This happened to Laura, a friend of mine, a nurse in a hospital cardiac rehabilitation program. I'm using her really name because you don't know her and she'll get off - maybe literally - on knowing you're thinking about her ass.
Guys coming to cardiac rehab are not young. Maybe sixty-five and up. To get admitted, all you need is a heart attack, a heart-valve replacement, or a stroke. Then, as I understand it, Medicare pays for thirty sessions in rehab. Let's talk turkey, as they say in New England: A rehab program is a "profit center", the hospital administration knows it, and men stay in rehab partly for the nurses half their age. Laura takes their blood pressure - holding their arm, smiling, chatting; she is likely the only one in their lives who asks about their diet, sleep, aches and pains, exercise schedule, and bowel movements.
Laura is pretty, she smiles, she remembers names, and has an enthusiastic hello for everyone. To do this job, she would not have to be so cute. She's an Italian girl with a full mane of glossy dark hair, blue eyes, a pretty but serious face, and, for late 'forties, a shape. I am not saying Sophia Loren - to dial back to the generation where these guys became enslaved to breasts - and I'm not saying that her boobs are named "holy" and "shit" - but no one can miss that Laura is concealed carrying. I'm not even saying "full lips" - but pretty, and they smile. And I am not saying hot legs, though Laura's legs are long and she's a runner. She's a damned dedicated nurse, but being a little hot didn't hurt in getting the job. After all, the point is to keep hearts beating.
By the way, she has to wear the same clothes every single day; blue sweat suit, bottom and top. Why? Frankly, the old guys may not be so good at recalling names, but Laura is "blue," Jessica is "white," Elaine is "black," and so on. We are dealing with more problems than just the heart.
I said I would not draw out this narrative. Recently, a "young man", say sixty, walks in. He has not had an infarction or a triple bypass. He has had a lifelong genetic problem, now corrected by open-heart surgery. He is feeling about now that his heart is better than ever.
The hospital's rehab facility is a health club, with exercise machines, treadmills, free weights, and posters extolling exercise, healthy diet, and keeping the mind sharp. Notably missing is "libido rehab," but that is my own catty comment.
The new patient is Raymond, fit as young geezers go, with a dark-red, ten-inch vertical scar down his chest, midway between his nipples, where they sawed his sternum in half and sewed it up with wire, which they left for the flesh over time to cover. Raymond is still a type A personality. On every machine he is a demon; the neat little personalized workout slip setting his "watts," "mets," "incline," and "time" he views as mere guidelines. His own regimen is hit it, hit it, hit it, so he sweats like the proverbial pig and probably risks an infarction. Except that he is wearing a heart monitor box around his neck with its wires connected to four contacts on his chestβfor the black, white, red, and green wires. The nurses teach patients to apply the contacts and snap on the wires, and hearts are monitored on a computer screen. So, when Raymond begins his Navy Seal fantasy, Laura strolls over, smiles, shakes her head, and points a finger at his program. Slow down, asshole. But smiling.
A physical young fellow like Raymond can't stop checking out the cute nurses, which is all of them. When they smile and lift his arm to apply the pressure cuff, his fingers gently rest on their hips with just the slightest acceptable pressure. He smiles up into their eyes.
I'm not into percentages, but say ninety-seven percent of the guys work out in street clothes. They come wearing running shoes and mount the first machine. Raymond brings shorts and a T-shirt and sweat socks that don't show above the shoes. His legs are long and, not surprisingly, given his drive, slim and muscular. His arms are muscular. What hair he has is white, but full and nicely groomed. He has a Harvard accent and a chilling, ironic smile to match.
Let me, dear God, get on with this bloody story.
Raymond can't stop looking at Laura across the room, from atop any iron horse he is riding. When she glances up and catches him, he does not look away. Then, I imagine, her dark and lovely eyebrows come together with a reproachful frown. But she cannot help it, she then smiles her widest, welcoming Italian-girl smile. She likes men, is all.
Raymond, of course, does nothing and certainly Laura does nothing. I don't know what Raymond might have been thinking those first weeks, but I know what Laura was thinking because she told me. "I can't help it, Ellen, he does turn me on." She sighs, chin in hands, "He's wearing a wedding ring." Sighs again, "I haven't been fucked in two years since Carl died..."
And then, before I reply with my typical irresponsible suggestion, she says: "No. No, not with a patient. I can't." I nod, feeling for her, but Laura fends off men.
The rehab facility has a locker room. It isn't boy/girl, or private, just a wall of smallish lockers with locks scientifically devised to baffle users and two big bathrooms, one with a shower. Taped on the shower it is a paper sign, "Please wait 10 minutes for water to warm up." No one uses it.
Raymond has finished his workout, done his stretching and "warm down," and been cleared by the heart monitor to leave. He has not removed the four stick-on contacts for the monitor box that hangs around his neck. That is not especially relevant. What is relevant is that he can't open his locker. Four numbers to press, the same he always uses, part of his Social Security number, and today the motherfucker won't open.
Laura has come to the rescue with the universal code. She has squatted down to tackle the low locker. He stands behind her in his shorts and sweaty T-shirt, watching her. And somehow, her sweat suit's pants, usually tied tight and double-knotted, pull a costume malfunction. How the hell did it happen that day? I can't get that clear from Laura. I have a suspicious dirty mind. Let it go.
Laura is a private woman, but a woman. She has one sexy tattoo on her ass, left cheek near the topβclassic location. She got it one August night when she and the girls were respectably carousing in Montauk. Got this rather large and tarty tattoo. "Do nurses do that?" I asked her.
She raised her eyebrows, shrugged. "Too much to drink. I guess nurses do if no one sees them. I don't see nurses in the nude, so I don't know. I can't be the only one. If the patients knew..."
Well, however it happened, when Laura squatted down with Raymond behind her, gazing down I suppose at her luxurious black hair, her sweat pants rode down a few inches on her big white ass, which was thrust back by her position. Laura did not realize it, intent on the lock, the code. Raymond is looking down at the top half of the tattoo. On this charming nurse's left buttock. He can't make it out, not entirely, but what he sees says, "Take Me..." The rest is still covered.
Raymond says, in his Boston-Harvard accent, discreetly lowering his voice, "Laura, you have a charming tattoo..."
Laura told me--I wasn't there, of course, and she was talking girl-to-girl--"I jumped up and screeched as though a mouse had bitten my pussy lip." She isn't that kind of girl, believe me, but we were drinking, she was relaxing and, I think, pretty high on getting fucked for the first time in two years.
So, she shot up straight, hauling up her infernal pants, and whirled on Raymond, her pretty face a comic image of round blue eyes and open mouth, and she is gasping, "Oh, I'm so, so sorry." Her hands come up to press her cheeks in the classic pantomime of horror.
"What was the fucking big deal?" I asked her with my characteristic sensitivity when she first told me.
"I'm a nurse," she told me incredulously, staring as though I'd been living under a mushroom. "A nurse in cardiac rehab, a serious job. So responsible..."