This is a direct continuation of the previous installment. Note that while some of the characters have families, and their children are mentioned, all characters appearing "on camera" are of legal consenting age or older, 18 in the USA.
And yes, Miaz is me thirsting after Bashar Murad, the Palestinian singer.
Raechel and I walked out of her townhouse straight into a reminder that we were nude in public. We very nearly walked into the mail delivery.
"Good afternoon!" Raechel greeted the postal worker on her front step, an older woman in a somewhat outmoded Royal Mail uniform.
The woman sniffed, handed Raechel her mail, and moved on to the next townhouse without a word. Her disdainful gaze swept us like dirt.
Hello, anxiety, my old friend. I see you've come to fuck with me again.
"Don't mind her," Raechel told me, not exactly quietly, as we strolled off up the street toward the Hammersmith building. "I believe you call her type a Karen in the States?"
I was focusing on the safe space of the office building up ahead. Maybe I should see a therapist. This was starting to feel like rejection sensitive dysphoria or something. I'd been in such a relaxed vibe just minutes ago, and all it took was one disapproving glare from a textile, reminding me that while it had in fact been legal since 2016, nobody was ever supposed to actually do it. How dare I be naked in her space? And my affect dropped like a crate of glassware onto concrete.
Nigel said his first day was awful, but that it got better day by day. He'd also said that it had taken him a week before his breakthrough. I was on day one. This was not going to be a fun ride.
Raechel and I parted company at reception, her office being round the left and mine being upstairs. I took the steps rather than the lift, partly to work off the nervous energy. Thankfully, the hall on the first floor was clear. Anyone I ran into would have been a fellow naturist, not a textile, but I wasn't up to dealing with random encounters of any sort at this point.
The rest of Day One was spent on tedium. Blessed be the tedium that occupies the brain and keeps it from running in the hamster wheel. I unpacked my office stuff, and got my certs and awards lined up on top of the cabinet over my desk as was expected. I did my first login, and got my ID card keyed to all the right places. Everyone who has ever changed jobs in a white collar position has gone through this, and we'll just gloss over it in these few words.
The important thing here was I spent some time in my office, in an enclosed space. Is there such a thing as claustrophilia? I'd been a naturist for ten years or so. I'd been socially nude on a lot of occasions. Today, I seriously felt naked. This wasn't naturism, this was me parading down the street bare-ass with my dick hanging out.
By the time I joined the queue waiting for the shuttle with a dozen other naturist employees, and rode home in a flurry of introductions that nobody reasonably expected me to remember the next day, I'd thankfully settled a bit. Invitations to the pub were easily declined with a plea of jet lag. I was able to escape into my flat with only the threat of extended introductions in the morning hanging over me. A few memory tricks skimmed from a Dale Carnegie manual would help me remember names, and worked better in an extended social engagement, where I had time to build a portfolio.
No, the fun part was that, in the morning, I would be riding the bus going into town nude. A bus that would drop a whole crowd of naturists on the pavement outside the office building. Safety in numbers, I hoped.
I had to actually take out my PN cert, and read both sides of the card, to get the nervous twitches to stop.
I did sleep well that night, once I got to sleep, thank you so very much Raechel. My own company just wasn't doing it for me as far as anxiety release.
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Day Two started a bit more auspiciously. I'd picked up a bag of German-label coffee beans grown in Vietnam and a couple of microwavable breakfast-type meals at the Aldi downstairs, and had better coffee and hot food to get me started. How the Brits manage on a slice of toast and a cup of tea I'll never know.
Protein and caffeine needs met, I packed up my messenger bag as before, and faced the door.
Nude.
Dammit, this is what I wanted, right? Except permanent nudity meant walking down a public street, in full view of everyone, not just splashing happily in the pool at the naturist resort.
Deep breath. I wasn't breaking the law. I had the Official Government Fuck-Off Card if anyone challenged me walking around with my dick swinging. I'd had an AANR card for ten years before that.
None of which reduced the trepidation I felt just trying to walk out my door and go to work.
Fuck. I was not going to miss the bus because of first week nerves. I opened the door, stepped out into the hall, made sure the door latched, and walked down to the lift before I realized I'd left my sandals.
Back to the flat, kick my feet into my sandals, check the door, get back to the lift before the door closes. I ducked in just in time to avoid getting bumped by the closing doors, to the amusement of the three people already aboard.
Sheila Otter from Accounting I'd been introduced to in a walk through yesterday. I was surprised I remembered her name from the brief contact. Naturally wheat blonde, as evidenced by the nearly invisible tuft at her mons, she had pale skin and a dusting of freckles across her shoulders. She was also in her late thirties, and her C cup tits sagged from two children, dark areoli surrounding fat nipples that pointed at the floor.
The broad-shouldered, stocky man with the uncircumcised dick standing next to her was probably her husband, Kervyn. He looked like the photos she had in her cube, anyway. We exchanged a brief nod.
Next to him was a tall, lean man, dark-skinned but not Black, with thick black hair cut short, clean shaven all the way down, not a hair on his body below the neck, and also uncircumcised, which I was learning was much more common in the UK than in the States. He had an old appendicitis scar on his lower abdomen, but above it was another scar, with a sunken-in spot and a jagged line extending around his side.
"Gunshot," he said.
I blinked. "Sorry, rude of me to stare," I apologized.
He waved it off. "Everybody asks. I was at a protest a few years back and took a stray round." He shrugged. "Could have been worse. There was a kid behind me."
i wasn't really quite sure how to respond to that.
"That's a collector's item, isn't it?" he asked, breaking the awkward silence, and pointing to my Pitney Bowes thermal mug.
"Sharp eye," I complimented him. "Yeah, they only did the one run before the supplier went broke defending an IP suit against a tool manufacturer. Pitney Bowes was nearly pulled into the lawsuit. Legal convinced them that logo mugs were a bad idea."
The elevator jolted to a stop, made a couple of grinding noises, then dinged, and opened its door in a series of arthritic lurches.
"And that's got to be on my agenda this morning," the man said. He stepped aside, and put out a hand as we exited. "Damien Springett, Facilities, which means the lift is my problem."
I shook his hand. "Ian McCormick, IT, but you probably already knew that."
"Right," Damian said, "the undercover Scot."
I sighed. "My parents had some kind of pretension or other, but I've got so many nations in my ancestry there's not enough of any one to claim."
Our quartet passed through the inner doors and into the wide hallway that led outside. I distracted myself with the Aldi, on the right. I wondered how the employees dealt with the tower's requirement they work nude, in respect to the tower's naturist rules. Of course, Aldi insisted they had to carry the company logo, and so by compromise they all wore the official work apron, and nothing else, while on duty.
I'd met one of the staff last night, Erma Hotchkiss, a single mother in her early twenties. There being no line, we had a moment to chat when I checked out. She'd been living in the tower when Hammersmith bought it, in a subsidized flat with her three year old son, and couldn't find work. When the firm bought the tower, she said the hell with it, got her cert, tossed her clothes, and promptly got a job at the Aldi. Her son attended the tower daycare and had adjusted faster to full time naturism than she had, as children often do.
But then we went through the next set of doors, and were out on the pavement. A damp breeze blew past, putting forth the possibility of a more serious effort at precipitation. Sheila shivered. Her husband put an arm round her for the few steps down the pavement to the shuttle.
"If you want to run back inside and get your ponchos," the driver told us as he opened the door, "I can wait a minute or two. The schedule's not that tight." He winked.
The other three conferred quickly. I got a questioning nod from Damien, gave him an affirmative. We all set off back into the tower.
Across the entrance hallway, signs proclaimed LOCKER ROOM to either side of a set of double doors. Beyond, lockers lined either side of a long room with benches down the middle. The ones on the right, I'd learned last night, with yellow doors, were for visitors to stash their kit while on the premises. Anyone wanting to visit had to go nude, tower rules. Exceptions were made of course for first responders and the like.
The blue doors down the left had card readers instead of padlock holes. I found mine, swiped my card, and opened the locker. Inside was the welcome kit I'd been issued - two shower towels, one washrag, two sitting towels, all with the HF logo embroidered on a corner, a pair of rubber flip-flops in a plastic bag for the showers round the far corner, and another plastic packet that I pulled out and stashed in my messenger bag. Folded up inside was a clear plastic rain poncho, again with the HF logo.
"Must keep the wet off," Nigel had said, when we confirmed that my card opened the door of the half-height locker on the upper tier. "You'll find you don't get chilled quite so easy after a few days, but getting wet tosses that in the bin."
I closed the locker, and caught up with Damien, who was following Sheila and Kervyn out.
