PART 1: Fading Summer

Chapter 1: The Long Good-Bye

The Friday before Labor Day weekend would be Kaitlyn’s last day at work. She’d arranged a formal leave-of-absence that allowed her to return with her seniority and pension intact, though of course she’d be doing without pay while we were gone.

That was a week away, though. Today was August 29th, and we were spending the whole weekend at Kaitlyn’s parents’ house to celebrate Mama Mary’s birthday.

“Kate-love, so good to see you! And you, too, Big Davie!” her mother greeted us enthusiastically.

I grinned nervously and lowered my voice, “So is Little Davie…still in service?”

“He is, and you don’t need to whisper. I told Ramón all about it.”

“Dad’s not jealous or anything?” Kaitlyn asked.

“Well, dearie, he’s getting a bit on in years, you know,” Mary replied. “The old plumbing isn’t working entirely reliably any more. He’s happy to let me take care of myself from time to time.”

Little Davie was what Mary called the silicone dildo she’d bought after seeing me naked and erect once. She’d gone out of her way to find one exactly the same length, girth, and color as my cock. More about that story I will not say, but you might be able to find an account of the story somewhere else.

Kaitlyn and I shared a meaningful glance at Mary’s revelation. I suppose we shouldn’t have been surprised, but we surely hadn’t been thinking about whether her father had any erectile dysfunction when casting about for family members with health problems. Now that I thought about it, I wondered how many quietly hidden problems we’d uncover this weekend?

Mary urged us, “Come, come! You’ve got to see our retreat area! It’s coming along nicely.”

We walked through the house and out the back door. There off the patio was a large fenced-in chunk of their back yard, well-screened from view by outsiders. We walked in through the gate and saw…nothing but sand. I was disappointed, but I covered with, “Well, it looks like you’ve done a lot of work on it so far.”

“Oh, you have no idea,” Mary said. “That fence was a whole project by itself, and then we had to bring that sand in one wheelbarrow full at a time. And all of this during high summer. Oh, how we wanted to strip off and do the job in our skin, I’ll tell you that!”

Kaitlyn and I both smiled at the idea. Kaitlyn put my thoughts to words, “About the only protective clothing you needed for those two jobs was some leather gloves. Can you imagine Mrs. Johannsen seeing you working on the project like that?” The two smirked knowingly at each other.

“Well, we had to leave the project here as you see it. Harvest time’s coming up, and we’re running around doing all kinds of other things now.” Mary gave the area a wistful look. “We’ll get back to it next spring.” Then she turned to us, “So speaking of next spring, I hear you two are running away to Salt Lake until then?”

I answered that one, “Yeah, I’ve decided to use the cold months to get better at massage. It’s a skill I’ve always wanted to pick up. Well, I have some skill — you saw that at the wedding — but I want to get truly good at it, and with work dying off during the winter like it always does…” I trailed off, then added, “Well, in past years I did a lot of camping to use up all the free time I had each winter, but this year I’m going to do something more productive instead.”

“And how about you, Kate-love? You’re going with him?”

“Well, we are newly-wed, mother,” she pointed out. “Besides, I wanted to get good at it, too, so my choice is to either go with my new husband or be left behind for seven months just weeks into my marriage.” She shrugged expressively.

“Hmmpf. Well, I suppose you two know best,” Mary said, and started to lead us back inside.

I stopped her. “You’re skeptical, Mary; I get that. How about we show you where we are now, and you then imagine where we’ll be when we’re trained? Let us give you a massage.”

“Even better,” Kaitlyn put in, “you do mom, and I’ll do dad! You two have to be aching after all this prep first for harvest and now for this weekend. You’ve got to be wrecked, in fact. Let us help you two.”

Mary now looked openly skeptical, temporizing, “I’m a bit busy…”

“Please?” Kaitlyn asked.

“Oh, all right,” she said, sounding slightly exasperated. “Ramón!”

“¿Sí?” he called from inside the house.

“Please come back here! And bring the mineral oil!”

When he emerged, carrying the requested supplies, we called him into the unfinished retreat area with us, closing the fence gate behind him.

“Good to see you, Ramón,” I greeted my father-in-law, grasping his hand.

“Y tú, Daví,” he said with a grin, pronouncing my nickname as it might well be rendered in Spanish.

“Daddy, you heard that Davie and I are going off to massage school, right? We want to show you what we can do now, so you can be properly impressed when we come back, knowing where we started from. But we think we’re pretty good now, so it probably won’t be a complete waste of time,” Kaitlyn said, trying to achieve modesty and failing.

“And I suppose you want us two stripped for this?” Mary asked.

“Actually, we’re intending to make it a specialty of our practice: both client and therapist nude,” Kaitlyn replied.

“You think you can get away with that?” her mother asked worriedly.

“Why not? It’s a private arrangement between two adults. As long as we’re not trading sex for money, it should all be okay, right?” Kaitlyn reasoned.

Ramón objected to that, “I think the authorities would have something to say about it. If you work nude, you’ll probably be subject to the same laws they passed regulating strip clubs and such.”

We were silent for a while, then I said, “He’s right, Kaitlyn. We’re going to have to come up with another plan.”

Undeterred, she said, “Well, this is a private affair, and we’re doing this massage nude!” She took a breath, then seeing no more objections, said, “Okay, quit stalling, you two. Strip!”

The four of us began peeling down, Mary becoming the center of attention as we set our outer garments aside a piece at a time. Kaitlyn spoke first, referring to the modestly lacy full-coverage teal underwear Mary was revealing to us: “Those are nice, mom!”

Mary harrumphed. “This massage of yours is kind of ruining a surprise, Kate-girl: I bought these last week, and I kept them hidden for tonight, intending to show Ramón first. Not that it’s any of your business, you two, but we kind of have a tradition of giving each other little reverse birthday gifts. This is mine to him this year.”

He gathered his wife up into a full-body embrace, the two of them in their underwear, and he said, “Lovely bows and wrappings on my lovely young wife.”

“Ooooh, flatterer!” she accused, smacking him comically on his bare chest, leaning back from the embrace.

“It’s true. You’re still 19 here,” he said, tapping his temple.

Mary continued to lean back, looking him in his eyes for a time, then melted back into his embrace and kissed him long, slow, and sweet.

The two were so gooey-eyed afterward that I expected to see a string of caramel syrup stretch between them as their fingertips separated.

“Awwwww!” cooed Kaitlyn, hands clasped into a pillow under her tilted head, her parents blushing at her now.

I just grinned along with her, hoping we’d be like that at their age.

As the elder Gutierrez couple separated themselves from their scanties, Kaitlyn’s mother came up with another objection. “No towels?”

I took this one. “That’s another thing we hope to specialize in. Kaitlyn and I have been doing each other on the warm sand, and we like it that way. The oil makes the sand stick to it, but it’s nice to be rubbed down to clean off the sand afterward. We’re thinking of making it a feature of our practice, not a problem to be avoided.” This explanation appeared to satisfy them, so I continued, “In fact, we’re thinking of using something like the setup you’ve got going here, where we do the massages outside in the sun whenever possible.”

“Ah, so we’re your guinea pigs,” Ramón put in drolly as he lowered himself to the sand.

“Don’t worry little piggy, you’ll like it!” his daughter answered impertinently. He swatted playfully at her ankles from his prone position.

Kaitlyn and I began to strip as well, placing all of the clothing off in one far corner of the retreat area, laying our ‘clients’ out in the center, side-by-side. We slipped into a trance and merged into rapport with each other and with Gaia, both to better manage the healing power flow but also so we could show each other what we were seeing without using words. What one saw and felt in that state, the other did as well.

We began our work with a straight massage, paying little attention to what the other was working on, but as our clients began to relax and slide into a comfortable space, Kaitlyn’s attention began to drift to me, and I felt her join me, so I began probing her mother’s body for problems.

The first things I found were the obvious ones. She’d lived a life of manual labor on the farm, and being middle-aged, she had all kinds of daily aches and pains that she’d just learned to live with. I’d never heard her complain about it, so I wondered if she’d simply gotten used to this constant background level of unease. Once I was sure I had Kaitlyn’s full attention, I began to slowly fix these problems: I rebuilt cartilage, polished rough joint surfaces, firmed up osteoporotic bones… I gave her a complete skeletal tune-up.

Then I indicated to Kaitlyn, wordlessly through the bond, “Now you. Go carefully.”

I then turned my attention to Kaitlyn’s view of her father and watched her apply similar techniques to his problems. They were of an age, and they shared much of the work, so naturally they shared several health problems as well.

Our clients began to groan with the release. Mary spoke up, “My goodness Davie! You say you’re untrained?”

I replied quietly, not wanting to break the mood, “We both are, and we aim to get better.”

“I’m not sure I can handle better. This is amazing as it is!”

“We’ll see,” Kaitlyn replied with a small smile.

We had them flip over, then gently and artistically dusted the sand off using techniques we’d developed between ourselves, and were gratified to see their smiles of delight at this new feeling.

I delved back into Mary’s body, looking deeper than before. I found a lot of particulate matter in her lungs, doubtless from living in this dusty climate, around so many bags of powdered this and that. Catching Kaitlyn’s attention, I loosened as much of this as I could, encouraging it to rise up out of the deep alveoli, moved upward within the lungs to where it could be expelled. Mary began coughing, so I had her get into doggy position. “Cough it out. Get it all out. This is good. Don’t be embarrassed.” All the while, I was stroking her and moving particulates up and out, healing her throat the while before it could become raw.

“Whew, I don’t know what got into me!” Mary said, gasping. “Maybe I sucked some dust down when turning over?”

I didn’t say anything, just shrugged my shoulders and had her resume her position on her back, soothing her jangled nerves.

Kaitlyn began repeating my actions and soon had Ramón coughing in doggy position, too. “For some reason,” cough hack “This feels…” wheeze kak “…good!” Ramón told his daughter.

“Let it up and out. Feel that clean air pulled in!” she encouraged him.

I’d begun massaging Mary’s breasts by this point, distracting her from her husband’s plight. As soon as he’d calmed, she began to moan softly. I caressed her all over, feeling her body’s tension relax from her core outward.

Kaitlyn and I fixed numerous small problems like that, all symptoms of life, not diseases per se: stomach erosions that would eventually turn into ulcers, a weakening heart, recalcitrant bowels… I cleared up as much as I could see with my limited training and skill.

And then I noticed it. Deep in Mary’s core, behind the stomach, something that just wasn’t right. ‘That’s her pancreas, isn’t it?’ I thought to myself. ‘That thing there… It shouldn’t be there!’ I took a quick magical look inside the three other bodies I had for comparison and confirmed that no such lump was there in any of the rest of us. Besides which, it just felt wrong to my mage senses; it didn’t belong!

I attracted Kaitlyn’s attention to it, and her face fell. It had to be cancer, didn’t it? What else could it be?

“Fix it, Davie!” she urged me through the bond.

“I can’t,” I objected mentally. “Not this way, anyway. The body doesn’t know how to heal cancer: it’s a hijacking of the body’s normal processes. Normal healing will just accelerate its growth!”

“Dammit, Davie, fix her!” she shouted at me in my head, shaking the bond.

I knew what I had to do then.

I began to intensify the massage, turning it from purely therapeutic into the erotic. I didn’t go straight for her genitals, but I didn’t have to: I had the power of Gaia. I simply turned the massage in a more sensual direction using the feedback from Mary’s own feelings to guide me. I focused on the lesser erogenous zones: the bottoms of her feet, the backs of her knees, her flanks, her armpits, her neck. I teased around her breasts and crotch, and then began rubbing in toward these centers with slowly increasing purpose without ever hitting those final areas that Americans so strangely call ‘naughty bits.’ I didn’t see anything naughty about them, but maybe that’s because I did not learn English as my first language.

I touched these areas not only with my hands but also using the techniques I’d developed down on Lake Powell with Kaitlyn, which I called the “mage egg,” since the initial application had been to magically replicate the effect produced by a remote-controlled vibrating egg sex toy that Kaitlyn’s mother had given us as a gift at our wedding. I learned to bring Kaitlyn to rapid orgasm by magical stimulation of her clitoral nerves without touching her body: in effect, my mind was the remote-controlled vibrating egg.

Extending this idea to other erogenous zones was trivial, but the specific application here meant that I set Mary’s body afire with erotic touch, simultaneously stimulating her in dozens of places, more than I had limbs or fingers to reach at once. I was subtle about it, but there was no denying the effect it had on her: she was getting very, very wet!

As the intensity of the erotic massage built, Mary looked up at me in surprise, but when I just smiled back, she began to relax into the flow of the sensations. Then she looked at Kaitlyn, and she smiled at her mother as well, so Mary began to relax even more. Finally, Ramón put out his hand toward her, and this long-married couple communicated on a level that I hoped Kaitlyn and I would one day achieve. Mary’s eyes finally closed again, a widening smile on her face.

“Ummmmfhh…” she groaned. “Oh, Davie, that’s so nice! Ahhhhh…”

I kept an erection away with my meditation-honed willpower, but I could see I was turning Ramón on, hearing his wife get turned on. He was smiling a bit, too.

When I’d gone about as far as I could short of outright sexual contact, I brought the massage to a tapering close, then said, “That’s about as far as I can take this, Mama Mary. How are you feeling?”

“Devindra Sanjay Bhat, you can’t just leave me like that!” she barked.

I’d never had her use my full name at me in anger before.

I decided simply to glance at her husband meaningfully.

“Ah, I see.” She lay her head back on the sand and thought for several seconds, then she said to Ramón, “You remember my tale about Little Davie, husband mine?”

He just nodded as well as he could, lying on his back as Kaitlyn continued to work on his body.

“I… I need to ask a huge favor. Of both of you,” she said, looking between Ramón and Kaitlyn.

“¿Sí, mi corazón?” Ramón answered, almost overlapped with “Yes, mother?” from Kaitlyn.

“I have to have him. Just this once. Please?” Mary asked, pain and desire at war on her face. “It is my birthday, after all!”

“Of course you can have a slice of my chocolate cake,” Kaitlyn replied, giving a loving stroke over her mother’s belly. “I’ve known you’ve wanted a piece for months now, and today’s a perfect day for it.”

“Ramón?” she asked, a pleading look in her eyes.

He looked steadily at me, and I just tried to look neutral, neither taking sides nor in any way threatening his position in this household. He must have liked what he saw, because he responded to her entreaty with, “Sí, pero no aquí.”

I decided it was time for me to insert myself into this negotiation. “Of course we won’t do that here, Mr. Gutierrez, especially with guests expected. I will not hurt either of you, and part of that means being discreet. She just has to get this out of her system.”

Ramón drew a deep breath and nodded. “I’m trusting you with the love of my life, son.”

“Yes, sir. And I recall how well you grouped your shots on those targets a few months back,” I replied, trying for a smile.

I got one. “Damn straight, kiddo. You just keep that in mind.”

“Thank you!” we both said to him. I didn’t send my thanks to Kaitlyn through the bond, it was the other way around. She knew what I was up to and who was the prime mover here.