The Wings of Ilium

The Wings of Ilium

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Special thanks to KenjiSato for editorial services.

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This is a combination Group Sex and Loving Wives story. A truly loving relationship that gets briefly side-tracked by unanticipated events.

A bit of character development up front, and plenty of sex in the rear, so to speak. (Actually - vanilla and oral group-sex - no anal in this story.)

The main character is a doctor, but this author is not. So, for MD's out there, please forgive any medical/anatomical errors I may have incorporated. I had a lot of fun researching this story and have tried to make it 'anatomically correct', so if anything piques your interest, then I suggest you search for more information about it online.

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Thursday, 22nd June, 2023.

~ ~ ~ Room 1402, Affinity Executive Suites. 4:16pm ~ ~ ~

I'm reclined on the hotel bed reviewing a clinical trial on my tablet, occasionally glancing up at the muted television showing the twenty-four-hour news channel. The Boston headlines are the usual fare - house fire, scaffolding collapse, burst water main. I saw all these fifteen minutes ago at the top of the hour.

My wife, Katherine, is wearing a hotel robe and focused on her laptop, set up upon the small writing desk in the room. If her work is interesting enough, she can concentrate for hours on end, doing coding, data manipulation, report formatting, or specialist tasks I don't fully comprehend. She freelances as a geographic information analyst. Today's job is creating a mailing list for a chain of pool-supply stores in Tucson; using a filter to automatically recognize backyard pools in survey photographs, converting these to street addresses, then filtering on some exclusions like travel times from their store locations. Normally, she would be working at home on her big desktop computer but it's our twenty-seventh wedding anniversary today and this job is 'just scripting, not hyper-spectral processing', so she took the train into Boston this morning, so we can have dinner together later.

I've been here in the Chinatown District all week, inspecting the nearby Essex Hospital which is affiliated with my employer, the Boston University Medical Campus. My name is Doctor Jason Barlow. I'm fifty-two years old and a Doctor of Pharmacy. I'm not so much a pharmacist now, more of an educator, a certification inspector, an 'adverse outcome' investigator (for when we screw up), and an accreditation specialist. Essex Hospital is undergoing a rolling refurbishment, so I'm on loan to them this week to verify compliance with various medical codes for the recently completed third floor. I'll be checking things like call systems, corridor width, staff stations, floor coverings, lighting, and so on. I'm basically a technical advisor to the Essex administrators.

In my work functions, I just listed educator first, not because I do a lot of it anymore, but probably because I have an appointment tonight with students in our EMT Fast Track program. I helped kick off this initiative during 'peak COVID-19' when we were struggling to staff our emergency room at the campus hospital. The intent of the program is to mentor selected EMT staff for accelerated development, bringing their experience levels up quickly, so we can promote them into ER roles. We currently have seven students in this group with whom I deal with regularly, albeit remotely from home, which is over an hour away in Plymouth. The students are typically keen to see me whenever I'm in town, not because of my teaching excellence (although I'm not bad), but because I'm a great facilitator. I have excellent relations with the specialists and support staff in our system, so I can place students in the best shifts for their development, rather than just exploit them to meet night-shift head counts.

Katherine looks up from her laptop to the window. I realize she is more looking at the window, rather than through it when she gets up to adjust the blind. It's mid-afternoon and the sun is still high at this time of year. As she reaches across the bedside lamp, the top of her robe gapes open, revealing a luscious white breast with prominent, pink nipple beautifully lit by the white robe aglow in the sunlight. Despite twenty-seven years of marriage and countless hours of nudity, Kath's breasts still captivate me whenever they make an appearance.

I'll tell you more about Katherine - and her breasts - because I'm sure you'd like to hear. I call her Kath or Katherine interchangeably, as I like both forms.

We met when I was twenty-one and Kath was nineteen. The location was next to a dumpster behind a strip mall (romantic, I know). We were both working in retail to support our university studies, Kath in a pet store and I in a drug store. Juniors quickly learn not to take their break in view of their boss or customers, otherwise you don't get a break.

So the loading dock area was where we would hang out in our downtime, normally just sitting on empty pallets and talking as this was the pre-smartphone era. Back then, she had B-cup breasts on her slim five-foot-nine-inch frame. Her uniform was a long sleeve, button-up, linen shirt, with a logo above the pocket. This sky-blue shirt was coupled with either black pants or a long, black skirt (strictly no jeans). She was annoyed by all the ironing the shirts required, but I think they looked spectacular on her, especially that one shirt that was a size smaller and taut across her breasts. It was lust at first sight.

Our first show of affection was standing next to that dumpster. Katherine was upset that a puppy she adored had just been sold to an 'awful' family. Earlier I had seen her walking past the pharmacy window, while I was restocking shelves; she slowed her stride briefly at the window to look directly at me, I saw tears in her eyes. I immediately took my own break early to see what was wrong.

Katherine explained, "The little brats were running around the store, tapping the fish tanks, yelling at the canaries... the mother wasn't controlling them at all. She was just buying them a dog as a distraction... Poor Sampson."

Katherine was fully crying now, so I opened my arms to offer a hug and she immediately leaned into me to sob with her hands against my chest. I didn't know what to say; her thick, wavy hair was tickling my nose, she had a foot placed between mine and a thigh pressed against my knee. I didn't even know which dog was 'Sampson', and I was quickly growing an inappropriate erection.

"There, there," I said, before immediately wincing at my inept words of comfort.

I couldn't have messed up too badly because a week later, she invited me to a party where we had our first kiss, plus a few dozen more.

A few weeks after the party, Katherine became my second sexual partner and I her first.

I won't dwell on those early days, sex was beautiful and loving but we were both young and inexperienced. Privately, Katherine has a running joke that I'm the 'sexually experienced one' because I'd lost my virginity earlier that year in a one-off encounter (no, not my prom date - it was a quirky older woman I met at a concert). I think back to those early days with Katherine for the love we started, but if I'm seeking erotic recollections, there are later memories I go to. Like hiking in Colorado in the spring; spontaneous outdoor sex in the flowering prairie, surrounded by nature on a perfect day; even the insects left us alone, only butterflies would land on us (I like to believe Jodie, our first child, was conceived that day).

It sounds preposterous in 2023, but a few years of savings from our modest jobs allowed us to mortgage a house together and get married soon after Kath's graduation (I still had a year more of university). Remember we are both early Generation X, so close enough to the Baby Boomers to reap their benefits, like cheap education and affordable housing.

Our daughter Jodie was was born in 1999 and our son Kyle in 2001. Jodie lives with her fiancé and Kyle is currently living back at home after his group house separated upon lease expiry.

Currently, it is Thursday afternoon and I've been in Boston since Monday. I was at Essex Hospital this morning when Kath's train arrived. After collecting a second key from reception, she worked out in the hotel gym and showered before getting her laptop out to finish the Tucson job. This is why I'm now enjoying some side-boob from the white robe.

Kath turned fifty two months ago. Her breasts are no longer B-cups, they became small A-cups after breastfeeding our daughter, plus she was fortunate her family's genetics kept her slim, almost irrespective of what she ate. What body fat she did carry was below her waist, on her hips and thighs. Clothing-wise she is a size-four top and size-six bottom and has been that way since I met her, even straight after each pregnancy. As I said, lucky genetics.

A few days after Jodie's birth, Katherine's milk came in strong - medically described as Stage 2 lactogenesis - and her breasts swelled to a D-cup size. Although very impressive, they were sore and looked 'overinflated' like an excessive breast augmentation, plus breastfeeding was frustrating because the nipples were too stretched for Jodie to latch on properly. Standard advice for this situation is to express in the shower by manually squeezing around the nipple, but we found my mouth worked better, so I was often called upon to drain any painful excesses of milk. I felt especially loved when Kath would let down (trigger her milk ejection reflex), which is just like what an infant feels, I guess. Frequently, she would fall asleep while I suckled, sort of leaving me 'alone with her breasts'. I guess this reinforced the strange duality men can have with a woman's breasts; they are part of the woman, but at times, we attribute a separate personality to them, a separate relationship. Or maybe I'm just guilty of 'objectification'?

As an aside, sorry about the medical terminology I use. I try to use common terms, but years of medicine makes that unnatural.

After the first few weeks of breastfeeding, Kath's breasts settled to a C-cup size, which she was very proud of. So I've seen my wife's breasts in all the common cup sizes and they are shapely and look fantastic in each of them.

Anyway, my wife's menopause has begun and she is carrying slightly more weight now, including some upper body fat that has brought her breasts back to a full A-cup. This has taken away most of the 'deflated balloon' wrinkles that breast atrophy had left her with. They are a nice handful now and I love them, but Katherine still complains about clothing she can't buy because she won't 'fill out' the top.

After adjusting the blind, Kath sits at the foot of the bed, out of reach of my hands but I give her thigh a small rub with my toes. It's around 4:20pm, our plan is to have an early dinner in Chinatown, so I can then go into Essex to give the planned tutorial from 7:00pm to 10:00pm. Tomorrow, Friday, is a day off for both of us, so we are going to explore the city together.

"I think I'll need to finish this job tomorrow morning," says Kath. "The client just messaged me to adjust the exclusions."

"It's my own fault," she continues, "they initially wanted all business addresses excluded from their mail-out. This morning, I asked them why and, of course, now that they have thought about it, they want me to add them back in. That's going to take a bit more time. I had planned to be uploading about now."

Katherine describes the crux of the issue. "Unfortunately, their firewall needs manual intervention to open a tunnel for me, so I can only VPN during Arizona hours; they're on Mountain Time, so they'll be closed by the time I get back from dinner and won't be available again until ten or eleven tomorrow morning. That'll take a big chunk out of our day together."

"How long will these extra listings take?" I ask.

"About twenty minutes to get the data. It's probably only a dozen or so addresses, so I don't need to script anything, I'll just cut-n-paste," she explained. "Plus half an hour or so for a final check, before I package it up and send it." Katherine takes pride in her work, so I know this final verification step can't be rushed.

"How about we skip dinner, so you can finish it now?" I suggest.

Kath frowns, "Our anniversary dinner?"

"I could order a snack from room service now, and we can meet for a late night dinner instead, after I'm finished," I adapt.

"I don't want to walk in the city at that time by myself. You'll have to come all the way back... Or I could catch a cab to the hospital," she considers aloud.

Without much thought I suggest, "If you can be finished by six you can come to the tutorial and assist me. Then we can go out to dinner after, when we'll both be able to drink wine. My work week will be over too."

"How am I supposed to assist you with medical training?" she scoffs.

"Well, I would like a model. We're covering the pelvis tonight, but I couldn't find any training aids as Essex isn't a training hospital. All I found this morning was a few bits of a cheap plastic skeleton. I've got a pelvis with no legs and only L5 and L4 vertebrae. I saw some random bits like a left foot and clavicle, but no long bones or skull. At least you're complete," I smile.

"So, you're going to X-ray me?" Kath jokes.

"No, but I'll be able to show some movements and muscle attachment points, if you wear your yoga pants."

"Eww," she responds. "I did thirty minutes on the orbital machine this morning, my gym gear is all sweaty and sealed in a bag until I get home. I've only got my jeans or a long skirt now."

"How about some sensible undies and a hospital gown? I can demonstrate the spine, sacrum, iliac, and femur relationship if you lie on a gurney."

"So, you're trying to show off my butt to your students?" Kath asks, with a smirk.

"I'm sure they'd like that. But seriously, a real body is the best way to learn anatomy. You could be their live cadaver," I offer. "For science," I add, finally getting more serious.

"For science," she repeats, while scrutinizing me. I'm not sure if it's a question or a statement.

After a quiet pause I take it as a statement. "Well, you better get back to work. I'll order something from room service to get us through 'til dinner." I start extracting the menu from the bedside drawer, so Kath returns to her laptop and is quickly engrossed again.

After ordering some grilled cheese sandwiches, I send an email to the hospital's chief of staff:

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Hi Jerome,

I'll be coming in at 1900 today for the EMT Fast Track session I mentioned. Could I get you to arrange these for me please?

1. Visitor's pass for Katherine Barlow, DoB 12/14/1972. She'll be assisting me tonight.

2. A gurney or (preferably) massage table on wheels, plus a patient gown, towel, box of gloves, skin pen, and some isopropanol wipes.

I saw a massage table in the Fracture Clinic this morning. That one would do fine.

I'll need some extra floor space so we'll use the Prayer Room, I presume it's available? Could you make a room booking until 10:30pm for me and check the BMS to make sure the heating will be on tonight?

Thanks, Jason.

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A gurney is a stretcher on wheels, like found in the back of an ambulance. BMS is the computerized Building Management System. And a skin pen is a skin-safe marker pen you probably associate with cosmetic surgeons; they leave a semi-permanent mark that will come off after a week or so, or straight away with some rubbing alcohol (hence the wipes I also asked for).

Composing this email made me think about what I was asking of my wife. The whole idea of having Katherine assist was a spontaneous one to solve our dinner dilemma. Spontaneous decisions aren't really my style. Usually I'm methodical, meticulous, and precise to the extent that it frustrates others - but I'm trying to be less rigid. I've learned that the medical world accepts my pedantic precision because lives are at stake, but in social settings, I frequently have to bite my tongue and not correct other people's medical vagueness.

The towel I asked for would be an additional modesty device because hospital gowns are definitely imperfect coverings. Kath would be in her bra and undies so the opening at the back of the gown would let me show her lumbar region while the towel can cover her lower body, just as if we were using the massage table for its intended purpose.

The 'Prayer Room' I'm booking is on the top (fifth) floor. Most Essex staff probably still call it the 'Chapel' as it was known before the renovation. Now it's a multi-faith space, I suspect will most frequently get used for Islamic Salah (daily obligatory prayers). I'm an atheist, but that doesn't mean I can't have a moral compass. My compass strongly points to this being a good move, the space should welcome all religions when it reopens - if that's achievable. I recall a discussion on Monday with the interior decorator who described the difficulty of not offending anyone. She came up with some pleasing pastel colors for the walls ("but not too colorful or it'll look like an LGBT rainbow"). The graphics for the faux stained-glass was her greatest challenge (it's actually a machine-cut vinyl transparency). She found almost every image has some religious iconography that can be misconstrued. In the end she mostly chose floral depictions for the window art, plus some adaptations of Renaissance paintings depicting Greek and Roman mythology. Dead religions don't seem to represent a threat, so it was safe enough to incorporate artwork like Botticelli's Birth of Venus if the nudity was left out. Even then, she had to rework some of it because one of the trees looked 'like a burning bush.'

Although the top-floor refurbishment is finished, the Prayer Room hasn't re-opened to patients yet, so I know the space will be available for us tonight.

When room service arrives, Kath eats at the desk while she continues her work. She is happy to keep drinking water from her sipper bottle. I consider the juice in the minibar, but can't justify the cost, so I also choose water to go with my cheese toastie.

After snacking, I get back to refining a lesson plan for the evening, but soon decide I can think about that in the shower. I want to be freshly shaved in preparation for our anniversary evening of an intimate dinner and a king-size bed. Once our respective work duties are done for the week, of course.

The shower has a clear glass screen and I've left the bathroom door open, so I can see Kath talking on her headset. Good, her upload must be ready and someone still seems to be there in Tucson to receive it.

With washing and shaving complete, I'm just standing there enjoying the water and thinking about getting out when Kath shows impeccable timing by standing up, stretching, then shedding her bathrobe with a quick flick of her shoulders. She is coming to join me.

"A second shower?" I note, as she steps in.

"I want to get ready for your students. Even if I am just a cadaver, I want to smell like a fresh one."

"And what about me? Would you shower twice for your husband or is Luscious Lavender only for the kids in class?" I ask, referring to the sickly sweet body wash provided by the hotel. I pump some into my hands, rub them together, then start at Kath's clavicles, spreading the soap down her sternum and then outwards to circle her breasts, closing in towards her nipples.

"You've studied every inch of my body. Maybe I'll enjoy some new attention from the class," she smiles. We're flirting. Kath didn't just join me in Boston for our anniversary dinner - anniversary sex was definitely a factor.