Hammersmith 06: Day Four

I woke up headachy, and with the sober realization that this was not a frolic at a resort. There was not going to be a point where I put my clothes back on and went home. I was home, and I had no clothes to put back on.

Oh yeah, the outfit I wore on the flight over? I dropped it off at the village laundry. Being only one set, it got mixed in with someone else's, and was now on a ship heading out on a month-long fishing loop. So very sorry, and you can get your things back when they make port.

And then there was the sex thing. This week had not been a series of casuals. I'd been brought into a polycule, and now I'd fucked someone outside of it.

Well, there were protocols for that. Now I knew why HR had asked for an STD series in with everything else. I'd figured it was an immigration requirement, but apparently it had also been my clearance to join the office polycule. I had no idea what that woman's testing status was, which meant I needed to get retested, today, and I had to let my partners know that I was off limits until test results came back. Given the casual openness with which Raechel and Pinny had treated our sexual relationships, I wasn't as concerned about acquiring a reputation, except perhaps for my judgment. Or lack thereof.

I had a feeling my telling Raechel that I'd fucked a mill worker would be old news by the time I got to her, anyway. The folks on the shuttle last night had had a pretty good idea what had happened, between the row down the pub and my showing up sweaty and looking maybe a little furtive.

First things first. There was a clinic on the ground floor, in the common area, next to the gym I needed to sign up for time at. I winced at the sentence construction, accepted that I was sometimes ungrammarly before caffeine, and set about rectifying the situation.

One of the hardest parts of living nude is getting up in the morning. I have to exit the blanket without a warm, fuzzy bathrobe to wrap up in. No shelter from the morning chill for me. I tried to order a bathrobe after I got to England. My account locked up. The help desk tech couldn't resolve it, and kicked it to level three support. They've yet to get back to me.

So I throw off the cover, shiver as the air hits my bare skin, shiver again as my bare feet hit the floor even though it's carpeted, and out I go into the morning as naked as I will be the rest of the day. With a nasty headache from being an American and grossly underestimating the beer, that could have been worse, thank you past me for hydrating before bed.

I'm a registered Practising Naturist, but mornings don't feel that fancy. I'm naked and cold and really want a bathrobe for a few minutes, please?

Coffee will have to do. Thankfully, British current heats up the kettle in less than a minute, and the French press is done by the time I've scrounged something edible. Black coffee on an empty stomach does not go well.

Brush through the hair, a quick swipe at my face with a washrag, and out the door I go, wearing nothing but a pair of sandals and a writswatch, and carrying my daily necessities in a shoulder-strap purse. Some naturist men call it a bag, or a carryall, or whatever. Fellas, it's a purse, get over it.

I didn't run into anyone in the hall or the lift, somewhat grateful for that, and I made it down to the ground floor without encounters. The atrium, not much more than a seating area really, this isn't a fancy hotel and there is no pool, was deserted at this hour.

Along the south wall were a variety of facilities, a janitor's closet, the aforementioned gym, the clinic, and then the daycare. All four doors were closed when I got there, and I paused at the clinic door before trying it to check the hours. Yes, they were open this early, I did remember correctly, and I headed in with a sigh of relief.

The small room beyond served as front office and treatment room both, with another room at the back fitted out for more serious efforts. Behind the desk sat an older woman, wearing a nurse's cap and a thin gold chain suspending a bright red glass flower between her collarbones. Her tits were flat, but with minimal sag, apparently never having been heavy enough to seriously droop. The nameplate on her desk said NURSE JENKINS.

"Good morning," Nurse Jenkins told me briskly.

"Good morning," I replied. "Isn't it a little risky, working the clinic nude?"

She shook her head. "Not really. Gloves and proper hand washing do most of the work, and I've got a surgical gown I can shrug on in about three seconds if you come in with something messy. If I have to sew you up, we're both getting gowns, and there will be proper surgical draping of the site. Now, what do you need?" She glanced me over, clinically, checking for obvious injuries and finding none.

I sighed. "I got incautious last night and need an STD test," I said tiredly.

All business now, she turned to the terminal on her desk and put out a hand. "ID?" she asked.

I gave her my card. She swiped it, checked over the record it pulled up.

"Ian James McCormick?" she read off for confirmation, then glanced up at me when I affirmed, and grinned. "The Secret Scot in person."

I rolled my eyes. "Sadly," I told her, "I really am American."

The nurse shook her head. "Were American. You've got provisional immigration status, so you're an incipient Brit." She checked off a few boxes on the screen, and stood, revealing that she shaved her pubic hair.

"Up on the table," she told me, "and spread your legs".

She smirked to acknowledge the sex joke, snapped on the gloves she'd pulled from a box on the counter, picked up a swab and opened it, and sighed.

"You don't look the type to enjoy this next bit," she told me, serious now, "so I'll just say sorry."

She took hold of my cock, twirled the swab into my urethra, and had it out that quick.

"And be done with it."

She closed the plastic cover on the swab one handed, got a squirt of something from a pump dispenser, and smoothed it onto the tip of my cock. Whatever it was, it cooled the cotton burn that was just starting to get revved up.

She patted my cock with the hand holding the swab, still holding it with her other hand, and said, "Now, be more prudent about where you stick this." She dropped my cock like a dead rat, and turned away, taking off her gloves.

"Test results in 48 hours," she said, "maybe less."

The gloves went into the medical waste bin.

"The lab will text you either an all clear or a seek medical advice."

She picked up the swab, noted its serial number on her terminal, dropped it into an opaque plastic bag and sealed it up.

"Both of those will come with a link to your test results. Sometimes you want negative results reported." She smirked again, this time at a joke I didn't quite get.

"All right then," I said. I took a deep breath, let out some tension. The tip of my cock felt like a mosquito bite that had been numbed. It was going to burn a bit later, and that first piss was going to be No Fun At All.

"It never is," Nurse Jenkins said, having been following my train of thought, clear in my expression and where my gaze had traveled. "Anything else? Need any jabs?"

"No, thank you," I said, maybe a bit tiredly. "I spent part of my two week notice period getting the full overseas travel battery, including for some reason the Asian sequence. I've been immunized against fevers I never knew existed."

She dropped the packet with my swab in a lockbox on her desk, checked her towel, and sat back down.

"And you're wondering why." I gave a brief nod, but she'd gone on without a pause. "Partly because England has considerable traffic with India and points east, and partly because there's a facility in Singapore you might visit at some point. "

"Um," I said brightly, the logistics of that being more than I was capable of processing on such short notice.

She laughed. "Oh lord, your face, and the expression was funny too. You did hear about the Red Light Revolution, didn't you?"

"Oh, yes," I assured her. I may have been in New York, but we saw the sex workers and queer pride folk leading the march on the parliament building, live until the government jammed the broadcast. Then it was Nepal all over again, minus any significant arson.

"I understand," I told her carefully, holding my voice steady more for my own benefit than for being polite, "I would be traveling to a queer friendly, clothing optional tropical nation. The flight there however would put me back through Gatwick, now, wouldn't it, and that's still a bit fresh in my mind."

"They tossed you in at the deep end, didn't they," she commiserated, "having you strip off before you even left the airport. "

I didn't reply. I was busy taking a deep breath and trying not to remember too clearly how it felt to walk nude through an airport immediately on arrival in a foreign nation, never mind I was moving here with the intent of immigrating.

She gave me time to work through it, then glanced at the clock.

"Next shuttle is in five minutes," she said.

"Thank you," I told her, and took advantage of the opening.

"Hope your day gets better," she called after me as I exited.

Me too, I thought, and picked up my pace to catch the shuttle.

=======

I made the shuttle with maybe a minute to spare, having looked out at the dismal rain falling, and ducked into the locker room to grab my company-issue poncho. Thus, only my shins and feet were wet, and cold, when I boarded, the rest of me wrapped in transparent plastic. Already steaming up and being uncomfortable against bare skin.

Only two other people were aboard, the gaunt woman from yesterday, and a short, slightly rounded young woman with Scandinavian features and dark hair cut short, sitting next to her, who was engrossed in her tablet and did not look up when I spoke.

"Morning," I offered. "We haven't met? I'm Ian McCormick." I settled for a cheery wave to the goth woman instead of reaching over her seat mate for a handshake.

"The Secret Scot," she said wearily, giving the impression of being as tired of the joke as I was. "Dusk Eventide, call center manager." She lifted a languid, long-fingered hand to wave in return.

"You'd still be setting up, then," I said, deciding to forego peeling off my plastic wrapping. Trying to get a wet plastic poncho off over bare skin would be an exercise in frustration, never mind trying to do it on the bus. I spread out a sitting towel anyway, to keep some of the wet from the outside of the poncho off the seat.

"Right," she said. "And we've yet to onboard the operations manager that I'll be reporting to. Can't get the scripts approved without the position filled, so I've been doing phone installations and voice hardware setup. On the bright side, I learned how to use a punchdown tool."

I nodded, made a hmm noise appreciating the effort, as you do.

"We're still doing the build out," Dusk went on. "Half of it is technical, putting in cubicles and creating the VDI image and setting up the VRU. Half of it is business, anticipating the most commonly asked questions, getting scripting for handling them, having legal review the recommendations for when someone calls about an allergic reaction, all that sort of thing. There's weeks of effort before we start hiring the call center agents. For labor pool reasons, the call center will be clothing optional, not nudity required like the main office. "

I made another hmm noise, acknowledging the required status infodump.

The other woman took advantage of the break. "Autumn Danjalsson," she stated, as if for the record, popping her head up to stare over my left shoulder for a moment. "I am the network specialist. Right now, I am the cabling person." She cocked her head, regarded me curiously, but still directing her gaze past my head. "You have not ridden this run before," she said. "You normally take the earlier shuttle with the larger group?"

I glanced down to break my attempt at eye contact, assuming either neurodivergence or a cultural thing. I had no idea where her accent was from. Somewhere very Northern, anyway.

"Right," I agreed, giving a nod of affirmation.

Her attention wavered, flicked down to the tablet. She seemed slightly lost, as if she'd run out of conversational tokens.

Dusk picked up. "We go in late morning," she said, "and go home late evening, when there's no deployment. Or at least, I do." She gave Autumn a glance. Autumn did not look up from the tablet that once more had her attention.

"I'd be concerned about the hours she puts in," Dusk said, speaking to me but looking at her companion, "but she seems to be one of those people who thrives on living at the office."

"I get that," I said. "I've known a few people who I think only went home for hygiene purposes. I dunno, I need time away from the office on a regular basis. Work life balance and all that."

We both broke eye contact, acknowledging that we'd done our proper effort at small talk, and spent the rest of the ride in on our respective phones.

Or at least Dusk did. I stared at mine and thought about the truly weird situation I was in. I mean, other than riding to work wearing just a plastic poncho, with two nude women in the next seat over. I still hadn't gotten used to riding in a vehicle nude. In the States, the closest you get to that at a naturist resort is a golf cart, and those are reserved for the folks that actually need the lift. Physical culture and all that, if you're able bodied, you're encouraged to walk.

One of the things I was having to get used to was the casual attitude toward sex. These people openly discussed their sex lives, knew who was sleeping with who, compared notes and even made recommendations. I mean, it seemed healthier than the culture I'd just left, all smarmy giggling and taboos and trying to work around embarrassment just to get active consent done.

But this morning, I was going to have to be particularly open about my sex life in particular, and tell folks that I'd banged a mill worker in the pub parking lot and was off limits until my tests came back. Now I knew why they'd run an STD panel on me before I left for the UK. The lab tech at the time had just shrugged and said that European immigration laws sometimes asked for some deeply personal stuff, and you should see how far the USA crawls up your ass when you want to move here. No thanks, I said, I'm leaving, and somehow, I don't think I'll be coming back.

At this point, realizing the constraint I'm under, yeah, unless the USA undergoes a major cultural shift and accepts social nudity as a norm, I can't go back.

=======

By the time the shuttle reached the office, the weather had settled in for a steady soaking drizzle, the sort of weather the research I'd done before embarking had led me to expect year-round. I supposed I'd been lucky for a few days.

The Hammersmith people were all under ponchos, the few who were on the street, the textiles all carrying umbrellas or wrapped up in brightly colored anoraks, or did they call raincoats something else here? I needed to check on that.

I fell in line behind Dusk and Autumn for the rollaway cart with a stack of standard-issue pool towels, a laundry hamper, one of those bag on a frame sort, next to it, for the damp towel once your legs were dry. Courtesy of the contracted laundry service, which also supplied the building with sitting towels and other linens for those who forgot or misplaced theirs, or suddenly needed a replacement.

I took a moment to fold up my poncho, now reasonably dry, and drop the towel, now moderately damp, into the hamper, before taking that next step. Because there, in the entry hall, were Raechel and Pinny. Having a conversation, hopefully not about me, I'd actually like to pass the Bechdel on this one.

So of course, when I took that last step out of the vestibule area and into the reception office proper, they stopped their conversation, and both turned their heads to look at me. Raechel raised an eyebrow.

"Yes," I said, maybe a little tiredly, "I fucked a mill girl last night. I've already been to the clinic, and I'll forward my results to you when I get them."

Raechel nodded approvingly, but her eyebrow stayed up.

Pinny let out a breath, a bit of tension, and said to Raechel, "He knows the rules. He's being all responsible and shit." Her attention turned to me. "You do realize that makes you hotter, right?"

"Worth waiting for," I said, finishing the joke.

"Ian was hired without interview," Raechel said, finally looking back to Pinny, "based partly on his reputation in the naturist community. We did a background check," this to me, "that inquired after your social habits, because we needed to know if you'd work out as part of our community."

Pinny laughed, almost a titter. "Is that the new euphemism for polycule, dearie?" she asked Raechel, maybe a bit archly.

"In my defense," I said, might as well go for the full monty, "in the midst of my lapse of judgement, I did remember to use a condom, so there's that."

"Not his first polycule," Raechel told Pinny. "The Americans would say his first rodeo, but I'm not sure about where that leaves me."

"I dunno," said Pinny, and nuzzled the tip of her index finger with her lips. "I wouldn't mind being roped and ridden."

"Got your morning tea yet?" Raechel asked me, not so much changing the subject as vaulting the median into the oncoming lanes and spinning halfway round in the process to join the flow.

"Haven't," I said. "Let's smash it."

As we walked away, leaving Pinny pouting with no one to tease, Raechel told me, "Proper use of the idiom, but it feels a bit off coming from someone of your generation and accent."

"So noted," I said.

=======

I stepped out of the stairway and nearly ran into a textile carrying a load of electronics. Past him, another guy in clothes, this one with a camera on his shoulder, and then, oh crap, a slender nude woman, small tits with startlingly dark areolae even given her warm brown skin tone, and a professional bob over a face that had reported on British naturism since Malpeth.

"Hi!" she said, spotting me. "Lakxshmi Gopal, BBC. Have you got a moment?"

I glanced at the camera, then back to her.

"For an interview, yes," she confirmed. She and the camera guy performed a pas de deux, and the light above the camera went on.

I'm pretty sure they got a solid five seconds of me staring into the camera like a jacklighted deer. Lakxshmi filled the dead air with an intro.

"Lakxshmi Gopal, BBC, and I'm here with Ian James McCormick, one of the two people immigrating to the UK for this project." She turned from the camera to me without missing a beat. "Ian, you're from a nation that suppresses naturist practice. Was the opportunity to go nude what drove your decision?"

And then the mic was in front of me and I couldn't leave dead air, wouldn't be professional. Never mind that trying to wedge "professional" into the situation wasn't going very well.

"What really drove it," I said, "was getting a very nice compensation package offered to me the day my previous job downsized me."

I waved my hand while I spoke, forgetting I had a cup of tea until a bit sloshed onto my hand. I switched the cup to my other hand, and tried to shake off the worst of the wet.

Lakxshmi gave a cut gesture to the camera guy, who promptly put out the floodlight.

"You all right there?" she inquired, poitning to my hand with her mic. "Not scalded, are you?"

I shook my head. "No," I said, "it's cooled off in the trip from downstairs. I could use a napkin, though."

She stepped back the little bit the corridor allowed for, and ushered me toward my office. I eased past the camera guy -- damn, he was built, shame he kept his clothes on -- and through the door.

Resisting the urge to close the door and hide from the camera, I swapped a paper napkin for the tea, putting the cup down on a warmer. Lakxshmi followed me in, and the sound guy wedged into the corner by the potted ficus. The camera guy stayed in the doorway, partly because he could get the entire room into the shot, and partly I think because he realized he'd be taking up over half the space.

Tiny mess tidied, I tossed the wadded-up napkin into the trashcan with a muttered, "two points".

"Ready?" Lakxshmi prompted. I turned round, took an imaginary mark to one side of my desk so she could have the other side and balance the image visually. Corporate media awareness training from the previous gig not such a waste of time after all really.

She moved to her mark, brought the mic up. "We'll just pick up here," she said, "rather than restart."

She gave a nod to the technicians, got thumbs-ups in return, and went On-Stage.

"Amazing timing, wouldn't you say?" she asked.

"Mhm," I agreed, then verbalized. "Hammersmith's search had been running for some time. I was just lucky that the timing worked out so incredibly well."

Luck, my ass, I thought. Dude in the cash cab knew the odds, if he wasn't something that wasn't supposed to exist.

"Did you know that Hammersmith was a naturist reserve operator?" Lakxshmi asked.

"I did," I answered. "I'd spent a very lovely week at one of their European resorts, on the Continent, a year or so back."

"So you recognized the name, and the opportunity?" she pressed.

"If you're referring to the chance to get rid of my clothes, no, that bit was after the compensation package," I answered. "I will admit that it was terrifically welcome."

"You found the USA too restrictive of your body freedoms?" she asked.

I began to see where this was going. "Okay, you were one of the first in the UK to get your PN cert, and have been full-time since the Tesco in Malpeth. You know the law probably better than I do."

I must have paused, because she gave me a go-on gesture.

"The USA has been becoming more and more restrictive every day," I said. "The UK offered what I felt was a more rational system, laws that reflected positive body culture. Yes, the opportunity to obtain a PN cert as a UK citizen, and enjoy a right as fundamental as the right to ramble, was part of the attraction." That ought to be stated neutrally enough, and with enough emphasis on adherence to the law, to keep me from fouling up my citizenship application with an admission that I'd come to the UK to get naked.

"But before you came here, you hadn't lived full-time," Lakshmi said.

"No, I hadn't," I admitted. "Like we've already said, America frowns deeply on such things."

"How's it going? Are you adjusting okay? Have there been some rough patches?" Again, the mic to me.

I laughed. "Well, this is only my fourth day of being full-time. Ask me again after I've had a weekend. Thus far, I've been either at the tower block, which is naturist only, or here in the office, which is supposed to be naturist only." I shot a look at the techs. The sound guy just shrugged, and the camera guy didn't react at all, holding steady to keep the shot going.

She shrugged. "Well, you have to give visitors the option," she said. "Not everyone is as comfortable going nude as you and I."

Oh, honey, if you only knew. "I'm getting there. I'm not ready to re-invent the Tesco Slide."

That got a laugh out of her. "Have you been shopping yet?"

"Only at the Aldi in the tower block," I said. "Serious groceries require going to Mevagissey, and that's going to have to wait for the weekend."

"What about going round to the pub after work? How's that going?" She really was after something.

"That's been interesting," I replied. "I had a conversation with another naturist in the pub last night, local man who went full-time for the job. He'd got a week or two on me, and we talked about the initial shock of it. He had to walk out his front door in front of his neighbors, and down to the court office with his family to get their certs. I had to walk through Gatwick. It's like there's some kind of rite of passage required for going full-time, some initial walking-out that has to be done."

"And you feel like you're past your initiation, and settling in?" she asked.

"Well," I said, shrugging. "I'm standing here in my office, nude, talking with a nude woman on camera as if it's the most normal thing in the world. And for me, this is in fact, the new normal."

She gave a nod, then turned to the camera. "Lakshmi Gopal, BBC" she announced, and gave a cut gesture. Then, back to me, "Thanks. Good sound bite there at the end. Oh, and I did not invent the Tesco Slide. That was the older couple who objected to the manager's shouting at me in the car park, and went and doffed their kit before going in."

"I'll keep that in mind," I told her. We said our goodbyes, and she herded her techs on to the next victim.

Egad. All I needed today was an ambush journalist. Someone could have warned me that I was going to be on camera this morning. I glanced at my reflection in the still-dark monitor, and frowned at the stubborn cowlick over my right temple.

But, work. And so I lost myself in data structures and allocations and capacity planning, until well after noon, when my phone started pinging. Multiple texts from friends in the USA, several at nearly the same time, so I had to unlock the phone to find out what had exploded.

"I just saw you on the BBC news with your bits out."

"You was really fucking serious, holy shit."

"I thought the Stonehenge photo was a fake, and that was real?"

"So how's living naked treating you?" That one from Jerry, who'd gone with me to a couple of bowling nights on dates. That one I replied to straight off, while checking the BBC news site.

"I'd rather you didn't use that word. Full-time is the word the naturists here use."

Oh my God. The interview went to air on the noon edition. And, clicking through, it made for a Whodathunkit section on the international. There I was, in my office, with the Naked Revolution's own embedded reporter, absolutely no question which side I'd come down on.

Jerry pinged again. "You're in your office with the most famous pair of tits in the BBC with your dong out. You tell me."

"I'm not an exhibitionist," I sent back, telling him that for the umpteenth time. "I just think clothes are a bad idea and we shouldn't wear them. I don't have to any more, anyway, but that's being an Entire Thing."

"Do tell," Jerry shot back.

Instead of replying directly to him, I spent a few minutes writing up a social media post, reviewing some of the good and bad points I'd experienced over the past couple of days. Got that put up, copied the link, and sent that to Jerry.

We exchanged meaningless pleasantries about maybe seeing each other again at some point, and I got back to work. I had a commit to do before I shut down for the night, and I needed to make sure all my coded ducks were in a row before pushing the button.

Focus eluded me.

The good news? The commit went in and nothing broke. I started the test suite running, locked my system, and headed out.

The bad news? I didn't discover until I was on the shuttle, and the drizzle had started up again, that I'd forgotten my poncho at the office. Having been put off my game by the clinic visit, then having to deal with the BBC news crew, I was unprepared. Fine, I thought, I'll just be quick getting into the building.

The instant the shuttle set its brake, the rain came down hard. A summer rain in a warm climate is a glorious thing on bare skin. In the brief jog from the shuttle to the building, I got drenched in ice water. Every muscle I had tried to clench from the cold.

When I hit the air conditioned entry hall, my body nearly locked up at the thermic shock. Moving stiffly, gritting my teeth so they wouldn't chatter, I shivered through the locker room, ignoring the stack of towels. Instead, I lurched into the showers, and turned on the tap. Instant warmth.

Bless the people who put in the demand heaters in the locker rooms. The chill melted down the drain, my limbs unlocking as the shivering abated, I was still wet, but now I was warm. One problem at a time. I gave it another minute, to let the heat soak in, then shut off the water and padded out of the showers still dripping.

Damien watched with some amusement, as he folded his poncho and stashed it in his locker. "Forget your poncho?" he asked.

I scrubbed vigorously with the towel, trying to keep the warmth going. "Didn't expect the rain to be so cold."

He closed his locker. "Comes in off the ocean," he said, "cold as November in the middle of June it is."

I agreed that I would have to remember it, and respect the rain.