Author's Note: Apologies for the long delay between chapters! I find the longer installments tougher to write because there's more cross-referencing to make sure things are consistent. But I think it's worth the effort. Here, we reconnect John with each of his wives. This is a bridge into greater adventures, and I hope you enjoy it.
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The doctors had told me when I was discharged not to get frustrated. They told me there would be days when I felt like it was constantly one step forward and two steps back. Well, the morning I woke up at the Plaza Hotel in New York was one of those. I had felt great -- I'm not sure how much of that was appropriate dosing with the ketamine for pain -- and I slept like a baby. But that following day? I had regressed a week. Maybe more. My hip hurt. My whole body ached. And the six-hour flight home? Didn't make me feel any better.
What made it all okay was having all four of my wives on the plane back to LA. Katie was relieved the tour was over. The travel crush of going back and forth from home to the tour's latest stop almost every day ground her down. But it had been a triumph and a joy, as well. Still, Katie was a nurse by training. Her RN background really started to kick into gear that morning when we left New York, and I was feeling battered. She took charge of positioning me on the longest couch in the Gulfstream's cabin. She padded it with extra blankets and buffered my left leg with pillows, while also keeping it raised.
I took two of the higher dosage ketamine pills I'd been prescribed and coupled it with two bumps from the nasal spray. As I felt my mind disassociate from my body, it seemed like I could see my hip throbbing. But the pain started to seem further away. And then I was asleep.
The next thing I knew, we had touched down in LA, and Katie gently shook me awake. All four girls gazed down at me adoringly.
"Was I drooling?" I said sleepily.
They laughed.
"No, daddy," Katie said.
"Come on, darling," Rita said. "Time to go home."
The same Escalade that had dropped us off at Van Nuys Airport also picked us up. The transition back into our superbly secure cocoon was seamless. Twenty minutes after landing? I hobbled back inside our house, stiff from being knocked out during the plane ride and still feeling foggy from the ketamine. I managed to make my way upstairs. Katie followed me, closed the blackout curtains, and tucked me into bed.
I slept for sixteen hours, until the next morning. I heard the automatic curtains opening, and bright sunlight poured into the bedroom.
"Wake up, daddy," I heard Kat whisper in my ear. She repeated it several times until I stirred.
"Time to move, daddy," Katie said. "We've got PT."
We? My eyes flickered open, and I saw her standing next to the bed. She was intensely awake and bubbly, her hair pulled back in a bouncing ponytail.
"Come on, slow poke," Katie said. "I'm going with you. You've got ten minutes before we need to be out the door. Three hours today. Three hours every day, Monday through Friday. Let's go, mister."
My body was sore, but I forced myself to get out of bed. Maybe it had been an unwise indulgence to go to New York, but I felt like it was worth some short-term pain. It had been a blast. It was the first time I really believed life could be truly fun again since the accident. But, damn, the comedown was a bitch.
So Katie took me to PT. And she was as much of a task master as my therapist. Then she came again the next day. And the next. The girls were all in on it. They made sure my focus was on recovery and nothing else. They put an incentive system in place for me. Every day that I completed my three-hour PT session and didn't complain about it? I got a reward.
The reward system had a secondary purpose, other than just pushing me to give my all in physical therapy. We all agreed it was important for us to establish a routine again. We needed that certainty in our daily lives that would help us get past the tragedy we'd been forced to endure.
My routine was physical therapy with Katie, then maybe an hour or two after lunch getting up to speed on work. But I was doing that from home, not at the office, although I would pop in maybe once a week to go to lunch with Jason and Petey, which also served as a way to confront the lingering PTSD of the accident since that had transpired after I went to lunch.
The girls got back into workout routines, and they started playing tennis more again. Kat loved going to the Santa Monica farmers' market and returned to it every Wednesday and Saturday. Cooking took a more central role for us again. It was an easy activity that I loved and didn't require me to be on my feet for too long at a time.
That was a reality that set in -- the long, intense physical therapy really drained me. But it didn't take too long to see the benefits of it. Quickly, I graduated from just working on my hip at PT. I took on more exercises at home. I was probably working on my recovery five or six hours a day within two weeks.
But I had the best incentives to.
My wives came up with a series of goals for me. Each day I completed my PT without complaining? I got three points. For every hour of additional exercise I put in at home? I got five more points. When I reached ten points, I got to have sex with one of them. If I got to fifteen points? I could have two of them at once. Twenty points? Three. Twenty-five points? All four of them at once.
The problem for me was I couldn't resist cashing in my points right away. Despite being worn out from the physical exertion, I wanted to fuck. But it actually worked out pretty well. I wasn't only thinking with my little head. I could reconnect with each of my wives one-on-one this way, which was important. So we made the agreement that, anytime I cashed in a night with one, who it was would be randomly selected. Each girl would receive a number, and we'd use a random number generator. Kat was one. Jess was two. Rita was three. Katie was four. None of them could have a second turn until everyone had had one.
It seemed fair to me. But, I had to admit, I thought it was fair and just that the first day -- I accumulated thirteen points by doing PT and an additional two hours at home -- Katie's number four popped up in the generator. She had been a no-nonsense stalwart in getting me to have no distractions from my recovery.
After dinner that night, a Wednesday, Katie and I took the unusual step of peeling off from the group. Kat and Jess retired upstairs to shower, which I knew would turn into something much sexier than just getting clean, while Rita and Stephanie took care of clearing down the kitchen.
It was true. Stephanie lived with us now, in the guest house. Her vivacious and very sweet, considerate personality meshed beautifully with us. She only had a few days of work left at KTLA, and you could see in her disposition how badly she craved being done with it. The pendulum of a schedule that she had been pigeonholed into continued until the end, with her working nights sometimes and mornings others. There wasn't delineation or any reason for which days she worked which shift, and it was brutal for her sleep -- or lack thereof. Stephanie had a deep fatigue in her eyes, but she didn't let it affect her disposition. She was sunny and optimistic, regardless of how tired or dejected she was. Of course, I think she didn't mind that Rita had taken to personally giving her booty bumps every morning she had to make that 3 a.m. wake-up call. She also knew that it was almost over. And once it was? She would slide into the comfort, relaxed lifestyle that we had grown to love so much.
I had to admit, I was looking forward to finally getting a chance to plunder Stephanie's compelling and alluring physical gifts. At the same time, I couldn't lose sight of my priorities. The accident had thrown our lives out of orbit and knocked it off-axis. We needed to get that righted before I started jumping into Stephanie's bosom, no matter how ample or attractive.
"Do you want to join me by the pool?" Katie asked shyly as we pushed back from the dinner table.
"Whatever you want, darling," I said.
I unwrapped an ice pack from my hip, which I had taken to putting on during dinner to help speed up my recovery each night.
"Let's go to the pool," she said confidently.
Confidence was something that had bloomed in Katie since the U.S. leg of the Stages Tour. She had no problem taking charge or making decisions. She refused to just go along with things. She was growing up. She was finding her voice. Literally. And I didn't have an idea just how far she had gone down that path until after dinner that night.
"Wanting to go for a swim?" I asked as Katie and I walked through the French doors to the backyard.
"No, daddy," she said, slipping her left hand into the pocket of her cutoff jean shorts.
They were ridiculously short, and a generous amount of her ass cheeks hung out below the cut line. She wore a beige, tank top bodysuit with it, which I knew snapped closed between her legs. She showed a ton of thigh as we sat down on a couple lounge chairs at the far end of the pool, as far away from the house as we could go. She had fished out a large joint from her left pocket, and her hand disappeared into her right pocket to produce a Zippo lighter.
"Let's smoke," she said.
I knew she could tell by the look in my eyes that the depths of her newfound affinity as a stoner surprised me.
"I don't know why I resisted it for so long," Katie said, then put the joint to her lips and sparked up the lighter.
She held the flame to the tip of the joint, and the crinkled tip of the pink rolling paper lit up and revealed the sticky, home-grown bud beneath. She took a drag, lighting up the cherry brightly, and gave a couple quick puffs to make sure the weed was blazing fully. She pulled it from between her lips, blew on the tip gently, and then returned it to her mouth and took a long, deep inhale. While she held the smoke in her lungs, she handed the joint to me.
I took a hit and enjoyed the burn of the acrid smoke. Katie was on the lounge chair next to mine, but we were turned to face each other. She rested her hands on her knees, which caused her to bend forward enough for me to get a teasing look at the ample cleavage of her tank top. I leaned my head back and exhaled high into the air, the smoke curling above the pool.
Katie was still holding her first hit, the joint delicately dangling between her left thumb and forefinger. She leaned forward and blew the smoke out from deep in her lungs into my mouth. Then we kissed before she stretched back and pulled on the joint again.
"It suits you," I said. "You look sexy."
"I really, really love getting stoned," Katie said, batting her eyelids at me. "It's like the most pleasant fog. And I totally love fucking on it. My god."
She shot-gunned her second hit with me, and I smiled at her. We kissed more.
"I think I've only fucked you stoned a couple times," I said. "You must have been getting fucked on tour."
"Oh, daddy," Katie said, her kisses becoming more urgent. "Not really. I was too consumed with going back and forth. I'd smoke a ton of weed to deal with the anxiety and worry about you. I'd do some coke on the plane to stay awake. Then smoke more to calm down and get some sleep. Then more lines to get up for the concert again."
"Not really?" I said, focusing on the wrong thing that she had said.
"I think you're missing the point, daddy," Katie said flirtatiously. "I put my body through a ringer for you. It's the first time in my life I ever felt that kind of sense of purpose. Do you understand that? The girl you met originally was just a party girl looking for a good time. Yeah, I was a nurse, but that was just a means to an end. I could fuck doctors and get coked up. I never thought I'd be using uppers and downers to regulate myself so that I could come take care of my husband and our family."
"You did put yourself through a ringer," I acknowledged while Katie took another hit off the joint. "And you have been such a rock during my rehab. I don't know how to thank you."
Katie smiled and blew a cloud of smoke in my face. I smiled back at her. We kissed again.
"Let's cash this joint," Katie said, "and go inside. I'm so wet, I'm going to cry if I don't get you inside me soon."
We polished off the weed and, pleasantly stoned, walked back into the house. We found the freshly showered Kat finishing up the dishes in the kitchen, while Jess, Rita, and Stephanie sat at the bar chatting with her. I guess Kat and Jess had shown some restraint in the shower. They were also indulging in some dessert. Their favorite one -- cocaine. Stephanie had just polished off a line, and Jess had her head down, inhaling with her usual vigor.
"Do you want some, Katie?" I asked.
"I do, daddy, is that okay?" she said.
