PART 8: Bicyclists
Chapter 50: Second Annual
“Hi, Miki,” I said, standing on her front porch, the dawn rays backlighting me. “Where’s your bike?”
“Morning, Davie. It’s just around the side of the house,” she replied, pointing.
“Okay, I’ll handle it. You’re in the back with the girls.”
“Segregation now?” she replied jocularly.
I just smiled and jogged off to get her bike. She’d see.
Upon opening the Nude-Mobile’s rear passenger door, I heard her say from behind me, “A-ha! So that’s how it’s going to be!”
Fainter, from inside the car, I heard my wife observe over the clicking of Miki’s bike cassette, “You can strip now or strip later, but one way or another, we’re seeing you naked.”
I was almost around the back of the car with the bike when Miki managed a reply: “My neighbors might be watching.”
I saw her looking around as I was hoisting the bike into position behind the other three already strapped down.
From inside the car, my wife observed, “They’ll likely see you on the news tonight anyway, but suit yourself.”
“Or un-suit yourself,” I called from my squatting position, reworking the bottom tie strap through the fourth bike frame and its front wheel. “Whichever.”
When I stood from my task, Miki was still standing beside the car, its stark naked occupants mostly concealed by the hedge lining the driveway. I smiled and said, “It’s kind of fun to undress in a moving car, too. Ask me how I know.”
“You’re darn near undressed already,” she temporized.
She was right: I had on only a pair of the magewear shorts, barefoot and topless otherwise. “I have a tee shirt and Tevas in the car for use at the gas station,” I said. “You’ll find that Kaitlyn and Chanel have similar cover-ups close at hand, too.”
Miki looked into the car, then quickly around the morning-quiet residential streets, nodded her head decisively, and started peeling rapidly, tossing her light summer clothes into the rear footwell a piece at a time.
I stayed beside the driver’s door to watch the show.
Miki was far more motivated to get inside than me, so she had the rear passenger door closed by the time my hand was opening my door, from which issued a series of girly giggles and an excited, “Whew!” from our group’s latest addition.
I’d just shifted the car into Drive to leave Miki’s subdivision when I said, “All right, one more and we’ll be on the road.”
We hadn’t told our guests about our fifth passenger, so I wasn’t surprised to see two sets of widening eyes in the rearview mirror.
My wife said, “Don’t worry, he’s nice. We call him Chris the Chivalrous.”
“He? Him‽” exclaimed Miki, her arms going around her chest and a blush stealing over her face.
Chanel was just smiling amusedly now.
My wife said, “Lookit, Miki, if you can’t handle a stranger seeing you naked today…” She said no more, her implication clear.
“But in the car?”
“They’ll be all around you at the event.”
“I suppose…”
“I told you, he’s nice. Besides, he’ll be in front, so he’ll hardly see you. He’ll probably have eyes only for Chanel here anyway.”
And thus it was that I pulled up to Chris’ house with a carful of naked women.
He was sitting on his front doorstep, a small EDC bag over one shoulder when we rounded the corner onto his street, standing and walking out to the curb as I parked.
On opening the front passenger door and looking inside the car, he raised an eyebrow and asked, “Getting an early start, are we?”
“Hi, Chris!” my wife said, waving.
“So good to see you again, Kaitlyn,” he replied, smiling faintly. “All of you,” he stressed.
“This is our friend Chanel, and this is my other boss Miki.”
Chris had one knee on the front passenger seat, reaching between it and the driver’s seat to shake their hands each in turn, but he held the handshake extra long with Miki.
Greetings accomplished, he rotated down into his seat and asked, “Am I expected to get naked, too?”
“Yes!” called Chanel brightly.
She was overridden by my wife who said, “Please yourself, Chris, but beware that you’re in the most exposed seat. Besides, I thought you were here to spectate, not to participate?”
Chris turned my wife down earlier when she tried to get him to ride nude, which is one reason we now had Miki and Chanel in our car, but when I pointed out that the Nude-Mobile has a 4-bike rack but five seats, Kaitlyn tried again, telling him there was now a spot open for a spectator, which got him on board.
Chris replied, “I am; I just don’t want to be antisocial.”
I told him, “Kaitlyn and I believe in liberty, Chris: freedom-to and freedom-from. That last means we only get to make demands of you against your wishes when someone else’s liberty is threatened. No one in this car is harmed by you remaining dressed, so there is no cause to make you change that. We only require that you observe the same principle’s inverse as well: you aren’t harmed by their nudity, so they are free to remain unclothed. Same for my partial nudity, for that matter.”
Chris nodded and said, “Perfectly fair. It seems a bit sexist for the women to all be undressed and us up front not, though.”
My wife asked him, “What makes you think Davie’s keeping those shorts on all the way up?”
And indeed, my shorts hit the floor as we crested the hill north out of Moab. I didn’t put them back on until we were just outside of Wellington, where we always stopped for refueling and refreshment on trips to Salt Lake.
Back on the road again, back off with the shorts again, Chris the only one dressed in the car.
He wanted to spectate, right?
I didn’t re-dress on reaching the Greater Salt Lake Metro Area, deciding that if they were going to let us bike naked today, they were also going to let us drive naked today.
Therefore, I drove us straight to the event’s starting point, and we all got out there in a public parking lot, four bare riders and one dressed spectator. We drew a lot of looks, since most of those participating were either not going fully-bare like we were or they were waiting to undress closer to the start of the ride. We were certainly the only ones nude in the parking lot, all of the other early starters being in the park where the pavilion tents were set up.
We four rolled our bikes to the sign-in table, and Chris wandered off to gawk.
As we were standing in line, a young guy walked up to us and uncertainly asked, “Chanel?”
She turned and said, “Oh, hi Paul. Been a while.” She looked him up and down in a way that suggested that she’d seen all of Paul previously, though he was currently dressed in summer wear: metal band tee shirt, knee-length jean shorts, sneakers.
He blushed at her intimate regard, then said, “Yeah, I, ah, transferred up to the Salt Lake campus. Better parties, y’know?”
Chanel looked thoughtful at that, then said, “I might like to go to one of those. Doing anything after this?”
“Wow, um, no. It’d be great to, ah, see you again.”
“Cool. We’ll be staying for the after-party at the end of the ride, so if you want to pick me up then?”
Paul looked her up and down, then asked incredulously, “Like this?”
“No, silly, I’ve got a change of clothes in the bag,” she said, flicking a hand at the cargo bag mounted to the back of the used full-suspension mountain bike she’d bought by selling her old car.
We’d offered to finance the bike to let her keep the car, but she’d said, “I haven’t driven out of town once in the last two years. Can’t afford it. Stands to reason then that I really can’t afford to own a car, doesn’t it? If I keep the car, the bike saves me money in the long term, but if I sell it, the bike saves me money from Day 1.”
Chanel had helped us with gas for the trip as well, pointing out that it was a fraction of what she’d have paid to drive up solo and that she’d already saved it in the few weeks of owning the bike.
Paul was speaking over my recollections, “…catch you later, Chanel. And, ah, it’s great to see you again!” with a long look up and down her amazing body.
When the guy was out of earshot, my wife asked in a low tone, “Prior client?”
“Yup,” Chanel answered. “Time to start paying my debts.”
Once we’d gotten signed in, we found that we were not the first of the Moab contingent to arrive.
“Sherry!” my wife exclaimed, waving at a mixed couple.
Not something so jejune as mixed race, but far more fundamental: she was starkers, and her man was arguably overdressed for the hot mid-July weather, not a cloud in the sky.
“Poulsen,” I greeted him, extending my hand.
“Quite a sight, us two,” he observed.
He was right: a bare naked East Indian shaking hands in a public park with a white guy dressed in business casual wear. I decided the inverse image would have been even more powerful, but we’d have to work on him some more to pull that off. We’d asked him to join us, but like Chris, the most we could talk him into this year was to spectate, not participate. Oh, well.
“My, Davie, you’re looking absolutely delish!” squeed Sherry.
“He’s been working hard,” my wife said, bragging on me with a proprietorial note in her voice.
“Seen any of the rest?” I asked them. I hadn’t recognized any of the vehicles in the parking lot, but that included whatever Sherry and Poulsen had driven up, and they were clearly here nevertheless, so I figured it was worth asking anyway.
Both shook their heads.
“We’re early,” my wife pointed out. “They’ll be along.” I was about to speak when she interrupted, “Oh, hey, the Northern contingent is here!” She pointed, her arm arced over the heads of the crowd. I followed her indication and saw Jess and Vin rolling their bikes in from the parking lot.
“Looks like they need help,” I said.
“With their bikes?” my wife asked with a mystified tone.
I understood her confusion, for they clearly had those well in hand. I replied, “No, love, with their clothes!”
She smiled back and asked, “What, you want to judo them into a submission hold and peel them bare?”
“That could be fun, but perhaps we should just hold their bikes while they see to their own denudement.”
“That’s not a word!” objected Vin, the family pedant, having come into earshot of our exchange by this point.
“Sure it is,” I told him. “Here, let me demonstrate.” I slipped inside the brotherly handshake he offered and quickly pulled his shirt up, forcing one of his arms into a 45 degree up-angle, the other still holding his bike’s handlebar before he stopped his surprised resistance and raised his arms to accede to the inevitable, letting the bike fall against our hips.
I still had my own arms up from pulling his shirt off when he gave me a different sort of sibling greeting, a brotherly punch to the pec. Seeing that he was more surprised than annoyed, I announced with a proud smile, “Denudement!”
Then to Jess, I asked, “How many points is that in Scrabble?”
As she flipped down the kickstand on her bike, she replied without any hesitation, “Best case without bonuses is if you had exactly three of the letters already on the board and them all one-pointers, which would get you sixty-one with the bingo. With bonus spots, best case is a triple-triple, which would get you well over one-fifty, varying depending on how the word lined up. If you could get the M onto the double-letter between the triples, it’s one seventy-six.”
Yes, dear reader, she did just do those calculations in her head. That’s our Jess!
She slipped inside my offered embrace and said, “Mmmmm, nice,” her head across my breast, eyes closed in the warmth. She looked up at me with those mage-sculpted eyes, still holding tight, and asked, “You gonna denude me, too?”
I was about to answer when my wife butted in, “Hey, no fair! He already got a piece. Next one’s mine!” She reached around Jess, still in my arms, and unbuttoned her jean shorts, unzipped them, and slid them down her friend’s legs, then left them there as she caressed back up her legs and thong-bared buns.
“These new?” my wife asked her friend, hooking a finger into the thong, pulling it back a bit and giving her a slingshot smack.
“Yeah, Vin got a summer job and bought me this set just for today.”
I was about to offer to reveal the matching bra when Sherry joined in, asking, “May I?” her hands on Jess’ tee shirt hem, looking a question over her shoulder.
“Sure,” Jess offered, lifting her arms.
After Sherry pulled the tee shirt off, showing that our current denudement target did indeed have on a matching bra, Jess asked, “Who’s next?”
Chris was back, enjoying this new show, so he asked, “May I remove your footwear for you, ma’am?”
“You may.”
Chris knelt reverently at her feet, supporting one foot on a thigh, untying its shoe neatly, slipping it off as Vin helped her balance on one foot. Off came the sock, then a repeat on the other side. He held her shoes up to her like an offering, the socks stuffed inside.
“Thank you!” she said warmly, then leaned down to kiss him on the cheek. On straightening, she said, “Next!”
Sherry said, “Get in there, Jazz,” referring to her boyfriend by a pet name only she was allowed to use.
Jasper didn’t make any requests, but he didn’t need to, because Jess turned and backed up a bit, telling him exactly what she wanted him to take. Wordlessly, he unclasped her offered bra. Jess held one hand over the opposite bra cup, her arm on that side extended, so he helped her slip the bra strap over that arm, but then held onto it, smiling slightly down at her. The body language was clear: he was saying, ‘Your move, Jess.’
She paused a second to interpret this, then smiled and spun away in a dancer’s twirl, leaving her bra behind, her other arm extracted from the straps along the way, her heavy breasts now wobbling free in a public park, likely for the first time in her life.
Vin spoke, “Last piece is mine.” This was a proprietorial claim, not a request, but he knelt before his girlfriend just as reverently as Chris had done, looking a question up at her before sliding the matching thong slowly down her legs.
The move was similar to one I’d done myself and also to one I’d seen done recently. Jess must have made the same connection, because she said, “Careful there, boy. You might just end up married if you do that with any more ceremony.”
Vin held her panties up to his face, inhaled deeply, and said, “I’m not seeing the downside here, Angel Puss.”
Jess blushed with pleasure and handed him up into a much more passionate embrace than she’d given me. They kissed long and lovingly.
When they broke apart, we applauded, then gave Vin much the same treatment. I’d already gotten his shirt, and both Chris and Jasper elected to skip their turns, so Vin was denuded by his sister and girlfriend working in concert. I found it amusing rather than erotic, but Kaitlyn’s cheeks were pink when she stood to rejoin me.
About that time, four more familiar faces appeared, Joss and Allison followed by the ’rents, Mary and Ramón, whom they’d ridden up with. They got the same treatment, though with more hands wanting to take a piece of clothing, we broke the task up into smaller chunks. I got Allison’s shorts, one of Mary’s socks, and one of Joss’ shoes.
Ramón stayed aloof, watching with amusement while seeing to his own denudement.
In the middle of this game, a couple I didn’t recognize walked up to us. They were fully body-painted, toenails to tresses, the man in an Asian tiger motif and the woman in a fair facsimile of the Pink Panther. Yes, the Pink Panther with boobs and prominent labia, clearly wearing nothing other than the paint! I had to shake my head to clear it after seeing that.
I smiled at them in a friendly-stranger sort of way and turned my attention back to the stripping game in my introverted fashion.
The Pink Panther spoke, “Do you not recognize us, Davie?”
I knew that voice, didn’t I? “Molly?” I asked.
“Molleeee!” squeed Kaitlyn, whose attention we’d caught with this exchange, running to her friend, then pausing short. “I’d hug you but…”
“Yeah,” Molly said, “we’d prefer not to have our paint jobs messed up. We can trade paint later.”
“Where’d you get this done?” Jess asked in wonder. “It’s excellent work!”
“We found a hair place a few blocks away that had someone on staff who was able to do it,” Molly said.
By that point, I’d noticed that both big cats had tails somehow affixed to their lower back just above their butt cracks, so I pointed at them and asked, “How did you drive with those on?”
“We didn’t!” exclaimed Norman the Tiger. “We got the body-painting done for free on the condition that we undress at the two stylist stations closest to their all-glass storefront then have the work done right there. The shop owner said he was sure we brought in a bunch more walk-ins than they normally get.”
“The other part of the deal,” added his wife, “was that we walk to the event and tell anyone who asked where we got it done. We walked four blocks in Salt Lake nearly nude!”
“We passed a uniformed policeman as we approached the park,” confided Norman, “probably here for event security, but he just waved us into the park, didn’t bother us at all.”
Mary said with a smirk, “There’s a tale for the grandkids.”
“That’s the idea,” said Molly. “Carpe diem, right?”
Before the event kicked off, we ran into several more friends and acquaintances.
Kristen drove up separately, her best path here not going thru Moab. Today’s event was partly an excuse for her to visit Carlo, who’d also be riding with her, covertly representing the nude mage faction along with us.
Another notable was a college friend of Mary’s she’d introduced us to last year, but I didn’t recall her name, and she flitted back off before I could catch it again.
Why notable? Because she’d been dressed last year, but not so much this year.
For me though, the main highlight was two of Kaitlyn’s coworkers from the Moab BLM office, who said she’d inspired them by her participation last year.
The guy was wearing nothing but dark sunglasses and a fake crocheted beard, clearly wishing for a soupçon of anonymity while still participating fully in the spirit of the event.
The woman didn’t hide her face, but she did wear a thong side-tie bikini bottom, participating topless.
Both of them checked out Kaitlyn’s stark unashamed exposure, staying to chat far longer than I’d expect if we’d all been at some other social function, dressed, clearly drinking in the uncommon sight.
After they finally turned away to see what else was on offer, I saw the woman toying with her bikini bottom’s side ties a few times, but the crowd swallowed the pair before she could muster the courage to pull one loose.