This story is entirely fictional and the product of my imagination. All characters are at least 18 years-old.
This is a continuation of my New American University of Chinese Medicine series. It's not necessary to read the Intro., but you might find it interesting background. Please enjoy.
On the first day of our Foundations of Chinese Medicine, Caren Mendez, Joy Saint Clair and I formed a weekly study group for the class. In our first couple of meetings all we did was discuss the materials that we went over in class two days before. We quickly realized though, after the first quiz, that we really needed to memorize the material rather than just "get a good grasp on it". So, the three of us started making flash cards of the concepts and categories Foundations covered. This helped a great deal, and the games that the three of us came up with for these flash cards made our three to four-hour study sessions seem to fly by.
Caren (though I usually called her Mendez, rather than her given name) was a thirty-year-old single mother who had decided to enroll at the New American University because, in her words she, "came from a long line of brujas and curanderos" and was most interested in the herbal remedies in Chinese medicine. In some ways, she certainly looked and dressed the part. She frequently wore her slightly wavy black hair in two long braids and tended to favor long, flowing skirts, that somehow still managed to highlight her full, round butt and wide hips. Her choice of tops, loose low-cut blouses, did nothing to disguise her enormous breasts and her comparatively narrow waist.
I many ways Caren was the personification of the sometimes bawdy, earth-mother. She had no qualms about making jokes every time the word "Yang" came up in class and seemed to relish telling Joy and I about her most recent sexual partner, sometimes in lurid detail. While a guy might say to his buddy that he took a woman home from the bar, Caren tended to go into the particulars of the who, how, when and where of her adventures.
The three of us always studied at my place since I lived alone. Caren lived with her mother and daughter and Joy lived with two roommates; a couple that she knew from massage school. There were just fewer distractions in my apartment. I usually made coffee to fuel us through our long sessions, and after the second session either Joy or Caren would bring a bottle of wine for after as a sort of reward and wind-down.
On the evening of our last study session before the comprehensive final exam Caren couldn't make it because she had to cover a shift at work. This exam would cover the entirety of the material from Foundations of Chinese Medicine. We needed to know all of the properties fo Yin and Yang, the Six External Factors and Seven Emotions of illness, how to recognize excess or deficiency in its many manifestations, the functions of the Zang and Fu organs as well as their corresponding times, channel names, planets, dreams, animals and foods. Everything in the forty-hour course and the additional thirty hours of reading.
Joy and I had been studying for a couple of hours, quizzing each other with flash cards, when she leaned back in her chair, sighed heavily, rolled first one shoulder and then the other, and rubbed the right side of her neck. I asked if she was okay, and he said that her traps and rhomboids were very tight and sore.
"Maybe I slept wrong last night," she said.
Joy was a tiny woman, only about five-feet tall with a tight dancer's body—a nicely rounded ass, and very strong looking legs that were particularly on display when she wore shorts or a skirt. She had a narrow, muscular waist that accentuated her hips, which while not very wide, were just enough to give her a petite, feminine shape. Her straight hair was so black and shiny that in strong sunlight it almost looked like there were blue highlights, and so long that it fell to the middle of her back.
Joy frequently wore big sweatshirts, sweaters or loose, off the shoulder, tops and her breasts did not seem to be very large, or even very prominent, as they were never on display, though here nicely muscled shoulders, defined collar bones and shapely neck often were.
Joy had been a dancer since she was a small child. At first, like many little girls, she had studied classical ballet, but when she realized that she would never be tall enough to be professional ballet dancer she had switched to hip-hop in high school.
"Would you like me to try to take care of that?" I asked. We had massaged each other, all of us Caren, Joy and I, in the past so this was not an unusual question for me to ask.
"Would you mind?" she replied.
"Not at all. Come over to the couch and I'll see what I can do," I answered.
I sat on the couch, perpendicular to the back of the couch, my back against the arm and one leg out in front of me on the cushions. Joy followed me and sat down with her back to me, her butt between my legs—almost pushed up against me.
Placing my hands on Joy's shoulders made me realize how small she actually was. With my palms on the tops of her shoulders, I could cross my thumbs together over the back of her neck. I knew that I was fourteen inches taller than Joy, and outweighed her by at least ninety pounds, but my right thumb resting on top of my left drove that reality home in a way nothing else had before.
I moved my thumbs so that they rested near Joy's shoulder blades and began to knead her shoulders and the base of her neck. I could feel how tense her muscles were, bands that resisted and rolled slightly under my palms and fingers as I applied pressure.
After a few minutes Joy leaned back into my chest fully, again adjusted her hair out of the way, and tilted her head to the left to expose her neck to my right hand.
As I pressed the ball of my right thumb into Joy's hairline, near the base of her skull to feel where the upper part of the trapezius attaches, Joy let out a moan. A soft, breathy sound. A noise I had never heard from her before.
"You doing okay?" I asked.
"That hurts, but it hurts in a good way, so keep going," Joy told me.
"Maybe we should move onto the floor so that I can get some better leverage," I suggested.
Bending forward, breaking contact with my chest, Joy grabbed a throw pillow off the other side of the couch and stood up.
I pushed the coffee table out of the way, and Joy lay face down on the area rug with the pillow under her head and face. I knelt beside her and ran my hands along her spine from the waistband of her sweat pants to the tops of her shoulders. I added pressure as my hands passed between her shoulder blades, paying special attention to where Joy's muscles were the tightest and where I felt her knots.
My palms moved to Joy's shoulder blades and I used my thumbs to rub the knotted muscles there. As I began, Joy said, "Wait. Look away."
A little surprised, I turned my back to her, and there was a flurry of motion behind me.
I turned back to her to find that Joy had removed her top and was gain laying on the floor, face down, with her hands tucked up under the pillow bellow her head and her face toward me. Her top was tossed onto the couch, and her completely naked back showed me what my hands had already felt: that Joy hadn't worn a bra that day.
Smirking up at me, she said, "This might make it easier."
Joy's skin was absolutely flawless. Her entire back was an even tone of caramel tan skin, thanks to her Peruvian mother. Not a single blemish or tan line. The lights from the kitchen and the lamp beside the couch cast shadows in the valleys between her shoulder blades and the shallow depression of the small of her back, marked by the two deeper dimples that were the demarcation before the upward slope of her ass began. The light and shadow ripples of her ribs framed the long, smooth muscles of her upper back.
I took this all in, and I pushed it out of my mind as quickly as I noticed it. Spending so much time together, both in class and during our study sessions, Joy and I had become very friendly. There had been some mild, almost innocent, flirting—usually silly stuff. Harmless innuendo or double entendre, some quick glances, shy smiles and arched eyebrows. When Caren was with us, she usually monopolized the sexual conversation; Joy and I were usually along for the ride, as it were, the roller coaster of her stories. However, having spent the better part of a decade in a corporate setting, I knew where to draw the line to avoid coming off as creepy. A woman eleven years my junior, at 21 years-old, was essentially off limits as far as pursuing her went.
This new situation did make massaging Joy easier, and after about ten minutes working on her back and shoulders Joy sighed contentedly, smiled up at me again and said, "Thank you. That was really good, and I feel much better. If you'd hand me my shirt can get back to work."
