Chapter 35: Training Montage
Vin moved in with Jess as planned over that Winter Break, Kaitlyn and I putting his things away while they drove back for the second load, a beat-up foosball table he’d rescued from a curb and had taken on as a restoration hobby. Kaitlyn wouldn’t let me leave the house nude again in broad daylight, little meanie that she is, and I wasn’t willing to break my nude streak just to help her brother move his meager belongings in, he having left most of his pre-college things back in Moab.
After we’d put the last of Vin’s things away, Jess proposed a Scrabble game night to celebrate and relax.
The three of us were wary since she’d thoroughly stomped us in this game back at our wedding after-party last summer, but Kaitlyn came up with the answer. “How about we invite the Wellingtons over? We’ve been meaning to visit with them while up here, but we’ve been too busy. Five against one, we ought to have a chance at beating the word nerd.”
“I’ll take that challenge,” answered Jess with a cheeky grin.
Vin asked, “Can we even do six-person Scrabble? It’s two to four players, right?”
“I’ve got two game sets, the deluxe one we’ve played with before and an older one I got for Christmas as a kid once,” Jess explained. “We’ll just take two trays from the older game. The game plays fine that way as long as the two tallest are at the ends of the dining table so they can stretch to reach the board.”
That would be Robbie Wellington and I, then. I was a couple of inches taller than Vin, and Robbie another inch taller than me.
The Wellingtons were the empty-nesters we’d stayed with for a night while up here in Salt Lake last summer, so we definitely owed them a return of the favor. Kaitlyn also knew they would not object to my chosen mode of dress, so I offered, “Sounds like a great idea.” Then with a wry grin, I added, “Maybe offer them some consolation massages after Jess beats us anyway.”
Kaitlyn got on the phone and arranged things, telling them, “Come as you are, even if that means naked.” I heard a tinny laugh from her smartphone’s speaker.
While we waited for our guests to arrive, Kaitlyn got busy making dinner and setting up our massage things out in the living room while the rest of us hit the showers: me alone in the downstairs bathroom, Jess and Vin together in her master bath.
Those two were setting the table — still bare and shower-fresh — when the doorbell rang. Kaitlyn and I had swapped roles, and I was in the middle of finishing the massage setup at the time, so since I knew our guests would adequately block the doorway, screening me from public view as I got them inside, I decided to answer the door nude.
“Come on in, baby take a load off! Come on in, baby take your clothes off!” I sing-songed in greeting to the tune of an old Oak Ridge Boys song, recalling the way they’d greeted me at their house last summer.
Robbie and Sandra Wellington did arrive dressed, laughing at my antics, but their clothes didn’t make it any farther into Jess’ house than the front room.
After dinner, Jess did indeed stomp us flat in Scrabble, winning the first two games by a comfortable margin.
In the third and final game of the night, she played “coupling” down one side of the board where the 3-point “P” landed on a double-letter score and the “U” was reused from a prior play, allowing Jess to play all 7 of her letters from one triple word score to the other, giving her a nine-times multiplier for her word’s score plus the 50-point bingo bonus for a grand total of 194 points. Jess leaned back in her chair triumphant, smiling from ear to ear while we groaned.
“So, I guess we’re now playing for second place?” I asked the group wryly, for Jess could have sat on her hands the rest of the game and still won.
After we’d put away the game, Jess said, “You all are welcome to stay as long as you want, but I’m off to claim my prize. C’mon Captain, to the bedroom!”
After the rapid thump-thump of four bare feet faded away upstairs, Sandra asked, “Captain?”
We smiled, and my wife explained, “A pet name. Beyond that, not our secret to tell.”
Sandra said, “Ah,” then to change the subject commented, “Mary called at Christmas. She said you two were getting awfully good at this,” motioning expressively at the massage tables.
“We’ll let you be the judge,” Kaitlyn replied modestly.
While we worked our clients, we talked to them about their further nudist adventures. The freshest news we’d had was of their neighbors seeing them get out of their SUV in their driveway after driving home from participating in the WNBR wearing nothing but body paint. We’d instigated that but had to leave that same day, so we hadn’t been there to see it, hearing of it only afterward through Mary. They reported having several skinny-dipping and BBQ parties over the remainder of that summer with the neighbors to either side of their house, the ones that had caught them that day, growing much closer over that time.
We kept that massage entirely therapeutic, this couple still being near-strangers to us, and they gave no clear signals that they wanted us to take it further. Robbie got an erection from Kaitlyn’s ministrations, and I sensed some arousal from Sandra both by smell and by magical delving, but these are normal reactions, so we didn’t pursue them.
Part of their reaction might have been to a sequence of thumps heard through the living room ceiling, from the direction of Jess and Vin’s bedroom, but they said nothing of it.
“As Jess said, you two are welcome to stay the night,” I said, re-extending my friend’s invitation. “I think that couch over there converts to a pull-out bed.”
“Thanks, Davie,” Robbie told me, getting up off his massage table, “but I think we two need to get home to our own bed.” He handed his wife up off her table, hugged her, and nuzzled at her neck.
“Yep, our bed is calling to us,” she confirmed, and I knew they weren’t complaining of being tired just yet.
They thanked us for everything, dressed, left, and let Kaitlyn and I find our own bed.
We weren’t soon tired that night, either.
Classes resumed several days later on the first Monday of the new year, so I was finally forced to dress again that morning, twelve days past the time I stripped off in Moab after I gave Ann her first mage-massage.
“Next year,” I told Kaitlyn, “I’m going for two weeks solid. You in?”
She grinned back, “Yeah, me boyo, I’ll give you a run for that record!”
“Now I almost want to lose the contest!”
Holiday season was over, so there were no more trips down to Moab, no more big parties with the Alexanders. The next several months were therefore less eventful, but we did make progress in several areas.
We worked hard in school, knocking off credit hour after credit hour. We were certain we’d graduate now. It was just a matter of putting in the work, and we had that down now, fully in the groove.
We continued expanding our magic skills in the cold winter evenings out in Jess’ back yard, and when it got too bitterly cold to work out there, we bundled up in the living room and worked on our magewear, turning out several complete working outfits each, the designs now perfected.
While we worked at our sewing, Jess and Vin usually played their RPG console games on the living room’s big flat panel while we spectated. Jess continued to spend most of her time working on her Meepo the Kobold character. Vin ended up going through several characters before settling on a new guy he called Magic Merlon, who complemented Meepo quite well. It was rather sweet to watch this mutual accommodation; they were growing closer.
Vin’s cohabitation with Jess shifted our arrangements around considerably. Rather than being a special event whenever he came over, the four of us spending these rare evenings together before retiring, the pattern shifted to Jess and Vin spending more of their time together. We four still socialized, but there was now a bigger gulf between the couples, the partners in each binding closer together. Overall, Kaitlyn and I decided this was a good thing: it meant our housemates’ experiment was working.
Kaitlyn and I grew closer as well. We used some of our alone time to empirically discover where the magic came from when doing sex magic on empty reserves: after several carefully repeated experiments — yes, experiments, not wild monkey-love sessions, definitely hard-nosed scientific experiments! — we saw no evidence that the magic was pulled directly from our partner, draining them somehow. The partner was necessary, but observation showed that the magic was generated by the very act of sexual intercourse, much as moving a magnet past a coil of copper wire generates electricity. The hotter the sex, the more magic we generated per unit time.
The clincher was when Kaitlyn and I both drained ourselves magically before having sex one night, finding that we were able to simultaneously refill our reserves from the energy of the act itself. The math simply didn’t allow the mechanism to be one of draining: it had to be generation.
“You know what this means, Davie?” Kaitlyn asked after a very successful experiment, one which had left me sweating on the bed, collapsed next to my wife’s equally sweat-slicked body.
“Mfff?” I grunted into the pillow I’d buried my face in.
“It means we can do sex magic continuously in bed now! We have to be careful with our positions so as to not ground out the magic on the sheets and such, but we can repeatedly charge ourselves up, dump the magic into our partner, then go back to charging up, working until they’re fully healed!”
“That or the patient cries, ‘Enough, enough!’” I laughed back.
Of course, this only worked while sex magic was involved. Simple massage turned out to generate so little magic that it was a net drain for us to magically monitor the client’s body. That meant that once we went into professional practice, we would still have to go outside to recharge from time to time.
We continued to massage Jess at least weekly per our agreement, and Vin got more of these now as well, being around more of the time. We kept it mainly physical and therapeutic, having already gotten them to as near the peak of health as we could, months back now. The only way to take them higher was with diet and exercise.
Vin was still fairly fit from his time growing up on the farm, but the past months of living up here and going to school had taken some toll.
Jess was much worse off, not having seriously exercised since her last PE class in high school, four years prior, after which she’d gone straight into the rat race, having won a high tech job purely on the strength of skills she’d honed as a lifelong computer geek.
We solved both problems as the weather warmed, taking up practical martial arts training in the back yard, the four of us holding informal classes back there three nights a week. I led most of these, having had some formal training in years past, but the other three led the occasional class, attempting to pass along techniques they’d seen in Internet videos. This may sound like a poor way to go about it, but we found that the best way to learn a skill is to try to teach it to someone else. If we’d been working alone, it would indeed have been a bad way to learn martial arts, but by working together we moved rapidly through the skill acquisition process.
You, dear reader, might wonder why we spent so much of our precious free time in martial arts training with our housemates, thinking that we did not need it ourselves, being mages, but that’s simply backwards. A mage’s bodily control is excellent in a Gaia trance, but there’s still no substitute for trained-in muscle-deep reflexes. Self defense using only our magical bodily control is cerebral: I see you moving toward me, I think about what I want to do in response, and I finally enact my plan. By that time, if my opponent is any good, I’m clobbered. Gaia gymnastics are great for getting to the fight and getting back out, but once battle is joined, it’s all down to training and reflexes. The two skill sets complimented each other wonderfully.
We began these martial training nights in loose sweats, stripping layers off as we went to maintain a fairly constant level of bodily warmth, making up the delta with our exertions. Noisy as we were, we never got down past our underwear while training, but as the weather increasingly permitted, we’d sneak off each night after the training session to a dark corner of the yard to massage our pains away.
One side benefit of martial arts training with mages is that full-contact sparring becomes practical even for amateurs like ourselves. Kaitlyn and I learned a lot about healing that way, fixing strains and sprains almost every training night, bloody noses most nights, internal bleeding several times, broken bones twice, and once even a dislocated shoulder. We weren’t trying to hurt each other, we were trying to get to the point where we could a) avoid getting hurt ourselves; and b) inflict no more damage on an assailant than was necessary to stop the action.
These healing massages were necessarily done scantily clad at most and usually fully nude, healer and patient, but I didn’t think we were ever caught. Yet, who can really say? None of our neighbors ever complained about it, at least.
In addition to staving off the Freshman Spread for Vin and melting the excess pounds off of Jess, these martial arts sessions had another useful side benefit for Kaitlyn and I, which is that they kept up our muscle tone through the winter. We rode our bikes to classes as often as we could, but between severe winter weather and the occasional need to take our tables to the school for a class, we didn’t get nearly as much winter riding in as we would have down in Moab.
When they make the movie of our lives, this is the part where they’ll play a pop rock soundtrack over the training montage. It’ll be ninety seconds in the movie, covering nearly three months of our time up in Salt Lake.