Utterly Open & Honest

Chapter 40: Utterly Open & Honest

The wedding principals began arriving soon after.

I was standing beside the small stage we’d set up in the center of the wash, Allison’s wedding ring nestled atop a small decorative pillow, Joss nervously between me and the “altar,” a small table covered with a chaste white cloth, waiting for the appearance of the bride. Everyone else was here and in position, save the Gutierrez sisters.

I heard a familiar bliquireep sound from the side of the canyon where Vin stood, a handheld radio to his mouth, speaking quietly into it.

Seconds after, we heard the sound of mi burro’s engine start from around the next bend down-canyon, shortly followed by the appearance of same, Kaitlyn driving her sister up in a stately crawl to where Ramón was waiting to take his younger daughter on the most momentous walk of her life thus far. Allison was radiant in her ornate white wedding dress.

While Allison exchanged a few words with her father before he gave her away, Kaitlyn cut the FJ’s engine and scooted quickly around the seats to take her position as maid — hah! — of honor and ring bearer opposite me on the stage. She was outshone today, my wife’s beautiful bridesmaid’s dress not a patch on the bridal dress, but that was as it should be.

Their brother Miguel sat on a Navajo rug beside the stage, his Spanish guitar ready, and he began playing a flourish-filled rendition of Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” as his father walked his sister sedately down the sand aisle, between the chairs and up onto the stage where Joss waited beside Minister Jasper Poulsen, presiding.

After the last gentle plucks of Miguel’s guitar strings reverberated away down-canyon, Poulsen began, “Friends and family, we are here for the wedding of Allison Jodie Gutierrez to Joss Westley Taylor. Allison, Joss, is it still your intention to be wed in the nude?”

“It is,” they chorused.

“Please, then, reveal yourself in fullness to your friends and family.”

Miguel began playing a tune I’d never heard. Was it something he had composed or an existing one selected by Allison? Either way, it was lovely and fitting.

Allison moved first as ever, placing her bridal bouquet on the altar and removing Joss’ black bow tie, tossing it negligently in the center of the white altar-table.

Joss nervously removed his betrothed’s veil, carefully draping it along the edge of the altar nearest to himself.

Allison unbuttoned his tux jacket, removed it, and draped it on the altar beside her veil.

Joss walked formally behind her and unbuttoned her dress, but left it hanging from her shoulders.

She sunk down into a careful squat, removing his black shoes and socks without losing the dress.

Joss in turn removed his bride’s white shoes, leaving the long stockings where they were, for the moment.

Allison removed her groom’s cummerbund, laying it atop the jacket.

Joss leaned in and asked his betrothed a question, which we were just close enough to hear: “Allison, my love, may I remove your dress, please?”

“You may,” she answered, and he slowly, reverently, gently slipped the unfastened dress from her shoulders, revealing her wedding underwear, all white, chaste, and lacy. After Ali stepped away from Joss, out of the dress pooled around her feet, he hung it on the same juniper tree that had served this role in our wedding, the extra-long branches we’d “encouraged” the tree to grow still extending beyond the rest. Gaia’s own coat hooks.

The wedding party sighed at this exhibition, and Joss bowed to Allison on his way back to the stage from hanging up her dress.

Allison unbuttoned his dress shirt without asking, not a sign of objection appearing in his eyes from the first button pop to the time she laid it atop the rest of his things there before us.

Joss slipped the garter down Allison’s leg and shot it over his head blindly into the middle of the group, where Sherry caught it. Jasper raised an eyebrow, and I saw a quiver of anticipation quirk his mouth.

Joss stayed at his wife-to-be’s feet, unclasped her silk stockings from the garter belt, and allowed them to sigh down her legs by gravity alone. He removed them with grave ceremony, placing them at the corners of the table.

She unclasped his belt and slipped it out of the loops, laying it over his other things on the altar.

Joss removed the garter belt, leaving the couple in two things each.

For the first time ever in my experience, Allison knelt servilely before Joss, and she looked a question up at him. He nodded, so she unclasped his pants, unzipped them, and looked back up again. He repeated his nod, and she slid them down slowly, fully under her control, revealing his black silk boxers, which exhibited distinct tenting!

“Down, boy,” she joked softly.

Miguel reduced the already-soft volume of his playing to hear the groom’s answer.

“With the most beautiful woman in the world kneeling before me in her underwear? I think not,” Joss replied with mock dismissal, eliciting a chuckle from both sets of parents, in the front row as they were.

He helped her up with a chivalrous hand, spun her like a dancer, her back to his front, the couple now looking out into the audience, letting her hand go as she took a half step forward to give him the access he needed to unclasp her ornate full-coverage brassiere, easily the sartorial equal of her dress. He held the unclasped strap ends until she nodded, then slipped the covering off of her firm young B-cups, displaying them to us, eliciting another sigh.

Allison walked out along the stage’s periphery, then back in towards Joss, ending up beside him, facing him, giving us all a good look at her toplessness. There, she sunk artfully to one knee as he spun slowly to face her. She hooked her fingers into his waistband on her way down, looking up at him for his final approval once she was fully kneeling. He nodded, and she yanked the boxers down sharply in order to create a sproing effect on his erection, initially causing laughs, but I led the audience in a round of light applause. He turned pink as he handed his fiancée up from her kneeling position before him.

Perhaps to hide his embarrassment, he knelt much quicker than she had, but he looked back up at her with even more reverence, his hands clasped before himself, not touching her until she nodded her approval, waiting for it a second time between touching her panties’ waistband and beginning to pull on them, inching them ever so slowly down.

Allison stepped out of her pooled panties, turned to face her friends and family, and stepped out into a star pose, wordlessly communicating, “This is me!” to us. Joss joined her in the pose, his erection still raging, the panties in the hand not holding Allison’s own. Miguel’s song rose to a finishing crescendo through this sequence, ending in a loud strumming finale, his performance earning the audience’s enthusiastic applause.

They separated, turned, and faced Minister Poulsen, Joss laying the panties atop the pile, the final offering upon the altar, Allison once again picking up her bridal bouquet, now her only concealment.

Poulsen spoke, “Joss Westley Taylor, do you take the woman presented before us to be your wife, to cherish and protect her, to love her to the end of your days?”

“I do,” he said, nearly fumbling the wedding ring I presented to him, placing it nervously upon Allison’s finger.

“And do you, Allison Jodie Gutierrez take the man presented before us to be your husband, to cherish and protect him, to love him to the end of your days?”

“I do,” she said, almost doing the same with the ring Kaitlyn offered upon a small decorative pillow, her hand shaking worse than that of the man heartbeats from being her husband.

“Then by the power vested in me by the State of Utah, I pronounce you husband and wife! You may kiss.”

And boy did they kiss! I am certain they did not hear the first few bars of Miguel’s vigorous rendition of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, recast in mariachi style, but when they broke apart, our applause was just dying out, and they ran down the aisle amidst a shower of birdseed, their bits in full wobble mode.

---

The couple paused when they were out beyond the seats, then waited for us to gather behind their bare backsides. Allison took a peek over her shoulder and launched her bridal bouquet out into the group, where Sherry caught it.

“What does that mean? To catch both, I mean?” I whispered to Kaitlyn. I knew what it meant to catch the garter and bouquet separately, but…

“She has a hunting license to go after Poulsen now,” my wife informed me with a grin. “He’s helpless against her mojo. The only decision left is hers: when to pull the trigger.”

---

The couple briefly re-dressed in their wedding clothes — sans underwear — for a series of formal photographs done by my friend Jess, but then Allison said, “All right, that’s enough of that. Now I want a series with the two of us nude again, the rest of you clothed!”

This they did, making a more extensive series than the formals, the happy couple alone, then grouped with each meaningful combination: the whole wedding party, Gutierrez family only, the couple with the Taylors, Allison with Kaitlyn and Carmen, and on and on.

That done, she called out, “Now everyone get naked, and we do it all again!”

All of us there were comfortable with this to various degrees except for the Taylors. Anticipating their objection, I confidently told them, “These photos will be for us here alone, not shared outside the family. Consider that you will also have photos of us in your own collection.”

With that, they stripped along with us, and we did another series of photo shoots, several considerably more exuberantly posed than the corresponding ones in the earlier shoots.

---

The wedding lunch was much the same as for ours last year, with two major differences.

The first being that Joss substituted his family’s Hawaiian whole-pig roasting recipe for the ceramic smoker BBQ we’d done last year. His father did it in their back yard, starting it about midnight and then sleeping outside in a hammock with a shotgun nearby to keep feral animals away from the succulent smells as it cooked all night and into the late morning. They dug it up, wrapped it, and brought it out to the wedding still warm and juicy. Amazing!

This wasn’t a secret, though, being one of the major items on the wedding plan, so much like a Thanksgiving turkey, a part of its magic was sapped by anticipation.

Therefore, the dish that caused the most buzz was actually Kaitlyn’s garden salad. Of those in the wedding party, only we two had sampled the new garden’s first-harvest vegetables to this point, and we hadn’t told anyone about their amazing flavor.

It turns out, vegetables magically fertilized with love make better salads. Won’t find that recipe with a web search, though.

---

After lunch, Vin called, “Massage time!” and towed Jess off to the designated massage area after him.

Through the mage bond, Kaitlyn asked me, «Did Jess get contacts?»

«As far as you know, yes.»

She gave me a playful shove as I felt her slip a tendril of magic into her friend’s body. Not finding anything artificial up top other than a few fillings, she guessed again, «Lasik?»

I waggled my eyebrows at my wife.

«You didn’t!»

«I did.»

Kaitlyn slipped an arm around me, then perhaps to divert curiosity about our subtextual interactions declaimed, “¡Á donde va Vicente, va la gente!” then stage-whispered a translation to me, knowing I was most likely to need it: “Where Vincent goes, everyone goes,” and explained. “Just a silly old Spanish rhyme.”

---

“Joss, Allison, this is my friend from Salt Lake, Jessica Jevgenijeva. Vin’s living with her, going to school for computer science.”

As handshakes were exchanged across the sand, Vin spoke in an affected Australian outback accent, “Joss & Jess…that’s going to cause a little confusion. Mind if we call you Bruce, to keep it clear?”

Only Jess and I smiled at his paraphrase of the famous comedy bit. I realized that we were surrounded by Philistines!

Around her grin Jess said, “Yeah, and my last name’s a mouthful. Some people call me JJ. It’d fix both problems.”

“Happy to meet you, JJ,” said Joss, and they shook hands again.

“Hang on,” I said. “If you’re JJ, and your boy toy is V…”

“…they’re Vajayjay!” exclaimed my wife, the group’s laughter instantly sealing their couples’ nickname forever.

---

A minute later, Vin began eyeing the other couples, our flaming grins infectiously reigniting around the circle, one person to the next. “Nnngh,” he grunted, “y’all’re never gonna let that name go, are ya?”

“No, my Captain,” Jess said, “nor should they: it fits.”

“Fits what?” queried Allison.

To the newlyweds, I explained, “Vin’s initials are V-A-G, middle name Angel.” I pronounced this properly as the Hispanic name it was — AHN-hel — rather than as the English word.

Kaitlyn added, “Vin’s been teased for those two things since grade school, so just before last Christmas, he gifted them to Jess, trusting her to never wield them against him.”

“Awwww!” squeed Allison. “That’s tho thweet!”

“Innit, though?” I agreed.

On seeing my eyebrow lifted in question, Vin pushed some of the sand away in a shrug, then revealed, “The combination’s Angel Vag, referring to my love’s heavenly pussy.”

Joss blushed a bit, and I saw his eyes dart her way, then back down to the sand. Allison caught him at it, but she just leaned down and kissed him on the cheek, drawing his eyes toward something he could look longingly at.

Jess added, “It seemed mean to keep calling Vin my boy-toy after that gift, so we dubbed him Captain Cunny, Brave Spelunker of the Spasm Chasm!”

That broke the newlyweds up in laughter, Allison getting a “We?” out through a chortle.

I pointed over at Kaitlyn, who said, “Guilty.”

“’Mind me never to let y’all give me a nickname,” Joss mumbled through Allison’s resuming work on his back.

Which is what we immediately proceeded to do, settling on “Bob” as a diminutive for The Dread Pirate Roberts, a sufficiently obvious appellation to all present.

---

As I’d predicted, no one questioned Jess about her missing glasses, not even when she squinted at the feel of the breeze on her eyes, long accustomed to having a windshield.

This reassured me considerably, not just because I’d gotten clean away with this little feat, but because of what it meant for our plan to use therapeutic massage to cover our use of magic. About half of those present met Jess back at Christmas, when she’d been wearing glasses, but now she wasn’t. People can be awfully incurious, but I guessed that this effect was primarily a social one, people being trained not to ask invasive questions about assistive devices and health conditions.

That’d work in our favor.

---

Everyone wanted one of our naked sand massages, but the second set after the newlyweds went to the Taylors, as promised.

“What did you think of the wedding, Mrs. Taylor?” I asked her shortly after beginning work.

“The ceremony? It was certainly…different.”

“Holy,” opined Mr. Taylor.

“You think so?” she asked, sounding surprised.

“What ceremony could be more utterly open and honest than the one we just witnessed, Ash? We saw, graphically, what our son thinks about his new bride, not just in how he reacted to her, but also in the way they interacted up there on the stage. If they’d done the thing clothed, we might’ve come away with doubts as to how they felt, but this way… There can be no doubt!”

Mrs. Taylor was quiet, clearly thinking about this when a smile crept over her face, her head pillowed on her hands. “Wanna get re-married?”

He just laughed, but they joined hands once again, breaking their grip only when we had to flip them over. Mr. Taylor had a hard-on through most of the work, but his eyes were turned to watch his wife receive my ministrations, not up at Kaitlyn.

---

After the massages, we did the Krav vs. BJJ show. We chose to take it light, focusing more on holds and throws than on strikes, not just to avoid injury but also because it was great cover for gropes and caresses. Mages won hands down, but we had to fight smart and hard to achieve it.

We took our bows, and then Allison tried pushing Joss into the ring, but he wasn’t having any of it for some reason. I don’t think she had a visceral sense of what we could do, but she didn’t volunteer to take us on herself, either.

Miguel stood, though, pointed at his little brother Vin, and said, “Come at me, bro!”

At this point, I wish to explain a few things.

First, Miguel has about seven inches on Vin. And no, that’s not a double entendre. They call him by his diminutive, Miguelito, as a kind of joke, like how the biker bar bouncer in movies is always called something like Tiny or Cupcake.

Second, he has ten years on his little brother, Miguel being the Gutierrez family’s eldest, Vin the youngest. They were nearly strangers to each other growing up.

Third, Miguel’s an auto mechanic, working all day at a physical job, while Vin’s a computer geek.

Vin stepped to his brother, sank into a far more practiced version of the warrior pose Joss had tried on me months back, and gave his brother the same gesture Joss had given me.

…with almost exactly the inverse result, Miguel going flying over his little brother’s twisting form!

Like Joss, Miguel also made the mistake of attempting a throw when Vin came to help Miguel up, and Vin again threw his brother across the sand, probably half again his mass, bouncing twice before he stopped. Unlike with my second throw against Joss, Miguel’s stronger frame withstood this punishment, so he kept on coming, and Vin kept tossing him around.

“That’s about enough, hon,” Carmen announced a dozen throws into this one-sided contest.

She was leaning back into a sea of cushions Miguel hauled up in a farm trailer, legs well parted to ease the pressure on her gravid belly, her heavy breasts hanging to each side, the very essence of womanhood on display. I did a bit of mental math and realized she only had about a month left to go!

Apropos of this, Carmen added, “I need you healthy just now, ’Lito!”

Vin walked up to his big brother’s prone form, held out a hand, and Miguel just took it this time, standing and giving Vin a hug. “Proud of you, bro,” he said, and they parted a bit misty-eyed.

Kaitlyn stood next and asked Miguel, “Wanna try me next?”

He smiled tiredly and said, “You know, I think my ego’s taken a big enough battering today already, thanks.”