Chapter 24: Swim Like a Goose
It was only about a fifteen minute trip from the house to the campground, much of it retracing the same stretch of road thru Moab that Carlo took a month back.
The height of Norman’s seat above the road gave him far more concealment than Carlo, but I could tell that he was still plenty nervous. He wasn’t a natural nudist; that much was certain.
The rest of us had a wonderful chat, mainly filling Molly in on what we’d been up to since they’d seen us back at their New Years’ party where we’d had sashes to cover our birthday suits.
Just the sashes, mind; not even slippers.
On pulling into the campground, Norm carefully put the shorts on without quite getting up out of the driver’s chair, then fiddled with the motor home’s controls for a while, deploying the leveling jacks, trimming their positions, and deploying the slide-out sections, all while we continued our chat.
He then slipped his feet into the sandals, drew the curtains over the front windows, and went out to handle the paperwork with the camp hosts. We’d moved back further into the motor home by this point, now sitting around the galley table, the women with their backs to the side door, so Norman didn’t have to take special care on opening the door to avoid flashing us to the world.
We therefore kept up our conversation until he reappeared and sat down with us, the only one dressed, and that scantily.
“C’mon,” he said, “we came here to get into the great outdoors. We can sit around in our skin at home.”
Molly got up and went into the back to dress.
Only then did it hit me. “Kaitlyn, did you have a plan for how to convince our hosts to fetch our clothes for us?”
“I was hoping they’d just offer, but it seems they prefer that we remain stranded here in our birthday suits.”
Norman saw the serve and returned it competently. “Hmmm, yes, it’s true. I suppose you could go get your clothes yourselves.”
Molly emerged from the RV’s bedroom wearing a more casual outfit…that and a broad wicked grin matching the one her husband wore! She offered not a sliver of help in our predicament.
I essayed, “You know, this wouldn’t be the first time we were naked at this particular campground.”
“First time in daylight, though,” Kaitlyn pointed out.
I then told our hosts about our first interaction with Ex-Ranger Ed.
They thought the whole affair was quite funny, but they hadn’t been the one tasked with keeping control of the heavy bag that Kaitlyn destroyed at the gym later that night.
“Okay, you’ve bought yourselves some clothes with that tale,” Molly offered magnanimously, smiling the while.
I told her, “Bring the casual outfits from the bikes’ left side panniers: tee shirt, loose shorts, underwear, socks, and shoes. They’re at the top of each bag.”
“We aren’t going riding? We bought proper bike clothes for this trip.”
“Let’s eat first, then we’ll go for a casual ride up that paved path between the road and the river. You must’ve seen it, driving up? We won’t need Spandex for that.”
While the Alexanders prepared lunch, Kaitlyn and I pitched our tent, furnishing it in the idiosyncratic way we’d come up with almost by accident, then stuck to now by preference: one oversized self-inflating sleeping pad, one oversized sleeping bag big enough for us to spoon through the night together. An armful of nude Kaitlyn was the perfect way to sleep, as far as I was concerned. Kaitlyn rather liked it, too.
An hour later, we were burning off lunch calories on the Goose Island Trail, about half of which is asphalt-paved and the rest hard-packed red Southern Utahan dirt. The trail winds for about a mile from the campground along the Colorado River, which had carved a miniature of the Grand Canyon here, the actual one a few hundred miles downstream on the other side of Lake Powell.
The Alexanders were in front of us, we two guides watching critically from behind, evaluating how well they held their lines on the rough sections, how they accelerated up the small rises, and most of all how winded they were when we stopped.
At the end of the trail, where it merges into the highway’s breakdown lane, we were reasonably satisfied with how they’d taken the ride. To double-check, I asked, “So, how was that?”
Molly answered, “Beautiful area!”
“We should do this more often, Molls,” added Norman.
“Did you two have plans for dinner? There’s a fairly nice restaurant and winery about an hour’s bike ride up the road. It’s mostly level riding, though with small uphill bits in places.”
“That sounds like a nice thing for later,” Molly said.
“How about we go back to camp, play some games, and relax until five-ish, then bike up? That’ll sharpen the appetite!”
The Alexanders introduced us to a strange card game they called contract rummy, played with two poker decks shuffled together. Its rules are so baffling we had to maintain a notation on the side of the score pad to remember how to play each hand, because it changes each time! Naturally, they wiped us out the first few rounds, but we didn’t break to go wading in the Colorado near camp until we started to get a handle on it.
About an hour before our table reservation, I fetched our bike shorts and Kaitlyn’s sports bra from the panniers, and we demonstrated some of the subtler details to the Alexanders.
Our hosts were surprised that we did without undershorts, but they saw the sense in it once Kaitlyn introduced them to the wet chamois lube she favors.
Me, I’m a powder man.
We got the Alexanders into their own riding clothes, checking for a snug, chafe-free fit while we entirely professionally rubbed over their inner thighs, buns, and groins. Had to be done.
After readjusting the resulting stiffy, Norman began, “We bought these water bladder thingies…”
Much as I like spiffy gear, I’d resisted those as more trouble than they’re worth, but I scraped up enough tact to say, “You’re welcome to use them, but we prefer frame-mounted water bottles. We’ll be stopping to rest and drink a few times on the way up.”
The four of us then pushed on up-canyon to the restaurant. The Alexanders were definitely flagging by the end of the ride, each having drunk about a liter from their Camelbaks, half of it soaking their clothing, and neither looking like they needed to pee, the other half having evaporated.
“Don’t worry about the trip back, you two,” my wife reassured them. “Ve haf plans voor you two!” This last she delivered in a caricatured German military officer tone, straight out of 1950s Hollywood.
“I don’t know whether to quiver with fright or anticipation,” joked Molly while Norman coughed throatily, clearing the phlegm that builds in the throat of someone that’s pushed past their comfortable exercise tolerance point.
“It’s more downhill on the way back,” I reminded them.
“And at the end of the ride, you’ll find two massage therapists!” added my wife.
That brought a smile to their faces.
After a lovely meal, we got back on our bikes and began riding down-canyon, into the sunset.
Perhaps a mile down from the restaurant and winery, I signaled a halt, having spotted this section of the river earlier on the ride up. There was a soft roll-off from road level down to the sagebrush-lined section of land between the highway and the river, and the river was unusually densely tree-lined here.
We rolled our bikes down through the maze of green-gray sagebrush and pale dry desert grasses, stashing them in the trees as the sun disappeared over the canyon lip.
I said, “I’m guessing you’re beginning to feel the stiffness of the ride up, having sat through dinner.”
Molly answered, “Yeah. This short ride loosened me back up a bit, but I’ll really be feeling it when we hit camp.”
“No, you won’t, because we’re going to swim to the other side of the river, and then you’re getting your first massage of the night.”
“First?”
“Of two, yes. The other when we hit camp.”
“And, ah, I’m guessing we’re leaving our clothes on this side of the river?”
“Bingo!”
“This after you told us how you got caught last time?”
“This is us learning,” I told them. “We’re something like 15 miles from town and a mile down from the restaurant. As long as we cross when there’s no traffic on the highway, we’ll be fine. Notice that the other side of the river is tree-lined as well. We’re going back up in the little canyon off to that side, where we’ll be well-screened.”
Molly began to disrobe in the trees alongside the river, sold on our plan. Kaitlyn and I followed immediately after, Norman after a lag, clearly a bit reluctant but quite willing to go along, if we can judge by his rapid erection on seeing the two nude women.
It took a good minute to slip into the river shallows up to our chests. Never mind that it’s a desert river, it was still a month from the start of summer, and the Colorado flows down out of the Rockies. The river water is still C-O-L-D here at this time of year! Norman lost his stiffy seconds after it dipped below the surface.
Once we were used to the frigid flow, we paddled around there in the shelter of the trees along that shore, which increased the speed of water past our bare skin, requiring another adjustment period.
After a car passed on the highway, Kaitlyn called in a low voice, nearly a whisper, “Let’s go!”
To the Alexanders, I added, “Go, you two. I’m the rear-guard.”
We swam for the opposite shore and reached it without any vehicle lights coming up or down the highway, so Kaitlyn immediately got out, followed by the Alexanders.
I was almost caught by the lights of a car coming down the canyon towards town, but I was able to scoot into tree cover behind Molly just in time.
The main difficulty was our charges’ tender feet. There’s plenty of poky little sticks and such in a tree-lined river bank, something Kaitlyn and I forget from time to time, our soles magically toughened to rival good sneakers. Kaitlyn managed to find a good sandy landing, though, the mouth of a small wash where water funneled into the river from the narrow canyon we sheltered in, so the Alexanders got up onto shore and behind the tree screen readily enough.
We used the further reaches of that wash as our massage area, much cooler than earlier in our back yard with the fading sunset over us, the stars beginning to peek out.
It was a dry massage, but the Alexanders seemed to enjoy it well enough. While we worked, we used the power of Gaia to heal their stressed muscles and tendons, knee and hip joints, relaxing their tensions away while giving them the benefit of the exercise without the full burden of pain.
“Oh, you are just amazing, Davie,” Molly murmured as I massaged the front of her thighs, having turned her over shortly before.
“Thank you.”
Norman was quite stiff before losing it to river shrinkage, so I wasn’t too surprised that he was standing tall again now that he had Kaitlyn working mother-bare atop him. She didn’t offer anything more than the massage, and Norman didn’t ask.
I think Molly took her cue from that, because although I felt her getting aroused, too, she didn’t try to start anything.
When we were done with the massage, I pulled Molly up into a spoon within the wash, and Norman followed my example with Kaitlyn, being taller than her. We just watched the stars, as crisp as they ever get at this altitude, no light pollution at all in the way.
Wordlessly, perhaps half an hour later, Kaitlyn and I got up together and led the Alexanders back to the river, where we slid back into the water much more quickly. For some reason, skinny-dipping’s easier the second time, even if you warm back up in between, as we had.
Our swim back to the other side of the Colorado knocked all the sand off, so we were left with only a thin coat of river silt from the muddy water and a slime of river-bottom mud on our feet. We just sort of strolled carefully among the trees, air-drying and enjoying the feeling of being nude in the night, not speaking but caressing each other, partly for the enjoyment of it, but also to spread the water out to make it dry faster.
When we got to the point that only our crevices were still wet, we used our riding shirts as towels to dry those bits, dressed, and got back on the road, now using our bike lights, me in the lead with the brightest headlight, Kaitlyn with a dazzler of a taillight bringing up the rear.
Being more downhill, we had an easier ride, but by the time we got back to camp, the Alexanders were tired and sweaty again. We four climbed into their motor home and quickly sprayed off the silt and sweat in their tiny shower. Kaitlyn and I could have managed well enough with a sand shower, but we saw no reason to raise suspicions by refusing their hospitality. Besides, it’d have meant going invisible inside the RV before opening the door, something we weren’t willing to show to the Alexanders just yet.
All of us now clean and dry, we gave them a second massage using our magical power reserves to heal their new riding soreness, draining the last of our magic to strengthen their bodies again, for tomorrow’s ride would be even harder!
Once the Alexanders began to look amorous, trading small caresses, we took that as our signal to leave for our tent. I cracked the door to the motor home, slipped a tendril of magical awareness out and scoped out the nearby camping spots. Finding no one about, I climbed out into the night, still quite nude, followed by Kaitlyn.
We carried our clothes to the tent, tossed them inside, charged ourselves back up there on the semi-natural camp spot’s pounded ground, healed our own biking soreness, and climbed in, zipping the tent door flap behind our bared butts.
I sent Kaitlyn into dreamland that night with my tongue, driving her delirious from the power of the orgasm, so that I barely got her into the bag before she was asleep.
I slipped in behind her, nestling my unrestrained erection in her gluteal softnesses and joined her in well-earned slumber.