Chapter 8

As Dusty took a seat at the fire he noticed that Marie and Rachel were all sitting on the other side of the fire watching him, Suzan, while on the same side as he was just down a ways, was watching him as she sat smiling. Lori seemed disinterested and was reading some bound book seated next to Rachel.

Dusty figured that he needed to get this over with so he tried to continue the conversation from earlier. He needed information about where he was.

"Let me ask this, what year is it?" asked Dusty sitting down. He was starting to realize some things weren't quite right in this world.

"What's a year?" asked Suzan.

"You know, the turning of the earth, the seasons," said Dusty.

"Oh seasons. It's the 1123 season in the reign of King Michael," answered Suzan.

"You tell your yearly cycles by the passing of the seasons?" asked Dusty quizzically.

"Well it is the turning of the world, you know as the seasons come and go," answered Suzan smiling.

"Where do you come from?" asked Lori frowning at him. She was the one with loose black hair that was carrying the staff. She suddenly looked up from her book to ask this question.

While she was the one that most made his heart beat faster when he looked at her, she appeared to be one dour woman. Even when he smiled at her she just frowned back at him while waiting for her answer.

"I'm from Indianapolis Indiana. It's a far away land and apparently in a different time," said Dusty slowly.

In answering her question apparently Dusty no longer held her interested and Lori returned to reading her book. Apparently he was dismissed. As Dusty noted her disinterest in him, he frowned a little.

Dusty was still trying to adjust from what he learned so far since he got here, and he knew that he should be in more shock, but he figured that would come in time. Right now he was sitting with four major hotties and getting freaked out really didn't look cool to the ladies.

"Are you pulling our legs?" asked Suzan suddenly while still smiling at him.

"That depends, do you have clothes like what I'm wearing around here?" asked Dusty smiling at her as he pulled on his jacket.

As they shook their heads no Suzan suddenly asked "May I see your fancy cloak?"

"Uh sure, if you really want too," answered Dusty as he stood and took off his coat.

Even though it was a cool night he pulled off his jacket and stood there in jeans and a tank top. The motion of the standing up had Lori look up from her book to see what he was doing.

As he took off his jacket he noticed all the ladies seemed to sit up a little taller as he did.

And Suzan even went as far as to give a soft and low whistle. He wasn't overtly big but he did have a lot of muscle, but it tended to be more on a slender side like most martial artist and fighters normally had. He was built about like a middle weight boxer in looks and in size. Even Lori's sour expression seemed to be showing mild forms of shock.

He always knew he was definitely bigger than average without being really muscle bound. But he was very proud of his very sharp muscle definition.

But seeing their reaction helped his self esteem that took a major hit when Lindsey was cheating on him to be with Chad. Her cheating made him feel worthless, like that he wasn't quite man enough to keep her away from seeing Chad on the side who was more muscular and attractive than he was.

As he handed the jacket to Suzan she slid off her cloak that she had covering her body. He noticed that she was wearing a large breastplate that covered her back and chest and that had loose cloth sewn to it from underneath that caused the cloth to drape over her body.

Probably a form of padding he thought.

And as she popped a couple of the buckles on the side of it, it dropped free of her body to the ground.

It took all Dusty's self control to keep his eyes in his head and not let them pop out and roll around on the ground.

Suzan was stacked.

Not just stacked, but her build was completely unbelievable, and he couldn't help but notice that she had quite the nice rounded butt as well.

Her cloak and armor heavily masked her build and made him believe she was stocky when he first met her, where as she was built very, very well! Almost to Playboy playmate proportions!

She was wearing a short sleeved tunic underneath that was low cut in the front. She had her shirt cinched by a wide belt into a pair of cloth pants that looked to be armored from the inside. The belt helped show off her waistline and the swell of her hips.

But it was her breasts that were trying their complete and level best to climb out of her snug shirt. And the fact that her shirt was wet from being under her armor gave the appearance of causing her nipples to appear to set up in the cool air.

If Lindsey hadn't turned him completely off from sex, he knew watching Suzan now as he did would have totally raised his flag pole.

As she accepted his jacket from his outstretched arm, she didn't seem to notice his staring or lack of much movement after she took it from him.

He slowly lowered his arm as he watched her put it on.

"Mmmmmmmmmmm, this is so soft and warm. No wonder you like it. It won't do for armor. But it does feel wonderful," said Suzan in her raspy voice, smiling at Dusty with half lidded eyes, as she pull the leather jacket on.

The way she said it as she spoke, caused chills to race up and down his spine. For the first time in months he felt a hard twitch in his pants, and thought it felt like he might have started drooling.

He found her voice as she spoke was the rich sound somewhere between the voice of Kathleen Turner and Cree Summer doing the voice of the green M&M in the commercials.

As he stood staring at her, she grinned widely mischievously and turned back and forth pulling the jacket tighter around her frame.

What he didn't know was that she fully knew what she did too him as she spoke. She had known since she was younger she had this power over males. She used to amuse herself by watching them walk into things as she suddenly and unexpectedly spoke to them.

And she was enjoying pulling his chain by using just her voice alone. Comparing herself to the other women she traveled with, she always felt that her voice was her only real weapon to get men to notice her when they were around. The men always seemed to pass her by on their way to the other women.

Gradually they all wanted to try the jacket on.

Surprisingly even Lori, who wasn't wearing any form of armor, and when it was her turn she just dropped her cloak and displayed her simple dress that was contoured to hug her body that the cloak had been covering.

Dusty couldn't miss the fact that Lori was stacked either. The dress didn't give him any illusions that she didn't to have a pronounced figure. He could see she was really built well.

Lori's dress was a simple charcoal grey dress with no other color or pattern to it that was laced up the front with some form of coarse string from the top of the dress to midway to her stomach. Dusty found that to be the sexiest outfit of them all.

Dusty got his look at all of them and was amazed. Suzan and Marie, the one with the dark hair covering one eye and ponytail, had the largest chest that seemed to be almost too large for their frames, with Lori just barely smaller, and Rachel, the one with the brown hair and ponytail, was last.

Even though Rachel looked very similar to Lindsey she was a little smaller than she was in the chest. But all the ladies had very nice chests that seemed to fit their frames without making them look unbalanced.

On the whole they were all major league hot! He couldn't remember being in the company of so many at one time. He was finding it very hard to tear his eyes away from these women!

As they each tried on his jacket he hefted one of the breastplates taken off by the women. He was amazed. The thing had to be almost thirty pounds easy! He couldn't figure out how they could move around so easy in it!

As they finished trying on his jacket and gave it back to him they convinced him to leave it off as they talked to him more about where he was from. Lori just sat her book next to her and listened in on the conversations without any input on her part.

Dusty had been traveling with the women for a couple weeks and was able to learn a few things about them and they learned some about him as well.

They were on their way to a job, and since he had no where else to be he just tagged along with them when asked. They were members of a fighter's guild, but were toying with the idea of starting their own one day.

He was still worried about how he got here and where here was. But until he found someone who knew what happened to him he just had to pretend everything was normal.

At that time though he came to realize he wasn't in the same time period he used to be in. He was in a form of medieval society and he had no idea how he got here.

He remembered the old man and the hallway, but tripping and falling in his dark apartment didn't explain how he ended up here.

The first thing the ladies did was buy him some more common looking clothes. He didn't want them to, but they said that he would attract less attention that way. And people quit staring once that happened. When he tried to pay them he realized that he didn't have any local currency.

Since he was so adamant about not taking charity, Suzan offered once to allow him to take it out in trade with her, but the other girls made her quit teasing him.

Dusty kept looking over at Lori to see her reaction during the various teasing by Suzan, but she looked at him stoically, gave a brief smile, and then went back to hardly giving a reaction to him. It was clear to everyone that she just barely tolerated Dusty.

He couldn't understand why he was even disappointed that she didn't even make an attempt at teasing him like that.

They also purchased him a backpack to carry his old clothes in. They could see he wasn't willing to part with them. And to be honest they really liked how his leather jacket felt as well.

But to at least feel like he wasn't taking at vantage of them, he offered to give them some training in the martial arts he knew.

None of the ladies really knew much about what he was trying to show them and they really didn't have much skill with it. They really could only use weapons with their feet firmly on the ground.

Suzan tried the hardest and kept insisting he supervise as she attempted a move he showed them, but seemed to always end up falling on top of Dusty somehow.

Marie and Lori only wanted to watch and seemed to have only mild interest in it, but it was Rachel who kept asking him a lot of questions and kept touching his arm a lot as she asked, and that move made Dusty feel uneasy.

Dusty knew this wasn't Lindsey, and at times he wondered how Lindsey was getting along since he knew it would look like he disappeared off the face of the earth to her.

But when Rachel touched him all the feelings he had before and after his break with Lindsey came flooding back. It was all he could do not to cringe.

But she seemed so nice and she kept seeking out his eyes and would stare deep into them as he talked to her. He always felt like she was searching his soul when she did that. It was obvious to him that she was deeply attracted to him.

And Dusty always thought it felt like to him she was trying hard to separate him away from the other women so she could learn more about him by herself. He had to work hard to keep her from doing this.

But Dusty just couldn't get past her resemblance to Lindsey in his mind. He maintained a politeness but kept trying to limit the time he was alone with her. But she persisted.

As they traveled they would often camp outside at night close to water. Dusty found that they used some type of lye soap, which since he wasn't used to stung and burned his skin for a while, and some type of powder in place of deodorant. He was thankful for that so he could cut down on his body odor.

When the women bathed he tried to find something else to do until they came back. Because they were so helpful he didn't want to make them uneasy around him. But he found his mind fantasizing what Lori looked like naked. He knew that was a good sign.

But it was Suzan who was always giving him a glimpse of her topless all the time. And it never bothered her that he blushed like crazy when she did. She just acted like it was no big deal.

But for some reason when it was his turn Suzan took to hiding his stuff or making a lot of noise around where he was bathing to give him the impression she was going to peek on him. That caused more than one embarrassing moment for him

And he found that Suzan was always making suggestive comments to him, but he found it hard to be mad at her because she was always smiling all the time, seemed really flirtatious, and didn't really harm him with her pranks. And her good humor was infectious. She was still the only one who could make him smile just by her smiling at him.

And as they traveled Dusty and the women continued to learn more about each other. He was surprised how easy and eager they were to talk to him. It took a few days, but he managed to get all their stories.

The one thing they all got out of the way early was that none of them had a boyfriend, husband, or any form of romantic interest at all.

Surprisingly Lori also volunteered this information to Dusty without his asking all the while looking disinterestedly at something just beyond his shoulder then returning to her book to read. He felt summarily dismissed as she did this.

It appeared to Dusty she said it just because it was expected of her and not because she really cared if he wanted to know. He felt the same way when Marie said it too him as well, that while she mentioned it, she didn't really care one way or the other if he knew.

Only Suzan and Rachel seemed to really want to make sure he knew they were single.

Dusty learned that Suzan was an only child. As she told him about herself, she would smile and seem to talk lower as she watched his face. Dusty would be lying if he said that didn't get his attention.

Suzan had an interest in swords at an early age and her father taught her. She was a very big tomboy and was very curious what else was out in the world. And when Marie and Lori passed through her town she decided to hook up with them and to travel.

For the group she was their second best melee fighter behind Marie.

She said she had nothing to tie her to her home. As much as she loved her parents she needed to be herself. From his best estimate she was about twenty five or twenty six years old. He was confused by the season thing. If he was right and she was twenty five that would make her about a year older than him.

Next went Marie a few days later who was the unofficial leader. He put her age at about twenty five and was a user of a Bo staff. She was the oldest of five children and she was really proficient with that.

Growing up her father instructed others in the use of staff and spears and he let her be his assistant. Eventually she tired of that lifestyle and decided to join a guild and do some protection work as a change of pace for a few seasons. If she managed to someday meet the right man she might settle down.