Wasted Bras And Wasted Thongs

Wasted Bras and Wasted Thongs: Throbbing in the Christmas Hot Tub

by Buck Maelstrom, M.D. and Miss Manners With a Whip

Detective Lisa Anderson had been headed home, her mind on two weeks of Christmas leave, when the radio in her unmarked car crackled with the news. Her sleek, supple body rippled with tension at the prospect of a new crime on the verge of her vacation. Finally, after muttering a few unprintable comments, Lisa resigned herself to cruel fate, pulled the Ford into the remote gravel road, and followed the memorized instructions from the police dispatcher to the enormous trash container by the construction site.

As she emerged from the vehicle, several uniformed policemen paused, turned from their search, and followed her progress. As trained investigators, they could not help but note her tailored jeans as they hugged her aerobicized physique, the tweed jacket that only inadequately concealed her curves. As her eyes flicked toward them, however, they turned away. Her eyes were deep, her gaze penetrating. But they were sleepy as well, as if announcing a sensuality barely slumbering beneath the surface of her professionalism.

"Why me?" The thought filled Lisa with anger. Was it male chauvinism? The dispatcher had been given instructions to send Lisa. The report on the radio had seemed quite benign. Who cared if some underwear had been deposited in a dumpster? What was the big deal? And why did Headquarters want to pawn off such a silly, inconsequential case on Lisa? Her assignment was major crimes, and solving some minor theft would not enhance her resume.

As Lisa approached the enormous trash container, she noticed that other detectives had tilted an aluminum ladder against the side. Beefy Sam Johnson was gazing in, his brow furrowed. A dead body? Lisa had no idea. Sam climbed down and motioned for Lisa to take a look. As she did so, Sam could not help but admire her strong, slender legs in the tight-fitting jeans. With heroic effort, Sam turned away, not wanting to be caught admiring Lisa's hips as she ascended the ladder. As Sam did so, he caught two patrolmen doing that very thing. He admonished them brusquely to return to their chore of gathering evidence.

Lisa peered over the edge of the trash container and gasped. The magnitude of the crime was apparent.

With a gasp of sheer horror, Lisa saw in the trash a Freya Zeta Luxury Thong, a beautiful mixture of sheer and opaque materials finished with a contrasting edge of eyecatching floral detailing.

She saw a Gossard Charm Low-Rise G-string, with a fashionable jewelled decoration hanging off the hip. In her mind's eye she naturally saw a handsome guy kneeling beside her, kissing the jewelled decoration as it hung off her hip.

Business. She had to concentrate on business. With an effort, Lisa sought to focus on the crime. Why would anyone dump such wonderful, new lingerie?

She saw an Aubade Legende Demi Cup Underwire Bra. Involuntarily, she imagined the bra surrounding her own firm, tender form.

Lisa saw a Jezebel Risque Low-Rise Thong with a semi-sheer front, with thin straps and a lovely bow at the center of the waistband. And she saw, nearby, the matching Jezebel Risque garter belt with matching bows.

Against her will, Lisa began to imagine the Jezebel Risque Low-Rise Thong on her own body. Toned by years of running, her tummy taut from years of situps, Lisa knew just how tempting it would look.

Not for nothing had Lisa undergone laser treatments to make her form smoother and more thongworthy. While she was studying Criminal Justice in college, one of her former boyfriends had been getting a M.A. in Nude Beach Fashion Trends. As a consequence, Lisa had experimented in the past with a tiny, slender landing strip 3/4" wide and 2" high. She had also tried a tiny triangle with each side 1" in width. However, in terms of thong fit and overall tactile appeal, Lisa generally favored total smoothness.

The starkness of it -- the beautiful lingerie in the dumpster -- disturbed her. It was, perhaps, the reverse of the Stendahl Effect. Seized with a sense of wasted life, Lisa could not help but contemplate. How many lithe women would now be unable to wear the teasing little thongs she saw merely tossed in the trash? How many young career girls, just like her, would be unable to enjoy those wisps of fabric -- bras and thongs which tantalized the wearer as well as the viewer -- because of this heinous act of destruction?

But there was an even more poignant thought. Lisa sighed and descended the ladder. Oh, it was sad. How many boyfriends would now be deprived, in the bitter Alaskan winter, of the sight of their girlfriends in enticing bras and thongs?

A thousand miles to the north, as the Taylorcraft circled over the frozen lake, Bob looked up and waved. The bush pilot, low now and plainly visible, acknowledged the wave and dropped a freezer bag full of letters on the ice near Bob's cabin. Then the plane turned, climbed, and vanished into the vastness.

After retrieving the bag, and trudging along the path he had shovelled between the lake and his cabin, Bob reached the warmth of his cabin. There, he removed his black wool watch cap, hung his parka on a wooden peg, and unzipped a heavy wool tunnel-collar sweater. It was mid-December in Alaska, and the time for Polartec had gone. The deep freeze had arrived and it was a time for Gore-Tex and wool.

Bob fetched a fresh cup of Gevalia Stockholm Roast from the top of his cook stove, inserted another log into the wood stove, and went to sit at his desk. There, in the oak chair, he gazed out at a peerless view of Lake Clark. Bob recognized the return address on Sawmill Lake, and eased the point of his Camillus knife into the flap and slit open the evelope. It was a letter from Jim Alston, the bush pilot who had transported him into the back country of Alaska five years before.

Bob had done well in the stock market throughout the 1980s. By the middle of that decade, with a personal computer in his own house, he realized that automation would sweep not merely the office but also the home. Voting with his feet, Bob swiftly made money on the Nasdaq. Sensing a market top in the summer of 1999, he sold and transferred his money to safer instruments. It was only a million dollars, which was not much in an expensive area like San Francisco. Not much if he continued his yuppie lifestyle of Beamers and gourmet restaurants.

But Bob had other dreams. He wanted to go north, to Alaska, and his rush was on. So it was that the summer of 2000 found him sawing trees for his cabin on Lake Clark. In the summer, he fished and gardened.

Others who built cabins made fireplaces from local river rock. Despite their charm, fireplaces were inefficient. Bob paid the extra amount to have a small Vermont Castings wood stove flown in. He placed it at the center of his great room. With a fireplace, a cabin might be 40 above inside when it was 40 below outside. But Bob knew the startling performance of wood stoves. An interior temperature of 80 or 85 could easily be achieved in the dead of winter.

When the land was locked in ice, Bob was snug as a bug in a rug in his log cabin. Behind it, of course, was his food cache on stilts, so the bear population could not reach it. With apples and clementines and coffee and such brought in every other month with the mail, he couldn't have been more comfortable.

The peace and quiet of the wilderness were essential to his spirit. But Bob also needed to access bikini sites on the Internet. And, understandably, he needed to read porn stories written by good citizens for publication on Literotica. On the roof of the cabin, almost hidden by the moss of the roof, were solar panels. These generated sufficient electricity for Bob's computer, which accessed the Internet by satellite. Thus, if some person mentioned Jennifer Garner in a a Yahoo chat room, Bob was able to take the necessary steps to search for topless photos.

Were there times, when the moon was out and it was 50 below zero, when Bob felt a bit lonely in the magnificent solitude? Yes, there such times. He had constructed a primitive hot tub on his front deck. Of course, he had to fill it by means of repeated trips from the wood stove. But it was seldom used. The reality was that Swedish models rarely hiked the frozen tundra there.

But there was a woman coming--not Swedish, not a model, not even a hiker, but a detective. Bob held the letter in his hand, wondering if the pleasure of female companionship was enough to offset the strain of sharing his tiny cabin. Most assuredly it was not, not if the woman looked like most detectives he'd experienced. No doubt she was gruff, masculine, big-boned, and lantern-jawed, apt to pull a gun and book him if he so much as suggested she might need the assistance of an experienced woodsman in the wild. He wondered if there was any possible way he could refuse to have her.

But Sam Johnson was an old friend and it was his request, something to do with investigation of a French import-export dealer who took advantage of the little-used Ukrainian/Scandinavian channels of trade to market luxury goods to the U.S. Bob didn't see how he could say no, so he booted up the computer to reply via email to Sam.

What luxury goods would a French exporter be smuggling? Louis Vuitton luggage? Truffles? Cheese? Cabernet Sauvignon? Hermes scarves? Bob dismissed the specifics of the case from his mind and pondered how to accommodate another resident to the cabin with a minimum of personal interaction.

The cabin consisted of two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. She could take the spare bedroom. Still, perhaps it would be a good time to go off into the bush himself and hunt for a week or two? He had a snowmobile with a pack sled behind it. Often, he would spend a night or two out. The windblocking tent on his sled came with a small, foldable wood stove. Combined with his LL Bean minus 20 down-filled sleeping bag, the folding stove made it possible to sleep out in a tent even in brutal weather.

But no. That would leave his resident unprotected and unskilled in the harsh Alaskan wilderness, and the thought of putting a guest in danger, however unwelcome, was untenable. He would have to stay and make the best of it. Bob finished his grudging email and went to check for spare snowshoes.

Two weeks later, right on schedule, Bob spotted Jim's four-seater circling above the lake, ostensibly with the passenger who was to spend the next week with Bob, a bushel of Golden Delicious apples and five pounds of Kona coffee to be savored on these winter nights. Bob pulled the fur-lined parka even farther over his face and blew a frosty breath out into the frigid air. As soon as he could get the initial pleasantries over with and his houseguest to the cabin, he intended to brew some coffee, take a hot bath, and explore Victoria's Secret's latest website offerings in the privacy of his own bedroom. The detective could enjoy the fire he'd built and help herself to whatever groceries Jim had brought along with her, but Bob was not about to relinquish his much-prized solitude to make small talk with a stranger. Not unless the stranger was Sophie Marceau or Catherine Zeta-Jones. Even then chat would not be his first priority.

As the woman descended from the four-seater, Bob experienced an immediate shift of his paradigms. Even swathed in a down parka, waterproof Red Wing boots, and a balaclava, his new cabinmate was something to see. He caught a glimpse of translucent porcelain skin, smoky hazel eyes, and hair that shone like pale fire underneath the hood of her parka. Her jeans could not conceal the lush curve of her flanks, and Bob tried not to gape openly as she strode toward him, her pace impeded by the thick snow just enough for him to savor her approach as he rapidly rethought his plans for the evening.

Throughout the two hours of the flight, Lisa had been humming the old Freddy Fender song, "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights." First, there had been the shock of the beautiful lingerie thrown in the trash. Then she had watched her vacation evaporate. Finally, Lisa had learned that she would have to head into the frozen back country to track down the lingerie smugglers.

Trudging up the path, with almost four feet of snow on either side, Lisa only caught a glimpse of her host. Feeling no interest whatever in her assignment, chilled from the plane ride, and generally annoyed, Lisa looked up at him and said: "Grizzly Adams, I presume?" The fur of his parka hood concealed his face, but she heard a laugh, saw a flash of white teeth, and noted his gesture to proceed to the cabin. So he wasn't ill-natured, at least not initially, as she had feared, and his orthodonture was lovely. It must be a favorable sign.

He wasn't smelly, either. In her worst moments on the plane she'd imagined a Jeremiah Johnson with none of the taciturn charisma of Robert Redford--a backwoods roughneck who laundered his long johns monthly and took a bath weekly, a man who would only grunt at her as he tossed slabs of moose jerky onto a grimy table for dinner. This man was a pleasant surprise. Peeking from the neck of his parka was one of Lisa's favorite LL Bean wool plaids, its texture well-worn but soft, and his jeans, doubtless flannel-lined as well, were clean and even creased. What kind of man took the time to iron his jeans up in the wilds of the Alaskan outback? Intrigued and a little perplexed, Lisa followed the path up to the cabin, which, she was even more relieved to note, had no rusted machinery or animal carcasses beside it. When she entered the cabin, she felt as if she were stepping into a wilderness vacation brochure. The blankets lining the walls, the warmth emanating from the wood stove, the fragrant aroma of some dish bubbling on the stove, all served to make her realize just how exhausting her journey and her uneasiness about the trip had been. She wanted to flop down on the quilt-covered bed she glimpsed through a doorway and pull her frozen boots off. Tomorrow would be soon enough to decipher how Gossard, Aubade, and Simone Perele silk had found their circuituous way from the looms of Paris over the ice-choked waters of the Bering Straits to repose ignominiously in an Anchorage dumpster.

Just behind her, as he stepped inside the door, her host swept back his hood. Lisa immediately began thinking of Daniel-Day Lewis. However, this man's musculature was even better than Daniel Day-Lewis', his nose more prominent, his eyes more hawk-like. As he took off his jacket, she noticed that the rigors of heating his cabin and stocking his larder obviously required a stringent physical regime, each movement of which Lisa imagined she could see reflected in the curves of his biceps and the cordoned muscles of his forearms.

But really, she had no time to spend speculating about (she cast another surreptitious glance) the flat abs and long thigh muscles of her enforced roommate. When he nodded at the open door of the bedroom Lisa had already spied, she wasted no time in heaving her pack through the door and collapsing onto the bed. She meant to unlace her boots and remove her outergarments; really she did, but she made the mistake of lying back for just a moment on the goosedown pillows. As drowsiness surged over her like a glacier over the Brooks Range, she heard the distant clink of saucepans and lapsed into dreams of hot soup and camomile tea.

Moreover, the smells and sounds of something delicious cooking greeted her when she awakened. She stretched luxuriously, appreciating the warmth of the wool blankets and the loft of the featherbed against her bare skin. Bare skin? But hadn't she been too fatigued from her flight to undress? She checked underneath the covers, where she also didn't remember crawling. Apparently she had either sleep-stripped or her host had taken the liberty of removing her outergarments for her. While she was still clad in her jeans and a thin silk undershirt, she feared that he had been confronted with evidence that her interest in tracking down luxury lingerie smugglers was not wholly dispassionate. An outline of the rich guipere embroidery of her Jane Woolrich apricot silk demi-bra showed through her undershirt, and she was just as glad that Bob was occupied at the stove in the other room.

Her waking dreams had been, oddly enough, of an Arctic expedition involving a rangy, clear-eyed explorer and herself on a bearskin in an igloo, testing how far the heat of passion and shared bodily warmth could take them in sub-zero temps. The resulting arousal was clearly visible through the thin silk of her garments, and she felt a bit overheated by the lingering images of limbs lit by a fire's glow. She grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders to preserve her decorum as she entered the kitchen and faced the object of her sensual dreams.

Over dinner, Lisa found that Bob was not only a good cook, but easy to talk to. She tried to hold up her end of the conversation, but she still felt disoriented from the long flight and the surrounding wilderness gave her a case of the heebie-jeebies, though she would never have let her nervousness show. Without seeming to notice her perfunctory conversation, Bob explained how he managed the isolation and enjoyed the solitude that sometimes lasted for months without a respite. As she shivered under her blanket, he noticed that she was chilled and immediately offered his hot tub as a remedy, an offer she eagerly accepted. She started to mention that she'd not brought a swimsuit, but realized Bob must surely know that.

From her vantage point in the hot tub, Lisa looked out at the expanse of Douglas firs, now barely visible through a fall of silvery snow. Above, she glimpsed a ragged patch of starlight through the clouds and thought she might never have experienced such bliss. The only improvement she could imagine was a view of the Northern Lights as she soaked, but just as she leaned back and breathed a sigh of complete gratification, a voice startled her. "Mind if I join you?" Bob asked. She could hardly refuse; after all, it was his hot tub, but she was a little unnerved at his proximity with the images from her tantalizing dream so fresh in her mind. She swished over a little in order to accommodate him, but anticipating the tight fit in the hot tub intended primarily for himself, Bob moved the same way and they ended up practically on top of each other. The electrifying sensation she felt as soon as their bodies touched discomposed her, and as she struggled for a light-hearted comment, he attempted to shift to a more sedate position. Instead of breaking contact with her, however, he pulled her onto his lap in one swift motion. As he ran his fingers over the curve of her breast, all the while riveting her with his piercing eyes, Lisa forgot to be startled. She felt she was sinking into a abyss of desire, its heat inversely proportional to the frigid air bounding them on all sides.

Law enforcement was all about situations which had gone out of control. A night of drinking could swiftly turn into violence. A friendly discussion could degenerate into a fight. So Lisa knew about control, and she tried to maintain it even in odd and unexpected circumstances. But the frigid night, the curtain of steam, and the hot water had combined to lower her guard. It was almost a comedy of errors that she had ended up on the lap of this muscular semi-stranger. As she squirmed to stand in the slippery tub, her breast again filled his hand.

At the dining table, Bob had thought he saw a glimpse of swollen nipples. Now, as his right hand ran over her right breast, there was no mistaking it. Yes, there were the demands of courtesy, but Bob was also unprepared. It was one thing to view lingerie online, but it was quite another to summon up some form of protest when a beautiful, naked visitor ended up quite literally on his lap.