of their breasts, peeking alternately around their bare backs as they worked their hands vigorously under the hot water, bent slightly over the sinks. I kept my eyes on theirs in the mirror.
Mainly on the mirror.
Miki smiled at me knowingly in its reflection, and I bit my lip, realizing I’d been caught.
Kaitlyn was saying, “Well, I ask because I wonder if there’s some kind of opening for a specialized cleaner, someone to take care of this under direct PT department supervision.”
“You two bucking for another side gig?” Miki asked. “Aren’t you busy enough as it is?”
“No, not us. We’re helping out a young woman who’ll be going back to school as a junior at USU this fall. The branch here in town, not the main campus. I got her a job at the BLM, and it looks like it’ll take care of her bills, but only just barely. I was hoping for some sort of position here for her as well to get her a bit of spending money.”
“She reliable?” Miki asked, shutting off her sink with her elbows, Kaitlyn leaving hers on for me as they proceeded into the shower.
I saw my wife shrug as they rounded the corner.
“It’s only been two weeks since she started with us, but it’s worked out well so far.”
I heard no more, my sink and their shower spray drowning out the rest of their conversation.
The two were thoroughly soaped up, standing out of the shower spray when I walked in.
Miki was saying, “…can get her assigned to the PT department.”
“Oh, thank you, Miki! It’ll mean a lot to her,” my wife half-squealed, giving her boss a hug between the shower heads.
(No, dear reader, they did not do the full-body grope thing in the shower, just another one of those triangular hugs, but yeah, I saw that in my mind’s eye, too.)
The two women finished rinsing, shut their shower heads off, then stepped back by the room’s open entranceway to watch me, chatting quietly as I soaped myself up.
Miki’s voice rose artificially above normal conversation level at some point in their exchange, observing to my wife, “He is a pretty, pretty man, isn’t he?”
They giggled, and my ever-faithful, kind, and loving wife Kaitlyn answered, “You trying to see if a suntanned Indian can visibly blush, boss?”
“Yeah,” Miki replied, “and turns out, they can. This one can, anyway.”
“Flex for her,” bade my wife. “Show her what you’ve earned on the PT equipment out there.”
I looked embarrassedly over my shoulder but did as my wife asked, putting one foot back in what I took to be a Greek statue pose, then flexed from shoulders to ankles.
“My goodness!” Miki breathed. “I guessed from what I saw out there in your workout clothes, but this…!” I heard her sigh deeply, then she addressed me, “Davie, I’m seriously rethinking the hospital policy on working nude.”
I grinned broadly at that. “If you can pull that off, I absolutely will do it.”
The women laughed, knowing there was zero chance of success, but it was an amusing thought nevertheless.
“You know, Miki, there is a way to see Davie work naked.”
“Massage at your house?” she guessed.
“Well, that’s one way, but I meant work in the exercise sense, not in the job sense. How would you like to see those buns and thews pumping on a bike, in public?”
Miki didn’t speak for a while, but finally said, “Oh, you mean that nude bike ride thing up in Salt Lake! I read about it in the paper last year.”
“Yeah, we were there, and I’m inviting you to come up with us. We’re going again this year.”
“And you want me to ride in this thing? Naked?”
I shut off my shower as my wife answered, “Not necessarily. You can just spectate, if you want. However, I will tell you from experience that the view’s better from the peloton!”
“But I have to be in my skin to get that view?”
“The event rules aren’t strict about that, but you’ll get looks if you aren’t scantily clad at the least. Some go body-painted, some only topless, that sort of thing.”
“I’ll…think seriously about that,” Miki replied, now looking me up and down openly.
I spoke up, “Do we have room?”
“Oh, sure, we can get her a seat in the convoy and a spot on a bike rack.”
“Who all’s going?”
“Well, Allison of course, and that means Joss, too. Mom’s riding, and dad’s watching, so that’s one car.” My wife pressed one finger down with another while we walked back out into the locker area, me toweling off behind the women.
At the lockers, she pressed another finger down. “Sherry finally talked Jasper into going.”
“The opportunity to see you and his wife naked in public should’ve made it an easy sell,” I commented.
Still bare beside her locker as Miki and I dressed, Kaitlyn replied, “Jasper’s also a cop, Davie, so it was hard enough to get him to attend as a spectator. They have other plans afterward and only a two-bike rack, so there’s no spare room there.”
I nodded, and she resumed her enumeration, “That leaves…” Then she tilted her head back and looked up to the ceiling, her lips moving as she went down the list and removed those already mentioned. “…you and me, of course, and then maybe Chanel.” She pressed down a third finger, apparently counting the Nude-Mobile.
“Did you ask her yet?”
“No, we still had it down to two cars for a while, so I’ve been holding off, but now that we’re taking three and we’ve got that four-bike rack, we’ve got a spot open. Want it, Miki?” my wife asked.
“Who’s Chanel?” our boss temporized.
“She’s the college kid we were telling you about. She’s nice.”
Miki thought a second, then said, “Tell you what, bring her in and see how we get along. I don’t want to spend eight hours in a car with someone I can’t stand.”
“Sure, sure, of course,” my wife soothed.
“If we get along, I’ll definitely go. I don’t promise to ride, but I’ll watch at the least. Hell, I think I’d be willing to drive up solo for it, if it came to that.”
“Lovely!” my wife said and gifted her boss with another triangular hug, Miki now in her street clothes, Kaitlyn still wearing only her skin.
Miki said her good-byes and left. Only then did my wife dress, with me leaning against the opposite locker bank, enjoying the show.
Chanel did get that second part-time job in the hospital janitorial staff, and Miki did manage to get her assigned to the PT department.
Her time there often overlapped a bit with ours: she would be coming into work as the department was shutting down for the night, so we’d be wanting to get into the changing room to clean up and get back into our normal clothes as she was scrubbing up to get started for the night.
Occasionally it would work out the other way: we’d finish up before Chanel arrived, so that she’d have to wait out in the hallway on us instead of the other way around.
The first time she called, “Anyone in here?” into the changing room from the zig-zag while we were in there, I was just about to join Kaitlyn and Miki in the shower, so I called back, “It’s us, Chanel. We’ll be out in a minute.” I worried that inviting her in with us might be taken as a subtle form of pay-back for getting her both jobs, letting her leave sex work behind. Our own private strip show, you know?
After this happened a few times, my wife took Chanel aside to discuss it, and they decided I was wrong to leave her out in the hall like that. As Chanel put it, “It’s just practical, Davie: the sooner I get showered, the sooner I can get to work, so the sooner I can get home.”
The next night, she arrived early enough to cause the same overlap. Once she verified that it was us in the changing room, she came in, picked a free locker, kicked off her sneakers, and unzipped her painted-on skinny jeans, wiggling them down her hips with some effort, revealing a sporty black-and-white striped cotton tanga.
Which I wasn’t staring at.
I was definitely not staring, which is why I almost missed her small knowing smile while unbuttoning the frilly short-sleeved azure blouse she was wearing that barely contained her breasts. Those didn’t spring from confinement because she’d enhanced her cleavage with a matching striped bra, the bold pattern calling the eye. I realized she must have known it had this effect; she was a professional on her home ground here, after all.
I spun back to my own locker to finish undressing myself, so I didn’t see her stow her socks and underwear.
Once I’d finished baring myself, and I had no choice but to close my locker and turn away, I found myself in the presence of a goddess. I’d thought Chanel had looked amazing in her tight evening dress on the night we’d met her, but there in the locker room… Wow! She was even better looking than Carmen, the most objectively beautiful woman I’d ever seen naked in person, pregnant or not.
Chanel’s knowing smile broadened.
I thought Kaitlyn would give me some other sort of look in turn, but no! My wife was looking at Chanel hungrily, too!
“Well!” I said brightly, leaning back against my closed locker door. I took a moment to regain my equilibrium, then said, “I’d best be about it.” I turned and almost fled to the sinks to begin scrubbing up.
Chanel joined me at the other sink, bare and wobbly as she mimicked my practiced technique, but I tried to keep my eyes off her jiggly curvaceousness. That put my eyes into the mirror, where I found my wife still watching hungrily. Her eyes caught mine in the reflection, and she blushed, turned, and coughed lightly.
In the shower, my wife broached the WNBR topic.
Spiel received, Chanel said, “Yeah, I heard about that. Sure, I’ll go; sounds like a blast!”
Oh my dear reader, I leaned hard into my meditation skills to keep myself flaccid that evening.