Chapter 22: Two to Grow By
We’d spent several evenings leading up to this retreat canvassing the local hotels, restaurants, museums and such.
We weren’t surprised by the number of double-takes we got when they opened those flyers up to inspect them and found the photos of scantily-clad and implied-nude people inside, but we wouldn’t’ve guessed how often they connected one of the photos to the clothed supplicants standing before them! This usually worked in our favor, particularly when it was Kaitlyn they identified first. Even when they got huffy and rushed us out, it was entertaining enough to keep us pounding the pavement on that basis alone.
Those open to our business ideals generally required some persuasion before they’d let us displace other brochures from the crowded stands gracing their lobbies. Free massages for the management usually pulled the trick. A few set up later appointments, but most took it right there and then in a room on-site, particularly the hoteliers.
We didn’t mind the freebies: our efforts got the word out. Besides, massage isn’t the sort of service where a single session tides the customer over for months or years. Freebies frequently elicited further service appointments, so the work paid off almost immediately.
We were packing up our things in Kaitlyn’s room at the B&B after the Avery people left that evening when I realized, “Hey, we missed this place while canvassing last week. We’re here now; wanna do a few more freebies?”
“Lemme go take a walk in the garden,” she replied, implying that she’d need to heal up first.
I walked out with her, and under cover of a barefoot stroll on the cool lawn we magically worked the kinks out of our backs and the stiffness out of our hands in a few seconds each. An observer might have guessed that we were breathing in the scents of the greenery around us, and they’d be right, but they’d be missing the main fact: we were breathing deep sighs of relief.
Back inside, we found one member of the married couple who owned the B&B busy with a new arrival, but the wife came over and asked, “Can I help you with something?”
Kaitlyn answered, “We were packing our things up and wondered if you two would like a massage before we leave. No charge.”
“Oh! Well, evenings can be a bit busy with the new arrivals…” she temporized.
Her husband called over the shoulders of a couple at the check-in desk, “Go! I’ve got this, Noreen.”
“Well, I guess I’ll meet you in…um…”
“Room 8,” I prompted, having nearly finished packing my things up in Room 7 already, so only Kaitlyn’s setup was still ready to use.
The woman went down the hall ahead of us, through our makeshift curtain, and past the door to the massage room. She turned to ask, “I assume you want me showered and bare?”
“Showered, yes,” my wife answered, “but we can work on you in any state of dress. Massage does work best when you’re bare, but…”
The other woman appeared not to need further explanation, because she quirked her mouth up, nodded, turned, and headed for the bathroom.
As Kaitlyn and I were resetting for a four-handed massage, I told her, “We need candles for night massages.”
“Those kit bags are going to get a lot heavier, aren’t they?”
“Gonna have to get rollers for them soon,” I joked.
The co-owner of the place emerged shortly, bare and towel-less, but dry.
We lay her down and were curling her toes when she said, “We saw what went on here last night.”
There were at least three major events she could be referring to, so I said, “Oh?”
She explained, “Jim and I often relax in the garden after the guests begin to settle down, but we arrived to find half-a y’all in yer skin and half in yer undies!”
Since Dr. Condon and Mr. Avery didn’t bring it up at this morning’s meeting, I assumed no one complained to them about it, so I guessed, “This didn’t bother you, I trust?”
“Mr., ummm…” she began.
“Davie,” I supplied. “Just Davie, please.”
“Well, Davie,” the woman said as Kaitlyn and I were working her shoulders, “it was a bit of a shock, but we make it a policy not to get up in our guest’s business. We’re more or less renting our guests a temporary home, after all, and we don’t go around telling people what they can do in their own home, right? We draw the line at illegal stuff, but you were being quiet out there, so we left you be.” Then she sighed deeply as we moved up to the back of her neck.
While I was wondering whether this woman would have left us alone if she’d come out to find Carolyn and I alone on the lawn, Kaitlyn took up the conversational thread, “We thank you for your discretion, ma’am. We were simply stargazing, cooling off in the evening air.”
The woman retorted, “Never done that in my skin!”
In a quiet gentle tone, my wife opined, “You should.”
The two of us had returned to her lower back, working downward from there, ramping up onto her fleshy buns when she finally replied, “Not with all these strangers staying in the place.”
I asked, “Do you ever go nights without any guests?”
“Not in peak tourist season like this,” she replied, “but around late September, early October the occupancy starts thinning. That room overlooking the garden always goes last, though, so even then…”
My wife offered, “We’d welcome you two out for a couples massage at our house in the evening. If you take the last slot of the day, you could stay out afterward and do…whatever. Davie and I could go back inside and sort of return the favor, you know?”
“Tempting,” the woman replied.
We were speaking of B&B management issues when her husband arrived, just after we’d turned her over onto her back. He watched the show from the doorway, clearly keeping an ear cocked down the hall for the desk bell or footfalls in the hallway.
As we were finishing with his wife, he slipped away and got showered himself, arriving with his wife’s clothes in his arms, his evidently left behind in the bathroom.
They traded places on the table, and the wife sat on the back of a chair by the doorway, her feet on its seat so she could see down onto the high massage table, remaining undressed. She kept her knees far enough apart that her inner labia opened, showing a bit of pink.
Her husband asked, “Aren’t you going to watch the desk?”
“That was the last reservation you were handling, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll hear the bell,” she said, and he just grunted in acknowledgement.
No one disturbed us, so the woman — a Mrs. Noreen Howard we later learned — did not dress until shortly before we finished with Jim, her husband.
Kaitlyn got Noreen to accept a sheaf of brochures for their display stand in the lobby, and we got not only fervent promises of referrals from them but also an appointment for a nighttime couples massage the following week!