My girlfriend and I once took a sensual massage lesson offered by the Learning Annex. It was a lot of fun and made me open to the use of candles, oil and taking your time with the opposite sex. It even helped my relationship with my difficult and demanding mother, for I would give her a neck and shoulder or foot massage occasionally. After a day or two we’d find something to argue about again, but for a while there was peace.
Two years ago Alice, a long-divorced friend of my mother’s was getting married, so mom threw her a bachelorette party. I think another woman arranged it, but it was at our house, and I was ordered to leave the house and not come back until midnight. At five after midnight I arrived home from my girlfriends after a decent night of sex and pizza to find the party still in full swing and a male dancer throwing himself all over the ladies. The dancer glared at me in open hostility. I glared back and went to the family room on the other side of the house. I guess he liked being the center of attention or felt my arrival stopped the flow of tips into his g-string or something. Whatever the case, he left shortly and the women returned to some drinking games and the opening of gag gifts.
My viewing of Saturday Night Live was interrupted by shouts of my name. Curious, I went back to the living room and found that a collection was being taken to get me to give Alice a sensual massage then and there. It was my mother’s idea and she put her arms around me and did her best to convince me to go along. Other women clapped in agreement. I was tired, but agreeable. The person really needing convincing was Alice, who kept saying “No”. Some of the women plied her with alcohol to get her to change her mind and guilt-tripped her over all the money collected, a very respectable total of $73.00. My mother gave me the money and told me to light a candle or two in the guest bedroom and heat up some oil. I did, but I fully expected Alice to chicken out. She’s a vice-principal at a junior high school and very straightlaced: lots of hair spray, makeup and always conservatively dressed. Even tonight, a night to let her hair down, she looked like she was going to work in a long navy-colored dress.
I lit the candles, warmed up my only massage oil in the microwave for a few seconds and lay down on the bed. Minutes passed and I began thinking what cds I would buy with the money, then I fell asleep. An hour later my mother and two friends knocked on the door, escorting a wobbly Alice. They were all drunk or close to it. Alice still resisted, which was why they were escorting her. Another delay ensued when Alice said she could never take her clothes off in front of me, so mom got her a robe and they took her “under guard” down the hall to change.
The three women practically pushed the reluctant Alice back in the room and slammed the door. Alice, tipsy for the only time in my memory, kept repeating that this was “crazy, crazy, crazy”. I said the same thing, but got her to lie down across the bed face-up. I sat in a chair by the side of the bed and massaged her head, face and neck and shoulders for 15 minutes. She seemed to enjoy it and chatted away nervously between actual sighs of pleasure. Mom and friends came back to check on her about then. They convinced her to get her hands out of the robe sleeves and turn over on her stomach so that I could do her back. Alice thought that was too intimate and said “no”. The women insisted, but Alice said “No way”. More argument followed, then Alice finally agreed, so long as she could keep her bra on. Mom’s drunk friend Betty would have none of that and unfastened Alice’s bra herself with a scream of delight. They all ran out of the room after that. I locked the door behind them and stopped Alice from re-hooking her bra.
“Just keep your arms at your sides and I won’t see a thing” I smiled. Not strictly true, but…
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