Chapter 10

I heard the doorbell, but before I could move from my comfortable chair where I was reading a risqué website I'd discovered, there was a knock and then the rattle of a key in the lock.

"Doc?" Rita called. "Doc? Are you here?"

"I'm in the living room, Rita." I'd given Rita a key, but usually she knocked or at least yelled out when she entered the house. I'm not sure if she felt she needed to warn me that she was in the house so I could sneak someone else out or if it was just her insecurity about being welcomed whenever she wanted. We weren't living together, but I could certainly see that possibility in our future.

She hurried into the room. Her hair was straggly as if she'd been sweating. Her normal business clothes were askew as if thrown on quickly. It was unusual to see her on a Monday evening, but even more unusual to see her after work in less than a professional demeanor. I suddenly wondered if she'd been in an accident or attacked. I stood and rushed to her.

"Are you all right? What happened?"

"Doc, how much hot water do you have?"

"It's an demand water heater. It doesn't run out," I answered. I'd had the house re-plumbed about five years ago and a demand system was high on my priorities. I hated to run out of hot water when I was in the shower or to not have enough hot water if I was doing dishes, laundry, and a shower at once.

"Shower. Now," she said as she dragged me by the hand to the master suite. I'd converted a five-bedroom three-bath house into a three-bedroom two-and-a-half-bath house over the years by extending the master suite into one of the bedrooms for a dressing room/closet. I'd changed the back-to-back full bathrooms, one en suite and one public into one-and-a-half baths. The house was built before the age of bathrooms the size of Texas came into vogue, and I decided to update the house for a more luxurious feel. The only thing my bedroom was lacking was a fireplace.

Rita was shedding her clothes as we headed to the marble room with a large open shower that filled one end. She was tugging my clothes off almost as fast. I still wasn't sure what was going on and I was more than a little worried about what had inspired this sudden need for a shower.

"Hot, she said. "We need lots of steam in the room." I adjusted the temperature of the shower heads on each side and the room began filling with steam almost immediately. I reached to turn on the fan, but Rita stopped me. "Lots of steam." She dragged me into the shower and we sat on the low marble bench that ran the full width. It had been one of my inspirations when talking to the contractor. He had mentioned a client who wanted a shelf built into her shower so she would have a place to put her foot up while she shaved her legs. I thought that was a brilliant idea and then thought of all the other things one might do if there was a full width bench in the shower. Unfortunately, there had been few opportunities to explore the possibilities since the remodel was complete.

Rita pushed me to one side of the bench and then slid to the side opposite. She leaned back against the wall and put her right foot up on the bench while her left foot trailed along the floor. This position left her breasts and her pussy delightfully exposed to my eyes, though the steam in the room was getting thicker by the minute.

"I have to tell you what happened," she said just above the sound of the running water. Her voice had turned from urgent to husky. She was still breathing heavily.

"Mondays after work I go to a spinning class at the club. That's what keeps my butt in the nice shape you like so well," she giggled. "It's a class that has a very uneven attendance. One week every bike will have a rider and the next week only two people show up. It's weird. But the instructor doesn't even notice. She has her workout routine set and she follows it whether we there are two or twenty. I'm not even sure she ever looks up to see how many people there are. She just shouts out instructions for changing gears and taking hills as she buckles into her own workout. You would think someone named Gabriella would be heavenly and ethereal or that she'd be the kind of down-home gal you'd call Gabby. But she's neither."

I tried to imagine this Gabriella, but I was so distracted by the visual image I had in front of me that it was hard to concentrate. The shower—the whole bathroom—had filled with steam and Rita continued to sit opposite me with her right knee up, letting it sway back and forth a bit. This caused her pussy to gap open and closed as her knee moved. It was hypnotic.

"I went to class tonight after work. Got to the bike room and I was the only one there when Gabriella started barking out orders like the room was full. Somehow, I think she took some bizarre pleasure in making me work even harder because I was the only one there. All of a sudden I find out that 'we're going to do hills' and I've got my head down pumping away and the terrain keeps changing. I realize that she is pushing her settings out to the bike I'm on and I'm supposed to keep up with her. The 40 minutes were hell! I've never worked so hard in my life and I thought I was going to collapse by the time we went into cool-down for the last ten minutes. Then she just says, 'Good ride, ' and leaves."

It didn't sound like that good a time to me. Nor did it explain why she came here to get showered and cleaned up after her workout. Rita simply is not that anxious to be seen in public if she is not perfectly put together. But Rita wasn't finished with her story. The steam in the room shifted with a bit of air current and I could see that Rita's right hand had crept across her belly and was lightly stroking the neatly trimmed hair of her pussy, her knee continuing to rock back and forth. I was feeling a stiffening in my member in spite of the heat in the shower.

"By the time I'd dragged myself into the locker room, it was 7:00. No one else was there. I suppose everyone is still stuffed from Thanksgiving Dinner and just couldn't face a workout. I was certainly regretting it. But I decided that I'd just relax. After a quick rinse in the shower, I soaked in the spa and then decided I'd take a steam before I finished off the evening with another shower."

I could certainly understand the dip in attendance after Thanksgiving. Mine was not so much from the excess of food, but the excess of work. My team had pulled off their multi-day open holiday open house and like a good team leader, I attended every single session. They'd made it special by keeping cookies coming out of the oven, decorating the entire house for the holidays, and greeting not 100 but hundreds of guests. It took all five of us to keep the traffic in the house flowing and to collect the referral information from all of the guests. Our best estimate was that we'd collected over 200 leads from nearly 500 visitors. I'd taken my usual Monday off work and let the Team divide the leads among themselves. I was getting too old to work that hard!